I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We Share: A sideways look at privacy and Musing About Sharing And Privacy are two that come immediately to mind.

Take this post. The trigger for my writing it was StumbleUpon (I’m a fan!), who wrote to me saying they thought I’d like a particular set of sites. One of which I loved. Because it contained illustrations like the two below:

You guessed it. Someone has spent time taking the world map and reassembling it in order to depict the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac. He’s a graphic artist called Kentaro Nagai, you can see the entire work, entitled Twelve Animals: Piece Together for Peace, here.

I loved it. And thought I should share it with you. Because somewhere out there there may be one person whose day becomes brighter by reading this. Because somewhere out there there may be one person inspired to do something about something as a result.

That’s what matters. We’re human beings, social animals who look to each other for friendship, support, camaraderie, motivation, inspiration, whatever.

When I started writing blogs I had some very deep-seated views about what I shared, when and why. When I started on Facebook I had some similarly deep-seated views about the whys and wherefores. By the time I started using Twitter around five years ago, I’d figured out how little I knew about all this, my views were no longer as well-formed or as deep-seated as when I began.

Take Twitter. When I started tweeting, I said to myself “Share only when you have a clear idea how it would be valuable to someone. Even if occasionally that someone is you.” As I learnt more about the phenomenon, those views changed.

Now, I tell myself, “Share as long as you know it will not cause someone else harm”. It was arrogant of me to presume I would know how something would be valuable to someone else, and to filter everything else out.  I realised that the “do no harm” filter was a better one to use. Is it perfect? Certainly not. I rely on your feedback to tell me when I do harm. I will make mistakes. But this way it is more likely that through the organic process of people reading posts like this one, someone somewhere who needed to read this gets to read this.

Life is about abundances and scarcities. For most of my life I’ve seen stuff like bad news and negativity and criticism and cynicism regularly in abundance, and things like good news and encouragement and building people up and saying well done and smiling and making someone happy, all in scarcity.

For some reason, it appeared that what we term as mainstream media tended to focus on the negative, apparently because it “sells”. I can never figure out why. Time we inverted that. And maybe it’s happening.

I find social media in general much more upbeat, more focused on the positive, more willing to thank, to encourage, to support, to enthuse, to motivate. I don’t have a rose-coloured spectacle view of the web, about social networks or about social media: I am acutely aware of how dark a place it can be, how evil cyberbullying can be, how truth can be twisted, how people can subvert the web to nefarious purpose.

But still, overall, I find the web to be an uplifting place where people can and do support each other. It’s something they put in the water. And it’s one of the reasons I share what I share.

Why do you share what you share? Let me know, I’m interested. Fascinated.

The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is the record?

I will come to the answer later. Before that I want to spend a little time on the question.

I set it that way for many reasons.

…………………………………………

First, just Googling it should not work. This is important. Why?

I like to think of the process of answering questions as  a voyage of discovery,  a journey of learning. Today, the first port of call in almost any such journey is the internet. You can choose the particular type of vessel you want to use on the journey (Google, Dogpile, Mamma, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, WolframAlpha, Copernic, Bing, Mahalo, Phone-A-Friend, Ask-The-Audience or whatever else catches your fancy). [Incidentally, feel free to add any question-answering tools you use and wish to share with others, just comment below and I will summarise comments in a follow-up post as needed. Also incidentally, does Bing really (and recursively) stand for But It's Not Google?]

The journey, the voyage, is more important than the vessel.

And the discovery, the learning, is more important than the journey. It’s the whole point of the journey.

…………………………………………..

Which brings me to the second point of any question: Answering the question should teach you something; at the very least, it should reinforce some prior learning. Let me give you an example.

Some years before finishing school, we were given an intriguing maths question to solve. We were told that there was one, and only one, ten-term arithmetical progression (or “AP”) of prime numbers between unity and 3000.  And we were asked to find it. [Yes, I have written about this before, some years ago. But please humour me, I want to take you somewhere else this time].

I must have been 14 or so. And I was enthralled by the question. Not because I found the question itself interesting, but because I was really enjoying myself trying to figure out how to get to the answer. And why I would get to the answer.

How. And why. Not what.

[I won't spoil it for the first-time reader, I'm not going to give you the answer here. If you want to know, then please ping me via twitter, details on sidebar here,  or comment below or even "inbox me on facebook" (the way my youngest daughter's generation describe emailing).]

…………………….

