Musings & Meanderings

Matt posts Best Open Source Social Networking awarded to WordPress by Packt Publishing. Wtg!

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

…please count me out. I’m a stubborn believer in the wisdom of people being necessary to harness, and benefit from, the power of machines. An increase in combined and collaborative knowledge? Great. Crowds in the cloud with the wizard standing behind a curtain? Not so much. As long as people don’t really want to know how any of it works, though, the wizards will remain.

Twine is the ‘Facebook killer’ hopeful, an invite only beta social network
launched by Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks.
Nick Carr likes it better than Freebase.

This social network proposes to make sense of all your personal information. The aim is to deliver benefits to you in the form of better tools for organizing your personal data and sharing it with others. Could it be that one of the ultimate goals is to create targeted advertising effective enough to make it impossible to distinguish from personal recommendation?

Read the Terms of Use page on Twine before you sign up. Rights to all information you contribute to Twine are granted in perpetuity, which is pretty standard. You retain, of course, all responsibility for inaccuracy and illegality, and so on. I read everything I could find on the site. One of the many things I did not find was any mention of delineation between personal and non-personal information, or any mention of user rights at all.

Most any publishing of information on the web can be deemed, under what will eventually be understood as common law use, to constitute the granting of redistribution licenses of some type. All of us who venture out here have personal responsibility for what we do and say in public. There are very few of us both knowledgeable and fortunate enough to remain totally anonymous on the internet forever. Anyone whose true goal is total anonymity avoids public places.

Personal privacy is not about having something to hide. It is an essential component of freedom, autonomy, and simple human dignity, as well as an important element in personal and family safety and security.

My wish for the day is to see the buzzword ‘transparency’ replaced with a more traditional and meaningful word, namely ‘responsibility’.
A perpetual wish is for linking ‘benefits’ to ‘respect’.

There is so much that we users could accomplish and benefit from, together, on a semantic web. Yesterday I read Tara Hunt’s post on The Brown Act of 1953, and was struck, as always, by the casualness with which many embrace these online tools, and also by the unspoken characterization of older, more cautious generations as an obstacle to progress. Much of that caution has a sound basis.

When I first started blogging in 2006, there was much public discussion about trust, especially following the ground breaking sale of MySpace. Trust is essential to human communication and interaction. Trusting a corporate entity is different from trusting a person. I, for one, am much more likely to trust you with my data if you recognize and respect my ownership of it.

Millions trust Facebook enough to submit their birthdate, a fact connected to their driver’s license, social insurance number, etc., online. Hundreds of millions have an account of some sort with Google, which has relatively comprehensive privacy policies and offers snail mail access to communication in case of problems. Millions of you may also join in making Twine one of the next hot destinations. As Danah Boyd says, “read those contracts!”.

Semantics being about relationships and meaning, I’m attempting to apply the term in a personal, communal, and resultant way as I see tools being actively developed. By us, I mean the users, consumers, constituents, or any other term currently being applied to hundreds of millions of non-enterprise users.

From semantic search engines such as Powerset to ontological database tools such as Snap Logic, the next generation of functionality would seem to be approaching. I do take note of the w3.org site statement on the summary of OWL flavors… “It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support complete reasoning for every feature of OWL Full.”, and also note that there is little reference to the full potential for individual and societal use of and benefit from the semantic web now under construction.

The machine quest for meaning still seems to be about extracting more useful information from and about us.

Would we all benefit from better search? Certainly. Powerset, Hakia, and others, aim to compete with Google.

Would our use of social networks, blogs, etc., be enhanced by better ways of organizing data? Undoubtedly. Snap Logic can play a role in social network integration at an enterprise level and Aperture could be an integral component of, say, a Facebook or its successor. (Both of these are, I believe, open source based.)

Where, though, are the plans to put semantic computing power, such as it will be, in our hands?

Tim O’Reilly, in his recent post on the topic, writes that the semantic web means…
“the design of applications that don’t require people to think at all about ontology or document structure”
and that…
“Rather than there being a single specification capturing all the information about relationships between people, there will be many overlapping (and gapping) applications, and an opportunity for someone to aggregate the available information into something more meaningful.”

