RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

AOL putting mags behind the...

AOL putting mags behind the wall

The Washington Post reports that, except for the Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated Web sites, Time Warner magazine sites are going to be placed behind AOL's subscribers-only wall. With all due respect to the fact that AOL's Jonathan Miller says "AOL is in the broadband game, and we're in it to win," this strategy is a repetition of the Pathfinder problem Time Warner created for itself in the mid-90s.

At that time, the magazine sites were subordinated to creating a TW Web brand, called Pathfinder (see the gutted, bombed-out remnants here), and as a result the magazines became disincented to invest in content for the Web. If magazines' sites are tied to the AOL fees and cannot build revenue by placing more and better content in front of an audience (whether the revenues come from advertising or subscriptions), they will grow resentful of the online side. I know this happened before, because I consulted to Sports Illustrated, and it was a viper pit of distrust for the "Web people," who were viewed as taking the best of the publication and leaving nothing for the editors to build a differentiated site.

Instead of placing sites entirely behind the wall, AOL Time Warner needs to leave the existing content outside to draw new audiences to better content growing behind the subscription wall -- what it comes down to is the fact that without new investment in new content or services related to content, there is no reason for customers to want to pay to get through the gates.

High Holy Day

High Holy Day

Today is the first day of a full slate of Major League Baseball games. Praise the gods. As much as it hurts, being a Seattle Mariners fan, it was good to see A-Rod hit one out on opening day during Sunday's game.

Say Goodbye, Mr. Arnett

Say Goodbye, Mr. Arnett

So, Peter Arnett, who has covered a few wars, gives an interview to Iraqi television and says the U.S. war plan is being rewritten, then is fired for it. Now, why is this right? Because Arnett is supposed to be covering the war, not granting interviews. We all know the plan is messed up, but the role of a reporter is to report facts, not offer interpretation for the propaganda of a foreign nation.

"I said in that interview essentially what we all know about the war, that there have been delays in implementing policy, there have been surprises," Arnett told NBC's "Today" show.

"But clearly by giving that interview I created a firestorm in the United States and for that I am truly sorry," added Arnett, widely known for his dramatic live reports during the bombing of Baghdad on the opening days of the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites).

"My stupid misjudgment was to spend fifteen minutes in an impromptu interview with Iraqi television," he said.

"It was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview with state-controlled Iraqi TV, especially at a time of war and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions," NBC said in a statement.

The real problem is that while it is true Mr. Arnett is guilty of a foolish misjudgment, much of U.S. media coverage is equally stilted on behalf of the U.S. war effort and no one is being fired for that.

Here is a good analysis of the media maelstrom from the Wall Street Journal:

But this deluge is creating a classic paradox of the information age: We know more than we ever did before, yet we may not be any closer to the real truth. Instead, the overload of scenes and dispatches are creating an illusion that each hour's installment adds up to total insight -- whipsawing the public mood from highs to lows in the 11-day-old war.

The result is already proving taxing for the war's leaders. "What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a recent Pentagon briefing. "What we're seeing are slices of the war in Iraq. We're seeing that particularized perspective that that reporter, or that commentator or that television camera happens to be able to see at that moment. And it is not what's taking place."

One vivid indication of the public response: The stock market is fixated on this TV-driven emotional seesaw, careening from joy to despondency within hours. The day that U.S. forces began their "shock and awe" bombing campaign, the Dow Jones Industrial Average capped its best week in more than 20 years by soaring 235 points in the New York Stock Exchange's most active day of the year. Then came the weekend, packed with wall-to-wall reports of minor military setbacks and the capture of a dozen U.S. soldiers. On the next trading day, every one of the 30 stocks making up the Dow fell, dragging the blue-chip indicator down 307 points.

"Everyone is confused because no one has been through this before," says Bill Nichols, managing director for block trading at Bear Stearns Cos., surrounded by more than 20 television sets positioned around the firm's trading desk.

What is missing in this story, however, is the fact that the U.S. military intended the confusion by placing embedded reporters in the field. It provides nothing but a fractured view and that is the source of the problem -- the press went along for the ride.

Global employment trends: Heading down

Global employment trends: Heading down

According to the International Labour Organization's Global Employment Trends 2003, the number of unemployed has increased by 20 million globally in the last three years. The organization is also describing a "receding likelihood" that the global economy will turn around this year. The full report, which is a 24-MB PDF, is here and you can download chapters here. The prospect for industrialized countries is not sunny.

Invisible dogmas and their cost

Invisible dogmas and their cost

I'm working on an article for a book to be published by Cambridge University Press this fall, and have come across what I think is a perfect example of my subject, the invisible dogmas that can be built into organizations by the unexamined use of technology. I'll get to the example in a moment -- here's a draft of the first section of the article, which will be a chapter of the book Creating a Learning Culture -- Strategy, Technology and Practice:

Technology is neutral. Everyone knows that, or believes it. In the strictest sense, when technology is waiting on the shelf to be put to use, this is true—it can be put to almost any use. However, when confronted with the reality of supporting humans and their complex interactions, technology can be a Typhoid Mary of poor thinking. It can be a carrier of assumptions about how people can or should interact, dogmatic interpretations of the meaning of information and how it should be distributed among a group. It is rife with invisible dogmas that can foul the best-laid plans of management, leaving learning organizations in ruins as people and networks route around the rigid stupidity they perceive in misapplied technology.

 

Granted, a computer connected to a network is a remarkably versatile tool for managing information and can carry almost anything, including the assumptions, presumptions, biases and ideologies of the programmer, the designer or the customer who will use the tool. Technology does shape the flow of information. The vision and skill of the people who apply technology can expand or constrain the conduits for ideas. Simple decisions made by programmers become embedded in the hardware and software used by groups, whether those decisions were right or wrong. Early errors are compounded by upgrades that ossify the original features. Programmers and support personnel who build their career around a particular technology platform don’t just maintain that system but defend it from change and can ultimately create narrow channels that shut out or reshape much of what the systems were intended to let flow freely. This is an invisible dogma every learning organization—every group hoping to accelerate their work or goals with technology—needs to be aware of and attentive to at every step along the path of technology use.

 

So, choose wisely when choosing technology to support your organization. Simple enough to say, but what, exactly, are we to look for when trying to cobble together—which is what we must do because there is no end-to-end solution for enabling any group to collaborate and learn with equal facility in all settings—a foundation for teams to collaborate and learn together? Look for biases, which are embedded in the programming and design of a product. Usually, you can see it in the interface in the form of rules and design choices that represent the following strains of bias in thinking:

 

• Participation and modality biases, that define how and when users should contribute to the group’s dialog; this may take the form of forcing people to use a form or that they learn some esoteric mark-up language to participate—maybe some of your team is most comfortable using email, but cannot do so to submit information to the workgroup application (why do they have to change? Because a programmer said so? Not a good enough reason when those people earn $80,000 a year already and do just fine communicating by email);


• Semantic biases, evident both in the range of options available for categorizing information, from labeling every new topic as a “problem” to be solved instead of a business opportunity (this evolving from the quality-assurance based practices of software programmers) to limited ranges of choices in pop-up menus that prevent the group from straying outside the well-defined lines that the program lays out;


• Time and skill biases, based on the presumption that every user has the same amount of time each day to participate in a group project to assuming that it takes everyone the same time to perform chores in the interface (that they all have the same skill level with the technology);


• Historical bias, the preservation of outmoded knowledge because of the rigidity of technology. What if your company has moved from making buggy whips to airplanes and the software you use still is designed for a buggy whip company? Often, it is the failure of software to evolve with the organization that makes it utterly useless—this has happened in many media companies, where digital technology was designed for outputting paper or television signals and has locked companies that could be exploiting the Internet and on-demand multimedia networks into outmoded business models.