The third point, as important as the first two, is that answering the question should be fun. Again, an example from my teens in Calcutta. One of my friends had heard about a competition, I think he said it was in Punch, where you were given a “traditional” trivia answer and asked to formulate a non-traditional question. The example given was: A: Dr Livingstone, I presume. Alternative Q: What is your full name, Dr Presume?. [If I remember right, the winning entry in that competition was: A: Crick. Alternative Q: What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?]

The process of answering a question should be a voyage of discovery, a journey during which you learn something, and one where you enjoy yourself in the process.

As a result of answering the question, you should be able to answer most, if not all, questions belonging to that class of question. You know that cliched saying “I may not know the answer to the question, but I know a man who does”? There’s some value, some truth, in what it implies. It’s probably better expressed in the saying “It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man a fish”. Passing on learning is far more valuable than passing on a short-term, “single-use” answer.

Knowing how to get to an answer is often more important than knowing the answer. And knowing why is the foundation for remembering the how.

This principle colours the way I view much of education. There must have been a time when people used slide rules incessantly in classes involving numerate subjects. By the time I was at school, they were already passing out of favour. In similar vein, my generation had to carry our own “log table” and “trig table” books, but I think we were the last “batch” at school to engage so closely with logarithmic and trigonometric tables. The generation after me learnt to use scientific calculators in anger.

And the generations of today know their way around the web. Or should do. [Provided, of course, they have access to the web, something I regard as a fundamental right of the 21st century, given the incredibly positive impact it can make on education, health and welfare].

…………………….

Learning by watching and copying has been the way of the world for aeons. Sometimes I’m surprised by the way that gets forgotten in some spheres of education. There’s too much focus on the answer, the “what”, and not enough on the process and the rationale, the how and why. If a student can answer a question correctly by surreptitiously peeking at someone else’s work, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply engaging with Google and entering a “raw” search term, then it’s a poor question. If a student can answer a question correctly by simply looking up Wikipedia, then it’s a poor question.

Google and Wikipedia are tools. Like slide rules and log tables and scientific calculators. Or even abaci.

Knowing how to use the tool properly is important. If the tool is designed to provide enjoyment as well, even better. Concentrating on the answer provided by the tool is all quite wrong.

……………….

If you’ve read this far, then you’re probably someone who is sympathethic to my way of thinking. So humour me a little longer.

When I asked the unGoogleable question in Twitter, an old friend and colleague, Dominic Sayers, tweeted the following:

So now I have to come up with another unGoogleable cricket question.

Here goes:

On a cricket scorecard, an asterisk is used to denote the captain, and a “dagger” to denote the wicketkeeper. Since the dawn of Test cricket, with thousands of matches played, there have only been 26 “asterisk-daggers”, players who, simultaneously, kept wicket and captained the team.

26. Over thousands of Tests.

During this time, there have only been five instances where a Test has involved a “double asterisk-dagger“, where a wicketkeeper-captain has faced a wicketkeeper-captain.

These instances involved only five specific asterisk-daggers: one three times, three twice, and one just once. Name the wicketkeeper-captain who has faced a wicketkeeper-captain in a Test match just once and once only in his career.

I’ve been following the work of W Brian Arthur for over three decades now, starting with his paper on “Samuelson, Population and Intergenerational Transfers” in 1978 or thereabouts, while I was reading Economics at university. During the 1980s, he was responsible for introducing me to the concepts of increasing-returns models, understanding path dependence better, working out the importance of positive-feedback loops and so on. His work on looking at the economy from the perspective of a complex adaptive system was also a key influence on me.

He may have written many books, but the two I’ve read were both brilliant: Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in The Economy (back in 1994) and The Nature of Technology (which came out a couple of years ago). More recently, I made reference to his article in the October 2011 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, on The Second Economy.

The article is all about this great invisible network of things extremely busy talking to other things so that people like us can get on with our lives. Don’t write it off as yet another “internet of things” article, Professor Arthur deserves real respect. His description of the evolution of the web of interactions between machines is of fundamental importance, particularly once you understand that it’s all about software, particularly when you realise that this is what happens when Wal-Mart grows up.

You can see the sequence, can’t you? There was a world before Wal-Mart, and the machines who lived there were called mainframes. Then came minicomputers and Wal-Mart and some level of distribution. Along came PCs to increase distribution’s reach, and that begat Amazon. And soon we were in the land and ubiquity of mobile phones, heralding the dawn of Facebook. Now, that people are talking about another 10x, the internet of things, who’s going to be the facebook of that generation? What particular Noah Business will they be in? What disruptive vision will they build the infrastructure for?

