David Weinberger on Too Big to Know

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David Weinberger – another of those authors whose books I read as soon as they come out – recently published Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, a very long title on the topic of how to separate the wheat from the chaff in a world where knowledge is seemingly inexhaustible. As anyone who has edited Wikipedia knows, knowledge is now dynamic, networked, and crowdsourced, both in academia and outside. Knowledge – good and bad – spreads blisteringly fast and can flatfoot many an authority.

I attended a seminar with David Weinberger today, at the Berkman Center – the turnout was quite good, about 150 people in my estimate. Here are my notes:

  • Physical instantiations of knowledge coming apart (encyclopedias, newspapers, libraries) because of one little innovation: The hyperlink.
  • Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, not his own facts (senator Patrick Moynihan.)
  • Knowledge seen as building on bricks on bricks, nailed down, and then a product of filtering
  • Too much to know, the world is too big to know – the strategy is to break off a brain-sized (“skulls don’t scale”) part of the world and allow an expert to know it really well. We can ask the expert, then get an answer and then we can stop asking. A system of stopping points – you don’t have to rerun the experiment, you can trust experts based on credentials.
  • Books are not linked – linear, winnowed (through good writing), permanent
  • Following footnotes used not to be done, now it is trivial.
  • Knowledge is picking up the properties of the new medium, just as it did pick up properties of the old medium.
  • Clay Shirky: No such thing as information overload, just filter failure.
  • Information overload (Toffler) came from sensory overload idea, 60s. People worried about information overload, would not keep you sane.
  • What constitutes information overload has changed – we tolerate much more stuff now.
  • Previously, stuff that was filtered out (by publishers and newspapers) was not available, but now it is, in blog posts. We filter forward on the Internet, we do not filter out.
  • New strategy: Include everything, the cost of getting rid of something is higher than getting rid of it. So you include almost everything. And you filter on the way out. (you’d never keep notes from library committee meetings in Wozilla, Alaska, because they would not be interesting, until Sarah Palin becomes vice-presidential candidate)
  • We are good at making order out of things. Knowing categories is to know the world – categorization is a serious pursuit for thousands of years. But physical entities need to have one and only one categorization – you cannot sort your CD collection alphabetically and by genre. But on the web, you can have thousands of playlists – a mess but a very rich mess.
  • Messiness is how you scale meaning.
  • For every fact on the Internet there is an equal and opposite fact. The Internet is a stew of disagreement. We don’t agree on anything and we never will. And that is fine.
  • We don’t even know if Moynihan really said that thing about facts and opinions
  • Shows picture of platypus, lots of arguing about its categorization – now we don’t care any more. We can have different namespaces that allow us to choose categorizations based on what we prefer.
  • We like to hang out with people like ourselves, and that is a problem – because we can create echo-chambers, which fragment and amplify disagreements.
  • Idea from the enlightenment – deep, down to the level of facts, anything else is not a real conversation. But this is a fallacy, for in order to do that you need to have large degree of similarity. Not going to solve that here, but Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler (both present) are working on it.
  • Long-form arguments are loosing their pre-eminence as highest form of human discourse. (Yes, I know I wrote a book, get the irony.) Not going away, but losing its preeminence. Darwin would, if he published now, be tweeting from the Beagle, had a conversation about finches’ beaks. And this web of knowledge would have more value than Darwin’s original work.
  • Michael Nielsen: Redesigning discovery. ArXive.org, scientists posting papers and discussing them.
  • Destructuring of knowledge is happening at all levels, also at the level of the data themselves. Darwin studied barnacles for 7 years after Beagle trip. Data is not like that any more. Data commons happening in field after field: Genetics, astronomy, government, libraries. Data.gov posting raw data because cleaned and curated data doesn’t scale.
  • Tremendous value in getting data out – and fast. Peer review doesn’t scale. Cannot scale science research, unless it is peer-to-peer review – open access journals that are peer reviews.
  • The third way data is changing is that it is linked – computers can make sense and link three different knowledge nuggets about platypuses (characterizing them as platypus, watermole, and ornithorhyncus anatinus) can be linked by linking to references.
  • This process is fractal and recurring.
  • Data are getting linked, fractal and destructured.
  • Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but it is truer about knowing.
  • What we have in common is not knowledge about which we agree, but a shared world about which we disagree.

Professor Ann M. Blair (author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age) with question: On the pyramid from data to information to knowledge to wisdom, Plato said that the purpose is wisdom. Aristotle wanted a disciplinary (certain) form of knowledge, middle ages brought us information concept (Bacon). Information explosion already in the 1800s, that’s when data enters the language, takes off during 1950s. Now it is just raw data.