 

Invisible dogmas can take many forms, from filtering of certain words deemed unsuitable for a community to presumptions about the way people should use hardware or software. Necessity dictates that decisions be made at every phase of development which emphasize certain priorities or subtract what are deemed unnecessary features. This is the reality of developing tools on a limited budget and well in advance of a truly universal computational environment that can accommodate any information or mode of input with total flexibility to manipulate data for accurate re-representation to many users. It’s still very early in the computational evolutionary epoch and sacrifices must be made. An organization can face these realities by examining decisions to assess how they will shape the resulting knowledge for good or bad, increased or decreased accuracy and clarity and the ability to re-use information as technology continues to develop.

 

The scientific method, which demands rigorous self examination by scientists of their data, their analytical choices and the final results, is the model for abolishing—or, at least, substantially reducing—built-in biases and limitations that can have a negative impact on the groups using technology for learning or management. A discipline of software historiography will eventually emerge. This article suggests a few of the steps that can be taken today to launch this practice.

 

Decisions that shape the future collection and processing of knowledge are highly political. It is often uncomfortable to ask questions of acknowledged experts in a domain of knowledge that suppose they might be installing unfounded biases in a system for capturing information and conveying it to others. Yet this is exactly what programmers and information architects must do in order to ensure that they are not building errors or blind spots into the future of a field of study or even a single project. Knowing how and why design decisions are made, recording those decisions for future use by programmers charged with upkeep and improvement of an application, and recognizing when a decision is based on a controversial position or promoted by an influential individual, so that future users of the system can revisit its basic assumptions is a tightrope act involving competing agendas and personalities.

 

Unfortunately, most experts concentrate their deep knowledge in one area and cannot conceive of the complexities or concessions required to build, for example, a simple application for communicating information (as distinct from knowledge). Even the dedicated polymath who has learned a programming language in graduate school in order to process a large amount of data, but has not kept up on the latest advances in software, is likely to be many technological generations behind the leading edge by the time they reach 40 years of age. So, we must encourage the development of questioning skills that allow the parties to a technology-supported learning organization to collaborate to identify and eliminate to the degree possible within the allotted time and budget the invisible dogmas that they must create in order to get any working software into users’ hands.

Okay, so here is the perfect example of a hidden dogma: The U.S. military preparation for the Iraq war, which was largely "wargamed" using computers that selected feedback based on history and the assumptions programmed by the designers of a scenario for the war. Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to die as a result of the flawed assumptions in the pre-Iraq war games. Lee Gomes does a good job of explaining the process here: "People who follow war gaming say flaws might have occurred for several reasons. Intelligence failures may have miscalculated such realities as the size of Iraqi forces, for example. Or game planners may have let that age-old enemy of careful planning -- wishful thinking -- affect their analysis."

As a result, the U.S. military, despite its denial that it is the case (while CBS radio had an interview with a British general who said the coalition is working to make the "battlespace" right for the attack on Baghdad), is in a two-week or longer "operational pause" and Lt. General William Wallace is saying "The enemy we're fighting against is different from the one we'd war-gamed against."

Sixty years of economic and...

Sixty years of economic and diplomatic work going down the drain

The Doha round of World Trade Organization talks are falling apart, largely because no one knows what the Bush Administration will do and it isn't in the mood for any dissent -- so no talks will move forward successfully. It's a disaster, if you think the entire post-World War II era, during which the United States cobbled together a trade regime that was, albeit slowly, improving conditions around the world.

Anti-globalists will certainly take me to task for thinking that the WTO is a good thing while Bush-backers will say I'm naive to think the United States shouldn't be setting the global agenda without dissent. The problem with both these views is that they lead to a world defined by trade wars, where the compromises that were improving conditions worldwide are obliterated by self-serving decisions that erode prices and environmental and labor protection around the world.

A middle-of-the-road approach, alas, is never perceived as principled and courageous, but it has consistently proved to be the most successful approach as the United States brought together anti-Communist coalitions during the Cold War and, during the 1990s, dealt with the world as a conciliator rather than acting on its own without backing by other nations and the United Nations. In less than two years, all of this lies in ruins and it is a real concern looking forward at the economic opportunity for U.S. companies.

*A first in politics, I...

A first in politics, I think

Gary Hart, one-time presidential contender and potential future presidential contender, is doing his own blog. John Edwards's site has a blog, but it seems to be about Edwards more than by him.

According to Hart's first posting:

Now that America is at war and our economy continues to deteriorate, it's even more important that alternative voices and views are heard. I intend to be one of those voices, and I welcome your responses.

I plan to use this blog for just such a discussion. From time to time, I'll post my thoughts on current policy matters, as well as share some stories about where I'm traveling and the people I'm meeting. I'll also ask some of my friends to share their thoughts as well. I cannot promise to be as skillful at this as many of those who have made the blogger universe such an important part of the internet. However, I'm committed to using the Internet as a vital tool to engage people on critical policy matters and the future of our country.

*Invest Northern Ireland: The European...

Invest Northern Ireland: The European Wireless Opportunity

Wearing my InnovationWorld hat, I'm moderating a panel today in Palo Alto, I'll be blogging as we go along, to the extent possible while being an attentive and engaged moderator.

Opening remarks by John Lindfield, Invest UK

Paul Lee, Gartner

Let's not talk numbers but look at data in the context of analogs in business decision-making. The wireless data market in Western Europe provides lots of opportunities for creating new value. Over the past year, 802.11 has become a much larger factor, alongside 2G, 2.5G, 1xrtt, GPRS and GSM.

Making forecasts is dicey business these days. Western Europe is the second largest mobile market in the world (behind Asia/Pacific) with 312 million connections. Wireless growth is outpacing wired and has overtaken wired connections already, while U.S. crossover will not happen for several years.

If you are here trying to draw analogies to the U.S. market, this is a picture of what will come.

Adoption is flattening, handset growth is declining, but has slowed. In wireless data, however, there is continued growth while voice growth is almost flat. Wireless voice growth will grow 8.6 percent a year between 1999 and 2006. Wireless data will grow at an average rate of 24.8 percent a year -- even in the current environment.

There is a significant bifurcation between consumer and enterprise data use. In the U.S., heavy wireless usage is in transportation and logistics, so much so that Nextel is rebranding itself to address that market.

We've moved from hype to a growing reality. All the pieces of the puzzle are not in place as soon as Gartner thought they would be, and are falling into place now. By 2006, they will all be in place (billing, data prioritization, fraud prevention, etc.).

The telecom industry business model is failing. Only in recent months have all-in-one pricing packages coming into wide use, and that is a good sign.

Voice is still the "killer app" (though it really just an artifact of how we used phones before) and there are problems in the huge amounts of debt and a poor economy. But, at the same time, we'll see a huge migration from GSM to data services like GPRS, from 10 to 140 million users. GPRS is the primary enabler for application growth in the next three to five years.

The UK is a mature telecom market and a good place to launch Western European network while other regions (Scandanavia, France, Germany, etc.) have seen companies back away from promised new services. BT and Hutchison have sustained their commitment to wireless data.

With new intelligent devices coming out, handset purchases are increasing again, because people want to access new services. There is no killer app in wireless data today, but a lot of promising ones: SMS, MMS, polyphonic sound, and so forth. But from the consumer standpoint they are low-bandwidth and the business market is the first place where substantial increases in wireless data consumption.