You can see where you thought I was going. But I’m not going there. That post is for some other day.

Here’s where I am going.

We all appear to be very relaxed about machines talking to machines in their biliions, yet remarkably un-relaxed when it comes to people talking to people. As Doc Searls said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations.

Doc reminded us of the market in the context of the Middle Eastern souk, where relationships come first, then conversations, then transactions.

Let’s look at Facebook in that context.

The Friend Graph is all about relationships.

The Timeline is all about conversations.

Yup, you know where they’re headed. And they should. Relationship before conversation before transaction.

We’ve lived in a transaction-focused world for too long. Transactions are outcomes of relationships and discovered via conversations. That’s why markets are conversations.

I keep quoting Drucker, but who cares? He said people make shoes, not money. Money, like a transaction, is an outcome of something else done well. Not a goal in itself.

The broadcast-model centralised advertising-is-God style of business that dominated the postWar world should have been strangled at birth. But it wasn’t, which is why Messrs Locke, Levine, Weinberger and Searls had to write Cluetrain in the first place. To remind us of what we were losing.

Relationships.

And conversations.

The Facebook Timeline is about persisting conversation in a new way. Making conversation mobile, multimedia, multipartite. Yes, it’s an audit trail and that can make you feel creeped-out. But then your mailbox was an audit trail as well. And your call detail records. And your analog mail.

Over time, it’s become easier to persist the audit trail of conversations. This persistence comes with benefits and with risks.

The risks are to do with our erstwhile concepts of privacy and confidentiality and data protection; the concepts will themselves change, along with the social mores and values they underpin; as the concepts change, as society transforms their meaning and purpose, the law will catch up. Sometime.

But in the meantime there are many benefits to be had as well, as we share more and we understand more about what, when and how we share. As we interact with what we share, individually and in community.

It was only yesterday that I received an email from Pandora suggesting that I “listen to holiday music by Jim Croce”. Why? Probably because I’d tweeted about listening to him, or perhaps even because I’d tweeted my intention to have dinner at Croce’s in San Diego in early February.

One way or the other, they’d identified that I was interested in Jim Croce. They’d managed to identify an email address that went with my twitter handle (assuming their actions were related to my tweeting). But despite all this they hadn’t managed to identify that it’s not easy for me to use Pandora, given they adhere to the barbaric notions of licensing music according to national borders.

In all probability, you’ve been at the receiving end of targeted advertising gone not-quite-right, and sometimes wondered what you’d shown in your profile to get that reaction. That will improve and it will also change. Recommendations by social network are gaining in importance, and intention signalling is becoming more and more common. These developments will alter the advertising landscape in remarkable ways.

Marc Benioff’s Social Enterprise is about all this. It’s about getting the relationships right first, then enabling the conversations, so that the transactions that occur are not ends in themselves, but instead consequences of the relationships and discovered via the conversations.

In a way, when it comes to Professor Arthur’s statements, we may be talking about three economies rather than two: the first, the one we all know, the one that’s lying tattered and broken; the second, the invisible root system between machines; and the third, the now-becoming-more-visible conversations between people.

Markets are conversations. Conversations are social, and take place between people usually around social objects. Social objects come in many shapes and guises.

The Facebook Timeline is about making the discovery of those conversations easier in space, time and context.

I said yes.

And he said:

I’ll put it on your Wall, Dad

Like others in his generation, he uses email, but sparingly and reluctantly. For him, posting something on someone else’s Wall is the natural thing to do; it is the way he shares information and social objects with his friends.

His younger sister doesn’t do e-mail at all. Some months ago, I heard her tell a friend:

He’s lost his phone, so you’ll have to inbox him on Facebook

She doesn’t even use the word “email”, that’s how far removed she is from the mail culture. [Ironically, she uses a BlackBerry nevertheless, as do many of her friends. They're big on BBM.]

Her elder sister, my firstborn, was my third friend on Facebook. [Dave Morin was my first; his wife Brit Morin, then Bohnet, was my second.] She too engages with her friends mainly via Facebook Walls.

As of tonight, I understand the Wall’s coming down, to be replaced by the Timeline.

I think this is a big deal. And to explain why I think that way, I’d like to take you on a trip back through my own Timeline. Down Memory Lane, as they say.

The story begins with Wal-Mart and then continues with Amazon.com before coming to today and Facebook. [It also explains why I'm fascinated by Marc Benioff's vision for the Social Enterprise, something I will touch upon later. It's one of the reasons why I'm so enjoying my time at Salesforce.com].

