Archive for June, 2007
by supernova
June 24, 2007 at 2:10 am · Filed under
Session Content
Despite having intended to blog these notes as the session was happening yesterday, for various reasons it didn’t happen, so here’s yesterday’s notes today, more for near-completeness than anything else.
John Clippinger
Various different different identity systems coming out over the last year, OpenID, Project Higgin (?), a new way of thinking about identity, very different from past centralised stores of info. Give people control over their own data, and ability to take data from site to site. That’s going to have a big effect on how we think of networks, how networks are formed. People don’t have to aggregate around a particular site so can break away from silos. Can have a 360 view of people and their prefs. Identity layer isn’t just about security, giving way to identity management, have multiple identities, it’s contextual, want control on how you’re seen by other people, have single sign-on, all this can be accommodated by a new identity layer.
Kaliya Hamlin
‘Identity Woman’, very active in this area. Where is identity now? The old paradigm is that companies give us our identity and we need a different one on every place we go. User-centric paradigm puts the individual in the centre and they manage their relationship with companies and sites. Prime example of these first generation tools is OpenID. Individuals goes to a website and uses an identifier - OpenID - and the website looks at where the identity provider is, redirects there, asks for the password, accepts password and redirects back to the original site. Third party auth, single-sign on for the web. Got to another site, give the identifier, redirects to OpenID provider, which says ’she’s already logged in’ and then that redirects back without you seeing it.
Story behind it, was there were four competing single-sign one services, and if they all went to market they wouldn’t win, so they collaborated and became OpenID. Story of collaboration, open source ID projects looking at the next generation, looking at more complex data sharing and authentication. Lots of big players participating in next generation. Identity commons, not just technical abut also social and legal, because there are a lot of issues. Committed to balancing convenience, privacy, with healthy inter-operable communities. Wiki is important for this.
With identity layer will see increased value form application side and business, in terms of what people can do on the web. We don’t know the new types of services and apps that will be possible but hopefully they will be good things that aren’t too Kafka-esque.
John
A question about the motivation. Once concern was that we were moving towards a top-down model. So you’re actually making policy by building stuff. At the Berkman centre workshops, we brought in MS, IBM, which was an admission that we needed to look at this. A lot of conversations that preceded this, there’s a big shift, so want to bring in Marcien Jenckes from AOL, you made the decision to use OpenID which was a huge boost.
Marcien Jenckes
From our perspective a lot of what was just outlined is the direction in which everything is heading. Moving towards ID being a level of convenience for every consumer on the internet, there’s no example that i can think of, of a company that tries to make life easier for consumers to access the services they want to, on the terms that they want, and didn’t benefit from it. Inevitable that consumers are asking for a simplified layer to help them navigate the web, and we believe we can do it as the company that manages the identities for millions of consumers, 100s of millions, to help shape that in terms that are usable for consumers and that hit the right trade off, between convenience and privacy/security.
One of the things that we worry about the most, you can see even in the history of AOL, is that historically we control the identity of all users in our community. At the point we had billing information that enabled us to do a lot of things on behalf of our customers, click to buy, etc., but it also allowed us to offer great services for the community at large.
One issues we have to deal with is how do you prevent bad actors from participating in your community when you don’t control identity, when there are a number of identity brokers out there. How do you prevent people committing fraud or disrupt? So if there was a bad actor in the AOL community, we knew who it was and could take action against them. As we moved from what was an internet access service to now having people with whom we have billing information, and people we don’t, recourse for keeping bad actors outside the community has shrunk. No longer have the ability to just cut someone off through having access to their information and know exactly who it is. Now we have folks register for screen names and provide junk info just to get a screen name - just validates that it’s a person, not who the person was. I mean, it’s not even our namespace anymore, it’s people with identities in other namespaces and entering and participating in our community in a way that’s disruptive, what’s our recourse there?
So we’re doing it because it’s what consumers are asking for, and we want to lower the barrier to participation for the web, but the thing we really need to strike that balance again.
John
So you may develop a policy that might require authentication of information? E.g. regarding age?
Marcien
There’s a lot of legislation and stuff around age identification, but for any individual player like AOL to come up with a system to enforce in the community is replacing the history that we’re moving away from. So much more about reputation management, so if you enter in to a community but you have no history there you are limited in what you can do, so over time you can get to do more. So you have reputation level which has to be community by community service, because just because you’re a good merchant on eBay, doesn’t mean you were a constructive chat room participating in a gay and lesbian community.
John
Do you think you can take reputation from other communities and bring them into your community, that that provides some social currency? There are people asking for that.
Kaliyah
I think particularly you’ll see that in communities that are similar and have shared populations. So if I’m active in an environment community and then I join a ’save the rainforests’ community, then you can see that that actually is me, both communities can see my history and be sure it is me. That shared context.
