Dis - Aggregation

Steve Rubel's comments on free-agents ruining the larger analysts' party:

Charlene Li, an influential Forrester analyst who tracks digital trends, blogged that she is leaving the research firm to go independent. Some believe that the growing ranks of free-agent analysts may spell trouble for traditional research firms.

The reality is that many of the tools that workers need to do their jobs are becoming free or low cost. This extends into verticals as well. For example the Google Ad Planner, which launched last week, theoretically could allow anyone to become a nomadic media planner.

Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples.

We resemble that remark - after backgrounds in consultancy and digital broadband media we set up Broadsight 3 years ago as a 21st century business - virtual, very light footprint on the ground - because we could! In 2005 you could already get, via the Web, access to the sort of data that a few years before required large in-house research departments and/or copious analysts reports. Four years ago being web workers was much harder, as many of the tools, from wifi, wifi PC's, software etc were unavailable. Now they are near ubiquitous. Thus, our "buy" side has seen a massive reduction in cost and increase in efficiency.

That same revolution expanded our sell side as well - via the company website, this blog, and other social networks we have a massively magnified reach compared to the % increase the Analytics companies have achieved. We happen to believe we know our sector as well, if not better than (m)any of them, and can afford to be more independent as well.

A typical Analysts report sells for $'000. We wrote one on Online Advertising last year because we were actually doing work in the space and thus felt we knew more than any analysts did, it sells for about 1/2 the price and we have sold a healthy number of them, but our costs are probably far lower so margins are probably comparable.

At the other end, the market for 4 pager briefings for $100 or so is probably also under severe threat when you can just put a few good bloggers in that field together. Because the data is now so much more readily available, its much simpler for a smart person who knows the industry well to spend a bit of quality time on the Web, Linked In and Excel and get the 80/20 of the Analysts job done.

Steve's point on recessions driving trends - especially where there is economic advantage - also resonated:

Recessions often accelerate social shifts that are already percolating under the surface. One of the key trends I have been watching is the growing number of Digital Nomads.

Its simple Coasian Economics - as transaction costs come down, the size of the firm required to deliver a service reduces. I've yet to see an analyst's report say that about their own industry though

PS I liked Steve's title so I sto.. I mean adapted it

One of the interesting things about the emergence of the Social Media scene is that it has driven a lot of Londoners of quite wide backgrounds to physically meet up at the Tuttle Club, and one of the outcomes of that has been a flowering of collaborations in all sorts of interesting projects - musicians working with marketeers, film makers with PR people - and in our case we have been working with others on a project on the Female Web - it is our hypothesis that there is an arbitrage as there are many women as customers, but far fewer people developing services that give women the UI / UE they prefer.

And one of the really good things about this collaboration is that other people can write some of the posts on the blog So, here is a thought piece by Janet Parkinson of Talking Voices that sets the scene:

It's common knowledge that women make up only about 20% of the technology industry - the reasons usually given amounting to 'women just aren't interested' or words to that effect. But with comScore reporting that online women now outnumber online men in the US, I decided to dig a little deeper to check out other possible reasons for this discrepancy and came across the following:

At the Blackberry Women & Technology Awards last month (according to Ian Williams of vnunet ) Charmaine Eggberry, the creator of the Awards commented on the fact that although nearly 90 percent of girls aged 11 to 16 believe that using technology is 'cool', with just over a third chatting about the latest technology on a daily basis, "there is still a lack of understanding about the phenominal opportunities that a career in, or associated with, technology has to offer".

She went on to say that over two thirds of girls aged 11 to 16 believe that there is a gap between the playground and the careers centre because the UK lacks smart female role models in the technology industry, and that over half think that there should be fewer celebrity role models and more inspirational business role models.

This is spot on. Role models for all teenagers form an intrinsic part of growing up and of making life choices. So what role models are currently being presented to teenage girls? Teenage magazines seem to continue to feed the predictable celebrity hype, latest fashion 'must haves' and 'how to grab a guy' columns, while in the media generally both offline and online let's just say it's difficult to find many female role models worth aspiring to....