Each of these companies is what I term a “Noah business”. Like Noah in the Bible, they saw something that others did not see, a great storm coming. And, like Noah’s ark, they built infrastructures to execute on their vision.

Wal-Mart decided that they could put stores in places where others wouldn’t, because they saw the store as part of a network. A town didn’t have to have 100,000 people before they opened a superstore there. They built distributed infrastructure to connect stores up, located distribution hubs to serve networks of stores more efficiently, built up a nervous system with the store at the edge. Competitors had to follow suit or die. K-Mart anyone? If you’re interested in the story, this HBR article by Pankaj Ghemawat in September 1986 is a good place to start.

Over a decade later, Amazon did something similar. They decided they could ship books to places where others wouldn’t, they saw the customer as part of a network. They built the infrastructure to deliver as little as one book to a customer’s home address, and the connected customers, using their own computers, reviewed and recommended Amazon products and services to each other. Amazon invested in making sure they could serve networks of customers more efficiently, and built up a nervous system with the customer at the edge. And again, competitors had to follow suit or die. Borders anyone? If you’re interested in the story, this HBR article by the late CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan is a good place to start.

And now we have Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s genius is often quoted as being around the “friend graph”: Facebook saw the relationship as part of a network. They built infrastructure to deliver relationship glue to everyone, and focused heavily on helping people share social objects. They invested in making sure that they could serve networks of relationships more efficiently, and built up a nervous system with the social object at the edge. And yes, again, competitors will have to follow suit. Or die. If you’re interested in the story, reading David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is probably the best place to start.

[Of course, to do that, you should go to Wal-Mart and buy an Amazon Kindle, then download the e-book,  to complete the circle of my story elegantly].

Relationships thrive around social objects: by sharing experiences around what you have in common, you build the wherewithal to withstand the differences that will come. Jyri Engestrom and Hugh MacLeod are well worth reading in this context, it was through them that I really understood the importance of social objects.

Today, when I look at Timeline, what I see is an efficient engine for sharing, commenting on, “liking”, or otherwise engaging with, social objects. The original Wall was an early attempt to do this, but it was limited in its ability to help us understand the relationship networks in the context of the social objects. Timeline allows us to view the community of interest around an object more vividly, more easily. Time and location data are also easier to comprehend.

One way of looking at the Wal-Mart-Amazon-Facebook sequence is to compare it with the mainframe moving to midrange, PC and mobile. When I first heard Marc Benioff speak about the Social Enterprise, he made this point about how excited he was to be in an industry that’s evolved that way (from mainframe to midrange to PC to mobile); for some time now, he’s been reminding people that when he founded the company (along with Parker Harris) the question they were asking themselves was “why isn’t all enterprise software like amazon?”…. and, not surprisingly, some years later, the question they asked was “why isn’t all enterprise software like facebook?”

To my way of thinking, the Social Enterprise is the natural evolution of all this. Some companies need help in the Wal-Mart phase, connecting up their stores and employees. Some companies need help in the Amazon phase, connecting up their customers. Some companies need help in the Facebook phase, connecting up their relationships and their ability to share.

And some companies need help in connecting their Wal-Marts and their Amazons and their Facebooks into one open ecosystem.

The Facebook Timeline, by making it easier for us to visualise activity around the social objects we share, will help us understand more about us, our interactions, our relationships. Location and time will become more easily discernible. The text and still photo and link that dominated the Wall will evolve into a richer environment with audio and video, persisted when required (even if it was streamed earlier). It will help us understand our sharing habits more precisely: active and passive sharing will evolve further, as will the use of Like and Share. Communities will form around the conversations that the comment streams represent.

And Facebook will continue to evolve. And adapt. And learn. And share that learning with us.

Do I think Facebook has done everything right every time? Of course not.

Do I think there are significant learnings to take place, about privacy, about confidentiality, about the right to be forgotten, about educating people on good practice and prudent usage, about preventing stalking and cyberbullying and and and? Of course.

Do I think that walled gardens are a bad idea, and that open ecosystems are the way to go? Of course.

There are lots of things wrong with facebook. There are lots of things wrong with lots of things. One of the things I like about facebook is that people listen to views and complaints and then proceed to make changes in response. Not many organisations do that as effectively.