Marcien
Another example of that is taking your reputation on AIM, how many connections you have i.e. how established you are, is one part of the mechanism for developing reputation.
John
So you’re developing reputations systems within different communities?
Marcien
We see ourselves developing and contributing, we don’t feel uniquely capable to solve this issues. We have to leverage other things happening in the industry.
John
So Jyri, what’s your thinking?
Jyri Engestrom
Social networking as a whole is moving towards the mobile,a nd what this brings up in our case is microblogging, so people can be sharing their lives as it’s happening from their mobile devices as well as the web. So they creat this history from the physical world as wlel, and creating a single point of presence from where they can post photos on Flickr, or listen to music on Last.fm, and creates with a ‘lifestream’ that you can share with your friends.
One point that is really important that with OpenID we can do interoperable systems that talk to each other. So you can take bits form different services without too high a transaction cost.
John
So you’re comfortable that people can take their identities from site to site
Jyri
You want to be able to pick and choose things youv’e created on Flickr, or wherever and bring them together were and how you want. You want that kind of fluidity.
John
Doesn’t that challenge the terms and conditions of many services?
Jyri
Sure there are barriers. One of the things we do is say that you’ve got to be able to export your stuff.
John
What kind of business model is that?
Jyri
Business models stay the same. Ad supported etc.
Marcien
Today you can do a lot of what you’ve just described on a number of different services, where you can catch any RSS feed and track anything your’e doing on the web, if your’e posting on YouTube or Flickr, associate it with your identity and publish it to anyone who subscribes to it. Help me understnd what you’re describing is different from what is already available.
Jyri
I guess it is available today, i think an important part is that it’s new social objects are coming from things like mobile phones regarding location, need to support people getitng your messageas through SMS, through IM, and other clients. So get closer to the 3G phone.
Marcien
So it’s more about associating identity. There’s no reason why we would have to support OpenID to deliver that service.
Jyri
No, I think OpenID is not necessary but I think that the clear benefit of it is that it supports that sort of service.
John
Is there a need to have a real identity? Maybe with biometrics so you can’t have another identity.
Kaliyah
What you see is that if you don’t have an identifier that you use over time is that people will trust you less. If you don’t have a track record.
John
But that’s game-able.
Kaliyah
You’d have to do an enormous amount of work to game it. If you’re a real person, you’ll have a history.
Marcien
I agree with that, and from a service provider perspective, having credentials with durability helps. Whatever you’re interacting with, you need the ability to filter bad actors out. Say that you don’t want to see the activity that’s done from people who haven’t been individually verified, or who haven’t been acting constructively for a period of time. If you go to the extreme there are times when you need to know exactly who that person is, e.g. around age verification in the business world. For some businesses, they care very much who people are, and need to verify credentials.
John
Reid Hoffman, pioneer at LinkedIn. How do you see the evolution of identity?
Reid Hoffman
In OpenID there’s different components: there’s single sign-on and there’s enough demand for that; then there’s data portability, either there’s an import or export of data and imports are a good thing, and I think exports will happen as there’s a demand, so with LinkedIn you can take a PDF of your profile; validation, so going to third parties to validate users and connections, which will enable a lot, we do this in a light way doing some early identity modeling; hardest is reputation, because reputation is reputation for what? for being employed, so what is it? These four things are the main ones.
[These were all the notes I've got - doesn't include discussion.]
by Isabel Hilborn
June 23, 2007 at 5:26 am · Filed under
Session Content
Just enjoyed a fascinating session featuring David Weinberger and Andrew Keen offering two different takes on the direction the web has taken us. Please excuse my incomplete notes; I apologize for any errors; my personal (silent) comments are in italics.
David: Way too much information, they warned in the 90’s. way more than predicted. Why aren’t we drowing? More information to help us keep from drowning.
How are we going to find what matters to us? Fragmentation has always been the main challenge of the web. Solution is looking at the metadata.
Two orders of order – you organize the data. Everything goes in one place – archives of photos. Then you get metadata and sort that – the library card catalogue.
Being the person who decides what goes on top – ie newspaper editors - gives you power.
Books are knowledge, but they’re physical, so constrained. We like trees, we organize stuff, like the animal kingdom, and then we have experts in this.
Now we’re in the 3rd order of order – digitizing everything. We’re taking the leaves off the trees, making a huge miscellanous pile. Rather than experts decide, the users decide how to order and organize and sort.
So traditionally everything has to go on one branch, but online you can file in as many different categories as you want. Now if you remember a bit of the content, you can get the author and title. If everything is metadata, we just got way smarter than we were 10 years ago. And you can do this better online than offline. The most exciting stuff on the web is how we have helped each other – reviews, tagging, clustered and lumpy – find stuff.
In broadcasting we’ve been used to dumbing things down to reach the largest audience. We take complex information and simplify it.