Who is that someone? A Google, whose real customers are advertisers? A Microsoft, as unlikely as that may be, whose aim is to remain one of our dominant connections to the internet?

My abiding question is why those opportunities can’t belong to a lot of ’someones’, namely us.

The usual and obvious answer to that is that someone has to pay for all this development, and for the servers and data storage and bandwidth, and the someone paying is invariably a VC or 3 driven by the goal of capturing market share first, and monetizing second. There appear to be few business models in which we participate directly in the Semantic Web.

Why? The most successful web projects, in terms of real profitability (rather than stock valuations based on media industry multiples of eyeballs), are still eBay and Amazon, businesses based on consumer activities that far exceed the scope of many current start ups.

Reading Nova Spivack’s response to Tim O’Reilly’s post, I come to his term folktologies, which he illustrates using the example of Freebase.

His description of potential applications does seem to envision these tools in our hands, giving each of us the ability to ‘make each other smarter’, but Freebase is yet one more VC funded behemoth of a startup which makes no mention of an economic model.

I do prefer Nova’s view to Tim’s, if only because it envisions computer users capable of contributing to ontologies. The idea that non-techies can’t manage such an activity and wouldn’t want to anyway is hard to understand for anyone who watched eBay grow, who watched millions of non-tech users navigate hundreds of esoteric categories and figure out how to double and triple list items for the best exposure. Next time someone says that people can’t do classification, think of those millions of non-tech collectors and dealer in eBay’s glory days of Web 1.0.

Perhaps I am wrong, and the average users, the Us I refer to, are perfectly happy to accept whatever we are offered for free with no concern about responsibility for future access to the content we and others contribute, but I do not believe this. What I do believe is that we need far more entrepreneurial focus on economic models in which we can participate beyond putting ads on blogs.

Develop this proposition fully, and it can even, when built out, address the most basic issue of geographical access monopolies. We can make this place economically viable and much more so if we all participate.

Economic models which involve us, the participants who are, increasingly, the content providers, would distribute the control of this new world, control which is currently held in a very few hands. It would distribute risk and profit and the common good and a public trust, and it would truly enable free enterprise. It is a concept which can embrace the multitudinous goals and dreams of many for the benefit of ourselves and each other. It is a disruptive concept, and no doubt frightening to some and threatening to others, however it can be a basis for prosperity on every level. I also believe that it is our best hope of protecting our freedom.

There are many workable models of communal combined with private ownership in recent history that equate to both successful businesses and healthy communities. Examples include co-op high-rises in urban centers and successful franchises. These larger economic models are indicative of how elements such as small community business, home based businesses, home ownership, and the dynamics under which these co-exist integrate into the fabric of a healthy and free society. Such human scale enterprises are invariably connected to public resources and cultural riches to which we all contribute. They are supporting elements of those overlapping circles within community structures to which Tim O’Reilly refers.

Every type of human endeavor is already represented online, all striving in competition for traffic and a Google Page Rank. A true semantic web, in my definition, requires enabling and forging the natural connections and interactions of a healthy society. These are as central to human meaning as triplets are to ontological databases.

The internet should remain free. Free access to information and free speech are our greatest treasures, both individually and globally. The infrastructure, however, has to be built on an economic model. The ownership of that model goes hand in hand with control of it. I believe that, in order to fully develop a semantic web, we need to create more and better means of full human participation in it.

What say you?

Matt’s great post today, titled Showing the plug, not the cable illustrates for me once again how much we are all alike, tech and non-tech.

The central question, ‘Will it fit?’, is one that spans every culture and generation and knowledge gap that developers struggle with.

You could be a 40 something female (like me) shopping for clothing, an advanced user considering a social network, a developer integrating a hot web app, a collector or specialty geek looking for perfect components, a retired couple deciding on a holiday …the list of examples is endless. What we all have in common are the following questions.

1. What can it do?
2. How easy is it to get?
3. How much does it cost?
4. Who do I talk to if something goes wrong?
5. How is this any better than what I can get or already have elsewhere?