Teenage girls are moving from hard copy magazines to the internet and are happy to take control of what they do there and what they read - the bright young women of today are not necessarily ready to be dumbed down continuously. If what Charmaine Eggbury says is true then perhaps the magazines should take the plunge, remove Britney or Jade from the front covers once in a while and replace them with a few successful women from technology. And girls, make sure to tell everyone what you 'really really want' - you've heard it often enough 'Because you're worth it'.

This is a theme that has also been driven up by people such as Sarah Blow & team who have been driving Girl Geek Dinners, trying to help women build up a supply side network and hopefully provide some alternatives to the Britney model (and dispel the notion that women can't be technical).

You can imagine a Richter Scales style skit on this using the Clash's "I'm so bored with the USA".....anyway, this post by Fred Wilson on A VC caught my eye:

I read a comment on my “Looking For Inspiration” post this morning that suggested I was just getting bored with Web 2.0 like many others. It’s something I’ve considered a lot lately....

....I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the world. At times it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.

....And certainly there is much about “web 2.0” that doesn’t seem to address that need. Throwing food at your friends on Facebook or twittering about the length of the line at the shake shack lands squarely in the “banality” camp that Kirby railed about in his essay on “pseudo modernism” that I blogged about last week.

Fred has been seduced by Umair's thoughts about using the Web to:

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

I commented on this last week (see here), and have been mulling a Part II for it - the issue is in how do we organise - ie what structures are used - so here are the thoughts on how this might be done. First, the caveats - technofix is not for everything, nor is the hammer of Big IT - but one of the benefits of the more modern technologies is that they have a lighter touch, ie they avoid these issues better:

People would rather live with a problem they can't solve than a solution they don't understand
One of the professors on my MSc program used to say this about implementing successful change programs - ie an externall imposed solution seldom takes root as well as something developed by people in the situation. Ie its not enough to give people fishing rods etc, they have to be left to define which ones to use, how they will fish etc.

There is a risk of applying the most modern technologies to problems that can be more simply solved....
In the early 70's E F Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful", which showed how simple, locally produceable technology trumped large scale technology in developing countries. The lessons were largely ignored by aid organisations then (as most aid programs require recipients to spend money on the donor countries' technology) and by and large still are.

That said, I think there is quite a bit modern technology can do to drive change. A cursory glance at history will tell you that shifts in economics drive huge sociopolitical change. Communication technology has driven huge changes in these economics since the Industrial Revolution, but the benefits, like the future, are unevenly distributed. In my view Web media have especially high impact potential as they:

- Reduce Transaction Costs
- Give people access to correct information
- Allow people to self-organise
- Impact energy and resource usage
- New financial structures

Reduce transaction costs
Reducing transaction costs doesn't just allow people to be banal on Twitter - the uses are far more transforming than that, Ronald Coase showing in the 1930's that reducing transaction costs allow much smaller organisations, with lower capital formation, to be sustainable. In other words people can now create change with small organisations that don't need high capital formation. This is driving the Web 2.0 startup scene, but its also driving for example home-working, micro-credit, global action networks (of which terrorism is the dark side example) and should allow major increases in the ability of small groups of people in developing countries to organise themselves.

In many ways this is the Prime Mover for much of what we see today, but there are some of the specific benefits of reduced transaction costs that have major magnification effects - these are the ones noted below:

Access to Correct Information
One of the downsides of "social media" is that groups can become infected with "groupthink", ie "This is the way we have always done this" - so being able to independently acquire correct information, at low cost, must have a major part in any plans to impact these issues. Not only this, but ease of information transfer allow a greater understanding of global issues so hopefully allows the formation of systems that can re-allocate resources etc to where they are required, allows people to reign in dangerous leaders, etc. Today Wikipedia, what can tomorrow bring?

There is another side to correct information - there is a lot of cr*p information out there, but as more data is digitised and exposed, it can be crunched to hopefully ascertain the real facts rather than opinion broadcast by those who have access to media, which pervades too many areas today.

Allow people to self organise
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" is the latest book from a long line of people who have understood that allowing people to self organise to solve their own problems is a powerful tool. Web 2.0 systems based around social networks will be one of these tools as they evolve - in fact in my view the only way we are going to mobilise sufficient resources to solve the issues Umair lists is by using these sorts of tools. (This is also a long wave system - long after Facebook and Twitter have gone the way of telex and faxes, these systems will underpin much of the underlying comms structures we use.)

