broadstuff

Today was an interesting experience - the No. 1 son, a real* teenager, got a turntable (aka phonogram/record player) for Xmas and we duly cranked it up and listened to some vinyl records for the first time in about 20 years - among them Bo-Rhap (follow the link for music industry shortsightedness) from Queen's classic Night at the Opera album, shown above courtesy YouTube..

And the Christmas message from Queen and others is this - you can really hear the difference between digital and analog music, even on high sample rate digital tracks (and as for the low bit rate stuff that is streamed....). To be fair, Queen used higher production value than a lot of "pop" music does, but the difference in the same song between analog and digital is noticeable, the difference in effect between a finite and an infinite sampling rate.

So there it is - a fascinating counter-trend to the usual Teen Scene tales:

- The qualitative change from analog to digital has been a regressive step
- You can't reproduce analog music on digital online services (or you could, but the bandwidth required would be huge). It has to be bought as a physical good.
- Some New Teens are not just consuming more digital music, they are also driving a resurgence in anti-digital music - and the love of the physical media.

So here is a thought - there is a market emerging for quality analog music, driven by a youth market, and it cannot be disaggregated easily online (except for creating an efficient market in second hand records). A high- end in sight to digital disaggregation ?

(An afterthought - quite a few of those 70's albums have "home taping is killing music" printed on the dustcovers - some things never change... although, as one of the tracks on one of those old albums noted, they "aint seen nothing yet" )

* As opposed to "research" teens, the subject of multiple PhD's and papers, who often seem to bear little resemblance in many ways to the "real" teens I observe daily.

Given all the hoo-ha around Global Warming, Climate Change and those leaked emails, it has been rather fascinating to play around with Geo-Me, a Tim Berners-Lee inspired Open Data project that mashes up temperature records from weather recording stations globally, some of which have been running for 300 years. For the first time it has been easy to get at the raw data oneself.

The (un?)intended consequences, I suspect, are profound - in that anybody looking at these (I've looked at about 20 around the planet from places I've been to, mainly airports - sad, I know) is going to go "Um, so where exactly is all this global warming then?". Never mind man-made (anthropomorphic) global warming or AGW!

Its an inconvenient truth, but the benefits of Open Data cut many ways, pulling down myths with little respect for whose they are.

For your delectation I have put up Port Elizabeth in South Africa above, where temperatures are logged since 1880 in their database (in fact its been recorded soon after the 1820's when my forebears landed there) and as you can see, the increase has been tiny - and explained more by PE 's expansion as a deep-water port city (and thus the heat island overrunning the recording station) in the 1960's.

Or, to put it in the local vernacular - Anthropomorphic Global Warming? Ek kan fokol daar sien, man!

(For the record, I believe it is quite possible to want sustainable resource usage and a diminution of fossil fuel dependence - "Classical Green" I think the shade is now called - without buying Climate Change or AGW)

So folks, here it is for your Bumper Christmas Holiday Edition- the 10 Best (as in most visited) Broadstuff stories of 2009. In its own way its a good log of some of the ZeitGeist in the Digital Ecosystem space. In order of popularity they were:

1. Stuff White People Don't Like #2 - Real Geeks (#CabinetForum Redux) - Cabinet level consultation on future of Digital Britain wss mainly a media-political class fest, no techies who actually understand the stuff were allowed at the table. This story logs an overall story about the general view that Digital Britain is an opportunity that has gone begging (mainly due to lack of cash....)

2.
10 Ways of using the Twitter Egosystem - Twitter takes Vanity Publishing to new lows - marke the shift in the system from Chat room to Pump room.

3. Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong - Facebook (and many others) forced to copy Twitter's real time feed - marks the official start of Real Time Hype

4. SXSW – Jumping Sharks, Hunting Snarks, Punting Sparks and Something Stark
- Yes, SXSW showed that the Web 2.0 fad was peaking, and yes it is full of humbug and old dogs whose ideas should be left to die, but there is also so much else emerging there too.

