BLOG Google Wave: The
Wikification of Conversation
At
a meeting of Canadian IT leaders today, I was charged with explaining
Google
Wave to them. The objective was
for them to appreciate how GWave
will change the way people in business communicate.
I've viewed the videos and some online
explanations of the product,
which is due for public release in the fall. But none of these really
gives the end-user a sense of what GWave is, or does. So I decided to
tell a story instead. Here's the story I told them:
One
of our tasks is to provide guidance on how the transition of Canadian
companies to IFRS (the new global accounting standards) will affect IT
departments, and specifically how financial and reporting systems will
have to change to accommodate these new standards. We've prepared an
online training program (a webcast), a recorded interview with some IT
experts who have implemented IFRS in Europe (a podcast), and an article
in our association magazine. These three resources have been posted to
our
website, but we're struggling to get the intended IT audience to visit
the site, because they're not aware of it. Marketing is, alas, not our
strong
suit.
Suppose we had done all of this in 2010 instead of 2009. In 2010 we
will have access to Google Wave, a new tool that integrates the
functionality of e-mail, IM, wikis, blogs, Twitter, and other social
networking tools. Here's what we would do instead of our 'IFRS for IT'
web page, and what might happen as a result:
We set up a 'wave' (a
container for a conversation) entitled 'IFRS for IT'.
We post a text summary
of the webcast, podcast and article to the wave. We embed the webcast,
podcast and article (not just links to them) below the text summaries.
One of the audience
members of the webcast and podcast, who has put these two recordings
through a voice recognition software tool, posts a text transcription
of them underneath the embedded casts. The built-in Google Wave
semantic spell-checker auto-corrects spelling and homonym ("there" vs.
"their") errors.
We use the built-in
Google Wave translation tool to simultaneously post a French language
translation of the transcriptions.
The twelve of us (the
'core group') involved in the project each independently "subscribe"
people and groups we think might be interested to the wave. They
receive the entire 'conversation' to date (the content and messages in
the above steps). They can, if they wish, 'rewind' it and see each step
as it was added in turn.
Several of the
invitees post IMs right in the text of the articles and transcriptions
-- comments, clarifications, suggestions, and questions. The entire
wave is a wiki -- people have full 'author' privileges to make changes
(which are ascribed to them, and which can be reversed or amended,
wikipedia-style, by a member of the core group if necessary).
Other invitees, and
core group members, join in the conversation, adding replies to the
questions and to the suggestions. A whole new section of the article,
dealing with specific IFRS IT issues for the banking industry, is
contributed by one invitee, who invites other bank IT executives to
contribute to this 'wavelet'.
One banker embeds a
YouTube video in the wavelet, a transcription for it is added, and
several discussions about it ensue.
One invitee solicits
'best practices' in transitioning IT departments to IFRS, and posts a
'form' (essentially a database) for replies, using the built-in Google
Wave form generator. Within days, fifty practices have been posted to
the database. Some people begin and reply to conversations about some
of the specific practices in the database.
Someone starts a
Twitter tag called #IFRSIT and, using the Twave widget of Google Wave,
embeds a real-time feed of tweets containing this tag into the wave.
One of the bankers
wants a conference call on IFRS IT implications for that industry. He
posts a form soliciting participants for the call. Several people
enrol, the call is scheduled and held, and a recording and
transcription of it are immediately posted to the banking industry
wavelet.
Some remarkable things have happened here. There is no marketing
involved. People invite people who invite others, and all are
immediately included and engaged in the conversation. They can
subscribe to the whole wave or just wavelets. They can have sidebar
conversations, with full discretion over whether they are public or
private. There is a complete, organized transcription of the entire
'conversation'. The conversation is collectively managed and
collectively edited and formatted to suit the needs of the
self-selecting participants, and it's easy to follow the threads.
Updates and notifications occur in real time, and several people can be
changing any part of the wave at the same time. With Google
Voice (also
new from Google), voice conversations can be recorded and transcribed
and fed into the wave as well.
Inventing the story above (based on the features described in the
Google Wave publicity materials) led me to an Aha! moment:
Google Wave is the
wikification of conversation
You read it here first. I predict this will be the tagline of this new
tool, and that GWave will render e-mail largely obsolete. And why would
you send an IM or a tweet when it's just as easy to start a
wave, and capture and archive the entire multimedia 'conversation', and
when waves can be linked together (a tsunami?)
Here's another story, this one about (perhaps) the future of this blog:
It's May 2010, and
I've just agreed to do a conference presentation on Transitioning to a
Steady-State Economy and what it means for producers and
consumers.
I go for a walk in the
forest, with my iPhone and sketch pad in hand. I take some video of the
forest, with the voice track of my preliminary thoughts on both the
subject of my presentation (what I will say) and the format (I want to
make it interactive, conversational). I stop to rest, and sketch out
some graphics I'd like to show, and take a camera shot of them. I also
retrieve some useful graphics and links from the Web.