Good things about the book: Nuanced, neither technology deterministic or not, but you can find data and authoritative knowledge behind every position. Like that it is not about substitution but net as an addition. The net cannot stand in for current institutions. The book is optimistic – we need to understand and use the net. I do hope that we are imparting mental maps and the wherewithal to make judgments – though I am of the wrong generation. Not “don’t use Wikipedia” but learning how to notice deficiencies.

Comment from librarian Harvard (missed the name). What are going to do about building a knowledge infrastructure? Knowledge is lumpy, intertwiningly linked and so on, but there are still tensions between truth and untruth. We do not have one foundation on which we can rest for very long. Today we are caught in a time warp between the long form book and the Net revolution, and we don’t have a handle on this new form of knowledge yet? Refer to Thinking, Fast and Slow: Is the net making us change from thinking slow to thinking fast – i.e., making decisions based on reactiveness rather than analysis?

Ethan Zuckerman: This is the book that shifts us from the early Weinberger to the middle Weinberger. I don’t think this a happy book – we just had a very smart man stand up and tell us that facts is not what we thought they were and consensus is probably not achievable. If this doesn’t unsettle you, what will? David’s central point is that this is not economics: What killed the Boston Globe was that some fundamental processes change the world, in how we know things and how we find it. He is making the argument that we are going to put something in a book and make it authoritative is challenged. We are now three nanoseconds after the Big Bang, and it will take us a very long time to navigate through this. The deep challenge he is putting forward is to understand the world is to understand and accept the complexity of the world. Those of us who figure out to navigate this space are given the possibility of succeeding in a new and very different way. Houseman: The advent of economic complexity: Think of it in terms of person-bytes: Houseman argues that you can figure out what economies can or cannot do, by understanding how many person-bytes you have in it. You can line up experts and that is good, but it works really well if the knowledge lies between the experts – understanding knowledge as a process. So what I am hoping for is some understanding of how we are going to navigate this web of knowledge. This is the most exciting question you can wrestle with. The world David is describing is much messier, but by helping us wrestle with it he has helped us.

Questions:

How does the definition of truth change – have we gotten truth wrong?

We all have categories, fight about them, are you saying they are losing relevance? No, not at all, but the notion of a single, right categorization is losing its primacy. We discuss whether bloggers are journalists or not, many things hang on it, but we understand that there is not one right answer.

Importance of personal relationship rising parallel to web? Social dimension to knowledge? Will take the easy way out – I learn from mailing lists, and they eventually become social bonds. We want to turn information into communication.

Norwegian Data Inspectorate outlaws Google App use

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In a letter (reported at digi.no) to the Narvik Municipality (which has started to use Google Mail and other cloud-based applications, effectively putting much of its infrastructure in the Cloud) the Norwegian Data Inspectorate (http://www.datatilsynet.no/English/), a government watchdog for privacy issues, effectively prohibits use of Google Apps, at least for communication of personal information. A key point in this decision seems to be that Google will not tell where in the world the data is stored, and, under the Patriot Act, the US government can access the data without a court order.

Companies and government organizations in Norway are required to follow the Norwegian privacy laws, which, amongst other things, requires that “personal information” (of which much can be communicated between a citizen and municipal tax, health and social service authorities) should be secured, and that personal information collected for one purpose may not be used for other purposes without the owner’s expressed permission.

This has interesting implications for cloud computing – many European countries have similar watchdogs as Norway, and many public and private organizations are interested in using Google’s services for their communication needs. My guess is that Google will need to offer some sort of reassurance that the data is outside of US jurisdiction, or effectively forgo this market to other competitors, such as Microsoft of some of the local consulting companies, which are busy building their own private clouds. Should be an interesting discussion at Google – the Data Inspectorate is a quite popular watchdog, Norway has some of the strongest privacy protection laws in the world (though, for some reason, it publishes people’s income and tax details), and Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil” might be put to the test here – national laws limiting global infrastructures.

Computer security is about finding front doors

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This excellent little piece in Wired tells about a security researchers who could spy on corporate meetings by simply scanning for conference phones with “automatic accept” configured:

Using a program that Moore wrote, the researchers found the conference rooms by scanning the Internet for videoconference systems that were set up outside firewalls and configured to automatically answer calls.