5. Swine Flu Pandemic breaks out on Twitter - Far more panic among the Twitternauts about Swine Flu than among the public at large - early warning signs of the "wisdom of mob" news flows on Twitter that became so prevalent later in the year.

6. Shirky, Journalism, the BBC and me - sees Clay Shirky starting to argue against some of his more overoptimistic pronouncements in "Here Comes Everybody", as it becomes clearer that quality journalism will largely disappear in a FreeConomic world. 2009 has seen many of the more "New World" prognostications of the 2005-2007 period unravel, mainly due to the....

7. Bankers excessive salaries as predictors of Depression - Interestingly, it was possible to predict the Second Great Depression just by tracking the divergence of Bankers' salaries vs the Rest of Humanity. That this has not yet been fixed does not bode well.....

8. The Death and Life of Second Life - 3D Worlds were largely written off in 2008, there are second signs of life in 2009.

9. Jan Moir, the Web, Free Speech and the Wisdom of Mobs - worrying signs that the "Liberal Intellectuals" who apparently inhabit Social media re as intolerant as any decent McCarthy-ite. All you have to do is pick your issue....

10. Freeconomics 2.0 - or how Pay! is the New Free! - Chris Anderson's much heralded FreeConomics finally came out, but was more about Some-Of-You-PayConomics. A big shift from his original proposition that we argued so vehemently against in 2008, and which we predicted would drive the increasing Usurpation of Privacy (see "Bubbling Under" below)

Bonus Track:

11. SXSW Journalists need to get out of the beer tent and see real world (Shock, Horror) - It would appear that Real Digital Age Journalists are as lazy as Our Man in Havana ever was - no surprises there then. Big story is that even on the digital media, the message is being moderated by middlemen, so tune your channels with care.

Bubblin' Under

The Mashup Social Media Firehose - a rather good Mashup Event towards the end of 2009 did a rapid fire expose of many of todays trends including one of the starkest expositions on how your data is being mined

Its quite interesting looking over these, as they give a good review of the big themes of the year, which were by and large the chronicling of the Chrome of Web 2.0 tarnishing (to the extent that it even got a makeover to Web-Squared - we will see if that takes off):

- the recantation and/or downright disproving of early Web 2.0 New Economics and Economists
- the discovery of the power (and downside) of low value, high velocity real time content
- the replacement of advertising by data mining in the Web 2.0 business model

On the other hand, there is still hope - "Web 3D" is not over yet, people are starting to care about quality in their feeds, and other stories not hitting the Top 10 as they are too recent include the beginning of a fightback against privacy invasion, the increasing realisation that losing quality content is too big a price to pay for a Free-for-All internet, a belated realisation that women are 'Netpeople too, and the fascinating new-network effects of social networking that are emerging (such as Twitter being used in conjunction with TV watching).

So gather ye mince pies while ye may and gird your turkey loins, for next week we shall publish the Broadstuff Top 10 Predictions for 2010.

For some odd reason, Women don't "do" Wikipedia - WSJ:

A broad new survey of Wikipedia users found that only 13% of the online encyclopedia’s contributors are women.

..................

Of the 53,888 respondents who said they contribute to Wikipedia, only 6,814 were women. The male/female ratio is closer among those who read entries but don’t write or edit them: 69% men to 31% women.

The average respondent age hovers in the twentysomethings. Men tend to be a few years older, at 26, while women were 24 on average.

The question is why? I mined the comments sections, opinions were:

- What a surprise!! Could it be an unequal distribution to leisure time between genders? Ya why dont we spend money on that research too. Open your eyes.

- Perhaps today’s women are too busy trying to earn actual income to find time to continue volunteering in the capacity they have always pioneered in the past. If Wikipedia would allow payment for the type of skills it requires to actually get through the complicated procedure of publishing accurate articles on their site, maybe they could utilize the amazing workforce of women out there who are struggling to compensate their husband’s dwindling incomes and 401k’s by working from home.