So, while I see a lot of comments aired about Timeline, I’m for it. I think it’s part of the evolutionary process we’re all in. And I look forward to learning more….. I guess this post is going to get some serious flaming, praising facebook is not the way to become popular :-)

Take the Ricky-Tick Club in Windsor. Ever since I moved to Windsor in 1988, I’ve been hearing about the place. It started off as an R&B/folk club in a small upstairs room at the Star and Garter Inn, shown below, which appears to have been near where the Goswell House alleyway is today.

Then it moved to the Thames Hotel, down by the river, where the Old Trout used to be, and is now Browns. You can see the original hotel here, and below that a poster of the kind of people who used to play there weekly!

And finally, the club “settled” at the riverside mansion at Clewer Mead. I believe it was demolished to make way for what is now the new leisure pool.

Here’s a smattering of the posters you can find on the web to do with the Ricky-Tick in Windsor (while there were other Ricky-Ticks started in Reading, Guildford, Croydon and Hounslow, by the same team, it was the Windsor one that took pride of place). For the sake of historical relevance, I’ve included one poster that wasn’t for the club but for the music festival, held at Windsor Racecourse. It helps you understand what the times were about.

The list of people who played Windsor in the early-to-mid 1960s reads like a Who’s Who of the kind of music I listen to:

Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Wonder. The Rolling Stones. Eric Clapton. Cream. Bert Jansch. John Renbourn. Pentangle. Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Peter Green. Fleetwood Mac. The Animals. The Yardbirds. The Moody Blues. Alexis Korner. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation. Donovan. Ten Years After. Long John Baldry. Elton John. Not to mention people like BB King, Bill Haley and the Comets, John Lee Hooker, Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

What appears to have made the Ricky-Tick Windsor special is that it was a showcase for fresh talent; many of the people and acts named debuted there, in terms of their first real public performance.

And now?

Nothing.

Well that can be fixed, can’t it?

For many years, I have planned to build a school in Windsor when I retire. A school that others can copy for free. I will still do that for sure. That day is coming closer.

Now I know there is something else to be done after that. A good concert venue, where budding talent of the future can show us what they’ve got.

Talent is timeless, as is music.

As the web teaches us about the past, it can help us with renaissance. Where renaissance is called for.

Music’s a good place to start.

Incidentally, with respect to the Ricky-Tick. If you have any memories or memorabilia about the place then please comment and share. There’d been some rumours of a book coming out, by one of the original founders, John Mansfield, but I’ve not heard of it happening.

1. Malaria’s Achilles Heel: Details of a recent breakthrough in understanding how the parasite gets into red blood cells, and the discovery of a single receptor without which the parasite appears to be powerless. Early days, but there is now a real possibility that an effective vaccines emerge.

2. Crowd-curating: Continuing to track what hypothes.is is doing, something I’m very excited about. “A distributed, open source platform for the collaborative evaluation of documents”.

3. Matsutake dobin mushi: Ever since I experienced this dish a month or so ago, I’ve been mesmerised. Been trying to find out everything I can about it.

4. Unintended consequences of age-based privacy laws: danah boyd, John Palfrey, Eszter Hargittai and Jason Schultz looking into Facebook ToS and age constraints and COPPA

5. Preserving the lifesaving power of antimicrobial agents: James Hughes’ seminal paper on running out of antibiotics.

6. Keeping fit in 1919: An uproariously funny booklet issued in 1919, not intended to be funny at all, brought to life by the wonderful How To Be A Retronaut. Thank you Chris Wild.

7. Serge Storms: An excerpt from Tim Dorsey’s next book. Can’t wait.

8. Wolfgang’s Vault: The best live music downloads site in the world for retired hippies like me.

—Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as quoted in Wikipedia

The first time I was exposed to the idea of things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know, I’d never heard of Donald Rumsfeld. I believe I read it in some papers by Michael Polanyi, and anyway it was in the early 1980s, long before Rumsfeld had his moments of quotation glory.

Maybe it doesn’t matter who said it first, maybe it does. But that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is simple. Don’t write things off just because you don’t understand how value is to be derived from them.

Take Photoshop. A tool to touch photographs up, to amend and alter them. Useful but perhaps not seen as world-changing. Apparently most useful to narcissists and to those bent on airbrushing their way to amending history, usually the preserve of politicians.

Take social networks. A tool to connect people and allow them to share social objects and comment on them, to support and augment relationships, to communicate. Apparently most useful to people who want to poke people, throw things at others, run farms. All virtually and for the most past virtuously.