What is the difference between mobile and wireless? 802.11 is a surprisingly important factor that changes how we think of the way we use spectrum. And mobility and wireless will converge through a variety of technologies that take advantage of different connection modalities. Mobile technology is more expensive than 802.11 and a convergence event will drastically change the wireless opportunity [this could come with VoIP over 802.11 when your phone is able to access a WLAN, but it uses a carrier's network when moving between hotspots].

Middleware will be the glue that holds this new environment together. So, ask yourself:

What's happening at the handset level?

How fast will carriers provide support for these services?

Who has the capability to deliver these new capabilities?

This will help to navigate the risks and provide better returns.

Risk factors include:

Carrier consolidation

Mobile standards will be uncertain as they evolve

All value chain participants in driving apps to market, no one can do it alone

Infrastructure changes can happen more slowly than you'd like.

Paul Longhenry, 3i Group

Multinational investors in technology, ranging from seed stage to capital for expansion and PIPEs. One of the largest investors in wireless. We like companies that are international in their nature, and wireless fits that bill.

Asian wireless penetration is growing substantially in China, Korea, India, unlike Europe where initial penetration has been achieved. We don't necessarily think a company based on a particular company must succeed first in their home markets.

Areas that are attractive to 3i: Identify pain points for the customer.....

Carriers have seen declining voice ARPU with moderate growth in data revenues, but that's not enough based on current financing strategies. So, we look for accelerating data usage as a pain point.

Emergence of ODMs as providers of commodified handsets, which makes hardware cost reductions a significant pain point.

Where do the wireless/wireline convergence actually happen.

Our companies need to establish sustainable barriers to competition.

Roger Priestly, BT

We use Northern Ireland as a test market, because it is an IT literate community with more fiber per mile than anywhere in Europe. Wireless penetration in Northern Ireland is at 75 percent.

Interesting: Wired data usage exceeded voice usage several years ago, but that hasn't happened in wireless yet. This, despite 1 Billion text messages sent each year in the UK and growing by 20 percent a year.

Will have several hundred wireless hotspots in NI in a year, more than the rest of the UK.

The market is 99 percent small and medium size enterprises, which makes it an interesting challenge and one where applications must fourish.

If we don't lick the broadband problem, there won't be any BT. Wireless is a key technology for meeting this challenge.

At your desk, you'll have your personal area network, surrounded by our local area network (where you'll use 802.11) which include hotspots in public places. On the move, GPRS and 3G will eventually make this market happen at higher speeds (Hutchison -- now "3" -- has rolled out 3G in Northern Ireland) and you'll begin to think in terms of where you do fat bandwidth work and other areas where we rely on slower networks.

NI is a "surgical test market" because it is cleanly separated from the rest of the UK.

Question: What are the top apps?

You've got to the quandary for us -- we're in an age where all companies are saying let's get back to what we do well and we're good at providing connectivity. We are good at partnering with companies, and praying that companies will make use of our connectivity.

The handset is not the be all and end all. Looking to PDAs to be a part of the environment.

Penetration of hotspots has to be strategic to provide maximum connectivity at the lowest capital expenditure. Need roaming deals and are working actively on that. Payment models are very uncertain. We're looking for ways to develop meaningful partnerships to make WLAN useful -- will do revenue sharing on subs and pay-as-you-go payments systems.

Fredrik Skantze, Openwave

We make mobile application and services software. The traditional model of selling minutes of voice connectivity is dying and we're looking now at a transtion to selling transactions or buckets of transactions. It is like being a media company and very uncomfortable for carriers.

Data services is becoming the front and center positioning issue for carriers. See Sprint "vision" and the launch of Vodafone launch in Europe to sell media-ready phones (using Openwave software) and spending hundreds of millions on branding the service.

The devices we've been talking about for years are really starting to come out now -- XHTML color devices with MMS and rich media. The carriers are not launching vertical systems as often (voice mail, WAP end-to-end, etc.) and moving to horizontal systems based on standards that can be interchangeble and customized rapidly.

Openwave has a big development center in Belfast and in Japan. We service 85 mobile operators worldwide and 150 cable and telcos with new application services. Software on 350 million phones. Email is where we come from, but we have OS-Java systems and MMS is what we are doing today.

KDDI (Japan) has 54 percent of its customers using data services. J-Phone has 6 million picturephone users. Telesp Celular (Brazil) has 22 percent data usage among mobile customers. The US? 10 percent of mobile phones. About the same in Europe.

Belfast office: 150 employees, 100 of which are developers. Not contract or outsourcing, it is a core unit of the company. The 5th largest IT co. in Belfast, which makes it easy to attract talent (in a smaller market than the U.S.).

Jim McGibbon, Invest Northern Ireland

Talk a little about Northern Ireland.

Population: 1.69 million

Size of Connecticut

70 percent of population is within 25 miles to 30 miles of Belfast.

The UK is a half-hour by air; Western Europe an hour and a half to major cities.

There is substantial development after the peace process began and is now the fastest-growing region of the United Kingdom. Unemployment is around five percent, lower than the rest of the UK.

The 90s were characterized by a huge shift toward knowledge industries and Northern Ireland and companies have made huge investments.

Strong university presence, a well-educated workforce and high wireless penetration.

Employment costs: 32 percent lower than the U.S. (according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and 25 percent lower than the European average. The cost is 60 percent lower than West Coast of the United States.

Engineers: $30,000 for a five-year veteran.

Openwave says it is 50 percent cheaper to employ someone in its Belfast center than on the West Coast.

At every level the difference in costs are 35 percent lower, but that wouldn't matter if the quality wasn't good. Our educated workforce and Belfast center of excellence gives you comparable quality at these lower costs.

45 percent of the NI population is under 30 and many are multilingual (it's mandatory in schools). 3,500 IT graduates a year. Turnover is between five percent and seven percent, even during a boom time -- a strong work ethic.

Universities are concentrated on technology, especially telecom at Queens University. Many competencies in various technologies.

If you are an investor going to Europe, if you look at Europe and Northern Ireland you will not be the first to go there -- lower risk of making a mistake for young companies and solid performance for mature companies.

Invest NI will help make connections, links to universities, sales development and partnership/JV/collaboration development. Finally, Invest NI will support foreign direct investment assistance (money and tax incentives): employment grants; training support (50 percent subsidy); R&D programs; rent breaks; capital grants; equity finance; professional services assistance.

*Fotonotes: The cool new app*

Fotonotes: The cool new app

Greg Elin has rolled out his new tool, Fotonotes annotation of JPEG files with metadata. It allows you to embed stories in a picture and, as you roll your mouse over the image, sections are highlighted and the text appears. Dan Gillmor gives Fotonotes a rave here, and demontrates how the image annotation works.

Now, think about how Fotonotes can be used to embed metadata in images so that they can be related by database functionality. This picture of Dan Bricklin could be related to other pictures of Dan, as well as Mitch Kapor, who is sitting in the background. Want to know if people frequently appear together? Google their names and get this picture and others, such as from PC Forum's site.

Then there is a really wonderful market in putting stories in images for family, workgroup collaboration and so forth. We recently cleaned out my wife's family warehouse and found a lot of old photos about which we know almost nothing. If we'd found digital images with stories written by Kiera's grandmother ("This is Aunt Bessie, who lost her shoes when coyotes ran off with them during the night.") we'd know a lot more and be able to enjoy them more than we do just staring at them and wondering who are these strangers in sepiatone?

Mitch says "Check it out." Fotonotes

I would simply point to...

I would simply point to my earlier analysis

Today, the Dow is down 250-ish at noon Eastern; the Nasdaq is down about four percent. People are seeing this war for what it is, a diplomatic and battlefield disaster that will have huge economic consequences. Note that the Nikkei is up, indicating the Japanese know they can separate their economy from ours to some extent. See what I wrote a week ago. We are in very dangerous territory, since there is no way to get out of this without engaging in a savage battle against an army of roughly the same size as ours -- not a good formula for success in war.