- I’d say the editing atmosphere is argumentative and challenging rather than cooperative and helpful so anyone getting into editing usually gets kicked around a bit and perhaps one gender tolerates such abuse better than another.

Interesting to hear others views - 13% is a worrying number.

Fascinating report set on the Future of Mobile from Morgan Stanley (hat tip Streetwise). The report comes in 3 bits:

1) “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” – a 92-slide presentation that excerpts highlights of the key themes from the report.

2) “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” – a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in “The Mobile Internet Report.”

3) “The Mobile Internet Report” – a 424 page report which explores 8 major themes in depth and includes the two aforementioned slide presentations + related overview text.

I've read the highlights so far, and will be going through the others in the next few days. Morgan Stanley summarise their key findings as below, my comments are in italics:

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter. (Standard new wave pattern described, but the greater wealth creation/destruction argument is harder to justify)

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years. (Decent devices (thanks to iPhone), lower cost of access and understood benefits make faster rampup a no brainer now - but the point made above still holds - are they as high value?)

Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices. (Social Networking is a current flavourite of the month - the killer app is always comms, insofar as Social Networks facilitate this they will succeed or fail. Twitter and the like are superb unified comms systems so play well to this)

Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.(Facebook raises the bar? I'd argue Twitter is pushing Facebook and all the others at the moment. Facebook has the users but its still very clunky on mobile)

Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization. (People have tried to reproduce DoCoMo elsewhere before and failed, we've been watching it for 10 years and I can't see anything that's changed that recently. Industry structure in the West is different - see below - and does not play to a DoCoMo model, Apple ran an over the top model which is in our view the one to watch in US and Europe)

Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. (Yes, but carriers still have the main power in the value chain in US and Europe - which is why DoCoMo has failed in the past. Some countries eg Scandinavians, France have moved to a more Japanese-like model of state defined market structure so may be easier to ))

Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile. (Yes, but....the mobile pipes fill up fast, and have nowhere near teh carrying capacity of fixed line backbones. But at least a service can get off the ground and the fixed line infrastructure can come later)

A fascinating report, with much to study. But, I have a standard policy with all forecats from Planet Mobile, which is to halve the early predictions - its worked well for 10 years so I see no reason not to do so here, yet

Benjamin Ellis is trying a fascinating experiment - trying to live a week online without Google. Why? Well, those who are watching the runes are getting increasingly worried about Google's view of privacy (aka None, Get over it - see our comments here ) and wondering what steps can be taken. As he notes:

I’m just curious as to how pervasive a part of my Internet experience Google has become and how much data they really are amassing. The only way to really know is to pay some attention to it for a few days, so why not a week? At the end of day 1 I have to say I’m quite shocked. I’ll post a full summary at the end of the week, but here are some of my observations from today:

He goes on to list some things he's noted about how pervasive Google is:

- Firstly, I didn’t realise that Safari uses a “Google Safe Browsing” service, so that had to be switched off in settings before I could do anything else on my Mac.

- I couldn’t change the default search engine in Sarafi – the setting that I’m SURE used to be there is GONE! The site with instructions on switching Google off in the Safari web browers, returned by the Bing.com search engine, had both Google Friend Connect AND Google analytics, as well as google ads and google blog search on it. Doh! Foiled there as each of those services passes data back to Google, and so is off limits this week.

- Finally I thought, ok, I’ll just take “search” off of the safari tool bar. Would you believe I can’t remove the search box with out removing the address bar too? Apple, what where you thinking? Do they really love Google that much?

I've had a policy for about a year now of not using any Google products knowingly, including search, with one exception - YouTube. But what is interesting about Benjamin's findings to date is you may be unknowingly passing data back to Google via pre-sets in the architecture such as in Safari.

He also later noted later that he sees Doubleclick (aka Google) based Ads popping up on Amazon for example. This puts Google seemingly into increasing conflict with what users want, ie search results for the most relevant content. Be interesting to see what he concludes after a week.