This is not to say that self organising is a panacea, history shows this is best used for protest/resistance movement structures and not to actually run things, but to run things ongoing probably also requires derivations of these social media tools.


Energy and Resource Usage
One cannot of course have a discussion about "saving humanity" without talking about climate change etc. I'm still sceptical about mankind's alleged influence on all this, but I do buy the argument that continuing consumption of resources at the level of today's Rich West and then expanding it to the rest of humanity is unsustainable. I personally think we'll run out of resources (and water) long before we bake and/or drown ourselves in any new global Jurassic period. The comms technology we are building must have some capability to help here in terms of, for example:

- reduce energy usage by removing the need for so many journeys - online ordering / home deliver in urban areas is more efficient that car journeys, a flight saved by a webcast is always useful

- allow us to redistribute used goods far more effectively - it is always far more resource intensive to make something new than use something already made (take cars for example - ignore the Pious, buy a good second hand sports car and be virtuous ). Today eBay, tomorrow the world

- there must be all sorts of other small efficiencies possible just by accessing correct infomation and being connected to other people

New Financial Structures
You don't have to be a banker or economist to sense that there is something seriously wrong with the world's financial structures (in fact it probably helps not to be) but the combination of reduced transaction costs and being connected may help us to avoid if not replace the worst of the financial system's excesses. By this I don't mean makin' whuffie (too fluffy imho, we evolved out of gift economies for good scalability reasons) but by making it easier for people to find correct information and organise effectively sans middlemen (think of replacing brokers by online trading etc and magnify that) and having more say in distribution of our money. Imagine if you could vote for where your tax money went - how many foreign wars would we see?

This is not to say that new ICT alone helps - and just getting networked is an issue still in much of the world, as is affording the gear - but the arrival of the $5 mobile phone and $100 PC can't but help, as is the emerging skein of global wireless networking, brought about by sheer scale economics. initially paid for by richer people. My thought is more that people building a large ecosystem of Web 2.0 services that cut their teeth by throwing sheep etc allows the darwinian evolution of robust, low cost services that become very useful ongoing. Top down services designed to fix big problems always seem to struggle. That said however, I think if Fred and his fellow VC's are prepared to fund "GreenWeb 2.0" businesses that could be very interesting.

I was reading Umair Haque's thoughts on 21st Century Capitalism....its an interesting post, and I think these points are well made:

The great Joseph Schumpeter argued that growth happens through a process of creative destruction. There’s a simpler word for that: turbulence.

I think there’s a problem with this thesis. In an interconnected world, there are more and more players creating and destroying – as a simple example, the pool of workers in export-oriented industries has tripled, from 300 million to about 900, over the last 20 years. And so, today, turbulence is intensifying.

Creative destruction has two sides – the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff are going to sharpen. The price of growth, it seems, is a world that’s always riskier, more uncertain, and more brutal at the margin.

And the outcome is fairly predictable too:

When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble? What happens when the masters of the universe in Greenwich bid up the price of food for India, China, and Africa's huddled masses?

Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.

Its alluded to in the newspapers, and more bluntly in City bars, but we all know that speculation is driving some of the price rises for raw materials and basic foodstuffs (not helped by daft biofuel subsidies), and that this is tipping the point at which people starve.

But no national government, nor the UN, has the power to stop food commodity speculation - and not all even have the will, as starvation is not impacting the world equally. The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer and own an increasing amount of the planet's assets, and globally the middle classes are slowly sliding into peasantry as their share of real incomes erode and they live more and more in debt.

Here comes Feudalism 2.0..... So what is to be done?

Its been clear, even before I was at Uni (remember the Club of Rome) that the whole system of growth-chasing is unsustainable as is, but the belief has been throughout the last few decades that technology in one way or another will save us. What is becoming clearer today is that it may (or may not - the "how" is still unclear) , but before that happens a lot of "us" will lead very uncomfortable lives, if not die.

Umair's view of the solution:

What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

That's not an exhaustive list - it's just a beginning. What's important is the logic behind it. Let's make that as razor-sharp as possible.