I set up a Wave
entitled 'Mindful Wandering - Thoughts on a Seminar on the Steady-State
Economy'. It contains the video of the forest (just because it's
beautiful), a GWave-produced, auto-corrected transcription of my spoken
thoughts, my sketches, and the graphics and links I've retrieved from
the Web. I post the Wave to my blog (this is how I do all my blogging
these days).
My readers edit,
comment on, provide suggestions to, add to, and ask questions about,
the transcription of my conference outline, key messages, and graphics.
This is interactive -- I'm online the whole time, replying immediately
by text or recorded voice, and all the discussions get added to the
Wave. Someone contributes a video by Herman Daly, and someone else
attaches extensive, highlighted extracts from one of Richard
Douthwaite's online e-books.
I casually mention I'd
love to be able to talk with these two ecological economists. Someone
who knows Herman Daly arranges an introduction and time for a phone
conversation. I come up with and post the questions I'd like to ask
him. Readers suggest additional questions and refinements. I edit them
into a final question list. We have the conversation, and it's recorded
and transcribed, and posted to the Wave.
Now I'm ready to
finalize the presentation content. I create a mindmap of the
presentation, and link it to various parts of the Wave. Then I
reorganize and clean up the Wave to mirror the mindmap. All of the
changes in the above steps show up immediately on my blog, since by now
blog 'posts' have been replaced by blog 'waves'.
I 'perform' (using my
webcam) my presentation, and produce a simultaneous transcription of my
talk. I post it, in pieces, to the Wave, so that it's sync'd to the
graphics. Now anyone who can't attend the presentation can see/hear it
all, and those who prefer the text over the spoken version can opt for
that instead, or in addition.
I muse with my readers
about the format for the presentation. Should participants be expected
to watch/read the Wave version of the presentation in its entirety
before the conference, so that we can spend the whole session just
talking and answering questions? Should I just 'play' the presentation,
in sections, on the big conference screen, and then entertain questions
and conversations during the breaks between sections? Should I
're-enact' the presentation, live, at the conference, a kind of
lip-sync'd version so people get to look at me and not just the
screen?
There's lots of
discussion, but the conclusion is that, since it's a live conference
and since the audience can't be expected to view the Wave in advance,
I'll have to 're-enact' what's already on the Wave. I feel like Vanilla
Ice but that's what I do, and thanks to all the input from my readers,
it's a big hit. The live conference session is recorded, but
the only part of the live session that actually makes it into the Wave
is a transcript of the Q&A.
We all wonder how long
it will be before such conference sessions are replaced entirely by
'live Waves', where 'pre-recorded' wavelets are posted in real time on
a 'conference Wave Site', with real-time questions submitted by the
virtual 'attendees' queued and answered in real time at designated
points in the 'presentation' (or answered after the session if there
are more questions than can be answered in the time allotted). We
conclude that, precluding $200 a barrel oil, this will not happen soon,
because the real value of these conferences, as has always been the
case, is the networking that occurs in the corridors between and around
the actual presentations.
If you're sufficiently familiar with Google Wave, I'd love your
thoughts on how fanciful the above story is -- it sounds as if GWave
should be able to deliver all this functionality, but perhaps my
expectations are too high.
On the way home from the meeting I listened to a great David Weinbergerpodcast
from TVO, dating back to
February. It just reinforced my sense that GWave, by adding context to
conversations, will revolutionize the way we communicate. Highlights
from David's presentation:
We worry too much
about the 'echo chamber' danger of the Internet. There is no evidence
that we ever sought out people with conflicting views before the
Internet came along, nor that we change our minds once we've made them
up. Conversation is essential to how we self-identify.
Machines and digital
computers may be useful metaphors for how our DNA and brains work, but
they are not how our DNA and brains work.
The Internet has
altered long-held views that knowledge is orderly, order-able, the same
as 'content', more than mere 'opinion' or 'belief', or that any bit of
knowledge fits in one best 'place' (under a specific 'topic' in a
taxonomy or in a specific location). "Philosophy is not a topic".
It's easier and
preferable to filter stuff on the way out (user discretion) than on the
way in (provider discretion).
"Expertise doesn't
scale." Mailing lists (the wisdom and conversation of a group) are
inherently smarter than experts.
Broadcasting, politics
and advertising all oversimplify (dumb down) complex subjects to
"maximize information ROI". Conversations and blogs add back the
complexity, and in so doing add context and meaning.
Our modern perception
that we (can) live inside our heads is "psychotic metaphysics".
"Knowledge is never
done....We never get anything right, and then we die....[so]
transparency is the new objectivity."
Knowledge by itself,
without context, is worthless. Its value is as a means to understanding.
OK,
let me start by saying I'm a Twitter user and fan. But something about
it disturbs me. Like the near-defunct Usenet, the now-collapsing
MySpace, and the soon to collapse under its own weight Facebook,
Twitter doesn't make sense. For that reason, I predict it will soon
suffer the
same fate, replaced by tools that will do all the same good things, and
which do
make sense.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter (and users who haven't really thought
about it), here is what Twitter is in a
nutshell:
Twitter is an instant
messaging tool where the recipients of the messages
are determined by the recipients, not by the sender.