Taylor Davidson asked me this morning what I thought of the TechCrunch "The end of hand crafted content" article. In essence, it argues that the digital media will evolve to be full of industrial scale crap content:

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

Mention is made of AOL, Google's inability to sort the spamverse from real websites (you really notice it at times like Xmas when you are searching for consumer goods) and Demand Media

My response - based on our research it will probably start to resemble TV more and more, not just that Ad supported content will race to the Entertainment bottom, jettisoning Education and Information in its wake - but also that, again like TV, paid markets will emerge that serve high quality content for those that want it. I found one of the commentators pretty much said what I would so, being lazy, here it is:

Yes, there will be much more noise to the signal with AOL’s idiotic policy, but bad writing is bad writing. People will neither spend much time deciphering poorly written copy, nor will they put much stock in information coming from a source with a reputation for getting its facts wrong. Because people do want quality content, fast food news won’t eat at your readership base, though it will clog up the search results.

Regarding search results, people who encounter worse and worse content when searching on a given search engine are likely to move on to the next one, so there is incentive to return “real food” results. If the search engines don’t solve the problem themselves, then curators like Reddit, Metafilter, BoingBoing, Slashdot, Hacker News, and Collected.info can take up the slack, since the job of curating content is that much more necessary to avoid fast food articles.

I see Fred Wilson is picking up a similar line of thought, in that if the current crop of content finding systems won't work, we will find ones that will:

social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t. it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.

Good heavens - a return to curation mayhap? But, as P T Barnum once noted, no one has ever lost money by underestimating the public taste, and that was 100 years ago, so some things are ever thus. The difference between a Free Press and a "Free" Press, over time, will be the difference between the media being fertile ground or full of sh*t. As it is today...

The one exception I see is the UK, where the publically funded BBC will ensure that a dive too far to the bottom will result in no customers at all - which of course is why so many commercial playesr are desperate to pull the BBC back from its position in online media

News today that reducing the speed limit in UK cities to 20mph saves 42% of casualties and that this should be rolled out forthwith - BBC.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine study estimates 20mph zones have the potential to prevent up to 700 casualties in London alone.

Now, some people are very grumpy and feel that this would spoil the ability of cars to move on roads and thus fulfil their purpose, and others feel that the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine should carry on working in Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, not Traffic managment, But we feel they haven't gone far enough.

Why stop at 20mph? Surely every life is sacred? For example, if we can save 42% ( 700 lives in London - pop 11mn ) then if we went down to 10mph we could save say 66%!. In fact, why not go back to the Locomotive Act of 1865 - having a man with a red flag walk in front at 4 mph, as they did a hundred years ago. That's bound to get to 90% + saved.

And it would of course ensure that the country was totally green and we hit our emission reduction targets as no one would really use a car anymore, plus if we put up the price of public transport by 500% we could repay the national debt in just a few years. Bonus!

Now we would not propose that it goes to 0 mph and 100% lives saved, as that means no one would buy cars anymore, and that is bad for the economy

Kat "Clash City Rocker" Hannaford in Gizmodo has it in for e-Readers - she does a rather good fisk on their well documented major shortcomings, ie overpriced books and DRM worries:

With ebooks costing between $10 - $15, you're forced into continually feeding your Kindle/Reader/Nook/Other-warm-and-nurturing-sounding-device with cash, and as the ereaders are so physically large you also need to invest in a manbag just to avoid being mugged. Did we say mugged? We meant "laughed at." There's a reason why you don't see people using them on public transport.

Such shock that a proto punk would defend books - its a mixed up world Anyway, her argument on the death (or at least ongoing zombie status) of th e-Reader is that a combination of poor pricing and good enough other devices will see them off:

Any company that attempts to own market share in that area is fighting a losing battle. Consumers won't buy an electronic book when they can get a paperback for the same price or even less, and when they can lend it to friends, read it in the bathtub or even sell it on and make a percentage of their money back.

......

