Sowing Light

Hank William’s paints a bleak future for the traditional print newspaper industry. Readership is increasingly going online for its news, advertisers certainly aren’t interested in buying ads in unread print editions, and, unlike search ads, website display ads don’t work.

How is a cultural institution like the New York Times to survive? That’s the problem Mr. William’s article has had me thinking about all day. His solution, however, leaves me scratching my head. He wants to solve it by making the browser experience more like the newspaper experience - give them the power, he claims, and users will gladly fall back into familiar newspapers modes of browse and scan, making ads more relevant and saving the life of the venerable newspaper.

I don’t buy it.

I agree that display ads are less effective online than in print, but that’s just one piece of the equation. Traditional ads in general are losing their effectiveness. Print ads themselves don’t do as well as they did before the Internet. As a consumer, what use do I have for advertisements? They no longer inform, as they once did; I can ask questions online and get trusted answers instantly. With my needs well covered, I do my best to avoid ads in whatever medium they are found.

The online ad purveyors are busy adding in support for geo-location, but hyper-local ads don’t recover the utility that newspaper ads used to have. True, I may be interested in a new local restaurant, but when the local store will never beat the price of the online store, I don’t care if they’re having a sale. The only advantage they have over the online store is their location, and that’s a fact I can easily find out when and if I care to. There’s precious little that an advertisement can tell me that I will really care about.

What we’re seeing is not just a breakdown caused by a new interface to the same old content, we’re seeing the crumbling of a business model whose assumptions have eroded away underneath it. The new medium, as every major new medium before it, is entirely rewiring the way our society, our businesses, and our brains work. A browser with scan and pan isn’t going to bring back the relevance of traditional advertising.

So what will newspapers do to save themselves? Not knowing what else to do, they’re going to put the ads where people have to read them - in the story. Movies have done it with product placement and radio with announcer-read advertisements. The traditional reliance on ads will force their hand, and a good portion of the public will just learn to deal. The ads that are the basis of the business will begin to show on the face of the business, but I doubt that even this will save them. It will just be the last gasp of the dying enterprise.

With big-budget ad-supported players failing to make the turn, the real reporting is going to come from one and maybe two sources. The first is the massive number of plugged in people who are already becoming the nervous system of the planet. This source is a sure bet to remain a major force. The generation of news online is already a distributed and complex interweaving of parsed and recombined news streams - we can only expect that to grow and take on new forms.

The other source may or may not come into being. As the newspapers and magazines pass away and the organic news network gets noisier and noisier, there may be a thirst for the best of what the newspapers had offered - the investigation, the insight, the sharp analysis. If there are those who can provide what the network can not, if there are individuals who by their unique point of view can create content that the market desires, then we have all the makings of a natural news market - without the massive players and without the ad dollars. Those who can provide value will be valued. The market will drive the business, and it’s ultimately something very close to a subscription model that will keep good news alive.

Organizational Dynamics, Social Media Advertising, Marketing, Newspapers, Social Media

How do you draw the best out of people?

The question has been at the forefront of my mind for a number of years, and has made me a student of the art of human interaction. I’ve found that people flower in the warm wind of another’s listening. The deeper and purer the listening, the greater the potential. One who walks in this world with attention to others and belief in their potential leaves a trail of blossoming life in his wake.

The amazing work of 826 National comes down to this listening, this attention and belief. They’ve set up creative tutoring centers all over the world, changing the lives of thousands of kids, lighting up their eyes and their creativity. Dave Eggers attributes it all to ’shining a light’ on each kid. Most of these kids never had someone believe in them, someone really interested in their ideas. That’s all it really takes - one person, an hour a week, truly valuing them and what they do.

Believing in someone isn’t easy. Who do you truly believe in? Who do you truly think has great potential? I’m surprised at the ways I find to discount another person, to judge them or box them up. Recently, I realized that my helping someone can be a veneer over my lack of faith in them. I find that I can be “helping” because I don’t think they can do it on their own, because I don’t really believe in them.  That’s my problem, but it can hobble their potential.

Sincere belief means that I believe that the other person is far greater than I perceive, has the answers to his challenges within him, and has something to teach me. My belief in that goes a long way to making it manifest. It’s a discipline of loving, a discipline that brings new life into the world.

I’m starting to see, and appreciate, that in this world, I’m just a midwife.