As for the growing chorus of anti-Americans in the U.S. who say that it is unpatriotic to criticize and protest in the time of war, I give you the words of Nicias, the Athenian who was against the campaign that led to Athens' fall and spoke strongly against it even though he led the troops to his best after the city-state decided to fight:

"I affirm, then, that you leave many enemies behind you here to go there far away and bring more back with you. You imagine, perhaps, that the treaty [with Sparta] which you have made can be trusted; a treaty that will continue to exist nominally, as long as you keep quiet--for nominal it has become, owning to the practices of certain men here and at Sparta--but which in the event of a serious reverse in any quarter would not delay our enemies a moment in attacking us; first, because the convention was forced upon them by disaster and was less honorable to them than to us; and secondly, because in this very convention there are many points that are still disputed."

Nicias, from 2,500 years ago, could be describing the United States' situation with regard its two great foes of the late 20th century, China and Russia. Nicias then describes the problems of taking over a tribal region commanded by strong men as continues later in his speech:

"...while the Sicilians, even if conquered, are too far off and too numerous to be ruled without difficulty. Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered, while failure would leave us in a very different position than that we occupied before the enterprise.... Instead, however, of being puffed up by the misfortunes of your adversaries [as the U.S. media and administration were before this war], you ought to think of breaking their spirit before giving yourselves up to confidence, and to understand that the one thought awakened if the Spartans by their disgrace is how they may even now, if possible, overthrow us and repair their dishonor...." [which the Spartans did and, at least economically, China aims to do to us]

"When I see such persons [who want to fight a war to increase their reknown and wealth, referring to Alcibiades of the war party] now sitting here... alarm seizes me; and I, in my turn summon any of the older men that may have such a person sitting next to him, not to let himself by checked by shame, for fear of being thought a coward if he does not vote for war, but remember how rarely success is gained by wishing and how often by forecast, to leave to them the mad dream of conquest, and as a true lover of his country, now threatened by the greatest danger in its history, to hold up his hand on the other side to vote that the Sicilians be left in the limits now existing between us--limits of which no one can complain.... and that for the future we do not enter into alliance, as we have been used to do, with people whom we must help in their need, and who can never help us in ours."

Four years later, Athens was defeated in the Peloponnesian War.

We desperately need to recognize that if there is a conquest to be made, it will be fought on an economic field, which requires vastly more educational and international development investment and far fewer bombs and missiles. Prosperity would have defeated Arab anti-American feelings eventually, but now we are up to our necks in a war that we may not be able to retreat from until my scenario of last Monday plays out and we are economically and politically isolated.

I'm off to the airport to San Francisco to moderate a panel for Invest Northern Ireland and to attend a Deloitte CEO summit. More from available hotspots.

The Strip Mall Infomediary

The Strip Mall Infomediary

For long time, I've been talking about how there is a business model for an identity intermediary. Doc Searls does a very good job of laying out some basic principles in his recent Linux Journal column, Making Mydentity.  I've written that there is a simple business for identity intermediaries that can be put into place in any strip mall, one that draws from today's personal financial services companies, like EdwardJones.

Doc touches on this when he writes: "Instead of waiting for Disney to tell us they're offering vacation cruise deals to consumers of animated movie DVDs, we let Disney and other potential providers know that we're in the market for a cruise in the Caribbean this coming October."

But we cannot take time to manage access to our interests all the time, just as most people rely on money managers to help with their finances, doctors to keep track of their health, and so forth. The infrastructure that Doc describes, that Andre Durand has described here and here and Eric Norlin talks about when suggesting we "hijack" the Liberty Alliance protocol is necessary, but not sufficient. We also need people who are motivated to begin collecting the information that revolves around each of us and to organize that information for exploitation on behalf of the individual.

Back to Doc:

• Let's say I have engaged a new category of business--a relationship registrar called MyID--to certify, authenticate and otherwise substantiate the preferences, permissions and other variables that might be involved in mydentity-based relationships with participating companies and other organizations (including federal, state and local public ones). When I'm not using this mydentity, I still default to anonymity or to the relationships provided by current systems. A mydentity is not a Required Thing, but rather a huge value-add for the companies willing to do business with it.
  
• Then, let's say I'm one of millions of other similarly registered folks.
  
• Now, let's say I have a mydentity-enabled relationship with Disney. My family goes to their theme parks, buys their movies and takes their cruises. But the relationship has substance of the sort many of us have long enjoyed, in a deep but narrow way, with airlines that grant us privileges as frequent flyers and airport lounge club members. We matter to each other. Our mydentity-informed transaction histories substantiate that, as do our allied relationships with other companies and other customers. The difference is that whatever "federation" exists among those companies happens at my grace, not theirs.
  
• Let's say I'm interested in making connections between Disney and certain other companies or kinds of companies with which I like to do business. That way, when I book a cruise, Disney will know and value the fact that I prefer to fly on United Airlines, stay in Marriott or Wyndham hotels and rent cars from Budget or Enterprise. Disney also will know there are kinds of businesses I don't want to deal with, such as the kind that make unsolicited telephone calls and e-mailings.

Having this infrastructure in place will mean three things:

1. I probably will not receive unsolicited spam calls pushing Disney resorts.
   
2. I'll be a far more interesting and important customer to Disney and all the other companies I choose to deal with.
   
3. All kinds of new business can grow up around all these fully-empowered identities, starting with relationship registries.

This is not going to happen on the Net alone, because there is a huge public education process needed to enlighten people about their use of personal information. That's where the guy sitting in the EdwardJones-like office comes in. So, let's imagine the situation Doc starts from, the notion that there is a time for companies to get in touch with him about a vacation:

Doc's got an account at his local infomediary office, which involved sitting down with the rep and filling out two kinds of forms -- a profile and a power of attorney, which the infomediary uses to file claims on his behalf to restrict use of personal information about Doc Searls.

Now, there are two ways Doc might earn money (and the infomediary take a cut for managing the process -- since the aggregation of a lot of profiles, both at the local off and by a national network of infomediaries, is necessary to extract real value from information): 1.) Companies query the infomediary about making deliveries of vacation solicitations to its clients, and they pay the infomediary to deliver the mail; 2.) When Doc wants to learn about vacations, the infomediary sends out a query to vacation companies, like Disney and Carnival Cruises, offering to make their information available to an interested customer.

There are many other ways to conceive money-making instances. Every piece of junk mail and spam could be accepted only if the sender has paid and it fits criteria suggested by the infomediary, because, if the sender just wants a chance to bother Doc and Doc can get a penny and the infomediary a penny in order for the email to pass through Doc's email server, there is money to be made.

Perhaps, when Doc is ready to make a final decision about his vacation plans, he's considering two or three options and wants to bargain for the final decision. If he can get a better price on the cruise or an extra day at Disney that could be the deciding factor, and the infomediary goes to the companies (using the digital infrastructure) and offers them terms Doc would accept. The infomediary either charges the companies for delivering the bids or takes a small mark-up on the travel package (because they have the ability to close the transaction on Doc's behalf when he decides).

The infomediary is incented not only to protect the client's information, but also to develop new ways to make money for the client using that information -- just as Wall Street has created a thousand derivatives to create more value it can extract.

What is needed is an additional infrastructure, one for assuring there is a quality assurance monitoring system that tracks the fulfillment of transactions. This is where Xpertweb comes in. The infomediary should be able to prove they fulfilled transactions on behalf of clients, so that both the individual (Doc, in this example) and the companies (Disney and Carnival) can see a record that proves there was really a potential customer and a transaction.