In less than two hours, they found systems installed in 5,000 conference rooms around the country, including an attorney-inmate meeting room at a prison, an operating room at a university medical center, and a venture capital company where prospects were pitching their companies while laying out their financial details on a screen in the room.

As I always say – introduce too complex technology and too onerous password rules, and you end up with people using the same password for everything, ditching passwords altogether – or writing the password on a Post-It note and taping it to the back of their keyboards.

Manufacturing is changing, and so is productivity

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Two excellent articles on increasing productivity, and why this will not result in many new jobs:

Davison describes the new kind of manufacturing, where everything is done by multi-step, highly complex machines, producing small series, requiring very high-skilled workers with rather sophisticated education. But they also need unskilled workers doing simple things, like moving parts between machines. The problem is, the pay scale for the second type is very low, and the difference in training to get to the skilled level so high, that no company will provide it:

For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved up so her children can go to college—she’d need to become one of the advanced Level 2s. A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie doesn’t know, although Maddie is quite open about these shortcomings. She doesn’t know the computer-programming language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer language. She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.

The reason Maddie – hardworking and dedicated – has a job is simply one of distance: Shipping fragile parts to China for the unskilled operations is too risky and expensive. So Maddie has a job, but not career prospects. And the company’s management is facing very hard competition – their customers see them as a distributor – and is constantly scanning for things that can be outsourced or bought from another vendor.

Mandel describes the differences in productivity increases from improving productivity in domestic production – doing things smarter – and lowering cost by bargaining and optimizing the supply chain before it reaches the domestic organization. Both show up as productivity improvements, but have vastly different effects on domestic jobs:

But here’s the rub: both of these corporate strategies— domestic productivity improvements and global supply chain management—show up as productivity gains in U.S. economic records. When federal statisticians calculate the nation’s economic output, what they are actually measuring is domestic “value added”—the dollar value of all sales minus the dollar value of all imports. “Productivity” is then calculated by dividing the quantity of value added by the number of American workers. American workers, however, often have little to do with the gains in productivity attributed to them. For instance, if Company A saves $250,000 simply by switching from a Japanese sprocket supplier to a much cheaper Chinese sprocket supplier, that change shows up as an increase in American productivity—just as if the company had saved $250,000 by making its warehouse operation in Chicago more efficient.

This is known as import bias, and may be a problem, as it overestimates domestic productivity increases. Mandel goes on to show that this bias affect both left and right, and the difference in views is largely one about how to effectuate a change: Stimulus or tax relief.

Both authors advocate better data and better education as a way out, but quick fixes they aren’t. This is a real puzzler.

What you can learn from your LinkedIn network

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LinkedIn Maps is a fascinating service that lets you map out your contact network. Here is my first-level network, with 848 nodes (click for larger image):

image

The colors are added automatically by LinkedIn, presumably by profile similarity and link to other networks. You have to add the labels yourself – they are reasonably precise, at least for the top five groups (listed according to size and, I presume, interconnectedness).

As can be seen, I am a gatekeeper between a network of consultants and researchers in the States (the orange group) and reasonably plugged into the IT industry, primarily Norwegian (the dark blue). The others are fairly obvious, with the exception of the last category, which happens to be an eclectic group that I interact with quite a lot, but which are hard to categorize, at least from their backgrounds.

Incidentally, the “shared” map, which takes away names, provides more information for analysis. Note the yellow nodes in my green network on the right: These are the people hired by BI to manage or teach in China. They are, not in nationality but in orientation, foreigners in their own organization.

My LinkedIn policy is to accept anyone I know (i.e. have had dealings with and would like in my network), which, naturally, includes a number of students (I will friend any student of my courses as long as I can remember them, though I must admit I am a bit sloppy there.)

What is missing? Two things stand out: I have many contacts in Norwegian media and in the international blogosphere, which isn’t here because, well, Norwegian media use Twitter or their own outlets, and bloggers use, well, their blogs. Hence, the commentariat is largely invisible in the LinkedIn world (except for Jill Walker Rettberg, who sicced me onto LinkedIn Maps). Also, a number of personal friends are not here, simply because LinkedIn is a professional network – and as such captures formal relationships, not your daily communications.

Now, what really would make me curious is what this map would look like for my Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts – and how they overlap. But the network in itself is interesting – and tells me that increasing the interaction between my USA network and the Norwegian IT industry wouldn’t hurt.