These are the basic questions in the head of every consumer of anything. The marketing approach of capturing people’s attention and making them think they can’t live without something can be effective, but it’s also transitory. What many marketers don’t do is directly address the basic ‘Will it fit?’ question. Sometimes that’s because they are isolated from other parts of the business or company. Sometimes it’s because the company couldn’t care less what happens to their customer base after they achieve a goal such as IPO. Fragmented attitudes like this have boosted the second, parallel list in most of our minds:

1. What won’t it do?
2. How hard can it be to get, install, etc.?
3. What are the real reasons I’m getting something cheap or free?
4. How much will I lose, in both time and money, if it’s a dud?
5. What’s the real cost and risk of dealing with anonymous strangers?

Anyone who wants to develop a product or service for Jonesers and Boomers needs to understand that the older we get, the stronger the negative questions are, based on negative experiences. Trying to tell us why your ‘thing’ is a hot must have isn’t enough even if, and sometimes especially if, it’s free. We want to know the downside in order to be prepared for it. Everything single thing we choose and do in life has costs and involves tradeoffs.

Use the clothing analogy and picture yourself buying a garment that you intend to wear regularly. Think of how many different aspects there are to your favorite garments. Elegant or sexy, cheap or free, are common sales propositions, and they have value, but they’re just the tip of the customer’s iceberg. It has to fit and every single body is different. It has to be flexible if it’s going to be worn more than once. It can’t fall apart if you wash or dry clean or wear it. It has to come with you when you move. This is just one shirt or jacket or pair of pants we’re talking about. We get just as attached to computer programs, browsers, and apps, and want similar things from them. The age factor falls fast with this analogy. Buy a garment in the latest synthetic microfiber and watch it fall apart or lose its shape the first time you do anything with it, and you won’t be so quick to buy another one, whether you’re a kid or an old timer, and also whether it cost one dollar or a thousand.

Matt’s post asked a great question about how cables are sold, which was …why don’t you show me all the details so I can stop wasting time and make an informed purchase? I’d be such a happy customer if you did that. The wiki video in his post is great also. I’ve had so so many of my contemporaries and older ask me what is the point of doing things online? After watching that video, I could picture many of them seeing a glimpse and thinking of trying, and also hear every single one of them asking their very first prospect question, “what about security?”.

The older and more life experienced or jaded we are, the stronger our orientation (usually) to the second parallel list above. A really powerful proposition will often bring the second list down to par with the first in our minds. Tipping the scale rarely happens by focusing only on making the answers to the first list stronger, especially once you pass a point of diminishing returns. Address both lists, and that means really answer the questions in depth rather than just brushing them off, and the result can be more than just a sale or subscriber, it can be a loyal relationship for a lifetime.

In my earlier posts on Mahalo this week, I looked at it from a user and non-tech developer point of view. What I posted was essentially a personal review based on my interpretation of the way that Jason has been describing it. The term ombudsman definitely gave me the wrong impression, since it implies the existence of a community/citizenry requiring such representation.

This original misimpression of what Mahalo is, so far, sparked a strong interest on my part. It led me to think that, finally, I glimpsed the possibility of what I firmly believe many people would welcome, namely a public community where individual interests can connect, merge, and overlap with those of others.

There is a ‘community’ building Mahalo, in classic crowdsourcing tradition, which means mostly drawn from the .001%. Will that change? Possibly, based on drawing in students who always need a few bucks. That’s actually a brilliant little bit of strategy.

Mahalo may be more of a links directory than anything else, but the reality is that one of the most wonderful resources that most of us valued, before the marriage of search and marketing drowned a lot of them, were those fabulous link pages that so many individuals contributed and maintained for the love of it. In a way, Mahalo is aimed at rebuilding that sort of resource, to the power of 1000. I can even see this making a dent in the Joneser and Boomer markets, if the category development doesn’t end up skewing too young.

Looking at Mahalo objectively as a business offering, I’m making a bet that it will be successful, with success defined in the usual terms of adoption, eyeballs and valuation. It doesn’t have to take over all of search, or do unrealistic things such as displace Google, to be a winner.

Loser pays an “I was wrong” post. Any takers?