I looked at Umair's answer, and I think those are by and large the right areas to go after, but I'm not sure about how the "organise" bit works in practice - it implies central controls and smacks a little of "Marxism 2.0" to me as is - probably needs some fleshing out. I know Umair thinks for eg Google is very benign and is a model to cleave to, but I'm afraid I see any large public corporate caught up in the current structure as probably structurally unable to sort things like these out. I suspect we need new organisations with new structures to solve these problems.

Answers have I none yet - need to mull this one over a bit, but I suspect a part of of the solution is in the use of small scale, local, user owned structures, as E F Schumacher hypothesised when he looked at the issue years ago.

Another bit must be to peg back some of the freedoms of the financial markets, they were nowhere near this powerful or dangerous when the Club of Rome wrote its report in the 1970's. I think one thing that is cyclical over a Kondratieff wavelength is the wax and wane of the power of oligopoly, and we are living in a world akin to the turn of the 20th century in terms of power and wealth concentrated in the fewest hands, and that accountability needs to be returned to the people it has been eroded from over the last 30 years or so.

And another bit must be this Internet thingy - revolutionary new comms tools have tend to drive socioeconomic and political change throughout our history, so why not this time?

Incidentally, I do hope everyone realises that its not the planet we are saving from extinction, but our own sorry little genes - the planet will do just fine if we gas ourselves to death, its taken bigger hits before.

Anyway, more tomorrow......

So its tomorrow, and the overnight thought was this - The Earth is one giant Tragedy of the Commons test for humanity. Thus the answers can be framed roughly as "what is required to prevent Tragedy of the Commons occurring" and that will be Part 2 of this series a its a post in its own right.

But to be clear, failure of the test may mean extinction of the species, and will definitely mean extreme misery for many members of our and other species, and probably a major reduction in numbers. Its happened before in microcosm (even to extinction), and we are not dreadfully well structured to sort it out collectively (as Jared Diamond has recorded in Collapse). More thoughts on what "organise" means in Part 2 therefore, but some initial scribbles here:

- We seem (historically) to find it difficult to self organise early within a situation before fairly major catastrophe occurs

- I don't therefore believe that "here comes everybody" modes are the answer long term - traditionally these movements are protest based rather than structured to run things sustainably, and tend to be short lived

- However, it may be that this sort of mass approach is required to tip things onto a new plane.

- We can't expect the financial system to assist - its structure is a power law, the rich grow richer until it tips over (cf Great Depression)

- Ditto the public corporate value chain system - its causing most of the problems

- Not clear if current (Western) political structures can work - they are too gummed up in lobbyism and are probably not split along the right lines today.

- Also not clear if other models in say China or Russia will work - benign autocracy is wonderful in theory, but autocrats seldom stay benign if history is any guide

- Sadly, most of the people who need most of the help have no resources to get it and others need to fight their corner

- Those others need to persuade their own countryfolk to give up a huge amount of what they have, for a very uncertain future and benefit. For eg, US produces c 25 of man's carbon emissions, with c 5% of population - ask them to reduce by 4/5 and hand over to Asia and Africa? Aint going to happen

Uh Oh - Part 2 is going to be no cakewalk

This is a response to Fred Wilson's post referring to this article in Philosophy Now about what comes post Post-Modernism. In essence the argument is that the Digital Generation is a step change from what came before - Post Modernists differed from Modernists in the books they wrote and read and the theories they concocted, but the essential metastructures were the same, whereas today:

There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

And the result of this is, is that today's model is as much about the interaction as about the original content:

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in.

And the medium of this pseudo-modernism is in itself temporary, and lacks solidity - i.e. it has no persistence, as us netgeeks would say:

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete.

And irony is no longer the acceptable stance of the Internet Philosopher - dumb-ass certainty is the way to go (I can think of a few blogs in that mould....)

The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity....

....Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety

And thus we return to the infantile playing with shiny new toys:

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism

A new weightless nowhere of silent autism - or Flow, as some are wont to call it

So that's Modernism 2.0 - disposable culture, quality is defined by its audience, here today / gone tomorrow, content with zero useful thought but lots of strident opinion, often merely an attempt to flog consumer stuff, and driving an obsessive need to become ambient with the new new toys.