HOW TWITTER WORKS
So you sign up, and send a bunch of IMs (instant messages -- short
electronic messages that are delivered immediately and pop up on the
recipients' laptops or phones) into cyberspace, into the void. Just
like a newbie blogger, no one reads what you write, at first.
Eventually some people will 'find' you and subscribe to your messages
('tweets'), and if they like them, they'll rebroadcast them
('re-tweet')
to the people who subscribe to their
tweets. Some of those second-hand
readers will like what you say and subscribe to your tweets. When you
subscribe to others' tweets, some of them, out of curiosity or a sense
of reciprocity, may subscribe back to yours. You can post your
Twitter name on your blog, and on your Facebook page, and send it out
to your friends to get them to subscribe. This way, you build an
audience.
Just as there are 'A-list' bloggers with thousands of readers, there
are 'A-list' tweeters who have audiences in the tens of thousands. And
just as there are organizational and ghostwritten celebrity blogs,
there are organizational and ghost-written tweeters, trying, mostly
futilely, to market their product or information using this new medium.
Unsurprisingly, there are bloggers who simply 'tweet' links to their
latest blog posts. Tweets are supposed to be conversational (more than
half of them are replies to previous tweets, identified using the @
sign before the original tweeter's username), so most of these lazy
'broadcasting' machinations are considered bad 'twitterquette', and
generally fail. (Businesses, spammers and people trying to sell stuff
through
Twitter, please take the hint and stop).
The catch with this reverse-IM tool is that the maximum length of a
tweet is 140 characters, including the characters needed to acknowledge
the original sender(s) in a re-tweet. You can extend this somewhat by
linking to something longer by putting its URL in your tweet, or
linking to a
photo or video or song with its URL, and if the URL is long you can use
any of the
URL-shortening services to save precious characters. But there is no
effective way to link tweets together to make a longer one. Brevity is
everything. If you
can't say it in 140 characters, it doesn't belong on Twitter.
WHAT'S
WRONG WITH TWITTER
What
you end up with, mostly,
is a lot of cryptic messages you don't understand.
In the process of
squeezing your message to 140 characters, you will generally squeeze
almost
all of the meaning out of it. For example, when I've read the
rapid-fire tweets of people tweeting from conferences, one highlight
sentence or
quote at a time, I've found it impossible to fathom most of what the
tweeter found
remarkable, or even what s/he meant. There is simply no
context to provide
meaning, so most of what you
read is meaningless.
What's worse, when most of the tweets of people you've subscribed to
are replies to (or retweets from) people you are not subscribed to, it
is almost impossible (and rarely worth the effort) to chase down the
original thread to understand the context for the reply. In fact
Twitter is in something of a war with users, since they have tried to
reduce volume by suppressing these replies, so you only see replies to
you, and to people who both the
replier and you subscribe to.
Users
have developed ways around this, of course, and the war continues.
Currently I 'follow' (subscribe to the tweets of) about 100 people,
close to the Twitter median, who between them produce about 10 tweets
an hour. I probably find time to
read about 1/4 of
the tweets they send. On top of this, I try to read
any replies to my own tweets (those that have @davepollard in the
message are displayed for me on a separate Twitter tab), and I read any
direct
messages sent specifically and only to me (traditional IMs, displayed
on yet another separate tab). I have about 700 'followers'.
The protocol for IM replies has generally carried over to tweets:
Unlike e-mails, which you are generally expected to reply to, it is
perfectly acceptable not
to acknowledge or reply to IMs, and the same
applies to tweets. This is one reason why I like IMs and Twitter more
than e-mail.
Based on some research I did the other day, I would estimate
that, per
year, for 240 hours' time
investment, I scan about 36,000 tweets (most of them unintelligable)
and in so doing discover about 200
interesting or memorable thoughts or ideas, identify a third of the
content of
my Links of the Week blog posts, have perhaps 20 useful follow-up
one-on-one conversations and maybe make two
new real
friends. If I spent that 240 hours in other social activities, would
the yield be higher or lower?
WHAT
TWITTER SHOULD BE
Twitter has been important in emergency relief and grassroots
organizing, and the reason for this is simple: It is currently the most
globally ubiquitous real-time text communication tool. But the tool we should
have is an
IM tool that allows you to send
real-time messages either to people on your IM/e-mail contact list, or
to people who subscribe to your IMs, or
both. This would be a
simple add-on to GTalk or other IM tools, and it would render Twitter
obsolete because it would have all Twitter's functionality, and more,
in an existing ubiquitous tool. Tweets you receive would simply appear
alongside your other incoming IMs, and you'd likewise be able to send
tweets the same way you send IMs. In fact, Twitter originally did have
an IM interface for GTalk like the one depicted above, but Twitter
(perhaps fearing that IM tool developers would soon co-opt and
obsolesce Twitter's functionality) disabled
that interface some time ago.