Twitter redux

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How students search

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David Weinberger has posted his notes from a very interesting session at Berkman that I for some reason missed – Alison Head’s presentation of studies of students’ information search behavior from the Project Information Literacy project. The findings confirm a lot of what I would have thought just by observing my own (young adult) children’s search behavior, or, for that matter, my own. Wikipedia is used a lot, and quite intelligently, in the beginning of a search. You talk to librarians and other people to get the vocabulary necessary for a search. And students (and everyone else) wants one database, not many.

Academic corniness

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Ever so often, traces of humor peek through otherwise dreary and often self-important publications. Here is a smattering:

  • Doug Zonker’s Chicken chicken chicken paper, of course. Youtube version here, though in this case the paper clearly is better than the movie. Annals of Improbably Research, 2006
  • Tom Malinowski, Sarah Holewinski, and Tammy Schultz (2011) Post-Conflict Potter, Foreign Policy August 11
  • Dooley-Dickey, K. and J. Satcher (1991). “Doctoral Disorder of Adulthood.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 13(4): 486-491.

Feel free to add suggestions!

History for homebodies

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At Home: A Short History of Private LifeAt Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson is one of those writers whose books I buy sight unseen – so I can’t really understand how I missed this one. I got it as a very welcome Christmas gift and read it in small portions over the holiday – the book is ostensibly a walk through an old English house, room for room, but that framework serves only to very loosely organize a barrage of anecdotes and historical trends.

It is obvious that Bryson enjoyed writing this book – perhaps more than any other he has written. As one reviewer noted, it seems written in the pajamas. Many, if not most, of the stories he retells I have read before, but that doesn’t take away any of the pleasure of hearing Bill Bryson tell them again.

And sometimes you find a local connection – I currently live in Brookline, MA, and liked the story of John Longyear, who moved his whole 65-room house from Battle Creek, Michigan to Brookline in 1902. Longyear, of course, is the same business magnate who founded what eventually became Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani and gave his name to Longyearbyen. The enormous house is just a few blocks up from where I live, now part of a condominium complex.

Like his “Short History of Almost Everything”, this book is neither short nor a traditional history book, but it is immensely enjoyable. Preferably at home, with your feet up in front of the fire.

View all my reviews

Twitter redux

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  • “The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns.” Excellent in Wired: bit.ly/tddrtU by Jonah Lehrer
    All the easy causal relations have been found – and we now have to pay attention to the second and third interactions. New methods are needed – though Lehrer does not propose anything to do in this otherwise excellent essay.
  • From 2010, but current and extremely well-written: The end of men.bit.ly/u5ZM0Q
    I have three daughters and should welcome this development, but it feels a bit weird. Made me think about an experience a few years back: With a few other parents, I helped the teacher of a 10-grade class arrange a half-day at a climbing center in downtown Oslo. I was the only male adult there. The girls in the class all participated in climbing the walls, with different levels of skill and stamina. The boys, however, all huddled in a corner, not willing to do any climbing. I tried to challenge them, literally speaking, by asking them if they were afraid – a challenge no boy that age would have refused in my time. Instead, they just ignored it and continued to sulk…
  • Nick Carr on ebooks: on.wsj.com/rtubGe Likes the speed but afraid the marketers will retroactively alter content.
  • Anti-theft car seat that recognizes your butt… bit.ly/w3eYj3
    Should be a good reason to keep the slim line – eat too much and your car won’t recognize you.
  • Hugh MacLeod nails it: “Facebook is the new suburbia” bit.ly/uoP6Vn
  • Proposed new calendar would mean stable date/weekdays, no annual scheduling dance… bit.ly/vesPAX I would just love to have my courses and other things the same day every year.
  • HP Photon looks like just the thing for your living room bit.ly/ryGrPDOr banquet hall.

Twitter redux

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  • Cory Doctorow on the coming battle against general computation:youtu.be/HUEvRyemKSg
    (eminently lucid, as always. Compare to Brad Feld below, same argument, with additions)
  • Epicure on the finance industry – a necessary service, like garbagemen bit.ly/vlLgxI
    (“The nature of investment banking—and, dare I say it, management consulting, too—is not one that demands deep thinkers, brilliantly inventive innovators, or even virtuoso synthesizers of disparate intellectual strands. We want smart, fun, dedicated, aggressive youngsters who can work like animals, day-in, day-out, for as long as it takes. As you can tell, this is not a particularly nuanced or diverse set of criteria”)
  • Great: How Maskelyne hacked Marconi’s radio – in 1903bit.ly/smUHM6 (via schneier.com)
  • Brad Feld puts #SOPA in context: ideas.4brad.com/content-indust… 
    (compare to Cory Doctorow above – Brad uses airlines as example, Cory wheels. Both metaphors work.)
  • Eric Raymond on flavors of anti-intellectualism: esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001
  • O’Reilly on changes in publishing. Excellent summary.oreil.ly/uvTght Wish Norwegian publishers would read and act.
  • Good product: Logitech wireless earphones wp.me/p1Ug4Q-hq
    (an example of how excellent customer service can make up for a weakness in an otherwise excellent product.)
  • Excellent article by James Fallows: Hacked! bit.ly/qErjlP What to do not to lose years of email.
    (Backup, backup, backup. Unless you know Eric Schmidt.)