Yep, sounds about right to me..... a truly unbearable lightness of being

By the way, I got to the above paper from an exchange on Twitter last night, which at least shows that Twitter is going up in content value. From what you had for lunch to whether lunch exists or not in one short year. Maybe there is a bit of weight emerging in the nowhere after all, the force of gravitas operating on the mass market?

And as for silent autism...silent is one word I wouldn't use for the Modernist 2.0 lot......

Update - quite a pithy definition by Ian Betteridge on his blog Technovia of what this means in practice:

....the current vogue for opinion over argument is the triumph of the post-modern approach which claims that all opinions are equally valid. If opinion is as good as argument, then why bother with all that hard work of building a case, presenting facts, and so on

There has been a brouhaha this weekend, as Associated Press first sought to sue Bloggers using their stuff (even in linked excerpts) and then appeared to do a one-step-backtrack-two-steps-attack play. As they are finding however (in common with all corporates that come to bury it) , the blogosphere is (i) diffuse and thus hard to silence and (ii) very large and on 24/7, so it can park a myriad of tanks on lawns very fast. And holes in stories are very rapidly pointed out, as here by Scott Rosenberg:

On the one hand, AP execs are saying that they’ve decided to “suspend their efforts” to intimidate bloggers, yet on the other hand they are saying that “the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items.”

Maybe this is a face-saving walk-back. But as long as the demand is still being made, the possibility of a really destructive precedent getting set also remains.

The really puzzling thing here is this:

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

So why are they doing this - well, as always, it comes down to economics - in this case the real economics of the media. If anyone has read Flat Earth News, they will realise that AP is the middleman between PR agencies and the mainstream media, and blogging threatens to endrun that - as we show in the diagram below:



The precis of the Flat Earth News hypothesis (and its fairly well backed up in the book) is this:

Over the last decade or so, the Mainstream Media has been (i) increasing fatness of papers by adding more articles and (ii) reducing the number of Journalists to write them. But someone has to, and the PRShpere gladly jumped in, offset funded by those who had a Sponsors Message to get out (the irony between a Free Press and a Free (zero cost) press should not be lost on students of FreeConomics). The result is that the PR industry actually writes a huge amount of the stuff you read, never mind the Ads. However, many Journos are still semi-pro and don't swallow the PR spin wholesale. This is where AP and similar news aggregators come in - they are seen by the beleagured Journo as an accredited source, so if the PR fluff comes from them its OK. Thats a nice little business then if you are an AP, which, with even fewer Journos on staff, is allegedly more susceptible to taking the PR fluff on board.

Enter the Blogosphere, and this nice little earner is gone for a bummer - the bloggers will whip your stuff, by pass the paying MSM, and produce the Op Ed to the End User sans $$$, just a bit of link-lurve. Not only that, but the PR-sphere immediately sees an new (and cheaper) option to get their message sent - uncritically filtered by an army of unsophisticated dumb-ass bloggers - and bingo, you have an Unhappy Aggregator.

And now you have an Unhappy Aggregator who doesn't understand how the blogosphere works. Sit back and enjoy the fireworks

At the 21st Century Global Summit today I had the opportunity to meet Dr Lisa Harris of the University of Southampton, who is running a very interesting programme for small companies about using Web 2.0 technology to punch above their weight.

It was very interesting for me, as we have completed some work recently in this arena, and our findings were that small office/home office (SoHo) and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are driving the usage of modern technologies far more than corporates, and its been done mainly for economic reasons rather than any Web 2.0 "religion" per se - the technology is cheap to buy and use, and also tends to interoperate better than older technologies. The fact that it is also easier to use is a welcome, but secondary benefit.

What we've been trying to get is a handle on what "best practice" is emerging in the space - most of the work to date that's published has been around web working by independents (cf Web Worker Daily) and although we have some emerging conclusions its always useful to cross-collate with others. (And there is some self interest - we are drinking the kool aid ourselves, so other people's experience is very useful)

If you add to this the increasing evidence that there are changes in the value chain as it disaggregates, and Coase's law implies that as transaction costs fall you need smaller companies than were once required, and we are looking at the seeds of a fairly major shift in the structure of industry.

Thus Lisa and the team's work is very useful I believe - here is an introductory presentation they did on the subject.