Such a send-publish-and/or-subscribe
IM tool
would also have great value within medium-to-large organizations, and
could substantially
replace internal e-mail. It appears that Google Wave will incorporate
it, but expect to see IM and Twitter-type reverse-IM tools integrated
within the next few months. It just makes sense.
THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF TWITTER
What is it that makes
people sign up for, and spend time with, Twitter? I think there are two
reasons:
Twitter is addictive to
news junkies: The people who
go through withdrawal or feel guilty if they don't read the morning
paper cover-to-cover every day. The ones who look at every incoming
e-mail immediately, even during conversations, meetings, or while
driving. The ones who have more information in their RSS feeds than any
human could possibly hope to absorb. The ones who are hooked on
all-news stations with live coverage of the latest crisis, and watch as
nothing happens for hours, taking in all the inane, meaningless and
unactionable nearby-rooftop reports. For them (OK, us)
Twitter is like crack -- live instant updates from real people right
there, at the earthquake site, or at the ZXZZ technology conference.
People are looking
for attention, appreciation, affirmation, connection, and recognition.
In short, we're looking for love.
Twitter lets us get it (or feel like we're getting it) quickly,
safely, and anonymously. This is addictive self-gratification. Having
hundreds or thousands of people 'following' us is consoling when our
self-esteem is low. Getting people we don't know to reply to us
affirmatively is consoling when we're lonely. With text, with all the
wisdom of the Internet (and other tweeters) to draw upon and quote, we
can sound very smart, very together. All it takes is a willingness to
churn out a lot of short messages and read through mountains of
similarly cryptic messages
from people we follow, looking for a few to comment on, and we can
delude ourselves into believing we're appreciated, we're connected,
we're engaging in meaningful conversation, we're expanding our
networks, we're recognized, and people are paying attention to
us.
As
Dermot Casey
has pointed out, we've been through all this before, with Usenet,
twenty years ago. Tens
of thousands of Usenet forums were inundated with millions of short
messages, some of them fired off in such rapid succession that they
were close to real-time, and the only substantive difference between
Usenet and Twitter is that instead of
subscribing to a person you subscribed to a group about a particular
topic (perhaps Noam Chomsky, or nude celebrity photos, or how to commit
suicide
painlessly). Your posts were supposed to be 'on-topic', but as long as
you marked the article 'OT' (for 'off-topic') it was OK, and what
happened is that people formed clique communities where the people in
the group, and their relationships, were more important than the
ostensible topic.
What
happened to Usenet, and many other online forums that played
around with social networking in those Web 1.0 days? Mostly, people
realized that they weren't building real
relationships, real
friendships, that the information they were exchanging was ephemeral,
and that the online relationships they thought they had built were more
imagined, idealized, than real. This same phenomenon is evident in
Second Life, where text is preferred over voice for communication
because it's easier to sustain the illusion of an idealized,
reciprocal, perfect relationship. With online tools like this, we're
clever,
we're witty, we're knowledgeable, we're articulate, we look good and
sound good. We're always on. Totally addictive.
We are inundated with mainstream media that feed a dumbed-down populace
with propaganda and pap. It is not surprising then, that a medium like
Twitter, with its immediate, unrehearsed, uncontrolled, authentic
messages would have enormous appeal, and feed our addiction for
information at the same time. Likewise, we live in a fragmented,
stressful, isolating world, where despite the
crowded cities most of us live in we find it difficult to make true
connections, to build deep and enduring relationships, to be
appreciated and get attention for who we really are and what we do. So
we shouldn't be surprised, or ashamed to admit, that real-time, social
networking
tools like Twitter can fill an emotional void in our lives, a craving
for connection.
Is this harmless? For most people it probably is. We all have our
little addictions, whether it be chocolate or sudoku. Recreation is
good for us, and forty minutes a day Twittered away is pretty benign,
I'd guess. It depends on what you'd do with that forty minutes a day
(or more), if you weren't tweeting.
I think what we will see, over time, is that our longing for authentic,
one-on-one connection, and for context,
will win out, and wean us off tools like Twitter in favour of richer
and more personal ones. And the technology, with bandwidth and memory
becoming almost unlimited and free, will enable us to approximate
genuine physical meeting and rich face-to-face conversation more and
more. There are a few
tools out already that hint at
what this might look like.
The challenge is not in making the conversation real; it is in finding the
people with whom to engage in conversation.
This is the real magic of Twitter, and of other 'tools of discovery'
like blogs: The onus to search for
someone of like mind is moved from the searcher to the audience.
The people you're looking for find you,
based on your simple advertisements, in Twitter, blogs and similar
media, that say, simply: Hey, world, this is me!
Anyone want to connect?
BLOG Clay Shirky on
Helping People Find You, Content as Mere Conversation Fodder, Letting
Users Identify Their Needs, and the Formula for Effective Social
Networking
Back
to Toronto early from the BALLE conference in Denver this past weekend.