Take cognitive surplus. Apparently a luxury, available only to the out-of-work and the ne’er-do-well, people who have nothing better to do than fight over the treatment of subjects in wikipedia.

Photoshop. Social networks. Cognitive surplus. Three things that still have a number of doubters, that still have a number of people questioning whether these things have any redeeming value, people who believe life would carry on perfectly fine if these things hadn’t been invented.

And then…..

And then you have something truly tragic like the earthquake in Japan.

Tragic for the loss of life and limb. Tragic for the loss of lifestyle and livelihood.

And tragic for the loss of precious memories, the loss of thousands of photographs damaged by earthquake and flood.

Except….

Except suddenly, there is an ability to take these three apparently useless things and bring them together. Project Tohoku Photo Rescue http://hands.org/2011/08/19/project-tohoku-photo-program/

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill, using photoshopping techniques to restore water-damaged photographs.

People painstakingly giving of their time and their skill to help restore memories.

Memories. Try calling them useless. Try convincing yourself that what they’re doing is a waste of time.

And once you’ve failed to convince yourself, go vote for the project on the link provided. They deserve your vote at the very least, if not your admiration and your support.

This is curation at its best in a social context, the application of human passion to a digital tool-rich environment.

And this is what the social enterprise has in wait for us. When the power of connected people is unleashed into environments we can’t see to solve problems we can’t foresee using tools that are emergent.

Sound too futuristic for you? Remember the William Gibson adage about the future. It’s here, just unevenly distributed.

Google, Amazon and Salesforce were building businesses on the cloud while most companies were still debating service-oriented architectures and WAP.

The social enterprise is here; yet we have this weird situation where companies have Facebook strategies to market their products and services, perhaps even try their hand at actually engaging with customers in social networks, while continuing to ban access to social networks from the workplace.

The social enterprise is a radical departure from the past, and we are only in the early stages of discovering the immense value that is being generated by this phenomenon.

As with most radical departures from the past, there’s a continuum when it comes to adoption. Some early adopters. Some fast followers. Some late adopters. And some defunct companies.

The social enterprise is a true game changer. Which means the number of defunct companies will probably be surprisingly high. Which is why Clayton Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma will probably need reprinting. [and which, incidentally, is the reason I'm so happy to have joined Salesforce, formally measured as the world's #1 company when it comes to innovation, by Forbes recently].

As the Tohoku Photo Rescue program shows, human ingenuity knows no bounds. Give people the right tools to work together, they can change the world. And given the choice, people tend to concentrate on things that matter. Which is why the social enterprise is such a powerful proposition.

[note: Part 5 will concentrate on tools, something I'd intended to do in part 4. Patience. Please.]

I love the very concept of publish-subscribe: if you search for the term in this blog, you’ll find I’ve written maybe a dozen posts on the subject over the last six years or so. So I thought it would be worth talking about filters and firehoses in that context.

So let me start with the three “laws” of information filtering that I laid out in that earlier post: (if you want to know why, please read the post; I’ve linked it it earlier in this post)

1. Where possible, avoid filtering “on the way in”; let the brain work out what is valuable and what is not.
2. Always filter “on the way out”: think hard about what you say or write for public consumption, why you share what you share.
3. If you must filter “on the way in” then make sure that the filter is at the edge, the consumer, the receiver, the subscriber, and not at the source or publisher.

Yes, as Clay Shirky put it, we don’t live in an age of information overload; rather, we live in an age of filter failure.

So everyone’s been looking for better filters.

Which is fine.

What’s not fine is when we expect the publishers to do the filtering. Because that allows bad actors to come and spoil the party, whether they’re bad corporations or bad governments.

It’s not the job of the publisher to do the filtering. It should not be the job of the publisher to do the filtering.

But there is a job for the publisher to do. And that is to provide the tools by which subscribers can filter.

Let me expand on this. [Incidentally, when I started using Google+, I raised this issue under the guise of asking for "circles" to be built by publishers as well as by subscribers.... with some interesting discussions and comments as a result].

We live in a world of publish-subscribe, and this world has three facets.

There is an infrastructure, allowing individuals and aggregations of individuals to publish stuff, and to subscribe to stuff.

We exist as publishers, sharing stuff on this infrastructure.

We also exist as subscribers, sharing stuff on this infrastructure.

So now let me look at what I want to do as a subscriber. I want to choose whom and what I “follow” or subscribe to. Most of the time, I expect to be allowed to follow whatever I choose. Sometimes the publisher places a restriction on following, permission is needed. You may just have to ask for permission, register in some form or the other. In some cases registration alone is not enough, there is a gatekeeper who decides whether you qualify. And in extreme cases there is a paywall as well.