Nice post by Umair Haque on the use of modern technology to compete with established heavyweights, which he calls asymmetric competition - he use the Obama / Clinton run-off as an example. We don't usually go in for politics, but as Umair uses it it to illustrate a point:

So let's discuss how he clinched the Democratic nomination - from a strategic, not a political, point of view. Put aside your own personal politics for a moment – and I’ll put mine aside, too (or let's at least try to .

What’s immediately obvious is that Obama didn’t spend decades building the resources to power a campaign which could defeat Hillary: he was able to do so in a matter of months.

Here’s a parallel. Yesterday, it took Coke decades – and billions invested in advertising – to build the world’s most powerful brand. As we’ve discussed, today, the most powerful brand in the world is Google. And Google built it in less than decade – with almost nothing spent on advertising.

Two points here - one, the Obama example, two the impact on say Coke vs Google (Google now being the worlds No 1 brand). First, Obama - one of the commentators on Umair's post points to this very interesting analysis.

The result may have lacked the glamour of a sweep, but last night, with the delegates he picked up in Montana and South Dakota and a flood of superdelegate endorsements, Obama sealed one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to wrest his party's nomination from the candidate of the party establishment. The surprise was how well his strategy held up -- and how little resistance it met.
ad_icon

"We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states," marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama's top ground-game strategists.

"It's the big mystery of the campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe, "because every delegate counts."

The Obama strategy had its limits. Like a basketball team entering halftime with a 30-point lead, the campaign played a less-than-inspired second half. Obama managed only a split yesterday, losing South Dakota and winning Montana, meaning that he lost nine of the last 14 primaries. Before last night, that erratic finish translated into losing 458 of the 867 pledged delegates available since Wisconsin voted on Feb. 19, and 53.2 percent of the popular vote.

His inability to capture battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania may be a portent of what could await him in November against Sen. John McCain.

I'll be the first to admit I haven't followed the race in detail, but what the above article implies to me is that this is a classic strategic play of taking on the enemy where they are not, and doing it in a novel way. It seemingly took the Clinton team about half the campaign to get themselves in order, by which time - in a time limited game - it was too late. One thought I did have re Obama is that its one thing to divert the party machine - essentially a massive social network with all sorts of internal relationships - its another think entirely to be able to command it without being deeply enmeshed in it. That may take a lot more time, as many corporate CEO's parachuted in from outside also find!

Now onto the second point, re Coke et al and business strategies- I think this may be different for two reasons:

Firstly, its just another a turn in the circle of life - Coke is no longer the leading drink it once was as we have diversified, eco-friendly fied, smoothified etc so it's inherent support base has reduced. Google is the dominant part of a new thing we do a lot more.

Secondly, the Obama tactic historically works well in the one-off game, so long as the game then ends - its much harder to do in any ongoing game, which I would argue business strategy is more like. To use two military examples (as this strategy is quite well articulated in Sun Tzu's Art of War, written some 3,000 years ago) to illustrate.

Germany's Blitzkrieg method of warfare in World War II took more conventional armies by surprise, and they did manage to put one of Europe's superpowers (France) out the war. However, Britain stayed in the game and rapid analysis of Blitzkrieg allowed both Russia and Britain to develop alternatives, initially playing on their respective strengths (Russia's Fabian strategy and Britain fighting on "home turf" - the air over Britain and the sea) and then sorting out new approaches to counter the German tactics.

Ditto, in the Hundred Years War, England's use of the longbow allowed them to achieve some notable victories early on - but they could not force France out the war, and France eventually found the tactics to beat the English and win the war.

A business example might be Dell's use of Just In Time supply methodologies from the motor industry in computers, which gave them an entree, and a rapid company build - but over time les autres have learned how to play their own game and its no longer a slamdunk

So in conclusion, my thought re Umair's article - yes, he is absolutely right - there is currently an opportunity to use new technology to asymmetrically compete with current incumbents, and go very far, very fast if done right. It's especially useful if the incumbent, like Medieval France, "remembers nothing and forgets nothing" - but big behemoths have a lot of advantages they too can bring to bear once they have sussed out the game plan.