I wrenched my back getting up after sitting too long on a concrete
floor (the only electrical outlets for my laptop in the huge meeting
room were by the floor at the back of the room). I knew one day my
addiction to technology would be my downfall. Another form of information
sickness?
"A
network of dense clusters has fewer connections than if everyone were
connected to everyone, but still puts everyone at most three degrees of
separation from everyone else."
I
finally got around to reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.
The thesis of the book is that technology itself isn't what brings
about social change, it's the behaviour change once the technology
becomes ubiquitous that does so. For example, he says, the intellectual
landscape of the Reformation wasn't caused
by the invention of movable type and the printing press, but it was made possible
by those technologies. For social networking to work, he says, you
need, in order, three things:
A plausible promise
(something prospective members need or want that they don't have now)
An effective tool
(that helps the members find each other, connect, and collaborate), and
An acceptable bargain
for members (what everyone contributes relative to others, works for
them)
So for example, Open Space Technology works because it's premised on an
invitation that will ensure that only those who find that invitation
(promise) compelling will show up; it has a well-honed self-management
methodology (tool) that enables members who show up to collaborate to
achieve shared objectives; and it provides a mechanism called
'the law of two feet' (bargain) that ensures everyone will get as much
out of the Open Space event as possible.
Sometimes it takes a lot of work to extend the promise (Caterina Fake
said the success of Flickr depended on the premise that "you have to
greet the first 10,000 users personally"). The promise and tool must
address a real need: Shirky notes wryly "If you designed a better
shovel, people would not rush out to dig more ditches".
I realized too late (after I'd made a promise in my book) that the
website that I'd planned to accompany the book did not (and does not)
meet these criteria -- there is (as yet) no tool that can deliver on
this promise (the promise being to help people find potential partners
for their sustainable enterprises, such that the site would become an
'incubator'). More about this sad site in a moment.
The big shift that social networking
(the actions that occur when you have the plausible promise, the
effective tool and the acceptable bargain in place) makes possible,
Shirky says, is that large scale group activities and political/social
actions that once required an expensive, hierarchical organization to
accomplish, can now be done by self-managed collaborative groups -- and
faster, cheaper, and more congenially to boot. These traditional
organizations need to spend a lot of time and money attracting,
motivating and managing the hierarchy. When these costs of hierarchy
exceed the benefits they produce, 'markets' of organizations start to
outperform single monolithic 'organizations'.
An interesting side-effect of this that I've observed in organizations
with many young people is that, to Gen Y'ers, the 'costs' of compliance
with ineffective constraints (processes, restrictions on software
access, and rules) quickly exceed the value (job security), so they are
finding workarounds that bypass these constraints and set up 'markets'
for other ways of doing things (use of processes that they've imported
from friends' organizations or from previous experience, or use of free
commercial software tools). The use of these unapproved 'insecure'
processes and tools has set the stage in many organizations for a
culture war between the older, command-and-control style of senior
management and the new, peer-to-peer, workaround-based style of Gen
Y'ers, powered mainly by social networking. As Shirky puts it (and Dave
Snowden has illustrated in many case studies) "employees do better at
sharing information with one another directly than when they go through
official channels." It enables them to do their jobs more effectively,
and for many employees (especially the young) that's more important
than doing what they're told. The result is an epic battle for control
of what goes on in the organization, and in fact for control of
the organization.
Shirky asks, and doesn't really answer, the critical question that has
prevented my book's website (and a ton of other sites and social
networking tools) from doing its intended job: How do you reach the
people you want, without having to broadcast your message to everybody?
The book kind of implies an answer, though (using the successes and
failures of Meetup.com as his case study). The answer is you don't; you let the
people you want to reach find you.
This is now the challenge that I'm going to apply in rethinking my
book's website. Instead of trying to attract millions of prospective
entrepreneurs to my
site (effectively reinventing marginally effective social networking
tools like LinkedIn), how
can I enable anyone looking for partners in a new sustainable business (what Shirky calls
'latent groups') to
find and 'Meetup' with each other
using some combination or mashup of existing
social networking tools? If you're a whiz a social networking, and have
some ideas on this (that meet Shirky's three criteria) please let me
know; I'd be pleased to have some real-time conversations on this.
Enough about my book; back to Shirky's. He observes that the fact that
in large organizations information travels vertically, one layer at a
time, and poorly (instructions flow rigidly top-down, and information
requested by managers flows up, appropriately filtered so bad news
never makes it to the corner offices, because no one want to tell the
boss bad news, and s/he doesn't really want to hear it anyway) is
inherent in the very design of managerial culture -- it's the way
organizations prevent the 'information overload' that peer-to-peer
communications and messages that skip levels in the hierarchy would
otherwise produce.
Social networking 'tasks', he says, fall into three categories: in
increasing order of both difficulty and potential value they are (1)
sharing/coordination, (2) conversation/cooperation, and (3)
collaboration (collective action). I've written about these
three forms of group activity
before. The third category requires a strong enough shared vision that
decisions that some members don't like won't be enough to drive them
out of the group -- these, he says, are rare.