Subscriptions can therefore be open or closed, paid or unpaid. But they remain subscriptions. Choices made by the subscriber.

As a subscriber I now receive information. And I’d like that information to have certain characteristics. One, I want that information available to me wherever I am, whenever I am, whatever device I am using. [And I don't want to have to pay multiple times for the same information as it goes through format transformation]. Two, I want to be able to annotate that information, add notes, tags, links, images, whatever. Three, I want to be able to share that information, via twitter, facebook, google+, chatter, whatever; as in the case of opensource licences, it makes sense that I have to share-alike, share the information with the same constraints under which it was shared with me. Four, I want to be able to filter that information very granularly: for example, I may want to follow a person on twitter, but only for her music tweets; I may want to follow someone else on Google+, but for everything but his music posts. Five, I want to be able to persist the bookmarks, tags, shares, links, pointers, whatever, somewhere, so that I can recreate, “play back”, the shared information, for a specific date or range of dates, and with specific filters.

Simple, isn’t it?

So what should I do as a publisher? Even simpler. As a publisher I need to be able to share what I share in such a way that subscribers can do what I’ve described.

And infrastructure providers have an even simpler job: all they have to do is to provide the tools that publishers and subscriber need to do what I’ve described.

For too long, we’ve kept looking at all this from the viewpoint of the publisher. The publisher in each of us has to work much harder at publishing in a way that makes it easier for others to subscribe. To filter us out when needed. To find us easily when needed. To aggregate us, synthesise us, annotate us, edit us to shreds. Platform-independent, location-independent, device-independent. As private as the information requires us to be, and no more. As public as the information requires us to be, and no more.

So when I tweet, I don’t want to restrict what I tweet about. I want to be able to tweet about food, about cricket, about etymology, about idiocy, about work, about me, about my beliefs, whatever. I want to be able to blog about all these as well. And write books about all this, speak on the topics, and so on.

And I want to be able to do all this in such a way you can find me when you want to, block me when you want to, block me by subject, block me for a time, only follow me for a narrow subset of what I do. It has to be your choice. And the infrastructure I use has to be able to do this. It has to be able to let me do all this, so that you can do what you want out of it.

Which is where the fun begins. Because you don’t think of all this as a winner-takes-all arms race. Because we don’t this of all this as an arms race where we have to choose between the Betamax of Google+ and the VHS of Facebook.

Each of us, as subscribers, will choose how and where and when we will subscribe.

Each of us, as publishers, will choose the environment and infrastructure that most suits us to do what the subscribers want.

So federation and sharing between social networks is unavoidable. A multiplicity of such networks will exist, for cultural, technical and style reasons. One size will never fit all, when we’re seven billion people.

And each social network will come with its tools for sharing, for publishing, for subscribing, for filtering, for helping filter.

For helping filter.

Which is what this post has been about. What do I have to do in order to make it easier for you to find me or block me, find this post or block it, save it or share it, add to it or shred it?

Because you will decide. You will decide whether it’s Betamax or VHS or both or something else as well.

We can only fix filter failure by providing subscribers with better filters, by providing publishers with tools that allow subscribers to filter better.

More later.

I’ve never been worried about information overload, tending to treat it as a problem of consumption rather than one of production or availability: you don’t have to listen to everything, read everything, watch everything. As a result, when, some years ago, I heard Clay Shirky describe it as “filter failure”, I found myself nodding vigorously (as us Indians are wont to do, occasionally sending confusing signals to onlookers and observers).

Filtering at the point of consumption rather than production. Photo courtesy The National Archives UK.

Ever since then, I’ve been spending time thinking about the hows and whys of filtering information, and have arrived “provisionally” at the following conclusions, my three laws of information filtering:

1. Where possible, avoid filtering “on the way in”; let the brain work out what is valuable and what is not.

2. Always filter “on the way out”: think hard about what you say or write for public consumption: why you share what you share.

3. If you must filter “on the way in”, then make sure the filter is at the edge, the consumer, the receiver, the subscriber, and not at the source or publisher.