In truth, there is no just a midwife. Can you image a work with greater importance? A work that so touches the intimate secret of life and creation?

May we all be midwives to the people we encounter, and to ourselves.

Organizational Dynamics, The Creative Process Drawing out the Best, Listening

I’m thinking about social networks, and an apple falls on my head. The geeks were on this train eight years ago, but no one noticed. And you know what? They’re still on the same train, and no one notices. FOAF, or ‘Friend of a Friend’ is a formal, computer understandable way of declaring who knows who. Put a bunch of FOAF documents together, and bing, you’ve got a social network. FOAF started a good long time ago, as part of the grass roots technical effort behind the fabled Semantic Web, but just like the Semantic Web, it never hit its growth spurt.

I googled FOAF - 6 and a half million results. Not bad.

Facebook? 36 million. “Social Network”? 15 million. OpenSocial? nearly 11 million.

And FOAF had a six year head start. Eight in the case of OpenSocial.

What factors make FOAF just a footnote? A few things -

1) It’s hard - FOAF is all about geeks, from beginning to end. Writing a FOAF document is hard, getting it online is hard, and doing anything with it is hard. The potential market of the technology is limited by its form. The technology was never put within reach of the masses.

2) It’s boring - Who cares if one computer coder is friends with another? The declaration of this knowledge is computationally interesting, but it doesn’t do anything. There’s no sizzle to sell. It creates a social graph, but there’s no socializing happening.

3) It’s artificial - In FOAF, the social connections aren’t created organically, they have to be constructed. If sending an email created a FOAF connection, that would be organic. As it stands now, someone has to go out and document reality. If you want to document reality, it’s much better if the reality forges its own documentation.

Let’s look at Facebook, on the other hand. It looses points on the technical purity and openness scale; it’s a big mean closed network. But it gets the three points above spot on.

1) It’s stupid easy to use - there’s barely any barrier to entry at all. Point and click, instant gratification, AJAX love.

2) It’s exciting - on Facebook you can see pictures of people who you might want to date. There has never been a more powerful engine for technical adoption. Period.

3) It’s organic - I create connections on facebook by going about my daily business - talking to people, showing off, looking for love, complementing others, planning a party, building a cause. It’s all sorts of organic; it’s useful.

Easy, exciting, and organic. Can we do the same thing for other otherwise doomed Semantic Web technologies? How do you make OWL easy, exciting, and organic? Would love to hear your insights.

Social Media Facebook, FOAF, Organic, OWL, Semantic Web, Social Networks

The language of marketing is the language of hunting. Who are we aiming for? What segment are we trying to capture? Who are we setting our sights on? What’s our target audience?

The language itself implicitly sets up a power dynamic, and it’s easy to fall into a mindset of manipulation. In this mindset, the market exists to be taken advantage of, fleeced, used for the good of the organization.

Taken on a more healthy level, the question of market is really the question of relationship. Who are we relating to? Who are we in conversation with? Ideally, the relationship should be one of full information and consent - not manipulation.

Here are a few questions to ask if you’re working to identify your market. Use the ones that make the most sense to your situation.

I’m currently working with a client on the question of market. Before facing the question, we had to do a good amount of work on clarifying the mission of the organization - you need some sense of who you are before you can come into a relationship. Even with that initial sense of mission, tackling the question of market is making them rethink who they are. Relationship can do that to a person.

Organizational Dynamics

Joel Spolsky, in case you hadn’t noticed, just writes intelligent insightful stuff. He seems to have been on a blogging break for the past few weeks, and I’ve actually missed him. Now he’s back, and his latest piece has my brain thumping. In it, he speaks about the 5 Whys, originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota.

(digression: When I was young, my father drove a Toyota. It must have been 20 years old. The antenna was missing, and the frame was beginning to rust away, but the car just kept going. When I went to buy a car, I looked at the Ford Focus. In Israel the Focus is actually a very sweet car; we get the European models, totally different than the US models. The Focus drove tight, had lots of power, and was kitted out with all sorts of cool stuff inside. Then I tried the Toyota Corolla. It wasn’t as sexy, it didn’t have all the gear - it was boring, and it was the same price. Then I realized - they must have put the money in to something. If it wasn’t the MP3 radio and kitted out interior, it was probably the things you can’t see - like the engine. I bought the Toyota.)

