Dave Pollard: Blogs and Blogging

Google Wave: The Wikification of Conversation

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:21:16 GMT

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 Weinberger podcast 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.

Category: Communication Technology

The Psychology of Twitter: Doubly Addictive

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:56:13 GMT

BLOG The Psychology of Twitter

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?

Category: Communications Technologies

Clay Shirky on Helping People Find You, Content as Mere Conversation Fodder, and Letting Users Identify Their Needs

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:36:58 GMT

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.

Category: Social Networking

Making a Living From Your Blog: A Mini-Book-Review

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:55:56 GMT

BLOG Making a Living From Your Blog

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, citing Seth Godin's link to it, Chris Guillebeau has written a free, downloadable manual on how to make a decent living ($50,000 per year or so) from your blog.

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.

Category: Blogging Advice

The Optimal Size of Groups

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:40:12 GMT

BLOG The Optimal Size of Groups

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.

Category: Social Networking

New E-mail Subscription Widget

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:34:06 GMT

The R-mail subscription service that I have had on this blog for several years has ceased operation. At right you will see a sign-up for a new subscription service from Feedburner (now owned by Google), that you can use to receive this blog's posts by e-mail. Sorry for the disruption in service. Please tell me how this new service works.

12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:33:57 GMT

I'm preparing for a discussion forum on Friday in Quebec City, and one of the topics we'll be discussing is how the "information behaviours" of Generation Millennium differ from those of previous generations, and what that means for the tools they (and the rest of us -- they outnumber even the boomers) will and won't be using in the future.

Out of my research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which my generation thought were the last word in music storage, are disappearing even faster.

Here's the list:

Hard Drives: The price of bandwidth, and the price of storage space in cyberspace, have both dropped precipitously. Expect them to drop further. We may even get to the point where companies will pay us to host our content, even if it's confidential, just so that their clients can find out what we care about and can ask for a bit of our targeted attention. At the same time, Homeland Security is going to be scanning our laptops every time we cross borders, and delaying or charging us if they deem the content to be uh... unpatriotic. So why keep anything on a hard drive anymore? Let the storage and processing all be done in cyberplaces with lots of space and processing power and just stream the results to us, so our machines can be light, pocket-sized, always-connected, pure communication devices.
"Wall of Text" Reports & Documents: Generation Millennium is returning to an oral/visual real-time culture, where blocks of text are used only when visualizations don't convey what's happening better and more succinctly, and where written language is used only when spoken language is unavailable (and with communication becoming more and more instant and real-time, that's not often). This is not to dispute the elegance of well-crafted prose, stories and exposition, just to say it will be conveyed orally, not in written form. Iterative real-time conversation, visualizations, body language and voice inflection simply convey much more than the written word. Ultimately, good communication is more about context than content.
"Best Practices": It's natural that people want to hear what the leading companies and individuals in any area of business endeavour are doing, but the sad truth is that most "best practices" are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don't tell, and discuss, don't proclaim, are the information behaviours of the future. Less efficient, perhaps (stories take a while to tell, and voice is harder to browse through for fast learning), but much more effective.
Email and Groupware: I've written enough recently about the coming death of e-mail so suffice it to say it will be replaced by simple real-time face-to-face, voice-to-voice and IM technologies. Groupware has been dying for a decade: it's overengineered, asynchronous, complicated and unintuitive more-is-less technology, and will be replaced by its opposite.
Corporate Websites: I recently co-judged a competition of nominated best-of-class business websites, and I was aghast at how unnavigable and useless most of them were. My own research has indicated that most people who visit these sites are job-seekers, the media, and competitors. A combination of marketing/PR hype, just-in-case recycled internal junk, and self-congratulation, most corporate websites are devoid of useful content, and those that do have useful stuff have it buried where it can't be found. You just can't put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it. And your relationship isn't with Company X, it's with Individual Y at that company. Individual Y's blog, with lots of contact info, timely, casual-style articles and useful links, and instant connectivity options, is to the corporate website what your personal company rep is to walking into the company cold and asking for help. Next-gen blogs by individual employees -- personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer -- will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water.
Corporate Intranets: Same rationale as #5. The main way knowledge is, was, and always will be exchanged in organizations is person-to-person in real time. Rich context, iterative, personal, demonstrative, have-it-your-way information, conveyed through conversation. Accept no substitute.
Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don't know enough about their employer's business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they'll learn the employer's business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won't need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. "Information is always trying to be free", as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won't sell their research and analysis either: They'll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they'll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are.
Cell Phones: Now let me get this straight: On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you're going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I'm going to put up with this why?
Classrooms: There is really nothing that can be done in a classroom that can't be done using desktop videoconferencing with screensharing, for free. No travel costs/time/pollution. No bums on chairs. Unlimited multi-tasking without nasty looks from the instructor. And with YouTube, SlideShare/SlideCast and other tools, you have access to the best presenters in the world on virtually any subject imaginable.
Meetings: Same rationale as #9. With simple virtual presence tools you can actually exercise the Law of Two Feet without getting off your ass.
Job Titles: Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)
Offices: When I started working, executive offices had heavy dark wood paneling, fireplaces, and liquor cabinets. Now they're 10x10, utilitarian, sometimes shared, often empty, and sometimes without walls. Meanwhile the pay for executives has soared. People would rather have the money than the real estate, and as the cost of space, and travel to and from it, rises, the cost/benefit of offices worsens all the time. The next generation works anywhere, anytime, anyway -- home, car, coffee shop, and there is "virtually" no reason to go into an office to talk on the phone and work on the PC. As soon as simple virtual presence tools become second nature to the senior people in organizations (twenty years or so from now) the office will vanish.

I was tempted to add "keyboards" the this list but I'm not sure. Why is voice recognition and transcription improving so slowly? Even translation software is improving by leaps and bounds. I was also tempted to add "everything made by Microsoft" -- but that would be too obvious.

Anything I've missed?

Category: Technology and Society

Memorandum to All Employees

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:12:00 GMT

Delivered By Hand

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company's Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters -- if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to 'share' the contents of each other's screen while they converse.
For 'FYI' type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company's E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company's Instant Survey tool.
For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company's E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management

(well, we can dream anyway)

Category: Communications Technology