Month: October 2004

Long tail creators vs. organizational control

Scoble’s message in a bottle to Bill Gates keys in on an essential truth; that the underlying reality of the wealth of new tools around the web is about creating:

I told him to understand the content-creation trend that’s going on. It’s not just pod-casting. It’s not just blogging. It’s not just people using Garageband to create music. It’s not just people who soon will be using Photostory to create, well, stories with their pictures, voice, and music. It’s not just about ArtRage’ers who are painting beautiful artwork on their Tablet PCs. It’s not just the guys who are building weblog technology for Tablet PCs. Or for cell phones. Or for camera phones.

This is a major trend. Microsoft should get behind it. Bigtime. Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr, for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O’Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It’s the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company! Isn’t this all wild?

Obviously, this all ties into the recent flurry of commentary about the “long tail.” We’ve been indoctrinated for so long into the mythos of mass markets, that we’ve forgotten that human creativity preceeds and predates those markets. After you’ve created a mass marketing/distribution system, the system demands that you find or create hits to feed it. Change the economics of the creation and distribution systems and you open up the entire distribution not just the obvious tail. This is nothing more than Coase’s arguments about how changing transaction costs will play out. Tim Jarrett makes this point and also connects the argument to Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality article.

Both Robert and Tim begin to show how the problem of attention may not be as big a problem as has been argued. Sure, it’s a problem to the mass marketer/distributor who thinks they are entitled to a portion of my and everyone else’s attention. And initially, it’s a problem for me as I learn how to find and connect to that unique mix of sources scattered throughout the entire distribution that warrant my attention. When it settles down, however, my attention ends up better spent with that unique set of trusted advisors than it does filtered through the classic lens of mass market distribution.

One of my particular interests lies in what all of this means for doing knowledge work inside organizations. The mentality of mass market distribution manifests inside organizations as a concern for control. In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger. From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat. If I insist on routing all decisions about attention through a central node, then, of course, that node suffers from attention overload. But it does so at the expense of wasting potential attention capacity distributed throughout the organization. The only hope of tapping the available attention capacity of the organization is to give up the attachment to conventional notions of control. Put another way, the biggest obstacle to success remains the emotional needs of senior leadership to stay in control.

An early history of timesharing

I first used a timesharing computer in 1973 in a summer job with the old McDonnell Douglas. It was a Xerox SDS machine. My terminal was an old Teletype 33. This is a fascinating account from one of the early inventors in the field.

“I still don’t understand where all the computer time goes in time-sharing installations, and neither does anyone else.” — John McCarthy, 1983 (Of course, the state of the art has advanced considerably since then; now we don’t even know where the compute time goes in single-user workstations.) [Hack the Planet]

Multiple Monitors – put that extra laptop to use

I’ve got an old IBM Thinkpad available. With a little rearranging in the study, this could be a worthwhile investment.

Multiple Monitors – put that extra laptop to use.

MaxiVista is out with their new 1.5 version. This new version has a few bug fixes, but also supports up to THREE secondary displays via three other PCs. If you’ve got other laptops or Tablets around, you’ve GOT to try MaxiVista. Don’t confuse it with ShareKMC or VNC.

This is a SOFTWARE DISPLAY ADAPTER that shows up in your Display Properties. Treat it like any other monitor. Here’s my setup. It’s pure sex.

[ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog]

Wil Wheaton goes all the way

Another convert to full text feeds. Perfect timing from my perspective as I’ve just started following Wil’s site. I’ve also just started reading Just a Geek, which looks like it will be fun

full text rules!.

After several conversations at Gnomedex with geeks who are better at being geeks than I am, I’ve decided to put the full text of all my posts into my XML feed from now on.

I guess I hadn’t done this in the past because I wanted people to actually visit my site, but I don’t care about traffic any more. Now I just want people to enjoy what I write, in whatever format they prefer, including offline newsreaders.

In a related story, thanks for all the advice about newsreaders. I’ve been fooling around with Sage for the last few hours . . . the “discover feeds” thing is a killer app, man.

[WIL WHEATON dot NET: Where is my mind?]

Karl Sveiby knowledge management resources online

Thank you Judith for the reminder and pointer to an excellent resource. If we’re going to be serious about doing knowledge management in whatever flavor we happen to believe in (personal, corporate, or otherwise), then we need to stay grounded in the work that has come before us.

I’m reminded of an old software engineering quote that I can’t track down this minute since I’m blogging this on the train. I do remember that it was in the Proceedings of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering, which shows you the kind of useless stuff that clutters up my head. Anyway, the quote was something along the following lines:

“Unlike Einstein, who observed that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants, in the field of software engineering, we have mostly been standing on each other’s feet.”

Something to keep in mind if we hope to make some progress in a world far more complicated than the one that existed in Einstein’s day, or even in 1968.

sveiby knowledge management….

Old news to many but quite possibly new news to some–here is a link for your KM Library.

Karl Erik Sveiby–the principal of a global network of consultants, and a professor in Knowledge Management at the Swedish Business School Hanken in Helsinki–very generously supplies an online library of his earlier works, many of which are out of print.

This library also contains some of his favorite articles by other authors.

Check out the 90+ well-organized links available in his Sveiby Knowledge Management library.

[judith meskill’s knowledge notes…]

SpaceShipOne captures X Prize

If we manage to survive the next few years, this may prove to be the most important news of 2004.

Historic Space Exploration Event. spaceshipone

  • CNN: SpaceShipOne captures X Prize. SpaceShipOne climbed into space for the second time in a week to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize. X Prize officials said the privately funded craft reached 368,000 feet — well into space — Monday to win the $10 million prize.

    • A wonderful day for space buffs, and humanity. People will soon leave this planet, to live permanently in space and on other worlds, and this achievement is one huge step along that path. (Image thumbnail by Dexter and Southfield Schools, via CNN) [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

    McGee’s Musings new linking policy – what he said

    Now here is a linking policy I can get behind. It is, forwith, the linking policy at McGee’s Musings.

    Boing Boing has a linking policy. Cory Doctorow: After years of making fun of “linking policies” that set out the terms under which a website can be linked to, Boing Boing has decided to create a linking policy of our own. Here it is — now, abide by it!

    Boing Boing doesn’t believe in linking policies. They’re dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They’re a wicked, stupid idea.

    That said, if you believe in linking policies — that is, if you believe that people who make websites should be able to control who links to those sites and how — then have we got a policy for you:

    No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever. [Boing Boing]

    John Perry Barlow on John Kerry

    Once again, John Perry Barlow cuts to the heart of the matter. Here’s the core of it, although the whole thing is worth your time and attention:

    Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I’m having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.

    Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.

    We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs – many of them religious – that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn’t really matter who’s President. [Barlow Friendz]

    A day at the Brigham

    Quite a week.

    Had a more direct and personal encounter with the Emergency Department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston earlier in the week than I would have liked. I’ve been working for a client in the Longwood Medical Area here since mid-July. Over the last several days I’d been having chest pains off and on. Generally not considered a good sign for an overweight, underexercised middle-aged male. I finally decided that being moderately embarrassed if it was nothing was significantly preferable to what my wife would do to me if it were something serious. The image of her digging me up to kill me was the deciding factor so I walked across the street to the Brigham.

    I’m happy to report that the outcome was moderate embarassment rather than immediate bypass surgery or worse. I spent a good portion of the day on a monitor and they ran me through a treadmill stress test. While not absolutely definitive, it appears that my heart is sound. My thanks to all the good folks I met at the Brigham who reassured me that I had done the sensible thing and made me feel comfortable despite my anxieties.