The idea behind ‘5 whys’ is to keep asking ‘why’ until you get to the root cause of a problem. There’s nothing holy about 5, fell free to add another few whys if it suits you. I decided to tackle a problem with the 5 whys, and at the risk of being overly self-referential, here’s what I came up with:

Problem: I’m not blogging on a regular basis

• Why? I find myself not possessed with ideas worth communicating.
• Why? I get involved in routine things, and not things that stretch my brain.
• Why? I somehow feel like doing really interesting things would be wasting time.
• Why? I get caught in a hamster mindset, where I have to do things that are immediately demonstrably valuable, but not really long term contributions.
• Why? I don’t maintain consciousness of the unique contribution my soul can make to the world.

The question I’m holding now is what to do with the realization. Better yet - knowing a low-level cause, and that cause being a matter of ingrained outlook, how do I bring myself into the more healthy mindset that I’d like to? How do I plant, deep down, the realization that the real valuable contributions I have to make to the world are coming from within?

The Creative Process 5 Whys

Every year for the past few years, a host of the brightest minds are asked a probing question. Their answers are intriguing and sometimes striking. It’s called the edge question, and 2008’s questions is ‘What have you changed your mind about?’ The results are at edge.org.

While we’re talking about what brilliant people are thinking about, have you seen TED?

Smart Folks Edge, TED

Amazon has announced it’s next software-as-a-service play - SimpleDB - and the technical world is all a-flutter. You can see the breathless reporting all over the net. Is this the beautiful panacea of unleashed database power it’s being reported as?

A few months back, I examined S3 and EC2 (two of Amazon’s earlier web service offerings) and came away with the sense that Amazon is changing the rules of the game in a big way, but that there is still no good way to implement an online scalable database with these services. (I know that there are attempts to put a relational database on EC2, but they seem to be quite painful.)

In short, S3 is a great scalable online file system, and EC2 is a great scalable processor. Neither one of them allows us the sort of slicing, dicing, remixing, and re-serving of data that the world has come to expect from a database.

So when the news of SimpleDB hit the wires, I figured that Amazon was stepping up to answer my cry and providing an online scalable database. Well, they are, and they aren’t.

They are providing a way to store structured information online, but it’s hard to call it a database. In fact, it’s a bit disingenuous of them to do so.

Those who are concerned about the details can quickly find out for themselves that SimpleDB has nothing to do with the Relational Model that has been the basis for databases for the past 40 years. To call something that doesn’t even smell like the relational model a database is pure marketing.

But let’s leave the marketing aside - the service is in the field, it’s a totally new beast, and it’s called what it’s called. What does it look like? It looks like a place to store object instances. No classes, no schema, they-are-just-what-they-look-like, object instance. Besides coming with a whole new metamodel, it comes without a lot of the sugar that mature database systems have led us to expect. There’s no fulltext search, queries are lexicographic (so they don’t deal well with numbers or dates), the set of operators on a query is more limited than we’re used to, there’s no verification of the data, no triggers, etc.

All this is fun, but the real kicker is this - reading data from SimpleDB immediately after a write may not reflect the latest updates. This is called eventual consistency. That’s what you tell your customers - it’ll get there eventually.

What happens now? What happens now is that the developers start to relearn the way they handle data. No existing database applications - back-end, front-end, or middleware - can be easily ported to run on top of this new beast. You can’t tell your customers that the data will get there eventually, so you tell your developers to cover the gap. This service might save you a database administrator, but in the near term, you’ll need another developer to take his place.

In the long term, we’ll start seeing SimpleDB, S3, and EC2 aggregated under another layer - one that presents the tried and true relational model. SimpleDB will handle the tuples, S3 will handle the BLOBS, EC2 will grind the queries, and the application developer won’t have to worry about it. Whether Amazon delivers it or someone else does, it’s coming - the reliable online scalable database.

(Some of the sharper analyses: O’reilly compares pricing of SimpleDB to S3, Marcelo smells a familiar data model, Inside Looking Out lays out some of the technical hurdles, rc3 wonders how to tune it, and the comment from daveadams sings a love song to the relational model)

The Developing Future AWS, Databases, EC2, S3, SimpleDB

I just spoke with a friend about the mission and structure of an organization he’s setting up. He floated a few ideas past me. On some of them, his eyes lit up and he almost jumped out of his seat. On others, he slumped in his seat, and looked as if he would much rather be somewhere else. Why would he even bother considering the latter? All sorts of external pressure - what he thinks the funders want, pressures from the other people mixed in to the organization, a nagging sense of what’s supposed to be done. All sorts of nonsense.

