Musings & Meanderings

My mother, who is in her 80s, asks me if I think that her attire is inappropriate. She’s referring to her short (just above the elbow) sleeves. The humidity here is 88% and climbing; it feels like the Everglades, not the Great Lakes.

She had a fall almost 2 years ago. As a result of osteoporosis, she did more than break her right arm or wrist; she pulverized bones at either end of her forearm. 5 hours of surgery involving numerous pieces of metal have left the forearm, after 18 months of healing, ever so slightly curved, and scarred on the inside. You wouldn’t notice a thing unless you really looked very carefully at her, or unless she held her arms out and showed you.

In addition to holding traditional notions of propriety, my mother was (is) a beauty. Although she’s never gone on a single date since my father died decades ago, she’s very aware of her attractiveness, especially when it benefits her. She has never ‘looked her age’, and was for many years reverse-carded when claiming senior’s discounts.

“You know that you look much younger than your age.” I say. She smiles; when she was 50 she looked 30, and even now she makes a 15 year younger impression.

“Let’s say that your right forearm, only, now looks older than the rest of you.” I add. Bingo. Mother is delighted with this bit of reasoning and has ceased to be self conscious about her right forearm.

Not a topic I typically dwell on, but lately it keeps coming up. Normally I love it when a theme develops. This one, though, is hardly melodic.

For example, yesterday I tried on and off to find a proper attribution for the quote about classes and masses. I found none in books and disturbing ones online, in that someone would use the saying in a post or article and then be quoted with attribution. This was described to me as an old saying in the 1970s when I first heard it.

Then I came across these 2 articles, one after the other:

On July 11th 2005, Roy Williams wrote this column on Entrepreneur dot com.

On May 22nd 2007 Jane May posted this on Career Ramblings dot com.

This is only one of several such examples I have come across in the past few days, all by happenstance.

Finally, I started reviewing the recent conversation in various blogs and publications. Seems that conversation on this swells up about twice a year. The issue has become somewhat contentious as concerns blogging, with some marketing types vigorously defending word of mouth and viral marketing as free speech, but that isn’t really what plagiarism is. It is theft, pure and simple, and the more of us say so in no uncertain terms, the better the possibility that many new bloggers with little or no experience of the issue will understand better. Internet research also has, apparently led to an increase in plagiarism by students. The clearer we are on the ethics of this, as well, the better we will be able to educate our children on the matter.

You can read up on the legal aspects if you need to (careful about believing whatever you read on the web, though, if you really want to understand a legal position you must consult an experienced and reputable lawyer). Common practice, if you are quoting another’s words, is to make it clear you are doing so, and make the attribution to the original author. Legality aside, this is civil and respectful conduct of a sort that each of us appreciate from others. Most blogs and websites have a Creative Commons license or other notice of permissions given and withheld by the author. Read it before you copy anything.

A good place to start is this article titled The 20 Best Free Anti Plagiarism Tools by Jonathan Bailey on Blog Herald. Jonathan also writes a blog called Plagiarism Today, including a good post titled 5 Practical Reasons For Fighting Plagiarism. Search ‘plagiarism on the internet’ on any search engine, and you’ll find more people and organizations if you have the need or interest.

I’ve also learned that there is a category of software developed specifically for finding plagiarism. My first thought was, oh, someone should get these guys together with the relational search guys, but after further reading, I get the impression that it is perhaps still quite limited and clunky. Nevertheless, it is heartening to know that there is activity against plagiarism and plenty of conversation about it. Even though not all bloggers are professional writers, the better we understand the subject, and keep up with new definitions as they develop in relation to the internet, the better a contribution we can all make to this place of ours.

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Who remembers this one?

“Sell to the classes, eat with the masses. Sell to the masses, eat with the classes”
(the words live or sleep are sometimes substituted for eat)

The population size and overall wealth of our modern western society has made it possible to be very successful (and modestly rich) through specialization. Today, buzz words like niche and focus and user-centric are delegating the masses/classes concept to the conversational sidelines, yet it still holds true.

In his essay, The Hacker’s Guide to Investors, Paul Graham says,
“Ten years ago investors were looking for the next Bill Gates. This was a mistake, because Microsoft was a very anomalous startup. They started almost as a contract programming operation, and the reason they became huge was that IBM happened to drop the PC standard in their lap. Now all the VCs are looking for the next Larry and Sergey.”

I agree with this in that the ‘Microsoft formula’ is not going to be repeated exactly, and also in that the ‘Google strategy’ is the most popular one around at the moment. Even Microsoft is pursuing it, not to mention Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Mark Cuban, etc. What I disagree with is that looking for a Bill Gates is a bad idea. The exact confluence of events that led to the creation and growth of Microsoft may not recur, but other opportunities will, and it will take the same sort of person to see and develop them.

Whether inside or outside of the context of such specific opportunities, however, the central tenet to building a business empire is still to develop or sell a product that becomes ubiquitous, or, alternatively, to acquire a dominant market share in one that already is. This is not the job description of an inventor.