Frequently wikipedia is better than what we get from any one individual. Same with mailing lists. One person speaks, and another person comments. The list is smarter than any one expert on it. Knowledge has become social. Online, our kids are doing their homework socially but they’re being tested as individuals. So the system is broken.
And now we are seeing a cataclysmic change, where knowledge is encircled by understanding. It’s not being degraded by “more bad knowledge out there”. Yes it’s harder, but we’re getting smarter because we can understand what we know.
We’re building the real semantic web as an infrastructure for meaning. This is the real advance, we are just beginning on it and it will go on for years – and it’s ours, not belonging to any experts.
Andrew Keen –
Is it good or bad that authority is changing on the web? I’ve been defined by others as a conservative, but I’m not. I miss modernity, connected with radically new “access to culture”. Mass media, mass literacy.
Recorded music, movies, books, physical products have allowed mass access to education, that historically people haven’t had – in contrast to the late middle ages.
So where are we going? I’m fearful that the digital utopians – and these people actually believe what they say, they’re not being dishonest – I’m concerned it will return us to the middle ages. (IWH: Wow – I am blown away by the condescension of this.) What we’re losing in the withering away of mass culture is increasing hierarchy, the division between rich and poor. The scarcities are pretty constant. Talent is the key scarcity. There will be more scarcity of information and education in the new digital world. Not for us, the cognoscenti. But when you undermine the formal structures of authority, you’re doing away with access for education for the masses. We can come up with cute names for the masses but they’re still the masses.
What do we gain with hierarchy, what do we lose? The digital revolution is creating profound new hierarchies. Dramatic contrasts of wealth, like a return to the middle ages. Not a flat utopia, not the long tail, not what David Weinberger believes in.
Boundries became geographical and physical. We’re seeing this reappear, the lifestyle we lead that is artistocratic, these people who make lots of money and talk of the revolution. Like the elites of the middle ages. They lost touch with their physical community.
In spite of the optimism, the eulogies about democracy and accessibilty, the realities are _less_ conversation, communities rooted in hierarchy. This is generally bad. It’s not creating democracy.
David Weinberger responds: We all agree the digital divide is bad, and you argued against it. If we got rid of it though, you’d be upset, because more people would be in this new web world you don’t like.
Andrew: How do you think people acquire cultural authority — or is it given?
DW: This is one of the hallmarks of differences in culture, is that this happens differently everywhere. We’ve had a situation based on the scarcity of paper or channels, that have driven us to require experts.
AK: What I don’t understand is how authority will be derived from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
IWH: This is the inherent problem with Andrew’s perspective here for me, is that he seems to assume that everyone who is talking on the web who isn’t an established, edited journalist “doesn’t know what they’re talking about”. There needs to be the understanding that someone who works with digital security is likely to be a better expert in it than some journalist who tries to learn about it in time to write an article about it for Wired. I get Andrew’s point – that getting rid of newspapers could lead to unfettered morons writing the news. But in fact that’s not what’s happening, as we have seen. What’s happening is that smart people with diverse perspectives are establishing authority in their space precisely because they are smarter and more trustworthy – and most importantly, more relevant — than the mainstream media. There are so many more relevant topics to each of us as individuals, than mainstream, temporarily available mass media can deliver. Mainstream media hasn’t been eroded accidentally- it’s been eroded on purpose because market forces have made it less relevant.
DW: Many experts are talented and knowledgable – in much of mass culture, tastes are driven by the lowest common denominator. So we are inventing ways of addressing this very challenge that you bring up. Some of them are dead ends, but some are astounding successes. I’d count wikipedia as one, but if you disagree we can find another example. I don’t believe that you think you can’t find anything important or interesting on the web.
Kevin: How does the web bring more hierarchy Andrew? Can you explain?
AK: The web has been announced in the name of the people – the wisdom of the crowd and these other catchphrases. But this is an anonymous oligarchy. Is the crowd really doing what everybody says it is? Or is it a small group of activists who are driving this?
IWH: I see this as another way of saying, “Is the Internet just a fad?” This is a 1990’s perspective. Yes, people are using it. Just ask the Pew Internet and American Life project. But we Americans have a cultural difference with the British, and we likely use the Internet differently as well. So much of this disagreement may be cultural.
DW: There is a democratization, your book acknowledges that. The growth of YouTube crap instead of controlled editorial.
AK: It’s stuff out there. I don’t think people are really reading it. I don’t believe it has authority. The people need experts that inform and educate, and this media isn’t doing that.
DW. This is additive. The web means more of everything. You’ve got great experts getting exposure on the web. Mortimer Adler, you can get more of him online. The leading authorities are there. The web is more of everything – racism and Clay Shirky, porn. Cicero in Latin translated into French.
AK: What you’re describing is disorder, for us we can navigate it. But for the majority of the people it’s chaos. They need experts, they need teachers. This media doesn’t have signposts.
IWH: this sounds pretty condescending to me.