An important emerging phenomenon of social networking tools is what he
calls "mass amateurization"-- the capacity of non-professionals to do
what was always professional work: "Just as you no longer need to be a
professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional
publisher to publish." It's interesting to think about whether every
profession (doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants) might be doomed by
this phenomenon. Will a million people passionately collaborating to
help each other deal with a shared disease eliminate the need for
expensive specialists in that disease (except perhaps for the actual
surgery)? Will
'peer production' replace what all professionals do today?
While social networking technology enables individuals and groups to do
some things they could never do before, the dilemma (a consequence of
Shirky's now-famous Power
Law) is that social limitations
quickly replace the technological limitations. Once bloggers become
'famous' they lose the important ability to communicate at any
meaningful level with their individual readers. Bloggers with a dozen
readers, he says "don't have a small audience, they don't have an
audience at all; they have friends." Interactive
TV is an oxymoron, he says, because "gathering an audience at TV scale
defeats anything more interactive than voting for someone on American
Idol". A few e-mail messages allow you to converse powerfully with
people anywhere in the world, but 100 e-mails a day prevents you from
meaningfully conversing with anyone. So those will large audiences
broadcast, and those with small audiences converse. The most effective
networks draw on both: clusters of small tight networks loosely
'bridged' by Gladwell's 'connectors' into large networks with many
members spreading the word (see illustration above).
The challenge is to get the balance right. The most specific groups
(e.g. wiccans in Omaha) tend to bond best, but never achieve critical
mass. Those with the most potential members (e.g. environmentalists)
are too broad in scope to attract a devoted and attentive membership.
Meetup.com solved this problem of size/specificity optimization by
leaving it to the users themselves.
I thought about this in the context of the challenge for prospective
entrepreneurs to find each other and to find their 'audience' -- i.e.
the customers who need something the enterprise provides. Perhaps, I
thought, I'm trying to bring together the wrong groups of people. What
if, instead of a 'dating service' site for prospective entrepreneurs, I
was to create a series of unconferences not of prospective
entrepreneurs but of needy people
-- people who share an unmet, and probably unarticulated, need?
So, for example, what if we brought together people struggling to find
healthy, local, organic food? Prospective entrepreneurs who cared about
the issue of healthy food would be invited to sit upstairs in the
audience and just listen.
Then, once the size and scope and nature of the needs had been
articulated, the prospective entrepreneur 'audience' would come down to
the floor and brainstorm possible ways of meeting that articulated
need. The needy customer group would indicate whether they would 'buy'
any of the proposed solutions of the prospective entrepreneurs or not.
As in all complex problem situations, the problem and the solution
would co-evolve. Partnerships (perhaps including both prospective
entrepreneurs and customers) and enterprises would emerge naturally.
Could
this 'customer-supplier' enterprise co-development model work? What
kinds of 'unmet need' problems might it work for, and scale to? Would
it work for intractible, 'wicked' problems like community poverty and
urban sprawl?
As social creatures, Shirky says, we make meaning out of
information through conversation.
The value of the content itself, he says (in a message everyone in the
'Knowledge Management' business should pay attention to) is nothing but
fodder for sense-making conversations. Or as Cory Doctorow puts it
"Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."
And ultimately, Shirky argues, "all businesses are media businesses,
because they rely on the management of information" for their employees
and customers. Because of the power of social networking, "the more an
industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and
more complete the change [that social networking will have on it] will
be."
I'm not a believer in the value of trying to achieve large-scale social
or political change through networks (the fix is in, and a million
small, poor voices will rarely achieve what one rich lobbyist can). So
I don't have much to say about Shirky's suggestions on making such
political activism movements more effective.
He makes some interesting comments on the Bowling Alone hypothesis
(that many modern American phenomena like suburbanization have
fractured Americans' participation in groups, and drastically reduced
the nation's 'social capital' as a result). Some social networking
tools and activities (like Meetup) are, he says, attempts to rediscover
and reestablish that social capital.
He also talks about how Open Source capitalizes on social networking:
"Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source
ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts but because it is
outfailing them." We learn from mistakes, and social networking lets us
make mistakes faster and cheaper than any ommercial organization can
match. What this teaches us is that "the communnal can be at least as
durable as the commercial. For any software, the question 'Do the
people who like it take care of each other?' turns out to be a better
predictor of success than 'What's the business model?' "
One point he makes that I found intriguing (and frightening) is that
social networking is far more effective for passionate cadres of
loosely-linked extremist groups than it is for citizens with more than
one issue in their agenda. What
will happen when it's discovered that social media are enabling the
desperate and the criminal to do their work more effectively? Will
there be an outcry for censorship of these tools?
So if you haven't bought or borrowed Here Comes Everybody
yet, I'd recommend it highly. And I'd love your comments on the four
sets of questions I ask (in red)
above.