During September of this year, there were more ebooks added to Apple's App Store than there were games, according to San Francisco-based analysts Flurry. There's an obvious advantage to reading an ebook on an iPhone, as chances are you already own one. You don't have to fork out several hundred dollars on a new device that just displays lines of e-ink. iPhones are devices which serve more than one purpose, and while some ereaders allow for music playback and even gaming, you'd never buy one just to play MP3s on.

So, 3 comments and 2 predictions:

- Firstly, Kat is right with pricing - thats is the biggest impediment to it taking off in any big way. Its like "what have we learned from the CD market"

- Secondly, DRM needs to be sorted. There needs to be a trusted system that does not hand all power to the producer and can be changed at will. There have been enough cases of DRM systems going out of business or failing. We suspect there needs to be a pricing difference, with DRM'd stuff being much cheaper (ie un -DRM'd is sold on the assumption of copying)

- Thirdly, the iPhone is only a good enough today as the current crop of e-readers use old technology, but if you look at the next generation devices such as Plastic Logic's reader* there is an order of magnitude change in quality.

Now, the predictions:

- e-Readers will run alongside books, not replace them. When we did our research on the e-Reader market for Plastic Logic 2 years ago, we came to the conclusion that the major early market would be "road warriors" who would use the e-Reader to ensure they didn't need a second man bag to carry all their papers. It will be some time that they move out of this market and hit mass market price points - and even when this happens, history tells us that new technologies take some of the market away but usually co-exist

- Kat is right when she thinks that e-Readers are an interim phase - However, I think she is neglecting Moore's Law - go out 6 cycles (about 10 years) and you are looking at something two orders of magnitude cheaper and much, much lighter - it will be a commodity that we use in a semi-disposable manner, so it can be used in the bath and shower. It will also do other things, like do your singing in the shower for you. (I note that the biggest complaint when local newspapers close is the loss of the crossword, maybe that will be the killer app)

(Update - see Moore's Law vs Learning Curve discussion in Chris Edwards' comment and my replay - I used a 75% learning curve to get to 5% of the cost in 10 years)

And Kat shows a stunning lack of sensitivity to all us fusty techies when she says:

Our grandchildren won't be housing first edition ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kindle, passed down from generation to generation. There's no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book, and when it comes to works of fiction and non, which have had thousands of man-hours injected into them, surely that's the reason people read them?

You mean I've been storing my Sinclair Spectrum in vain? (I note an interesting trend among teens to start listening to vinyl LP's again, so there's a future in the past)

* Disclosure - we worked on the early day specification of the Plastic Logic e-Reader

Last night the Cass Business School in London ran the Networking the Workplace session, with a number of Social Media Evangelists on the panel:

- Suw Charman-Anderson, Social Technologist (SCA)
- Jemima Gibbons, Author 'Monkeys with Typewriters: myths and realities of social media at work' (JG)
- Euan Semple, Independent Advisor (JG)
- Luis Suarez, Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist, IBM (LS)

(I've used initials in brackets to speed up referring to who made what point bekow)

Jemima was also launching her book (its available from Triarchy Press) and was heavily involved in putting the evening together - a great way to launch a book in my opinion (Maybe I'll take a leaf out of it one day...)

The system for the evening was quite entertaining - a question, a quick set of answers, some audience feedback - and then a vote. Here are the questions, comments and votes (Caveat - questions are written as best as I could capture them, comments are what stood out to me):

1. Does social networking waste time?

- JG no
- ES can be
- SCA no - too much measuring waste, not measuring saving
- LS nuanced - use it for the right thing eg finding right expert internally

Audience view: Social Media reduces friction, - can waste time but can be useful if you use tool carefully. Need to decide on when what you are doing is relevant, as with all tools

Vote: 47% yes 53% no

My take - I'm with the audience - its a useful tool, but it can waste time if its abused


Is email the best way to share information and ideas?