Good product: Logitech wireless earphones

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I spend a lot of time on teleconferences and giving presentations via the Internet. I have tried a number of headphones and microphone setups. Most of them are good, but the last four months I have used a Logitech wireless earphone system (Logitech Wireless Headset H760 With Behind-the-head Design (981-000265)). These headphones have quickly become my favorite. They are comfortable to wear, and the battery lasts three-four hours (you can use the headset while it is charging, with a standard USB cable). The sound is decent and the microphone is good enough to use for online presentations and for automatic dictation. I am actually using them now, for this blog post, using DragonDictate 11.

One of the reasons I like them is, of course, that I can wander around the kitchen or my office while dictating or presenting online. Another is the very intuitive user interface: If you want to mute the microphone, all you have to do is turn the microphone boom to an upright position. This is a very natural movement, and you are never in doubt about whether your microphone is muted or not.

I actually have two of these headphones. The first one I got four months ago. Unfortunately, since I have a large hat size (and they are a little bit on the delicate side) the headset broke – it cracked along the slide that goes behind the ears. I needed to use the headphones right away, so I take them and started using them, and then forgot about them. Eventually the crack widened and I had to call Logitech customer service, who promptly sent me a new pair which I am using now. The customer service call was quick and painless, and the Amazon employee I first communicated with assured me that my problem would be fixed promptly. Which it was, making Logitech customer service another reason to recommend this product.

Twitter redux

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  • Good list of business articles: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/this-year-in-small-business-the-best-reads/
    (I especially liked the article about how the next bubble is going to be in higher education – when parents see their offspring moving back home after four years at $50K each, they will start to wonder if not something else – community college first, for instance – will make more sense.)
  • Keep getting questions about a paper I wrote about “Organizations as brains” in 1992. Should have published it. bit.ly/sHCfvK
  • Woman freed from kidnapper through Facebook update:mashable.com/2011/12/27/fac… FB with panic button?
  • Digitalt Personvern har passert 500,000 innsamlet! Hva med et romjulsbidrag? digitaltpersonvern.no/bidra/
  • Excellent article about the insane security theatre:vanityfair.com/culture/featur…
    (This article in Vanity Fair nicely summarizes the many paradoxes of security. A few simple acts, such as locking the door to the cockpit, actively tracking luggage, and the mental change that has taken place in airline passengers (that is, that they now will attack a hijacker rather than accede to his demands) as led to a situation where we are now much more secure against hijacking them before. The many high-cost initiatives, such as full body scanners, explosive residue detection, and no-fly lists have not resulted in any appreciable improvement in security.)
  • Bloomberg with Economic History Blog:bloomberg.com/view/echoes/

Twitter 24-hour redux

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  • A coming disruption in supercomputers? bit.ly/sSTxPd Amazon takes on really big iron.
    (this one has all the hallmarks: Cheap alternative, incumbents showing their best stuff and pointing out all the things the newcomer can’t do. But 30,000 processors at $1250/hour is hard to beat. And the virtual supercomputer is on a falling price curve.)
  • New Teslas might make electric cars competitive with normal onesbit.ly/w1cxGW
    (300 miles’ range, 30 minute to 50% charge, 4 passengers. This is beginning to look like a car.)
  • The Atlantic has a good outlook for tech in 2012 – not too pie-in-the-sky: bit.ly/up95ri
    (maybe a trifle boring, but the future tends to be more of the same.)
  • The more data you produce, the happier organized crime is to consume it youtu.be/6ueKilyThQg #digitaltpersonvern
    (Information stored is information vulnerable. Or as a @forsberg said: The only way to make sure nobody has access to a list is not to make the list.)
  • A lament for nickfromfulham wp.me/p1Ug4Q-he
    (Why doesn’t BBC put their stuff on Youtube? Here is my heartfelt opinion)
  • Dual SIM phones may be next step in BYOD mobile strategiesbit.ly/tlcCgO
    (or maybe just a stopgap fix, since connection prices are falling)
  • IT department can become hostage to cloud services bit.ly/s1dfaa
    (Hard to fiddle with someone else’s cloud.)