What's interesting about this manual is that it tracks very closely the
approach to entrepreneurship that I present in my book Finding the
Sweet Spot. It even has a
chart that shows, in a simplified version of
my 'sweet spot', the intersection of "things you really like to do"
(what I call your Passions) and "what your followers want" (similar to
what I call your Purpose, something needed in the world that you care
about). Chris misses the importance of also doing what you're competent
at, and the importance of finding good partners, but he's on the right
track.
In a nutshell, he proposes this process:
Have a well-designed
blog that tells an interesting,
useful, consistent story and builds readership over several months to a
few years, with free content. It should clearly and continuously answer
the question "Why should I regularly visit this blog?"
Identify which of your
followers (readers, potential
customers) is your real audience -- the subset who appreciate your
ideas and competencies enough be willing to pay a small amount of money
to get something of value from you. This may be a very different group
from those who comment on your posts.
Ask this audience what
they want and find a way to give it
to them. Use SurveyMonkey Pro or some similar tool to ask them why they
visit and what they're most looking for help with.
Avoid traditional
advertising (AdSense etc.) and traditional 'mass' marketing
approaches -- they don't work.
Write something
substantial (1000-3000 words) regularly --
at least twice a week -- on one or a few related themes that will make
your blog a regular destination for your audience. Whatever your
frequency, get into the habit of writing at least 1000 words per day.
Pace yourself, make it good stuff, and have the ambition and intention
that this become a true business, not just a hobby.
Be prepared to put in
many hours writing your blog posts
and products, and an equal amount of time in one-on-one marketing to
increase
visibility and readership of your blog (e.g. posting good ideas on
Twitter, sending out review copies of your products, writing regular
guest posts for A-list bloggers, answering all e-mails, letting people
subscribe to your blog by e-mail, including sending e-mail subscribers
special articles that don't
appear on your blog, building relationships with journalists and other
key 'linkers' of all kinds). Say thank you for the links you get. You
have to get the word out about what you do and why it's unique and
valuable -- don't expect people to discover you by word of mouth.
Gradually and
carefully (i.e. use an effective product launch process)
introduce additional value-added online products (detailed guides,
webinars, projects, consulting, teaching etc.) that build on what you
write about on your blog, products for which you charge a sum that
increases as your audience and reputation grow. Use e-junkie with your
PayPal account to make it easy for people to pay you online. Study what
other commercially successful bloggers have done (Chris lists a dozen
or more). Be prepared to weather the inevitable critics who don't like
anyone charging for their online work.
For me, point #6 is the biggie. Chris says your blog needs to be
essentially a full-time job, a quality, commercial product that you
work at. No writing whimsical stuff that's off-topic. No skipping a
week because you're uninspired. To me my blog is recreational, and for
me to work that hard at it would take much of the joy and spontaneity
out of blogging. I'm not sure I'm ready for that, but it's worth
thinking about.
But I think Chris is right -- if I really wanted to
make money from my blog, I'd have to prioritize my topics and my time
and get down to business. I'd have to learn to write what my
(potentially paying) customers want me to write about, not what I want
to
write about.
My favourite quote from Chris' manual is from Oscar Wilde: "Be
yourself, because everybody else is already taken". That's great advice
for
bloggers, whether they're trying to make money from their blogs or not.
We all need to find and speak in our own 'voice'.
Thanks to Chris for this compact, thoughtful, well-researched and
useful work.
Christopher
Allen of the Life With
Alacrity blog has expanded his articles on group size, with an
article on community
sizes and another on personal
circle sizes. The latter are our
own self-centred circles (those we're in the middle of), while the
former are
circles of which we have chosen to be a member. The dynamics of the
two, Christopher says, are different. Let's start with the personal
circles:
The Support Circle
(3-5 people) is the innermost, and consists of
people you would seek help from in a crisis.
The Sympathy Circle
(7-20 people, with a median of 10-15) are those
whose
death you'd find devastating, people you really care about.
The Trust Circle
(40-200 people, with a median of about 120) are those
people you trust and have strong personal ties with (you'd miss them if
you/they 'moved away').
The Emotional
Circle (median size of just
under 300 people) are those
people you have "weak ties" to, i.e. some kind of probably
non-reciprocal 'liking' for. You're probably familiar with 'The
Strength of Weak Ties' and the
importance of this peripheral group of people in helping you find the
people and opportunities that will have a dramatic effect on your life
and happiness.
Christopher also refers to a group called 'familiar strangers', people
you recognize but don't know.
Taken together, these circles form a 'topology' that Christopher
describes as follows:
Think
of these circles as the ridge lines of a topographical map. An
individual sits at the center, and around him lie many other people,
fading slowly away as the distance increases. Winding through these
topographical lines, like forests or rivers, are geographies of
physical and emotional connection.