It’s going to take a whole lot of energy to make an organization work. Without excitement about what you’re doing, you’re dead in the water. When you’re planning out a business, excitement is the compass. When you’re running it, excitement is the gas. Maybe some people get excited about the money; I supposed such things are possible (if a bit twisted.) The best workers in any job are the ones who are excited about the job. Certainly, the leaders of a non-profit better be all sorts of excited about the mission and about the organization.

Other factors come in, for sure - you need to build an organization that can succeed, you need to keep up a good relationship with your funders, you need to build a team that can work well together. None of these things should be done in a way that squelches the excitement that the leaders of the organization have. If you allow that to happen, you’re hobbling the horse before it leaves the gate.

Organizational Dynamics excitement, joy

With cheap software talent all over the globe, it’s tempting to spread a development project around the world and around the clock. You can skype over to those guys for free, it’ll be like you’re in the same room, and hey, your developers are sleeping a full third of the day; you’ve got to be able to improve on that!

The pitfalls of adding people to a team are well known - you add communication and learning overhead that will often end up delaying, rather than hurrying, the completion of a project. But let’s say you manage that issue - the teams are brought on line together at the beginning of the project, or the new guys have experience in the field, or you budget in a healthy load of learning time - you still run into the tragic poetry of Conway’s Law.

Simply stated, Conway’s law says that any team that produces a product is constrained to produce a product that is a mirror image of its communications structure. It sounds like black magic at first, but it really makes all the sense in the world. Creating a single thing - anything - takes a lot of communication and shared understanding. Put a team in two different buildings and you’ll already start to see trouble. It will be easier to make assumptions and keep coding then to walk outside in the cold. Introduce time zone differences, language barriers, and shoddy IP telephony, and you’re lucky if the two teams manage to communicate at all. Throw in one more team on another continent, and you’re doomed.

When my little company was swallowed by IBM, we were brought under a team in Massachusetts that was also trying to swallow a team in Boca, coordinate with a team in Texas (that had a person working remotely in California), manage the offshore folk in Malaysia, and be manged by the suits in Silicon Valley. Together, we were tasked with putting together a system that really had to function as one unit. A full half of the time was spent in throwing pieces back and forth over the walls between the groups groups and trying to figure out who was responsible for what. Only when we disengaged a bit, and plowed forward on a piece that could really stand alone, did we make any progress. In the end, we created as many different pieces of the puzzle as we had teams, and they worked together just as well as our teams did.

There are situations where having multiple teams can be helpful. Have the offshore team do the translation work, write plug-ins against a well documented API, or do the data-entry. As long as the assignments and the architecture are in line with the implicit team dynamics, you’ve got a good shot.

Let’s assume for a second that what I’ve said is right. The big question comes from the development methods of the major open-source projects. They have people spread out to the four winds, and they manage to come out with some really great stuff. Granted, a lot of these projects have a very small team at the lead with the rest of the folk filing in as testers and patchers, but some of the biggest and most successful are entirely distributed. How does that work? I’m thinking that there may be another dynamic at play.

If a team has a home in a physical location, bringing on a remote team will be a serious chore. But if the only home for the project is on the Internet, then no one is remote. If everyone knows that the core communications happen online, then the project has just one home - online. Remote communications are no substitute for face-to-face communications, but if they are all that you’ve got, you make the best of them. If I don’t have any team without the ‘remote’ team, then the whole distributed team can really function as one.

Is it possible to carry the mindset of the entirely distributed team into a situation where there are people physically concentrated together? I haven’t seen it happen. My intuition tells me that it’s a tall order, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The Creative Process conway's law, development, open-source, outsourcing

Nicholas Carr argues that a key factor in Kindle’s downfall is the lack of an already living and healthy market for free reading material. I share his misgivings about the Kindle, but I don’t agree with his reasoning. Although new books are generally locked up in copyright, there’s no lack of free reading material. That’s what we (as humans) have been busy developing for the past 15 years or so. It’s called the Internet.

And that’s really where Amazon is missing the ball. By locking down their device to access a tiny percentage of the potential content, and making it difficult to get the free content on and off, they’ve painted themselves into a proprietary corner. What they could have done was put a lightweight web browser into our hands - now that would have been fun.

The Developing Future browser, kindle, mobile