And as for Google, their place in the sun too will pass, its the Circle of Corporate Life.

It is with some interest that I read that David Sifry, founder of Technorati, has come up with a new gig - online travel guides. But not any online travel guides, these essentially scrape other people's content and are the repurposed and resold for $25 a pop. As noted on Techcrunch:

Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources, customized to you personally and then delivered via PDF instantly or (a color printed version) by mail within 4 business days. Data comes from open sources like wikipedia, wikitravel, Flickr and Google Maps, as well as proprietary sources that have cut deals with the company. And you can create a guide for virtually anywhere in the world - they have 30,000 or so destinations today, and will be adding regional versions in the futures (”France” or “Napa Valley” for example).....

......The guides aren’t free - a printed version costs $25, PDF (which can be printed at home or downloaded to a laptop or Kindle) is $10. Unsatisfied customers can get a full refund, the site says, and keep the guide.

There are 3 very interesting things about this:

Firstly, its the next step in personalising data taken off our new Read/Write Web for our own needs - the "Daily Me" of dotcom days revisited, with the much lower cost production and transaction costs of today. I'm mildly surprised that there is no "Social network" element to it - or is that sooo 2007 . I personally think this overall approach will be a more useful way of getting information off the web than pure RSS aggregation, as it has a number of filters in operation.

Secondly, it has come to my attention that our own blog (Broadstuff) is scraped by a number of services that sell on our material - along with others' blogs - as "market information" to companies, for profit. Its still small scale and as best I can ascertain to date, its done with attribution (with the exception of spamblogs, where among others our content has been attributed to such worthies as Video Chutney and Barack O'Blogger). This just takes that trend to an obvious conclusion.

The problem with scraping blogs etc (and largely the reason it has only been done clandestinely to date) is that it flies in the face of many copyrights - Creative Commons or otherwise - that expressly forbid the use of their material for other's commercial purposes without some form of condition / payment etc. In other words, its pushing scraping of the Common Wealth of citizen capital on the blogosphere to its logical limit.

(Or as Tom Lehrer said - Plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise - only please always call it research )

To be fair to these guys, they state that they are using sites that encourage use of material for commercial use, but - and if I may be a tad world-weary here - I doubt that it will stop at this point. The pressure is now on to take stuff off the Web. If not these guys, then the fast followers....

Now, no doubt the argument will be made that the material scraped is a "fair use" of the content - which will be pushing the concept of fair use into new territory.....you do actually have to put some of your own input into the changed work for this usage to be appropriate. Also, I also have no doubt the argument will be made that its just extending indirect (Ad supported) blogging to a direct conclusion.

However, up to now most blogged material has returned a benefit in terms of link love and traffic, which has a value - I don't think this will work in quite the same way if its printed or kindled material.

Thirdly, I am quite curious about the source(s) - an A-List, been in there from the beginning, New Web guy has set this up - and if you read the TechCrunch article and later comments, they are supportive - as is Mr "Naked Conversation" Scoble. It would appear these chaps see nothing untoward with this.....despite the issues raised above (which curiously are not mentioned on the supporting sites.... would the same view have been taken if it was an "Evil" main stream media company doing the same thing...... )

But look at the game theory of this - what this essentially declares is that its OK to scrape other people's content, repackage it, and sell it on - despite any copyright issues (taking my world-weary view). Given that a whistle has now been blown for open season on commons scraping, why do we think that a thousand such flowers will not bloom in short order - or that aggrieved website owners will not take counter-action to prevent their content being hoovered up. To say that it breaks the hippy-go-lucky culture of the early blogospere puts it mildly (as a number of the comments on TechCrunch make clear)............ its an Animal Farm moment when it becomes clear who is wearing trousers.

And put the boot on other foot - imagine if we took TechCrunch content (in small, fairly used chunks) and did the same (ah - not so easy - its copyrighted, not CC) - or even took Mr Sifry's material and re-did it (Hmmmm...I'll bet that is not CC either* ). I am sure they will support our publish-for-profit endeavours with the same hearty approbation they support this of course

And this identifies the difficulty with the business model - literally anyone can do the same thing technically, so it becomes a "Devil Take the Hindmost Marketeer" to make these sorts of businesses succeed, and whoever does it for cheapest will win. Someone like WAYN could put these out with very little additional effort and use offset economics to grab market share. I predict a Free version in a month. (Interestingly, a Free version may not breach as many copyrights, giving it access to more material...)