Kin are one of the most interesting geographies, because they lie all
across the map. There's a clump of them in the innermost circles, but
there are also many who lie in the realm of Familiar Strangers,
including those cousins and great-aunts who you only see at family
gatherings, and whom you know nothing about. There are also forces
being exerted upon the circles, acting like gravity to draw people
together.
Turning to community
sizes:
Working
Groups (optimally 4-9 people,
with a median of 7): Many studies
suggest this size is optimal for communication, collaboration, and
decision-making. Also works well for dinner parties and poker games.
Beyond 9 and up to 25 members, groups get increasingly dysfunctional
(12-15 is worst, so think twice about gathering your whole Sympathy
Circle together for any purpose).
Enterprise
Groups (optimally 25-75, with
a median of 50): An enterprise
is a systemic activity, a mutual undertaking with a common objective or
focus of interest. This is the optimal size for guilds, associations,
business enterprises, 'unconferences' and social networks -- you get
diversity and the 'wisdom of crowds' and critical mass for action, but
the group is still self-manageable. Christopher calls this the
'non-exclusive Dunbar number' because such groups rarely have
sufficient cohesion to attract anyone's full-time or life-long
energies. Beyond 75, groups again become increasingly dysfunctional,
until, beyond the 'official' Dunbar number of 150, the geometrically
increasing work needed to try to sustain any real cohesion, trust and
participation outweighs the so-called 'economies of scale'.
So what does all this mean for social networking, blogging, twittering,
Natural Enterprise, intentional community, the future of work, etc.?
Here are Pollard's
Hypotheses of Social Cohesion, so far hypothetical, except insofar as
I've observed the dynamics in a lot of workplaces:
If we want business to
be agile, resilient and innovative, we should break all organizations
down into small, autonomous enterprises, ideally with no more than 75
people each, and ideally focused on the local community they're a part
of, where their people and customers live (physically, or, if the
product is made of bits rather than atoms, virtually). There really are
no 'economies of scale' beyond this size.
As we move towards the
World
of Ends, more and more
production will be Peer Production, and stuff will be made by networks
of innovative small enterprises and Working Groups, not by
large corporations. I describe how that will work here.
The project teams I
have worked on that have accomplished the most per-person per-hour have
had memberships hovering around 7 or 50, with the smaller size (7)
working best for short-term focused projects and projects that have a
lot of shared and enduring passion among the members, and the larger
size (50) working best for more ambitious, open-ended problem-solving
projects where passion is more diffused or the members don't know each
other well. My guess is that Open Space events would work best
with groups of about 50, though I may be wrong.
Indigenous
'uncivilized' cultures generally had clans similar in size to the
optimal Enterprise Groups, and gatherer-hunter groups similar in size
to the optimal Working Groups. But because their 'world' of possible
contacts was so much smaller than ours their Emotional Circle and Trust
Circle would have been the same group, and that probably would
have allowed them the 'bandwidth' to have a larger Sympathy Circle and
Support Circle as well -- in fact all four might have been the same,
their 'tribe' or 'clan'. So they would have had no need for nuclear
'families' or for an inner circle of 'intimate' friends for sympathy
and support. I think one of the challenges of intentional communities
is that some members, perhaps 'naturally', expect them to be
the Support, Sympathy, Trust and Emotional Circle all wrapped up in one
-- unrealistic in our modern society. Perhaps intentional communities
need to plan to create cohesive Support and Sympathy Circles within
their membership, while encouraging the whole community to become a
Trust Circle, so that they can expand beyond the Sympathy Circle size
most seem to be stuck at.
My 'Gravitational
Community' listed on the right sidebar of this blog, and the number of
people I'm in regular two-way contact with (mostly as a result of my
blog), and the number of people I follow on Twitter, all seem to be
converging on 70-80 people, with about 40 of them 'hard core' and the
others ever-changing, entering and leaving my orbit as I enter and
leave theirs. There is substantial gravitational pull in these
networks, with many of the members likewise connected to each other.
These are people I think I would like to live in community with. I
think this is personal, social Trust Circle gravity. My guess is that,
for most people, a manageable Trust Circle is closer to the low end
than the high end of the 40-200 range and below the 120 median. As I've
spent more and more time online I think the 'quality' of these
friendships (congruence of interests, mutual knowledge and respect) has
grown even though fewer and fewer live in my physical neighbourhood. I
acknowledge, however, that it's hard (and sometimes risky) to move
'virtual' relationships into your Support and Sympathy Circles.
We are social creatures at heart, and increasing our understanding of
social cohesion and group effectiveness is important, for our
personal happiness and ability to live peacefully with each other, and
to help us to find meaningful, productive work as our current economy
crumbles. What does the topology of your various social networks and
work communities look like?
And what could we do, instead of herding people into anonymous housing
subdivisions and indifferent hierarchical corporations,
to better reflect our desire for self-selected
social connection and to improve our work effectiveness?
Top 4 drawings, taken
from Christopher's site, drawn by Nancy Margulies. Postscript:
Christopher is planning another article in this series, this time on
power laws, and what happens when some members of groups are more equal
than others.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs