Musings & Meanderings

On the surface it’s all in the Styling
(first impressions… and also maybe all we ever see)

• some of us are mostly just simple html
• a few either can’t manage a WYSIWYG editor or simply couldn’t be bothered
• some of us can’t resist flash pages and more
• adjectives such as elegant or cool mean that our code is so good that you don’t even notice it (and it probably validates too)
• most of us only render properly in one browser

Start interacting with the User Interface
(from trying to get a date to learning whether you should have)

• none of us come with instructions, but some offer lots of verbiage while others remain silent
• if you’ve met others sort of like this one you can probably guess where the buttons are and which ones to push
• we won’t do anything for you until you take the trouble to figure us out
• we try to signal whether we want something from you or prefer that you didn’t exist
• figure us out and maybe we can make beautiful music together

Share activities and get to see Scripts
(hopefully you’ve only gotten engaged and not married yet)

• find out which scripts we like most
• some of us don’t have many so you won’t have to wait long for repetition
• some of us are not into developing this level, and tend to run as few scripts as possible, stalling often to consider anything from security precautions to the costs of increased functionality
• anyone who is mad about RSS might be a salesperson
• can we consider a Freudian interpretation for an obsession with plugins?

Interact with the Language and Database
(sometimes you don’t get to see this until you’re already committed)

• we can be practical and staid
• or strictly limited and that’s that!
• some of us are dynamic and others are just pretending to be
• semantic types can be slow or with a tendency to get stuck, but when they’re good at it you’ve got a winner
• don’t confuse agile and fast with narrow or shallow

Get up close and personal to see the Operating System
(discover morals and values, and bank balances too)

• some are old fashioned and rather clunky but very reliable
• others are easy to use and beautiful but ultimately limited
• DIY grass roots type can be unpredictable but are usually true blue loyal
• DIY eclectic types come in the most flavors
• some of us ‘make it up as we go’ which can make for a pretty bumpy ride with lots of crashes

Find the OS Kernel inside
(knowing anyone at this level, including ourselves, is better than winning a lottery)

• there’s the legacy version …generations of inherited layers of rules (occasionally explodes or implodes in fatal error due to conflicts)
• some are purists …investing much discipline in adhering to core guiding principles
• some of us are put together like a Rubicks cube
• then there’s the master chef devoting a lifetime to creating the ultimate banquet with eight ingredients
• the deconstructionists know that there’s no such thing as WYSIWYG at this level

Isn’t it awesome that both computers and people actually work on all these levels at once?

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.

My American friend alternately tells me that everything in the US is about politics and that everything is about money. My response is that everything is about freedom. What do you think?

Being fascinated by all things cultural, from fine arts to psychology to free speech, I continually view political and economic landscapes from multiple viewpoints. The United States of America is truly the most dynamic and multifaceted nation on our planet for this kind of observation. It also offers, by virtue of the freedom its citizens enjoy, as wide a range of belief systems as any one society has ever simultaneously produced and allowed to flourish.

Every ideology has some positive values at its core. We can trivialize them, we can view them with cynicism, especially when they are misinterpreted or perverted or taken out of context, yet no matter how much we do this we can’t make them go away. We can’t dismiss a core value out of existence by sneering at it, and if we try to invalidate it by ignoring it our whole becomes unbalanced, or, to put it another way, the code won’t validate and the program will keep slowing and stalling. Unfortunately, our natural tendency is to concentrate on the values and processes we personally like, and when we get stuck we try to blame it on the things we don’t like.

What does all this have to do with money?

Monetary valuation is a lot like a piece of the underlying structure of a computer program. It performs functions based on values. It is also a universal method we have developed for understanding and allocating meaning to much of our day to day existence, to our actions and interactions with one another.

How we live our lives, what we do and how we behave in relation to others is what really makes the ‘world go round’. Our most natural functions, though, in conscious learning and living, involve valuation and judgment. Money is, at its essence, symbolic. Removing money as a symbol does not change what is being symbolized.

Communal ideologies, in practice, tend to crash on the basis of valuation, and this is because people are all unique and different. we have different abilities and needs, even when we have a common purpose. Altruism, charity, the concept of mitzvah, social responsibility, etc. are not things that can truly exist without personal belief and motivation. Individual achievements and actions that benefit several or many can be entirely satisfying without formal valuation, but an idealistic state where every one of us devotes all our efforts only to benefiting others is contrary to our basic nature. Each of us has many primary levels of need, beginning with those associated with physical survival, and increasing in complexity through levels of self realization, emotional balance, etc. Disassociating these personal needs from the money symbol is a good thing, but denying them as unique and personal isn’t. Trying to do so not only denies our identities it also threatens our very existence by devaluing them.