McDonalds didn’t invent food. Starbucks didn’t invent coffee. Walmart didn’t invent economies of scale. Rupert Murdoch didn’t invent newspapers or television. Likewise, Bill Gates didn’t invent the computer, nor Larry and Sergey search.

Developing a ‘best of breed’ product or service, as a differentiation strategy in a crowded marketplace, is being interpreted by budding entrepreneurs as targeting high-end or power users with a superior offering. As a strategy for expert specialists carving out a real niche, it is solid and valuable. However, this interpretation/strategy has served just a handful of bootstrapping young start ups well, and many poorly.

What the most successful empire builders have all had in common was a point of view both wide enough to encompass mass markets and deep enough to execute their ideas. The scope (width) of view requires both stepping back to see beyond the limits of one’s personal peer group and stepping forward into the wider marketplace to find the common need/desire. The depth of view is where specialization and ‘best of breed’ concepts apply, and where execution becomes critical. This dual view is the province not of businessmen, but of true entrepreneurs, and in this definition I include the angels.

While the web grows population wise, there are opportunities for bootstrapping new apps to add to the collection. Those boom time opportunities will not be sustained through growth slowdowns and market shakeouts. The field for empire builders, however, remains wide open, and those opportunities are the ones that can survive long term.

They simply don’t care. Just like some of us aren’t into gardening, or art, or cooking, or fashion, or cars, or scotch, or philately or numismatics.

They start with a vocabulary of 15 words:

computer, mouse, monitor, hard drive, printer, scanner, email, Microsoft, Windows (whatever version they have), Mac, internet, Google (even George Bush uses The Google), Wikipedia, Amazon, Expedia

(words such as Sign In, My Account, Pay Now, and credit card number are just plain English)

A problem might result in adding vocabulary such as OS, browser, cache, or spyware. Recreation might add YouTube. Collecting or bargain hunting might add eBay.

They don’t know how any of it actually works, and aren’t interested enough to find out. I know hundreds if not thousands of people like this, and some of them are 20 rather than 60 years old. They all own and use a computer.

Earlier today I was in a conversation with a non-tech entrepreneur in which a mutual friend/associate developer in his 20s was mentioned, and I used the term app.

“What’s an app?”

So I tried starting a rudimentary explanation, got 5 words into it, and was interrupted by,

“What does it stand for?”

Application, I answered. Silence. Then,

“What is an application? Give me an example of one.”

An example. There isn’t an example in this user’s vocabulary. So I resorted to trying to set up analogies.

The cable box on top of your television receives a signal from a satellite that unlocks the doorway for all the channel programming you pay for to flow through and appear on your tv.

I’m not positive, but I think I heard a yawn, and the unspoken thought that ‘I pay for cable. I watch it. Why should I care how it gets here?’.

Since part of the interest behind the original question was how is an app a way to make money, I tried again.

Your car is the pc …uh..computer. Power steering and cruise control could be described as apps.

(Actually, I think that power steering might be analogized to an app, whereas cruise control is closer to a widget, but this is a discussion to have with someone else…)

At the end of this segment of the conversation, my friend said,

“I think I understood about 10% of all this. It’s very boring.”

Right. Did I mention that the concepts involved are relevant to his business?

There are many many millions of people like this. Depending on their demographic, they’re researching or just looking something up on Wikipedia via Google, checking news, browsing briefly.

It is popular to think that these people are all really old, and that as new generations arrive it will all change. I originally thought that way also. In the past year I have been constantly surprised by elderly ladies publishing on the web and young people saying they don’t have time or interest for all this.

Do geeks outnumber philatelists? Probably, but I wonder by how much.

New generations might have 100 instead of 15 word vocabularies, but they won’t be all techies or geeks. The internet will never be ‘explained’ to non tech people with words. The only bridge to them is to make something here that interests them, and in order to develop that, speaking human is essential.

…running a sleepover camp?

Ever since reading Seth Godin’s Jobs of the Future #1: Online Community Organizer I have been pondering this job title. Seth drew a parallel, in terms of skill set, to union organizer, and that comparison flowed naturally into his description of the qualities such as passion and persistence that the two occupations would share. His post did make Community Organizer sound like a dream job. It also indirectly highlighted an aspect of the commercial internet that we would do well, I believe, to have a lot more understanding and discussion of.

Up until now, there’s been plenty of public conversation about aggregating information for the ‘common good’, but the conversation about aggregating people has been mostly about profit incentive, and therefore primarily in the province of media, marketers, and pr folks.

Now, I do not believe that profit incentive is evil, otherwise how to understand each of our need, right, and desire to be compensated for our work product? I am, though, seriously pained watching millions of people wandering about the web asking each other how to make money while enjoying their ‘right’ to all the ‘free’ toys, whether they are reading about the fortunes made by the developers of the toys or not. Free on the web, is, so far, mostly more about playing craps than about any sound economics.

So what does a Community Organizer do?