This is going to get very interesting methinks....... I suspect this action is going to have some major impacts on examining copyright law for the digital media. Not before time either.

* Turns out I may have lost that bet, Crosbie Fitch notes (asserts?) in the comments that its returned to the commons, and the pricing is for materials and labour etc. Wot, no profits then, Crosbie?

(Update - I had to insert this from one of he TechCrunch Commentators....

When I saw the “Carlsbad” book title in the video, I was excited to see something from the Czech Republic. Carlsbad is the German name for Karlovy Vary, a very popular spa town west of Prague. Turns out it was Carlsbad, CA.

I also assumed it was "the" Carlsbad and was impressed.... I shoulda known. )

The BBC has set up a Trust, headed up by ex BBC'er Patricia Hodgson, to oversee the BBC's spend in the digital media arena and see if it is in the public interest. The Torygraph digital editor, proxying in the Grauniad, is very vexercised over this:

So the baseline budget for 2007/2008 of £74.2m is bumped up to £114.4m - a healthy 54% increase at a time when the BBC's private sector rivals are feeling the full whiplash of a global credit crunch.

A bit of perspective on £114.4m: that's more than the combined digital budgets of all of Britain's national newspaper websites. And it's only the tip of the iceberg: it does not include the costs of bbc.com, the BBC's commercial international website, nor does it include much of the website's journalism costs, and nor does it take account of the BBC's juicy £400m "future media'' budget. So, in reality, the BBC has well in excess of £500m to spend on digital media - a big enough war chest to crush its rivals, should the BBC get its act together.

But of course, should rivals feel "overwhelmed by the scale of the BBC'' they can always appeal to an "independent'' panel - overseen by the BBC Trust - in a process that typically takes 18 months to two years.

But why should the public care? After all, if it leads to an even better website, then that's surely in the public interest.

Not so - unless you take the view that weakening the private sector news industry is in Britain's best interest.

Quite a few separate strands here.

Firstly, the size of the budget - c £500m. That is huge, and can potentially put paid to any aspiring startup in any space the BBC decides to enter. For that reason, since it is "our" money after all, I think it is incumbent on the BBC to use UK startups as much as possible. The Backstage Labs and Innovation program are excellent, but I think more could be done to nurture UK digital talent - the BBC as a customer could feed a whole ecosystem of startups. The UK's big skill over the US and Europe is digital media (as opposed to infrastructure or mobile per se) and the BBC could drive the UK to bat seriously above its weight.

(Update - Ian Betteridge notes in the comments that the BBC is mandated to spend 25% of its budget on UK companies - I knew that and forgot it - in fact they can spend more, as there are other discretionary inside/outside budgets as well)

Secondly, the criticism that BBC spend is greater than the ToryGraph, Grauniad etc' spend on digital media put together and could crush them. To me, that's more a reflection on the fact that the private companies are underspending in the space. If the BBC action forces them to open up the purse strings a bit more, that's another win-win for UK.com

Thirdly, as to keeping a private media sector being in Britain's best interest - two thoughts here:

(i) In nearly every media sector the reason the UK has such high quality is because the BBC is producing at a reasonable quality level - ie it keeps the private sector from devolving to the lowest common demographic, as occurs in other countries.

(ii) The private sector is not an automatic "good thing", it needs to earn that right - and right now it isn't - from republishing PR and calling it journalism, to scamming phone call ins, private sector media needs to do a bit more "log out of own eye" work to be automatically considered a Good Thing.

Fourthly - is 18 months to 2 years acceptable - no, but then I have seen many a private sector company use the law to spin things out for this long - even getting bills paid can take ages. Its a karma thing

The big question is - does the BBC scale hamper innovation? The answer - not directly, but it does scare people off areas that the BBC can get into. Why this is any different to competing with say Microsoft or Google is unclear to me though, its just like.

But if - as I suggest above - the BBC works with / uses some of the UK companies, and even possibly open its archive / R&D side for use, it could actually foster a vibrant ecosystem, not stifle it.