DW: We need to take this perspective seriously. We do know our way around, and kids need to be taught to be curious, it smells like a business opportunity. Let’s come up with ways that we can redirect the youth to the good stuff.
AK: What was wrong with the traditional media system?
DW: I can’t find the work that was written by someone I’ve never heard of, or the old books that are now out of print, the books the library can’t keep up with. The YouTube video that breaks your heart. We’re way richer than we were.
AK: I would strongly disagree. We are way poorer now. My book idealizes mainstream media, it’s not that glittering, but historically it’s done a good job creating mass culture. The problem with web 2.0 is it doesn’t do any of these things. It doesn’t sell, it doesn’t market, it doesn’t keep up with the expertise to build and develop and sell and market mass culture to the people. What we collectively have done is destroy that, in the name of the people. In the name of disintermediating. We’re left with the anarchy of the web. And now David is telling me, we need to figure out how to find the few decent blogs out of the 20 million. Having trashed an authoritative media economy, which is now in deep crisis, now we need to find a way out of it. Now we suddenly realize we’ve destroyed the thing of real value. Now we have to find the editors, the experts, to help us out of this.
DW: I’m saying that we are already doing these replacement things. It’s already happening.
AK: Collectively I think we’ve done a dreadful job.
Mitch Ratcliffe: You’re both skeptics. I could point to things in the real world that David is skeptical about. Nostalgia for any past is as dangerous as hope for a future which may actually be full of undesirable changes. As skeptics, what are the standards or principles that you two can agree on, that we can use to measure against as we leap into the future, whatever it may be?
DW: One measure is the value of the cultural objects we maintain. While Andrew maintains a canon, I think what’s important is more diverse than just that.
AK: I disagree that everything is miscellaneous. And that’s the whole problem with wikipedia, that some random thing is just as important as Joan of Arc. If you do away with the hierarchy of knowledge, and say all facts are equal, you’ve lost that.
MR: I asked what you could agree on, not what you could disagree on. And I heard what you can’t agree on.
DW: We don’t agree.
AK: Your question is interesting, this is an ironic thing about these debates, is that we share cultural and political values. I respect David and Kevin and these idealists. We share the same ideals.
Tom Mandel: This is the same argument that was made against writing itself, and against moveable type. “Now anybody can write a book!”. My point is that the authority of the Queen of England comes from tradition. The authority of the Rolling Stones comes from charisma. There’s no real means of determining authority and expertise. (Tom gets some applause)
Sam from Wikipedia: I agree with andrew’s concerns, but I think David is right. And I don’t think you’re very far apart. You want to always have the concerns of what you’re losing if you do something new. What’s important on wikipedia is what gets said, not who said it. It’s not about the people’s credentials, it’s about what whether they say is correct or verifiable or cited. It’s the strength of argument. And that’s what we want experts to be. We want them to be well-researched. It’s what they say that’s important.
Audience: I have a degree in library science, and a doctorate. It fits into what David has described. Let’s look at the people who don’t have voices. Kevin worked hard at finding new voices. But our history is one of white men without proven authority getting to be in charge. Do you have a doctorate? Are you a librarian? And yet, you should still be allowed to have your say up there. We’ll always have different lenses, and you’re saying other people’s lenses are bad because they don’t fit your world view. (Applause)
Brad Templeton. I want to address your phrase the scarcity of talent. In Canada our hockey team can whup British and US butts. Talent appears when there is a demand for talent. The supply appears when it’s something that’s done around the neighborhood. I don’t have the fear of a scarcity of talent. Today YouTube may be full of garbage, but it will get better.
AK: I would strongly disagree with the lady. [the Librarian]. The idea that mainstream media was run by cultural elites I don’t accept. Our current media system isn’t rooted in specific class or gender interests.
Librarian: That’s like saying you disagree that the sun rises in the east. It’s a fact.
AK: The media system is meritocratic. You’re not born into this, most people are free to pursue it if they choose. People aren’t stopped from being moviemakers because of the color of their skin or their gender.
IWH: I see a cultural divide here. To a British person, the US system is very meritocratic. To a black woman from the south trying to write for the New Yorker, maybe not so much!
AK: There needs to be a debate. My book is getting attention, because there are real issues here. We can’t agree on some muddled middle.
MR: It’s a misunderstanding to say I wanted a muddled middle ground! We can start with generalities and work out from those towards specifics.
DW: I’d be happy to discuss it with you Mitch but maybe not best discusses on a panel format. Andrew, the Canadian guy and the Wikipedia guy are saying that talent and authority can come from alternative sources.
AK: I’d argue that it’s traditional media’s job to find raw talent and polish it up.
IWH: To me, Andrew’s view sounds snobbish — it’s based on the idea that some people should be able to have a voice and others should not, or that some media is inherently good and other content is inherently not, or that Financial Times journalists are better at explaining economic theory than a grad student at Harvard. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. “Mainstream” does not define any one of our tastes. David’s is a more nuanced point of view. Not everyone is served by whatever shows up in a few magazines, TV shows and newspapers.