With the identity infrastructure and quality assurance for transactions, the infomediary business can take root. It cannot be a closed system, because we know there is no way a single entity can enforce its standards for information on many organizations. Some industries may adopt their own standards, but they need to coexist with other networks of identity/assurance data in order to address all aspects of Doc's life.

There you go. A $100 billion business laid out for the taking. Go for it. Consulting and business planning services available from yours truly.

Peter Shaplen, broadcast veteran, chimes...

Peter Shaplen, broadcast veteran, chimes in

My partner in production efforts, Peter Shaplen, who began his career as Walter Cronkite's desk assistant, chimes in. Alas, Peter is blogless, so I'm posting this for him:

I have yet to see anything that shows me the war has begun that people are paying the supreme price and that the technology has improved either the editorial understanding of the campaign or will prevent us from new wars to come.

The New versus the Old?...

The New versus the Old? No, it's the Old Self-Destructing

Dan Rosenbaum characterizes the response to the reported shutting down of Kevin Sites' weblog by CNN as "gnashing of teeth" and points to specific comments I made:

"The worst in journalism"? There is unprecedented access to troops and battle, combined with 21st century communications and imaging technology that puts us squarely in the world of Max Headroom. If pixelated views of jeeps moving through the desert at night don't turn his crank, it might be worth remembering that he's seeing live pictures at night from a featureless landscape half a world away. Just now, I saw high-quality nighttime pictures of Bagdhad (San Francisco on the Tigris) being blown to hell. Ten years ago, these were light green dots against a slightly darker-green background.

Wow. High-quality images of San Francisco on the Tigris being blown to smithereens where it looked like Space Invaders ten years ago. What a win for the human race.

In fact, this is only partly true. We saw pictures at night using night cameras in 1990 and we saw them again today. But, really, we don't understand anything more about what is actually happening, because the news crews in Baghdad are being censored by the Iraqis and if the commander of a U.S. jeep brigade decides to do shut off the CNN feed, he can. It's all very dirty while claiming to be a clean feed and, instead of making clear that what we're seeing is a battle of filtered views, the journalists (and, remember, I have been a journalist, so I know of what I speak) are JUST GOING ALONG WITH IT, PURRING ALL THE WHILE ABOUT THE TECH AND THE REAL-TIME ACCESS without mentioning the censorship or their agendas.

Agenda: Am I treading into the liberal/conservative bias issue? No. When I am watching a war on TV, I don't want agendas, just facts, like "That was a military building" (when it is) and "That was close to civilians" (based on informed understanding of the geography and not from the fresh-from-the-plane journo who doesn't know Baghdad). Facts good, uninformed speculation bad.

But, really, it comes down to this: The access is no better than in World War II, when Ernie Pyle (who was killed by a Japanese sniper) chronicled the important elements of the war instead, including the boredom and the intense drama, but did it reflectively, humanizing the story which is too big for anyone to sit and absorb through a bunch of soda-straw views offered by CNN. Today's coverage is just faster to land in our retinas. Read about Guadalcanal through Pyle's eyes and you get a real picture of the sweep of the battle; listen to Murrow flying over Berlin, providing in an 18-minute edited piece the nut of the experience of being in the belly of a bomber. Were they censored? Yes. Were they self-censoring? Yes. Did they have an agenda? Yes. But they acknowledged that and did not spend 20 minutes an hour rhapsodizing about technology. That gushing is just plain shitty reporting. Pyle and Murrow gave us facts: The pilot was called "Jock." The atmosphere in the flight briefing room was that of a school and a church.... Listen. It's real. Compare that to the CNN anchor saying "I see you're moving again, what's going on?" urgently as the pixellated desert starts to refresh poorly, only to learn that the tank the reporter is riding is moving up for fuel after sitting in line; then, the rapture about the tech starts again to fill time. In the meantime, there is no coverage of the budget debate raging on Capitol Hill. Ridiculous. Remember that if a fire fight starts CNN's Aaron Brown said "We're not in that business" and suggested the network would cut away to avoid the real horrors of war.

Did the delay in delivering the news, which involved more than cutting, reduce the shocking images of Vietnam to pabalum? No. It was telling stories and you often saw the important parts much more clearly than if they were repeated over and over to fill time until the next Bradley vehicle fueling stop.

Dan seems to intentionally ignore my statement that the technology should not be the center of the reporting when he suggests I think the war should be blogged. I don't think that. I think it should be captured and delivered in a variety of ways. Maybe the most powerful thing CNN could do is make its footage available for people to use to make their own points about the war. What if every time a bomb exploded a blogger could overlay the phrase "50 people died in that explosion" over the video? That would change the way we see this war, just as it would if every explosion said "50 U.S. soldiers' lives were spared by using that bomb, just as Hiroshima was necessary to prevent 150,000+ American casualties invading the Japanese home islands."

Dan goes on:

Is there a lot we're not seeing? Of course. But fer chrissakes -- it's a war! It's going on right now. Stories will be coming out for decades to come. That's the way journalism and history work. Howard Kurtz writes about this in Saturday's WAPost:

NBC's Dana Lewis, who is with the 101st Airborne, said from northern Kuwait that "we know unbelievable amounts of information" but that "you can't use a lot of it." Still, he said, "we'll go back to this two or three months from now and say, 'This was the original battle plan and this is what really happened to these guys.' We'll do a reality check, which I think is valuable."

The worst in journalism? I'd nominate not the war coverage, but rather the White House press corps, which rolled over the other week and let its belly get scratched by an automaton President.

That's bullshit, too. Unless we are engaged in another war, which we probably will be, there is little likelihood the media will ever do a reality check on the plan vs. the actual way the battle played out. And if we're in that war, we're much more likely be be shown night camera shots of Pyongyang than to get a dissection of military strategy in Gulf War II.

Yes, the White House press corp has been awful -- I've covered the president in the traveling press corp and it is a waste of time, unless you live to file meaningless daily footage, since the president lives in a bubble. It's all pretty bad, because the journalists who are supposed to help us understand events have ceded that responsibility to the technology, a kind of panopticon function that lends absolutely no clarity for the audience. Then, the only expert voices we get are former generals, maybe a former secretary of defense who agrees the war is going well (because if they disagree with the war itself, that becomes the subject of the interview and their analysis of how the war is going is ignored).

But a new media that collected these records of events and presented them in ways that can be navigated and explored so that, in addition to hearing and seeing the stories of a war or an election, we can participate and share our own ideas and get the ideas of others in a truly plural view of events, then that would be new. As it is, the broadcast press has become just one more cog in a machine that captures footage. It isn't even journalism, it's so bad.

Dan also brings up the getting paid problem, saying he wrote about it last year -- we all wrote about it last year -- and the question of credentials, the press passes used to limit access to events. Fact is, that's precisely the problem. We need to break that entire cycle of access and the way to gain access to events (I say as a long-time veteran of publishing and broadcasting) is to start a company that gets that credibility and forces new witnesses onto the scene. No one gave CNN a press pass when it first asked and I've gone from not being able to get ON24 cameras into a trade show to being invited to cover President Clinton in 18 months. It can be done.

No blog naivete in these tired eyes, just a large measure of rage at the idiocy in the world, which is what makes many people want to be a reporter in the first place. That, or they want to be a "star" and will do nothing valuable and anything necessary to win an anchor job: Geraldo Rivera told an ABC studio that he'd hold up the phone outside the Gary Gilmore execution so they could get the shots on tape if they put him on live ("I promise you you'll hear the shots!") -- he was a mile away from a closed firing house, no chance of getting the sound, so he has always been just a whore. Too many other "journalists" have taken that path and used "professionalism" to shut out honest witnesses.