If I define community in the context of a web based destination, my broad definitions are:

A group of like minded people gathered online to share in a common activity. A group of like minded people gathered online to enjoy a common interest.

An existing offline community bringing activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.

An existing offline community creating new activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.

These definitions represent vastly different constituencies, with the biggest contrast being between common activity and common interest. Activity is traffic is the name of the game for web startups, but traffic is not community in RL any more than it is on the web. A million users can move around Times Square or Mall of the Americas on a given day. Some may be friends, regulars, know one another, but their whole is not a community, any more than the daily traffic on Digg is.

A Community Planner, however, sounds to be far more than a traffic planner.

I should clarify the big assumption that I’m making here, based on something that is indirectly implied but not specifically stated in the post that started this train of thought. That assumption is that a Community Organizer is expected to build and grow a new or expanded community. I read the description of this person’s optimal value as a proactive one.

The Community Organizer, therefore, would be someone who already has a leadership role in an existing community, online or off. That kind of role is something that usually is built and developed over years of interaction, where trust and reputation have been widely established over time. The union organizer analogy, however, is a very good one, in that a strong populist orator can walk into a strange community and collect a following almost immediately by displaying understanding of the constituents and pushing all the right buttons. Historically, people like this are often either egotists or idealists, they can be profit driven or altruistic, but, regardless of the exact makeup, they invariably have pretty strong motivations and agendas. They don’t become dutiful employees, unless, of course, they have a stake in the agenda and rewards of their employer, or vice versa. (Yes, there are actors who can straddle this either or fence, but you usually wouldn’t leave your entire community to their making.)

There are many community roles within organizations, such as in public relations, marketing, customer service, etc., which are already well defined and well filled, so I am further assuming that none of these match the definition of Community Organizer.

Going back to my definitions of community, above, existing communities can be further classed into either online or offline. The definition of offline communities is clear, so my focus narrows to online communities.

Online can be divided into commercial and recreational. I’m leaving the world of online charities and fundraising aside, as they are adjunctal in nature, and deferring the important and underdeveloped area of community projects and the public trust to future discussion.

The only example of a new online commercial activity I can think of that truly formed some new communities is eBay, where specific groups of collectors ‘found’ one another and developed communities that did and could not exist previously. Some members of those communities derive their entire income there and simultaneously interact socially.

Pretty much all other commercial web activity is strictly transactional on an individual (or corporate entity) basis. A substantial amount of recreational activity of any scale at all, is actually also profit driven, ie. many people on Linked In and now Facebook are there to network, to make, renew, and maintain connections, all of which, directly or indirectly, benefits their careers.

So online communities which are truly recreational are traditionally very small and limited. I personally don’t believe that this needs to be the case, but do believe that it will continue to be as long as we each go on our merry way and never gather to discuss and consider the reasons. The best online means of public discussion about this, to date, is what I’m doing now. Blogging.

Does it sound as though I’ve deliberately left the original core tech internet communities out of this overview? I have. They have become a small group within the population explosion here, and also seem to fall into two primary groups. (Why are we always cleaving everything down the middle?) That division can be very roughly described as falling between the open source believers in free and the enterprise aligned who believe that it takes a lot of money, which equates to ownership and rights, to build a lot of things. That is as apolitical a description as I can make. This ‘cleavage’ is a great misfortune for us all, as that core community has the valuable ability to create for everyone’s, rather than only their own, benefit. They should also be speaking more directly with us. Those with idealistic beliefs have abilities to enable and empower many, and those with capitalistic beliefs can only benefit from a bigger and happier constituency.

What about offline communities that aren’t here yet, despite many efforts. Is this the intended role of a Community Organizer? To lead those people in? Perhaps they aren’t here yet because there is nothing here they want enough, and maybe their needs and desires differ somewhat from those of the population that is here. So bringing them here means making them the right offerings, and, it seems to me that this is primarily the role of a developer. The conundrum, of course, is that most developers are like everyone already here, thereby making most new development automatically exclusionary.

In my lifetime experience with urban real estate development, every great destination has a critical collaborative component. Most developers build homes (condos, etc.) for individuals, or offices for companies, or special purpose facilities for industry. That can be accomplished profitably with tools such location and in depth market information. No one, however, builds a destination this way. In retail, you need at least one good anchor, a big draw that is already a traffic destination in itself and will therefore also draw other, smaller, concerns of the same caliber. For public spaces much more collaboration is usually needed. Great opera houses are built for great opera companies and their subscribers, and so on. In the physical world, mixing uses together and creating vibrant neighborhoods (the urban seat of community) is extremely complex. Over the internet it should be remarkably easy in comparison. The single thing that I believe we don’t have enough of here, outside of tech and on the people side, is collaboration.

It would appear, without new and innovative thinking, that a Community Manager is most likely to be a charismatic leader type whose community experience is mostly with others who are already motivated to be involved online, whether they be newbies or old hands. Sounds rather like either a former or budding entrepreneur to me. I’d suggest giving them shares.