I think the disagreement here is so cultural – I see it as very British Vs. American in fact – it’s classist. I think the point that Andrew may be missing out on here is that something that I find incredibly valuable may never be covered in the New York Times.
I might want to see coverage on, for example, John Kerry’s traitorous Swift Boat career. And thanks to the web, that is available to me now, whereas the Times might not have thought it truthful enough to cover. Or I might want a Vogue sewing pattern for a 1960’s evening dress, and the traditional source is only offering the 2007 line. I might be a teenage girl more interested in Frank Sinatra than Britney Spears, but Seventeen doesn’t cater to my tastes. I might be a vegetarian, or a Mormon, or a Jew, or a diabetic, in a town that thinks I’m a freak because I’m different, and I want to connect with voices like mine although they’re not featured in the town newspaper I subscribe to.
by supernova
June 23, 2007 at 5:12 am · Filed under
Session Content
Liz Lawley
Lots of photos, all CC-licenced and from the world of amateur media. Nothing authoritative.
Not going to sum up the whole conference, because when you leave you won’t remember the bulk. Can take away only the nuggets that really mattered. The things you’ll remember are the things that were stated with passion, the things people deeply cared about.
Wednesday, in virtual worlds sessions, metrics are crap because they don’t measure the details, such as passion, and what matters. KC rocked the stage with her energy and passion, and when she said “we don’t have a culture of getting good data” I wanted to get on the table and cheer. Because we don’t get data, except from the people who have a vested interest in not giving accurate raw data.
People respond to energy. David Weinberger, has more emotion and passion than anyone. I’ve been on the backchannel, and there are two modes, one is a helpful supportive role where people debate the discussion. The other is where the group on the stage has so failed to engage the audience that the backchannel becomes a festival of hilarity. And the third mode is when David is on stage, and it goes dead because everyone is listening.
We need to listen to people who are passionate because they have something interesting to say.
Jerry Michalski
Want to talk about love. And humans. We’re pretty bad at dealing with humans. Use ‘consumer’ too much, we’re not just humans with gullets and wallets. Companies are afraid to address humans, and fear letting go of control, as exemplified by Andrew Keen. Because we fear there will be chaos if people are left ot themselves. But I look at gov’ts and I don’t like it. Gov’t got us into this war because the media slept on the job.
We aren’t paying attention to humans. Housingmaps.com we saw was really cool, but it wasn’t enough, because it doesn’t really help humans, you need more functionality and to be able to share with people. I think the challenge, is in many ways to provide a platform to let people mix, remix and do things. Not all of which are nice.
So years ago was brainstorming about PDA of future. What about a GPS-enabled phone that calls your AA button if you spend too much time in a bar. We are steps away from letting go and lets people build things and test the edges.
Monopolies are gone. Too easy to undermine. And they can’t organise.
Finally, the value of silence. A few seconds to go quiet, and say quiet for a second. And during that time, look around maybe, think about what has happened.
[Couple of minutes silence]
Umair Haque
What happening in the economy is that the number of interactions are exploding. This is as fundamental a shift as the ones that came before, because it turns the tables.
This notion that we are living in an era where distribution scarcity has gone away, and relationships are fluid.
We talked a lot about business models and strategies. The oxymoron is that if these sources of our advantage are eroding, then we shouldn’t talk about business models because they are in decay. So what are some of the forces we’ve been talking about?
Things get better the more people use them. Economists talk about goods, but these aren’t goods, they are betters. Our tools aren’t adequate to talk about betters, and we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Also, we’ve been talking about love. Purpose beats profit. Google foregoes revenue to balance it for both consumer and advertiser. Strategy not by how and what, but who and why.
Firms are one economic component, but there are others, markets, networks, communities. Will the firm go away? It will become remixed, hybridised, and firms not part of this shift won’t make it into the future. Ev Williams talks about how they are experimenting, no great plans.
Udi from Google blew my mind with the translation. Plastic beats specific and this was a good demonstration.
Flows beats stocks. Assets are what we built the business on yesterday, now it’s flows.
Need to think about institutional DNA. Anyone can set up a wiki, but what makes Wikipedia different is its DNA.
Two or three questions. Is it just technology or is there some DNA, as it’s DNA that’s going to sustain us, not the technology.
Where is the market or community that lives at the edges? And is it appropriate to use it to solve problems.