Money is an integral component of the methods we’ve developed for valuation of our actions and accomplishments, and it is only that. Primitive societies used other things symbolically for the same purpose. The issues related to ‘love and peace’ vs ‘aggression and war’ are important to most of us, but valuing then on an economic or monetary basis makes no sense. Both peaceful and warlike societies have died out, passively or violently. Power has been acquired and used by benevolent leaders and by tyrants alike, but neither benevolence nor tyranny are based on wealth. Money is one of our important things. It isn’t us.

Our personal motivations and actions can be moral or immoral, but blaming immorality on money is pure misdirection. Even more dangerous is associating immorality with the accumulation of money. Money doesn’t breed immorality …immorality breeds immorality. The more we hang on to this dangerous fallacy the more it ‘proves’ itself for us. In interpersonal transactions, whether we trade our work product peer to peer, create products or services for many, or are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, we choose constantly either to focus on creating and offering value or on trying to get away with something and this is the root of morality. This is the level at which we define, or misdefine it, and making this a conscious action is one of the best definitions of freedom I know.

Democracy is, perhaps, the best ideal we’ve created so far, and the statement that ‘all men are created equal’ one of the best expressions of it. This is, in my opinion, perverted by viewpoints which effectively deny our unique individual makeup, abilities, and autonomy, and thereby our freedom. The very concept of freedom is one of the most highly personal things there is, not a political system. It is also, and for the same reason, at the heart of every great human achievement. None of these have been motivated by money per se, yet, if money is viewed as a measure of prosperity and an instrument of freedom in society, then most of them were.

We in North America live in what was once called the New World, a place where opportunity to create a good life for ourselves, our families, and our communities was boundless. It was also a rough and dangerous place, involving risks and responsibilities that are hard for most of us to imagine today. Both peace loving settlers and daring adventurers survived and prospered, in part, by being prepared to kill or die at any time. Is modern society here safer?

An essential part of the romantic allure that permeates the history of this continent rests in the dream of almost limitless personal freedom. The history proved some very profound truths. More recent history illustrates the same truths, but they are becoming obscured by our increasing lack of understanding of personal freedom in the context of societal interaction and interdependence.

Every one of us has, deliberately or accidentally, said something politically incorrect. Recently, I pointed out to an aggressive bill collector following old records that he was looking for someone male with an Arabic name and that I was female with a Slavic name. His response was instant anger and his retort, (approximately) that “we’re all trying to become alike!”, struck me as sublime. This particular mantra isn’t about any real ideal of equality. We are, every one of us, completely unique in a myriad of truly wonderful ways, yet share an equally remarkable spectrum of needs, desires, and goals in common. Where individualism and equality meet, where they recognize and respect one another, is where freedom resides.

About 15 years ago, I bought a slew of fancy electronic equipment from a big chain. After walking in and listing the functionality I wanted very specifically, I was sold products that, it turned out, couldn’t do a single thing on my list. Insisting on a refund, I was told that the store policy excluded them. They definitely got that I was angry, but had no idea what to do. My back up plan was to literally go picket the store with a large sign and my two sons in tow. It would have been onerous time-wise, but I would have done it.

The back-up plan wasn’t needed though, because, after a few hours of furious telephone work, I had the name and private number of the owner of the chain in his chalet in some mountain resort. I’m sure that my call didn’t improve his holiday, but I got my refund. Sitting at this computer, I know that the same task would be even easier today.

Yesterday, I read about Jason Calacanis fighting for, and getting, an apology from Wired.

Jason’s a well connected guy, you say? You couldn’t accomplish the same thing? Yes, you could. Some of it might take longer without the shortcuts afforded by a powerful phone book, but you could do it. All you need is the determination and perseverance. When I tracked down that big chain owner, he didn’t know me from Adam. We weren’t in the same business or community, and didn’t live in the same city or even country. I was simply an angry woman and mother.

What is different than it was 15 years ago, is that we are all now publishers, just as I commented on Jeff Jarvis’s post pointing to his column in the Guardian today about Google becoming a content provider.

The Calacanis Wired scenario is one to take note of. Traditional media has been wrapping itself up in knots for quite some time now over their potential loss of control and authority over the news we consume. There have been many references on weblogs to the NY Times ignoring the pointing out of errors and requests for corrections. In print, newspapers could tuck retractions and corrections into an inside corner below the fold in small print, where hardly anyone ever read them. This can’t be accomplished the same way online. The prospect of apologizing publicly to a reader, let alone one who can talk back, must be the stuff of nightmares for them.

Most individuals publishing online aren’t journalists or reporters, but more of us could and should be advocates for ourselves and each other. A truly free press is a cornerstone of every aspect of freedom.

Next time you are faced with an injustice, stand up …you can do it. If it affects a lot of us, then we have to learn how to join our voices together more effectively, and we can do that too. The better we learn to use our voices, the more we’ll be able to achieve.