Old media minds, new media...

Old media minds, new media disruption

J.D. Lasica points to this report that CNN has shut down the blog run by one of its Iraq correspondents, Kevin Sites.

I keep seeing the worst in journalism displayed during this war. I've also seen many examples of big media -- and new and old -- refusing to think and act differently up close and personal. There is an explicit assumption by the people running Web sites that reporters and reports should be the same as they've always been. They will talk about the desire to change, but get to the point where actual change is required and they back away fast.

Time for new media-making companies. That's what's next. Having swallowed most of the Web, the old media companies are sitting back and thinking they've got it tamed. It's the perfect time to start screwing with media reality, again, the way Pulitzer, Hearst, Sarnoff and Paley did before. Doing this does not mean just embracing new ways of reporting the news, but also marketing the hell out of the product you create.

Is Tony Perkins doing something important with AlwaysOn, asks Joi Ito? The answer is he is packaging it effectively and that is significant. That doesn't mean he is taking blogging to the next level as much as doing the work any publisher would when shaping a new publication (which is just a different arrangement of the same letters and design notions on a page). We need to avoid confusing the tools with the thing created using the tools. Tony's not making that mistake, which is why people are talking about AlwaysOn. Is it a great source of information? Not yet, maybe never; we'll see.

If doing something radically new requires a form of corporate governance that supports teams of journalists (in the broadest possible sense, including bloggers and participants in events) who never meet face-to-face or have ideas that can co-exist peacefully, then we need to develop that. Or just go ahead and do it the old-fashioned way by paying a few folks upfront to edit what a lot of "freelancers" submit for publication -- again, I use the word "publication" in the broadest possible sense. Just be sure that what you produce is different in a fundamental way (What is that way? You have to pay me for that -- putting food on the table is what motivates, I've always found).

Let's face it, though, there are so many good journalists on the beach right now that the right would-be media mogul can make something happen. Want to be Ted Turner circa 1996 in 10 years? Put up the money for a really radical experiment in news-telling, framing the common dialog and instigating thought in the heads of the audience.

Let's take CNN as an example, because it sucks (scroll down to "The Sound You Just Heard Was Edward R. Murrow Rolling Over In His Grave" -- also see the letters in response to the piece here):

For weeks now I have been trying to figure out how is it that CNN is no longer the number one cable news network since they invented the genre, and then I watched Aaron Brown last night and it became all too clear. Just where did they find this smug talking head? [The answer is: He got his start in the Northwest, where many anchors come from because there was an idea for a while that we don't have a noticeable accent up here. Aaron falls right at the historic end of that memetic pipeline.]

Could CNN stop talking about reporting the news with new technology and actually show us something we've never seen before about war? No. Instead it's hours of pixellated video with Aaron Brown cooing like an idiot: "We talk about covering a war in real-time, but now we're actually doing it." Not informative or entertaining and mostly confusing and a disservice to viewers, because it gives the impression that since not many people seem to be dying on camera war is clean and easy.

In fairness to CNN's having made the mistake of falling prey to the service of its country's morale, rememember that Murrow ended his news career to join the Kennedy administration. What he did do during his time as a reporter and producer is tell the truth to the best of his ability and defined television news for a generation of news people (now long passed). All media and all media people are confronted with the question of how and when to serve their country best. Yet those questions should be coming up every day, not once a decade. CNN is tired and worn out (and warred out) because it isn't doing anything new with the images and variety of sources of information available.

Time for new news companies. Now.

Make a game of it

Make a game of it

The Gulf War Drinking Game. Just a few of the time to tip your glass include:

• an initial news report turns out to be false
  x2 if the anchor openly admits it
  
• this game is mentioned in the news
  x2 if the bush twins are playing it
  
• Bush directly addresses Iraqis
  x2 Saddam directly addresses Americans
  
• a saddam body double is seen
  
• someone refers to "coalition of the willing"
  x2 if is because a member is actually providing combat troops
  
• someone refers to 'Halliburton'
  
• Media cameras on the baghdad skyline focus on something that looks like an erect penis
  
• someone reminds us that osama bin laden is still alive
  x2 if he reminds us himself
  
• The media refuses to report something because of operational security
  x2 if its immediately followed by a commentator telling what will happen next
  
• the media reports that something "is not the start of the war"
  x2 if it involves any act of war
  
• the military learns of something for the first time from the media
  
• someone uses the term "cradle of civilization"
  
• ari fleischer lies
  x2 if it is directly to helen thomas

This is the reason it's...

This is the reason it's a bad policy

It's clear the Bush Doctrine is setting the stage for more terrorist recruiting, if you read the Saudi site ArabNews.com:

Arab News spoke to Saudis between 20 and 34 to hear their perspective on the war. Though most of the people interviewed were cautious about the quotations they wanted to be published in the newspaper, all agreed that Saudi Arabia could be a target for America in the future.

Abdul Aziz Al-Muammar, a 20-year-old university student, said that if the current Iraqi regime was removed, the United States would install a puppet regime in its place. “If you ask me, the Iraqi people are the ones who should determine who replaces the current regime,” he said.

He thinks that the United States’ motive for the war against Iraq is mainly the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields and tightening its control in the region.

Asked if he thought Saudi Arabia would become a target for America, the young man answered, “Yes. It will be targeted in the future.”

I think we need to be aware of this sentiment and work to make both U.S. policy and U.S. reality match the founding principles of our country, or we're in for a century of conflict with virtually everyone on the planet.

Another absurd day

Another absurd day

Here's the top headlines in my MyYahoo right now:

Not a good day.

Slow times ahead, good time...

Slow times ahead, good time for smart moves

The New York Times reports Economic Indicators Fall in February. The Conference Board's leading economic indicators were down another 0.4 percent in February and everyone I and the research staff at InnovationWorld talk to at companies are completely distracted by the war.

Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein said ``nervousness over world events, more than any other single factor, holds the potential for extending the 'soft spot' that the economy has been in since late last year.''

Optimists make the future. Now, I know I seldom sound optimistic about the economy and never so about the war. But folks, it is still possible to be optimistic about specific things, like the prospect for new technology, services facilitated via Web (especially since no one wants to travel anymore unless there's a very good reason) and by companies with established products that want to invest in gaining market share while others are paralyzed by uncertainty.

Warsday, March 19, 2003

Warsday, March 19, 2003

Sitting here with the CNN coverage, which is rippling with a sordid anticipation of the first shots, and listening to Chuck Barris reading his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind on Audible (which got a great review from Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal today). Both are absurd, but only Barris is aware that it is all a sick joke.

Yee-haw! Let's get those cameras rolling.

Meanwhile, in the coalition of the unwilling (that would be the countries we want to do trade with and think our leaders dangerous):

On Arabnews.com, says Saudi King Fahd: "The Kingdom will under no circumstances take part in the war against Iraq, and its armed forces will not enter an inch of Iraqi territory."

China is cosying up to Japan, trying to deepen trade ties.

The New Straits Time says Asian markets are thinking it will be a short war. "Most expect share prices to retreat once the US-led strikes begin, as there is still a measure of uncertainty as to whether there could be backlash to the attacks."

The Jakarta Post reports: "We regret the U.S. statement as it will spark acts of violence in the region," Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Tuesday after an emergency meeting with President Megawati Soekarnoputri. "We still believe a peaceful solution must be achieved as war will only create chaos around the globe," he held.

The Moscow Times: "It is important not to cross the line in which the war against terrorism might escalate into a confrontation of entire peoples, religions and civilizations," [Foreign Minister Igor] Ivanov told a security conference in Moscow.