Liz:
If we don’t delight people, we’ve failed. It’s not context or content. Google delight, and the companies that fail to delight consistently end up in trouble. The experience matters. The way that people feel matters. No one knows this better than someone who sits in a room of 17 year olds every day. If I don’t send a message in a way that makes them experience the information then I’m a failure. And the same is true here. If you don’t experience this conference, and feel engaged, and spoken to, then it’s been a failure. We need to think a lot more about the experience, the delight, the fact that we don’t live in a field of dreams world - if you build it they won’t come, they will go elsewhere where there is more delight. We have choices, and we need to build what delights.
by supernova
June 23, 2007 at 5:11 am · Filed under
Session Content
Before i get into the questions I think are interesting and have impact, what do you think is the single unanswered question associated with the ideas behind this conference? Email me at JHagel at Deloitte dot com. Forming a research agenda and need all the input I can get.
Going to pose some questions.
What if there is no equilibrium? There’s exponential growth in technology, but linear thinking in business. Disruptive innovation, reach points of punctuated equilibrium, but the assumption is that there’s equilibrium. What if there isn’t? With all previous advances, we had an eventually stable infrastructure, but that’s evolving.
How do we deal with this lack of equilibrium. How do you balance persistence with agility. In order to thrive, where there is no equilibrium, have to build long-term trust relationships. How do you get that balance right?
the most interesting institutional innovations are not going to happen in the US or western Europe they are mainly happening in China and India, and we have a lot to learn from them.
Can the firm survive as the action flows to the edges? are we all going to be free agents? Freed from institutional boundaries? Or are firms going to unbundle and rebundle in systematic ways that will lead to a greater concentration of firms in certain areas. For that to happen, the rationale for the firm is going to change. Rationale for the firm is an institutional platform to accelerate talent development.
Are all ecosystems created equal? Term used loosely and frequently. Terms like network and community, lose meaning. Need more discipline on how we used these terms so we can see what’s new and what’s available.
If the world is so flat, why are spikes getting more comment? Geography was supposed to not matter. But in this flat world, spike are more common. More population for the first time will live in urban instead of rural areas. Geography might matter more than ever.
More strategic questions.
Is adaptation all there is. In the absence of equilibrium, adaptation is the best strategy. Opportunity to shape outcomes in ways you can’t in stable environments.
Can we escape the ‘red queen effect’, have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Move to scalable learning.
As L-curves replace bell-curves, what’s the most promising route to the head?
How can you use the long tail as a launch strategy to get to the head?
Stocks of knowledge diminishing in value to flows of knowledge. HOw do we avoid drowning in the proliferating flows of knowledge whilst accessing the most relevant.
Metrics are lagging indicators, tell you what how you did after the fact. How do you have leading indicators that tell you if you’re on track.
Other questions on platforms
When is self-organising not enough? tend to celebrate self-organising systems. But maybe need to recognise that successful collaboration is never completely self-organising. Depends on an administrator.
How are platforms likely to evolve? How do people connect to the resources they need. Push programs treat people as passive consumers even when they are producers. Pull platforms treat everyone as creators.
What’s the next generation of IT architectures? Opportunity to start from scratch and start with the proposition that you want to organise 10k business partners. How do you do that?
Final question.
Is the latest generation of the web, Web 2 point 0, Web 2 dot 0, or Web 2 0?
by supernova
June 23, 2007 at 5:10 am · Filed under
Session Content
David Weinberger
People predicted we would drown in information, but we’re not. The issue is fragmentation of information and authority. How do we find the information that used to be highlighted by authority. Solution to look at the metadata.
Two orders of order. You organise the physical items; second order is that you physically separate the metadata and put it on a file card, and can order the metadata in a number of ways.
Basic rule of physical world is you can’t have two things in the same place at the same time. That’s how it works. Someone has to decide what the order in the first order is going to be. Making these choices gives you authority and power, e.g. front page of the Washington Post, who decide what goes in and what doesn’t.
Our means of preserving knowledge has always been physical. Books. They are lovely but they are difficult to use. Require making decisions about what goes in the book and then where do you shelve it. Because the physical is limited.
The idea that we should constrain data by the physical is limiting. Makes you sort things as if everything has one place, and you need people to decide this.
Laundry. You have a big lump of laundry and you have to split it out by person - whose clothes are they - and then by body part, and maybe colour. Becomes a tree diagram.
But now we’re digitising everything . So we’re taking the leaves off the trees and heaping them up. Users get to decide how to order and organise the data, depending on their own needs.
In traditional order, everything goes on one branch, or one shelf. Online, you can file in as many different categories as possible.
Messiness is a disaster in the real world, but it’s a virtue online. You want as many links as possible. Can sort at the metadata level.
Used to being a difference between data and metadata. Now you can also get the content, so you can search on content, and you get the metadata back. So everything is now metadata. Metadata is what you know, data is what you are looking for.
If you were in a shop and you heaped up everything in your size, you’d get thrown out. Online, you can do that. We own the data. We get to organise it how we like. Recommendations sites, reviews, etc. make the web not a flat space, but clustered and lumpy.