A lament for nickfromfulham

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(or, why BBC should put their material on Youtube).

The future of TV is on the net. Too bad the leading TV producers don’t understand it.

imageThis year I am living in the US, without a TV. So far I have not missed it – we have Netflix for movies and Youtube for music and clips. Having to chose your programming yourself means zero hours channelsurfing on the sofa, and a delightful lack of background noise from breakfast TV shows and similar junk.

But – what to watch when you want a little fun? For my youngest daughter (she is here in Boston to take a year of US high school) and I Friday nights have been spent in front of our nice 23 inch monitor, wathing Never Mind the Buzzcocks, a great, wild, satirical quiz show about pop music. And when I want to relax by myself, there is the unsurpassable QI, a [deeply intelligent/self-indulgingly moronic] quiz show with a pop science bent. Or I can watch some of BBCs great series, such as Stephen Fry’s programs about the English language.

Through Youtube, I have come to know and appreciate comedians and actors such as Bill Bailey, Phill Jupitus, Jo Brand, Noel Fielding, Alan Davies, Jimmy Carr, Sean Lock, Rich Hall, John Sessions, Rob Brydon, David Mitchell and Dara Ó Briain, just to name a few. I have learned a lot and laughed even more. The episode where Emma Thompson describes how she used her body to terrify Stephen Fry to complete breakdown or where Jack Dee serves the mother of all putdowns to Sandy Toksvig and Ronni Ancona are complete jewels.

Which brings me to a sad point: The channel NickFromFulham, who (assuming there is a Nick and he is from Fulham) has put up all these videos, was recently shut down from Youtube. Where should we go now for our witty and intelligent entertainment? You see, almost none of the stuff that BBC produces is viewable outside the UK, except in short snippets, on DVDs, or on the anemic BBC America channel, for which we would have to get a TV, and then put up with programs that are both delayed and also watered down in terms of swearwords, sexual and scatological references and much of the Britishness that makes Britain both British and bearable.

The funny thing is, of course, that if it wasn’t for Youtube’s technical capability and NickfromFulham’s diligent uploading and characterization, I wouldn’t know much about QI and nothing about Buzzcocks. Which makes me wonder a) what else is out there, not just in BBCland but in many TV stations around the world, and b) why the heck doesn’t BBC (and NRK, its Norwegian state-funded equivalent and all others) put their stuff out in digital format?

To the first point: I gave a talk to NRK in June, about disruption in the media industries and so on. As part of the discussion of how to strategize for the future, I urged them to fill up available spots in their many channels with stuff like QI – quality shows that have a very local appeal, but in an increasingly global world will have global appeal without sacrificing quality. When you treat your viewers as intelligent, they will act intelligently. To quote David Foster Wallace, in his his brilliant essay E Unibus Pluram:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

The point being – with infinite channel capacity, you can attract a large audience, in many countries, by not pandering to the lowest common denominator. (The fact that QI is one of BBC’s most watched programs shows that the common denominator may, in fact, not be so low after all.)

The future of TV is on the net – but in order to attract people to the net, you have to release your best stuff, and gradually become the source and context of quality entertainment rather than a prison of old business models. And incidentally, slamming the door in the face of your biggest fans is not the way to go about it.

As for us? Well, my daughter is 17 and an accomplished net surfer. She can easily find and download the next episode of Buzzcocks from one of many pirate sites. Not that I like it, but what can I do? (Well, IP spoofing and going to BBC’s web site in the UK itself would be another option.) Or I can watch something else, which, of course, lowers the commercial value of all those actors and comedians participating in the things I would like to see.

Incidentally, here is one of the most watched Norwegian skits on Youtube. Let’s see if you understand it, even if it is in Norwegian (with subtitles):

The morning browse

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  • Time to switch back to Firefox? bit.ly/vICWB6 I have gotten used to a few of the Chrome apps, myself
  • Wolfram Alpha and Siri secures Christmas entertainment bit.ly/uXCpCy
  • Martin Freeman seems a good choice as Bilbo youtu.be/G0k3kHtyoqc
  • Scott Adams’ take on “Race against the machine”: bit.ly/uBCxxv
  • Bionic eyes where you can zoom in. bit.ly/ufN7Tq Singularity, here we come…
  • The Name of the Rose “was the first and last of [Umberto Eco's] good books” bit.ly/tPD4UE Agreed.