- LS has it's uses but not best way to share data with many
- SCA interrupt costs from answering email, plus used as proxy to show productivity
- ES twitter is the new email issue, its blurring personal and professional and showing that managing the firehose is a major issuel

Audience: Email co-opted into areas it wasn't designed for, but still the best and widest didtributed general transport system

Vote 35% yes 65% against

My take - I think Suw was in error blaming email for interruptions - I recall doing "White Collar Productivity" work in the 80's, email was seen as a massive benefit to disruption vs the technology at the time, the telephone which isn't asynchronous (and has a higher interrupt time). As others pointed out, as new technologies become the new major transport platform they then also will cause interruptions. (I note with interest that Twitter adds email functionalities at a month by month basis, most recent eg lists). (Added later >) Key is to be able to filter and offload stuff better done elsewhere off email.



Social Networking is a danger to corporate integrity?

- JG it's about how organizations behave
- ES it's about how organizations manage risk - its useful to have monitors, but biggest risk- risk is in the senior guys not the rank and file
- SCA do you trust your staff or not eg cameras and photocopiers can be used too. There is a need to create guidelines in an organisation
- LS depends on who you trust - are you hiring the right people

Audience - Carter Ruck/Trafigura example shows risk is not just internal. But, people tend to be less inhibited on social media, and it has real persistence, so slip more likely and longer lasting than inadvised slip in pub. Also, people can say stuff that is defamatory without realising it,

My take - imagine if the Climategate emails were on an internal social net, not email - I'm sure they would have got out a lot earlier. Also, having been involved in share price affecting activity, legislated "quiet periods" and dealing with state of the art IP, there will still be stuff that is sensitive and the easiest way to keep its safe is not to disseminate it too widely

Vote: For 65% No 35%


Will SocNets remove need for special expertise / the more experienced you are the more likely you are to make the correct decisions?

- ES no
- LS yes

Vote 58% in favour of experts still needed, 42% against
My take - agree with the floor


Open Source approach may work for software but not for business in general?

- SCA with enough eyes all bugs are shallow, lots of brain cycles help in development and testing
- JG - can't separate strategy from implementation, move to the perpetual beta
- ES - not everything can be done by crowdsourcing expertise

Audience/Vote - didn't buy it but vote went 75% "will work in general" (The original question was poorly worded, I think they meant it the other way, ie 75% think it won't work in general)


If companies allowed employees to self organize nothing would ever get done

- JG - tuttle example of self organising entity that gets things done
- SCA - Dan Pink TED video shows old style metrics don't work for knowledge work (we showed this video at TEDExTuttle in September, this is it). Gore Tex spins off units once they get to 150m people

Audience - you can't rely on self organisation in all cases, eg in financial services which is regulated and fast paced/big impact of poor play. General feeling - "It depends" - what size of business - what type of decision - depends on environment - self organize around what?

Vote: 20% sceptical, 80% not (again, the question was double negatived so I wonder if this is the right way round based on audience comments

My take: All the reading I've done around self organising people shows that they usually organise most effectively around some simple issue (eg single issue protest movements) but cannot actually run things (protest movements fall apart and a more rigid structure emerges once they win). They also struggle to organise fast and repeatably, things businesses often need. On the other hand, where they can be used within structures they can be very powerful, as cell manufacturing / working studies have shown.


My conclusion - the panel were by and large always more optimistic than the audience (by definition, they are all evangelists for the upside ). Personally, I think the "Wisdom of the Crowd" - the audience - was pretty sensible, ie they are more likely to be correct than the panel in terms of the real degree of difficulty implementing Enterprise 2.0 stuff, but every movement needs its optimists to get things moving and point to what might be. A good show.

I also learned how one may write referendum questions to get the answer one wants

Update - Suw has listed the actual questions in the comments, they were:

1. Online social networking during office hours wastes valuable working time
2. Email is the best way to share information and ideas
3. Social networking tools can be a danger to corporate integrity
4. The more experienced you are, the more likely you are to make the right decision
5. An ‘open source’ approach may work for software development but it can’t work for business generally
6. If companies allowed employees to “self-organise”, nothing would ever get done