Favoured the broadcast regime because it’s simple. Dumb everything down and you get TV. True in politics too. All presidents have speech writers that take complex issues and simplify it. On the net, people take a speech and they make it more complex, they analyse and add information. Joy of complexity that is overwhelming the simplicity that has been foisted upon us by the broadcast media.
Experts. Wikipedia negotiated expertise. So people debate, change, and revert in this social negotiation of knowledge. Knowledge usually is better from the group than the individual. Mailing lists are another example. Experts know a lot, but other people’s comments enhance that. the mailing list is smarter than the experts on it.
Way too much stress on the notion that the net is about info or knowledge. Harder to know things because there’s more bad knowledge, this is true, but knowledge is an artefact of 2500 years of western philosophy. What we do on the net is understand what we know. We had this huge pile of stuff, enriching it with all this metadata. We’re adding to the semantic web, adding to the meaning of the web. We are making connections, it’s the real semantic web, as an infrastructure not just for knowing but for understanding. Infrastructure for meaning.
And it’s ours. It doesn’t not belong to anyone else, to a set of experts, for better or worse.
Andrew Keen
Debate about the value of authority in a connected world. Troubled that authority has value, another word for it is power. Power has always existed, will always be power and authority. There are three typologies, developed by early 20th century,
- traditional or religious
- charismatic
- legalistic
Help us define what power is and how it works.
So are these changes a good thing? Are they a threat to what we value? To help with that we have to define what we think a good thing is and what we value. I’m a modernist, I believe in the nation state and the mass society/culture that goes with it.
It’s a historical fact, and I can in some ways be nostalgic for modernity. Modernity provided mass society with radically new access to culture, information, education. Rise of the nation-state over the last 200 years, and mass democracy, mass representative democracy and cultural identity, mass education, mass media.
This manifested itself in massive access to culture. Recorded music, movies, books, physical products, has allowed mass society to information and education that historically they haven’t had. Modern age compared to late middle-ages or medieval period.
Where do I think this world is going. I’m fearful that despite what the digital utopians say or hope, I think people like David are well-meaning, and I respect their idealism to an extent, I fear that the digital revolution which is a reality that it’s going to return us to the middle ages, that what we’re losing in the withering away of mass society, mass culture, is increasing hierarchy, increasing division, between rich and poor, those who are media literate and everyone else. Between us and Asia and the rest of the world.
Let me address scarcities. They are pretty constant. Talent is the key scarcity. But I also believe that there will be more scarcity of education in the new digital world. For us that’s not the case, when you do away with gatekeeper of mainstream media, you’re doing away with access to information and education for the masses. We can call them ‘we the people’ but they’re still the masses.
What do we lose and gain with hierarchies. The digital revolution is creating profound new hierarchies. The return to a middle aged world is much more logical than the digital utopia that some believe in. Boundaries. the fragmentation of mass society is creating boundaries the complex boundaries of the middle-aged society.
New digital age, what we are seeing reappear, manifested like an event like this, is the emergence of a digital aristocracy. Similar to the elites of the middle ages, who spoke Latin and travelled and lost touch with their physical community. The realities are more boundaries, more fragmentation, less conversations, communities rooted in hierarchies, rather than the egalitarianism of mass societies.
I think that the digital revolution is generally bad, and it’s not creating more opportunity, democracy or opportunities.
David.
I”m struck how much of what you said is as if you are working against the digital divide, but I don’t think that’s what’ is your complaint. If we got rid of it, you’d be more unhappy rather than less, because more people would be in this world that results in unnatural hierarchies and the death of mass culture, as you said.
Andrew
Within that trinitarian definition of authority, how is authority derived?
David
It’s not about authority, it’s very different in ancient China and online. we have a regime of power based on scarcity of paper, because it’s rare, it’s limited by space. This has driven us to require access. It’s the scarcity that we’ve now overcome that has given rise to the authority that we have.
A
Important to bear in mind, the thing i value in terms of author, is authority derived from expertise. What I don’t understand is how authority will be derived from people that don’t know what they’re talking about.
D
That’s not the opposite of expertise. It is certainly the case that many authorities are wonderfully talented and we do well to listen to them. But in many mass culture they are driven by base drivers. Story of the web could be seen as addressing this issue of who to believe, who to read. Some solutions didn’t work, or drove people into dead ends, but some have been astounding successes. Wikipedia is a success, but if you don’t believe that we can find another. I don’t believe that there’s nothing worthwhile on the web.
A
What about the way in which the digital revolution is resulting in less not more democracy. …
Let me talk about mass media and culture. People have articulated this in the name of the people, ‘wisdom of crowds’ etc. Behind that is an increasingly anonymous oligarchy, there’s no evidence the crowd is going what people think it is doing. It’s a small group of activities who are driving this so-called democratised economy.
D
You do in your book you do talk about democratisation. This is the alternative to mass media’s authority.