And, on the media front:

At Asahi.com, there is a report that U.S. journalists are being told that "press coverage may be regulated for operational reasons," something that is not being reported here. Instead, the dimwits on CNN are joking that the Department of Defense may "have some surprises up its sleeves." Yesterday, CNN reported it will be able to broadcast live, even if a private standing next to the reporter is shot on camera. This conflicts with the Asahi.com report.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that the German government is claiming it has the legal authority to tap journalists' phones to solve "serious criminal offenses." “Sources are going to think twice about talking to journalists if they fear that their telephone information is being recorded by investigating authorities,“ said Hendrik Zörner, spokesman for the association of journalists.

What good times. Woo-hoo.

My bet with Eric Norlin

My bet with Eric Norlin

This morning, I got a note from Eric "DigID" Norlin, who said: "...direct disagreement over your war forecast (no big surprise there huh?) ;-)"

My reply was that I did not see how anyone with a sense of history could say that marching into a country without almost unanimous international support would be a good idea. Eric's reply turned away from that question and focused on the markets, which are related to my prediction, because I suggested the U.S. is setting itself up for economic counter-attacks by a large part of the world, especially China and Russia, which would like to claim a little of the capitalist pie for themselves.

Predictably, because Eric likes to argue with me, he said that he too is a student of history and disagreed. He says the market, which is rising on anticipation of a quick war and a fast turnaround, is an accurate predictor. In so many words, I said that, as it has done it the wake of the bursting of other speculative bubbles, the market is not reliable right now and is chasing any positive news (and ignoring the rafts of bad news just today, including Oracle's weak licensing revenue and lots of lay-offs). Specifically, I wrote to Eric in email:

My forecast for the war...

My forecast for the war economy

The war starts about 8:30 PM EST tonight. President Bush tells Saddam he has two days to get out, not to disarm but just to leave. Bombing of military targets--massively destructive bombing--in the no-fly zones begins immediately. A lot of military positions will be wiped out. The bombs stay away from Baghdad for the first two days, denying Saddam the opportunity to point to civilain casualties (though Basra and some other cities in the no-fly zones may be hit hard). While that goes on, troops move on Baghdad, so that they are there immediately after the deadline for Saddam's departure.

UPDATE: I've talked to a number of folks today about this scenario. Let me add that if, at this point, Saddam goes into exile or his generals hand him over, Bush will come out smelling like roses. Unfortunately, things aren't likely to go that way and the devolution I described earlier, below, will play out....

If fighting in Baghdad begins, there will be massive civilian casualties and some Americans and allied soldiers will be killed. The world will be enraged by this and, at this point, Bush's clumsy diplomacy will start to bite back. My bet is that most of the Iraqi military force in Iraq is in or near Baghdad--the positions outside the city are probably lightly manned. Fighting in the suburbs will be vicious and Tony Blair's government will immediately come under intense pressure to withdraw; and Britain may do so, with America "carrying on" on its own.

If civilian casualties in Iraq rise to 50,000 or 100,000, the world will begin to talk about war crimes charges against the leaders of the United States, including President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their administration. France will lead that charge. U.S. diplomacy will be decimated at this point, as being brusque about accusations of war crimes just doesn't play.

But what we are not paying attention to, and we should, is the economic cost at this point. If this war does not end in a couple days, trade and perceived safety of doing business will fall precipitously. The French, Germans, Russians and Chinese will ally to deny trade to the United States to the greatest degree possible, claiming market share for their domestic companies. The world is prepped to "put the U.S. in its place."

If the SARS disease simultaneously breaks out into a pandemic, the world trade picture will darken even more dramatically than post 9/11. People will not travel for fear of contracting this disease. Put it all together and you've got the recipe for a complete economic meltdown.

Caveat Venditor

Caveat Venditor

I've been working with Britt Blaser and Flemming Funch on the design of the Xpertweb and it has got me thinking about a number of questions raised in recent years about the role of the buyer, the employee and the citizen, who always seem to come out on the short end of the deal when there is some pre-existing power arrayed against them. The promise of progress is of improvement, and not just for the few, if you look at the history of the world. Whether you are talking about the evidence of European or "Western" society or any other part of the world, generally improvement can be measured in terms of its collective egalitarian advances and not simply the enrichment or increased power of a few.

The buyer has needed to be wary since the Romans coined the phrase "caveat emptor" to excuse the seller of poorly made goods or poorly preserved foods. If you were too damned stupid to recognize that your fish sauce was spoiled, tough luck. What Xpertweb does, by flipping the process of a transaction around and making payment dependent on the delivery of quality and quantity promises (whether of stuff or services), is give us the potential for an economic system that both improves the seller's responsiveness to the customer and eliminates the free-rider problem that could afflict a system of payment after delivery.

Let's look at the concept of "Caveat Venditor" ("Let the vendor beware") and consider how it's time has come. For a long time, customer-centric business has been preached and promoted by business gurus, but it remains an ideal that, at best, is a promise easily erased by the liability and indemnification clauses of contracts, sales agreements and user agreements. Every time we relegate one party in a transaction to the role of "customer," they are left to wait for the proverbial shafting, even if it never actually comes. The Cluetrain Manifesto put this in plain words: "Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures" end and "If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market."

Caveat Venditor is the embodiment of the business guru babble. Walk the walk, don't promise something and expect the transaction to go silently into history. Xpertweb documents both sides of the transaction, creating a history and, by extension, an environment of trust. The first step toward this system has been in the pursuit of a new integrity in business and politics. Investors and citizens are convinced we need greater accountability in corporate disclosure and campaign finance reform, even if "leaders" mostly disagree, because it is their unbridled power at risk.

As a customer, I don't want to hear how important I am, but later learn that if the company has failed to serve me accurately and completely that it does not care, will charge a restocking fee or brush me off. Instead, I want to create a record that holds that vendor accountable to me and future customers. Xpertweb can do this, installing a simple XML-based system for showing how sellers have performed in the past and, because it provides for a pay-after-fulfillment mechanism, insulates me, the purchaser of goods or services that currently can be hyped and exaggerated without any consequences for the seller, from being cheated.

Which brings me to the second point, that the free-rider problem is also dealt with effectively, because Xpertweb also tracks the purchasing party's fulfillment of its obligations. If I buy something and it arrives or my lawn gets mowed on time and to my satisfaction, I make a payment and the vendor's reputation is boosted. But, if I consistently find fault with goods and services, primarily as an excuse not to pay for what I bought, pretty soon my own ratings within the Xpertweb system will make me an unattractive customer, someone with whom no one wants to do business. A free rider may make a few bad purchases, but they eventually get shut out as the record of their deceit is documented.

Can the free riders come creeping back under a different name? Perhaps. But, because the Xpertweb system is based on being referred into the system by a "mentor," who puts part of their own reputation on the line, the free-rider is eventually going to be shut out. Mentors will talk and, just as bad checks get posted at the local convenience store beneath a "Do Not Accept From These Deadbeats" sign, the disreputable customer will be shut out, too.

The keystone of this market concept is openness. Everyone can join by asking for an introduction into the system from a mentor. Everyone can see how participants have performed in the past. Everyone can see, to the degree parties to transactions are willing to disclose their identities at each step in a negotiation, how the market is developing (something like the mythic notion of "perfect information" on which decisions in the market are supposedly made today).

When you take it to this level what becomes clear is that we are all customers and vendors. Whether we are selling cars or our labor and intelligence, we are all in this market together, sellers all.