Waiting for Christmas (with help from Tim Minchin)

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Tim Minchin, UK-based Australian comedian, composer and contrarian, performs what is my favorite Christmas tune, his “White wine in the sun”, which manages to be sentimental, smart, atheistic (or at least skeptical) and deeply felt, which I think everyone should be. Especially at Christmas, which is about so much more than religion.

And I am not just saying that because I am 3501 miles from home, with the family arriving for a prolonged Christmas visit, or because, just like me, Tim met his wife when he was seventeen and they stay together, but because this song describes the best parts of Christmas – indeed, the whole purpose of Christmas – quite precisely.

Looking forward to Christmas far to often is attributed to consumerism (at least for small children) or has to be legitimized through some religious reference, such as the inevitable pre-Christmas op-eds about how we are losing sight of what the holidays are all about, etc. etc.

So, this year as any other, I am looking forward to Christmas with our little rituals.

Just as long as it isn’t white. All our snow gear is in Norway. Snow would really let us have an American experience…

Douglas Adams on technology novelty

Posted by Espen on

Found this quote in Jeff Jarvis’ Public Parts, from Douglas Adams’ How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, published in Sunday Times in 1999:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

This is a surprisingly good explanation of a lot of things, and certainly something that should be taken into account by anyone trying to design policy to deal with technology.

What a pity that Douglas Adams died so young. We could need a lot more of his razorblade analysis and learned humor.

Jeff Jarvis on his public parts

Posted by Espen on

(taking notes from a presentation at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center, December 6, 2011)

(David Weinberger has a much better writeup.)

Jeff Jarvis rake thin, grey-haired, dressed in black and bearded, and has had cancer, but any similarity with Steve Jobs stops there. His latest book, Public Parts, advocates more openness in a time concerned with privacy yet somehow unable to press that “like” button on Facebook.

His key point is that the tools of publicness need to be protected – and though privacy and publicness is not in opposition – and his fear that privacy concerns are misapplied and sometimes dangerous.

When Kodak was invented, there were articles written about “fiendish Kodakers” lying in wait, and the cameras were banned in some public parks. Anxiety about privacy goes back to the Gutenberg press, microphones, video cameras. Society is looking for norms, but legislates to keep the past, in terms of the past.

The tools of making publics: Habermas said public discourse started in coffee houses in the 18th century as a counterweight to government power. It was ruined by mass media. Now we have the tools of publicness, and we get things like Occupy Wall Street. Jeff started (after a few glasses of Pinot Noir) the #fuckyouwashington tag, which spawned a platform with more than 110,000 tweets.

The Gutenberg parentheses: Before Gutenberg, knowledge was non-linear, with Gutenberg it became linear, after Gutenberg it is non-linear and the knowledge we revere is the net. Danish professors arguing that the transition into Gutenberg was hard, and the transition out of it will be equally hard. Web content still shaped as analogues of the past.

Had to understand what privacy is – first take was that it had something to do with control. Came to think that privacy is an ethic. This means that publicness is also an ethic, an ethic of sharing information. Sharing his prostate cancer, including impotence, on the web. Hard to do, but got tremendous value out of it.  Various people contributed to the blog, telling things that the doctors won’t say, etc.

We need to learn from young people how to control sharing. Danah Boyd: COPA requires companies not to keep information about children younger than 13. But more than 50% of 12-year olds had Facebook – “on the internet everyone’s 14.” Sullivan principles (developed for apartheid) may help: Rules for companies to operate in South Africa.

Jarvis propose some principles:

  1. We have the right to connect.
  2. We have the right to speak.
  3. We have the right to assemble and to act.
  4. Privacy is an ethic of knowing
  5. Publicness is an ethic of sharing
  6. Our institutions’ information should be public by default, secret by necessity
  7. What is public is a public good
  8. All bits are created equal
  9. Internet must stay open and distributed

Fear that governments and companies will take this away.

Various questions in the question round – but the discussion didn’t really take off.

Jeff comes off somewhat like his books: Well articulated and with many interesting and well described examples, but I keep looking for some more analysis and less description. More depth, simply, not just a plea that openness is good and we need to develop norms on how to handle it. But the “history of the private and the public” part of his book is very good. And it does make for an interesting read.

Competing online syllabus

Posted by Espen on

Name of course: Competing online
Time: February 7-8, 2011
Place: Lorange Institute of Business, Zürich, Switzerland
Instructor: Espen Andersen, Assoc. Prof. Norwegian Business School

The course, a two-day seminar aimed at senior business decision-makers, will give insight into the strategic and tactical choices facing companies going into electronic commerce, whether from a pure online strategy or using an online presence as a support for their regular service and sales channels. The syllabus is not meant to be conclusive – the right to make changes is most explicitly reserved.

If you are interested, you can sign up here.

Syllabus:

Tuesday, February 7

Session 1, 0830-1000: Introduction, the promise and peril of online competition
This session will introduce the course and use a short case as a starting point for discussing the impact of online competition on traditional companies. Please read and be prepared to discuss the following:

Study questions for the case:

  • Is eHerramientas a threat to Catatech?
  • What should Marisa do to design a strategy to counter eHerramientas’ competition?
  • What should Marisa to to communicate her strategy within Catatech?

Session 2, 1030-1200: The mechanisms of electronic commerce: Searchability and findability
Google provides the context in which you will need to be found on the web. Amazon shows a company that helps you find the right product when the customer lands on the site. In this session we will study the offerings by both companies, and see how they have evolved over time.

  • Article: Rangaswamy, A., C. L. Giles, et al. (2009). “A Strategic Perspective on Search Engines: Thought Candies for Practitioners and Researchers.” Journal of Interactive Marketing 23: 49-60.
  • Article: Andersen, E. (2006). “The Waning Importance of Categorization.” ACM Ubiquity 7(19).
  • Google technology overview, “What is AdWords” video,
  • Article: (for the more advanced student): Brin, S. and L. Page (1998). The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Seventh International WWW Conference, Brisbane, Australia. (this is the paper that started Google).
  • Amazon: “Inside Amazon” video, as well as this article: Linden, G., B. Smith, et al. (2003). “Amazon.com recommendations: item-to-item collaborative filtering.” Internet Computing, IEEE 7(1): 76-80.

Session 3 and 4, 1330-1700, with break: Evolving the pure online company
In this session we will study the evolution of Masterstudies.com, a company that helps graduate schools selectively recruit international students for their MBA and M.Sc. programs. We will be joined in this discussion by Mr. Linus Murphy, CEO of Masterstudies.

Session 5, 1700-1730: An introduction to disruptive innovations
In preparation for the group work for the night, there will be a short introduction to and discussion of the theory of disruptive innovations.

  • Articles: Christensen, C. M., M. Raynor, et al. (2001). “Skate to Where the Money Will Be.” Harvard Business Review (November): 73-81.

Session 6, after 1730: Group work

  • Case: Schibsted (HBS case 707474, Bharat Anand)
  • Article: “More media, less news”, The Economist, August 24, 2006
  • Assignment: On a group basis, prepare a short presentation for tomorrow’s morning session. More precise instructions will be distributed in class.

Wednesday, February 8:

Session 7, 0830-1000: Responding to online competition:

  • Case: Schibsted (HBS case 707474, Bharat Anand)
  • Group presentations, prepared the night before

Session 8, 1030-1200: Responding to the social web: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter

Social media represents many challenges to business organizations – but also opportunities for increasing brand awareness, learning from customers and .

  • Article: Mangold, W. G. and D. J. Faulds “Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix.” Business Horizons 52(4): 357-365.
  • Case: A blogger in their midst (HBS case R0309X, Halley Suitt)
  • Case: Coca-Cola on Facebook (HBS case 511110, John Deighton, Leora Kornfeld)

Session 9, 1330-1500: Responding to the technical threat

Security and disaster management is often ignored by senior management – partly because the issues are, well, technical and difficult. The iPremier case, in cartoon form for your reading pleasure, allows for a discussion of how to think about and prioritize security in an online business environment.

Case study questions:

  • How well did the iPremier Company perform during the seventy-five minute attack? If you were Bob Turley, what might you have done differently during the attack?
  • The iPremier CEO, Jack Samuelson, had already expressed to Bob Turley his concern that the company might eventually suffer from a “deficit in operating procedures.” Were the company’s operating procedures deficient in responding to this attack? What additional procedures might have been in place to better handle the attack?
  • Now that the attack has ended, what can the iPremier company do to prepare for another such attack?
  • In the aftermath of the attack, what would you be worried about? What actions would you recommend?

Session 10, 1530-1700: Short written examination

  • TBA.

Session 11: 1700-1730: Concluding remarks