A
You have cultural chaos, anarchy. Is that authority? It’s just stuff out there. I don’t think people are reading it, I don’t think they believe it. The people, the masses, need cultural authority, they need experts.
D
The web is more of everything, it’s additive. the great experts are there, online, and so is everyone else. It’s more of everything, it’s more bad stuff too, but also more good things. We’re just not restricted to the authorities.
A
you’re describing disorder. If you’re media literate you can get round it. But for the majority of the masses, it’s chaos. I don’t see them being able to navigate that. They need guides, teachers. There are no signposts.
D
It doesn’t have authority through scarcity. And you are pointing to an important issue, Clay Shirky blogged about it, kids do need guidance and be taught to be curious and interest in stuff, which education doesn’t do because they are too stuck in being an authority. So let’s do that, come up with ways to direct the youth to things that are of value.
A
But you are reinventing the wheel. It already exists.
D
I can find a copy of Cicero, but I can’t find the new works that libraries can’t keep up with. But I think that we are way richer than we were.
A
I think we are way poorer than we were. The media system as it existed was well oiled to bring talent to the fore. Mainstream media is a bit idealised in my book, but historically it has done a good job of creating mass culture. Discovering, developing and selling talent. Web 2.0 doesn’t do any of those thing. It does away with the ecosystem that over the last century has grown up, that has that authority and expertise to build and develop and market culture to the people.
All this ecosystem of experts, we’ve destroyed the whole thing and we’re left with the anarchy of the web. We’ve come in a surreal circle here, having trashed an authoritative media economy, which is now in deep crisis.
D
One difference. The story of the web is of us, figuring out how to deliver this.
A
Collectively I think we’ve done a dreadful job.
Q from floor:
You guys are both skeptics, David can be a harsh skeptic as well. What i’ve heard here is that nostalgia for any past is as dangerous as hope for a future that includes changes that we may not appreciate. As skeptics, what can you agree on as a way to deal with the future.
D
One of the criteria will have to do with the value of culture. I move more towards a process valuation, Andrew is more about a canon and criteria.
A
ONe thing I cannot agree with David on is that everything is miscellaneous, I agree with hierarchies, taxonomies. My problem with Wikipedia is that everything is indeed miscellaneous, no one determines whether or not one entry is more or less important.
Q:
That wasn’t my question. I asked what you could agree on.
[Silence]
A
What’s ironic about these debates is I think we share cultural and political values. I respect David and Kevin and these idealists. I think we share these ideals, I’m just more skeptical.
D
It’s way more complex, I would need different criteria for different sites.
Q from floor: the argument that you’re making Andrew is the same one that was made against Movable Type, and against writing itself. It’s just an argument that gets made over and over. But in this argument, I’m the expert, because I’ve read a lot more [Hegel?] than you about this. But my core point is that the authority of the Rolling Stones is charisma, the Queen is tradition, there’s very little expertise in the world you like. And there’s no generally accepted means of deciding who has the expertise other than to see what they know, which is what we do on the net.
Q from the floor, from guy from Wikipedia: I basically agree with Andrew’s concerns, but I think David is right. I don’t think you are that far apart, you have to be concerned about what you’re losing when you’re creating something new. But Authority doesn’t come from individuals anymore - it doesn’t matter who made the edit on Wikipedia, but what they said. It’s about whether what they’ve said is correct, verifiable. And you’re now having this abstract conversation when it’s not the person, it’s the strength of arguments. We want experts to be well researched, good arguments, not be based on the person. It’s irrelevant, it’s what they say that’s important.
Q: Liz Lawley; I have a PhD, and I teach, and I organise thing. Cultural authority doesn’t go away because people have a voice. Have a look at all those who don’t have voices. And the people are on the sage here, but our history is one of white men - do you have a degree, are you a librarian? Yet you have decided to say you have authority to talk on this, and you should be able to talk about it, but to say that other people aren’t authoritative is short-sighted.
Q from floor: About the scarcity of talent. I’m from Canada, and any ice skater could beat your British ass at hockey, because we do it from birth. Talent arises from demand for talent. Literary talent appears when it’s encouraged. Don’t feel there’s a scarcity of talent. YouTube may be full of rubbish, but as people get used to it, the talent will grow.
A
I disagree with the lady (Liz). One of the debates that’s going on is the idea that somehow mainstream media was run by elites. I’m not sympathetic to that argument. I don’t accept the notion that our current media is rooted in a social and economic elite.
Liz: how can you disagree with that. it is!
A
the media system is meritocratic.
D
You sound like you have evidence?
A
Do you have counter evidence? You’re not born into it. It’s open. You’re not stopped from being journalists or movie-makers because of the colour of your skin.
D
You have a renaissance idea of talent, and others have pointed to what’s generally true, which is that talent is properties of networks.
A
Web 2.0 people have a romanticised idea of talent. You need to take raw talent and polish it up. People aren’t born as geniuses.
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