From this perspective, we begin to see that many of the institutions of the past 150 years, assembled primarily by the rigorous hand-filing of bureaucrats (from the "bureau," a chest of drawers with a writing board, and first coined in the 1840s), were transient phenomena. Individualism has come into full flower in the midst of this bureaucratic epoch, which is why it's been getting a bit of a bum rap lately. Bureaucracy slowed life down inordinately, so we talk about the acceleration of life, forgetting that our anscestors could step out the door into the wilderness. Things always change fast, the problem has been that we've institutionalized processes from a century ago and are fighting to break free. Caveat Venditor, too, needs to be transitory or it will become a barrier to progress.

The full flower of individual choice will come in the midst of what free marketers have espoused despite it's total absence: massively accessible information for decision-making. As a tool for recording accountability, Xpertweb is a model for what is needed: It doesn't impose any particular structure and can work to support interactions among equals in a variety of settings.

Holy smoke! It works

Holy smoke! It works

After an arduous transition it seems my email and Web server have made the transition to their new digs. I'm going to go dancing in the streets for a bit....

Testing 1, 2, 3

Testing 1, 2, 3

Here's a second try at getting my blog working on the new server.

If you are seeing this

If you are seeing this

My new server works. Let me know....

Well, enough of FM Radio

Well, enough of FM Radio

I've given the FM Radio stuff a try -- very nice user interface, but missing integration with my templates. It did not, for example, know to post white text on this black background. For those of you following along at home, not one of the comments received in response to my "Radio or Movable Type" question has come down on the Radio side. Overwhelmingly, the voice of the bloggers says to move to Moveable Type ASAP.

Netpolitik: A paper on networks and diplomacy

Netpolitik: A paper on networks and diplomacy

The Aspen Institute's Communications & Society Program has released a report, Netpolitik: How the Internet Is Changing International Politics and Diplomacy, that is worth a read. A few choice excerpts:

Global Interdependence or "Liberal Internationalism" regards the world as moving to an intertwined world organism composed of international players -- governmental and nongovernmental -- for whom reality is interreliance among nations and cultures,economies and environments,and lack of control over many of the actions that affect one's own locale. It recognizes that people belong to several communities at the same time, have multiple self-images and identities,and need to see themselves as world citizens as well. Here,informal diplomats use soft power,the attractive power of ideas, to survive or prevail.

In short,the rules of international diplomacy and politics have changed -- not necessarily (indeed, probably not)completely, but significantly. There are new battles every day in this Era of Complexity for the citizen's attention, affinity, and loyalty. They implicate identity, meaning, grand narratives, legitimacy, participation, rights, and access, and they are carried out over a series of networks and through a variety of media.

Another new venture launched

Another new venture launched

About a year ago, Barry Soicher, Bob Ellis and I started talking about a foreign direct investment research company, InnovationWorld. We launched our first research report (now going out monthly) in November and now have got the Web site up and running - nice to have waited until we have a couple dozen clients.

Another new venture launched

Another new venture launched

About a year ago, Barry Soicher, Bob Ellis and I started talking about a foreign direct investment research company, InnovationWorld. We launched our first research report (now going out monthly) in November and now have got the Web site up and running - nice to have waited until we have a couple dozen clients.

DigIDers waking up

DigIDers waking up

Andre Durand, who will have a great deal of influence over how we control our personal information in the future is finally coming around to the notion that our identity begins and ends with our control over the information that describes us. Good to see that.

Andre goes so far as to say people should hijack the Liberty Alliance protocol because it was "designed by corporations for corporate federation of Tier 2 identities." My point all along, despite some back channel comments that I was being too idealistic. In the context of the emergent democracy discussion, this move to individual sovereignty is absolutely essential. It is also gratifying to see my friend Dee Hock jumping into the emergent democracy debate.

The project Andre outlines needs an economic catalyst. I think I know what that is, and Britt and Stuart have pieces that can make a tremendous impact on giving people an incentive to participate. There is a very simple business model involving store fronts in strip malls, but many folks seem fixated on nothing-but-Net ideas.

Still percolating....

Still percolating....

Here are a few things I've learned in recent weeks:

1.) Mac OS X Server is no easy-to-configure system. There is decidedly little integration between the graphical tools and NetInfo, between NetInfo and applications, etc. You have to go too many places to configure a single user. It looks like once it is set up it will be easy to manage, but getting it there is harder than Microsoft Back Office Server was in 1996.

2.) The qmail Handbook is almost entirely useless, because it doesn't do a good job of explaining concepts and offers a lot of commands that have nothing to do with what the index and chapter headings describe. There isn't a single chapter in which I found what it promised laid out in anything resembling steps.

3.) BIND and DNS are harder to configure today than 10 years ago. We desperately need to get to IPv6 and easier tools just to facilitate easy to configure reverse lookups in subnets.

4.) While I am disenchanted with the graphical front end of Mac OS X, having UNIX underneath to tinker with the system rocks. It's better than Linux by a long shot.

5.) Combining the stress of a system migration with a medical emergency is no fucking fun.

My son is better and will be returning to school in a couple days. Once that is finished up, I'll be rolling out the changes. A couple questions for those of you who have read this far:

Would you recommend shifting from Radio to Moveable Type?

A friend and I are hacking together an In/Out message board component that can be dropped onto a Web or blog page. Is this something you'd like to be able to use? If so, would you like it to be resident on your server or hosted? If it was hosted, would you pay $10 to $20 a year to be able to leave secured messages for colleagues and friends who you've given a password (i.e., more than just "I'm out of the office," like a specific phone number or time when you are available?)

Your patience appreciated

Your patience appreciated

I was sitting by my son's hospital bed last night when he said "Hey, Dad, I really appreciate you taking time away from work to hang out with me." This is my nine year old, who has his father's extremely high tolerance for pain (he was walking around with a burst appendix), which may lead him to a 20s full of sports-related injuries and a 40s full of 18- to 20-hour workdays, both like me.

Or, if we start using this technology the right way, maybe he and other kids will grow up to spend more time with their kids. I remember going to the hospital a couple times around his age and not seeing my father for more than a few minutes at a time, where I slept by my son's bed (or, rather, didn't sleep). So, while we take care of this I appreciate your coming by the blog to check if there's anything new.

The hospital has given me a lot of time to think about how we use technology, why I use it to work more rather than less, and so forth. I believe, looking backward and forward, that many folks have forgotten the emigrant ethos of making a better world for our kids. We dote on them more, but when you look around the hospital it is clear that a lot of what we do is create distractions -- from pain, from life. There are Nintendo systems and geegaws and, yesterday, a Mardi Gras party. But what happens when we step out the door, kid in tow? Do we go back to work? Do we stay engaged? Do we work to make it better? I know, we all want our kids to go to college, but that is a sort of maintenance effort these days -- like sending a child off to apprentice with the local printer or silversmith 200 years ago.

Everything about the level of connectivity I enjoy tells me there are powerful forces that could substantially improve my kids' lives if they are put to use to make them participants in, and not just consumers of, the media in which we live. I'm going to make some changes to this blog -- some new features -- and work on some things that I've been thinking about at the hospital bedside that put some of these ideas into action. Stay tuned. I also have to resolve my server transition problems.

Hey, if you are looking...

Hey, if you are looking for me

Using my blog as a universal in/out board -- I will be out, as my son is in the hospital, sans appendix, with dad sitting with him at night; and my site may drop off the net and reappear over the next several days, as I am moving servers.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGH!

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGH!

I've been working on installing my new server for almost three days -- found a bunch of bugs, screwed up a slew of settings. Learning to hate the Net, feeling like I did when I took apart a Datsun 510 in my backyard and had parts left over. In the end, the car was faster, but only after a lot of bloodied knuckles.