What am I basing all this on? Let’s take each point in turn:

a. Not filtering at all on inputs

One of the primary justifications for even thinking about this came from my childhood and youth in India, surrounded by mothers and children and crowds and noise. Lots of mothers and children. Lots and lots of mothers and children, amidst lots and lots of crowds. And some serious noise as well. Which is why I was fascinated by the way mothers somehow managed to recognise the cry of their own children, and could remain singularly unperturbed, going placidly about their business amidst the noise and haste. This ability to ignore the cries of all the other babies while being watchful and responsive to one particular cry fascinated me. Years later, I experienced it as a parent, nowhere near as good at is as my wife was, but the capacity was there. And it made me marvel at how the brain evolves to do this.

Photo courtesy BBC

There are many other justifications. Over the years I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading Michael Polanyi, who originally introduced the “Rumsfeld” “unknown unknowns” concept to us (the things we know we know; the things we know we don’t know and the things we don’t know we don’t know). I was left with the view that I should absorb everything like a new sponge, letting my brain work out what is worth responding to, what should be stored for later action, what should be discarded. And, largely, it’s worked for me. Okay, so what? Why should my personal experience have any bearing on this? I agree. Which is why I would encourage you to read The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, by Kounlos and Beeman. Or, if you prefer your reading a little bit less academic, try The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People are Eccentric. In fact, as shown below, the cover of the latest issue of Scientific American MIND actually uses the phrase “An Unfiltered Mind” when promoting that particular article.

b. Filtering outputs

We live in a world where more and more people have the ability to publish what they think, feel or learn about, via web sites, blogs, microblogs and social networks. We live in a world where this “democratised” publishing has the ability to reach millions, perhaps billions. These are powerful abilities. And with those powerful abilities comes powerful responsibilities. Responsibilities related to truth and accuracy, responsibilities related to wisdom and sensitivity. Responsibilities related to curation and verification. None of this is new. Every day we fill forms in with caveats that state that what we say is true to the best of our knowledge and ability; every day, as decent human beings, we take care not to offend or handicap people because of their caste, creed, race, gender, age. Every day we take care to protect minors, to uphold the confidentiality of our families and friends and colleagues and employers and trading partners and customers. Sometimes, some of these things are enforced within contracts of employment. All of them, however, should come under the umbrella term “common decency”.

These principles have always been at the forefront of cyberspace, and were memorably and succintly put for WELL members as YOYOW, You Own Your Own Words. Every one of us does own our own words. Whatever the law says. It’s not about the law, it’s about human decency. We owe it to our fellow humans.

When we share, it’s worth thinking about why we share, something I wrote about here and here.

c. Filtering by subscriber, not by publisher

Most readers of this blog are used to having a relatively free press around them, despite superinjunctions and despite the actions taken to suppress Wikileaks. A relatively free press, with intrinsic weaknesses. Weaknesses brought about by largely narrow ownership of media properties, weaknesses exacerbated by proprietary anchors and frames, the biases that can corrupt publication, weaknesses underpinned by the inbuilt corruptibility of broadcast models. Nevertheless, a relatively free press.

The augmentation of mainstream media by the web in general, and by “social media” in particular, is often seen as the cause of information overload. With the predictable consequence that the world looks to the big web players to solve the problem.

Which they are keen to do.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al are all out there, trying to figure out the best way of giving you what you want. And implementing the filtering mechanisms to do this. Filtering mechanisms that operate at source.

There is a growing risk that you will only be presented with information that someone else thinks is what you want to see, read or hear. Accentuating your biases and prejudices. Increasing groupthink. Narrowing your frame of reference. If you want to know more about this, it is worth reading Eli Pariser’s book on The Filter Bubble. Not much of a reader? Then try this TED talk instead. Jonathan Zittrain, in The Future Of The Internet and How to Stop it, has already been warning us of this for a while.

Now Google, Microsoft, Facebook, all mean well. They want to help us. The filters-at-source are there to personalise service to us, to make things simple and convenient for us. The risks that Pariser and Zittrain speak of are, to an extent, unintended consequences of well-meaning design.

But there’s a darker side to it. Once you concentrate solely on the design of filterability at source, it is there to be used. By agencies and bodies of all sorts and descriptions, ranging from less-than-trustworthy companies to out-and-out malevolent governments. And everything in between.

We need to be very careful. Very very careful. Which is why I want to concentrate on subscriber-filters, not publisher-filters.

Otherwise, while we’re all so busy trying to prevent Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’re going to find ourselves bringing about Huxley’s Brave New World. And, as Huxley predicted, perhaps actually feeling good about it.

More to follow. Views in the meantime?

Connected versus channelled

Some of you may have noticed that, in previous posts,  I appear to make a big thing of wanting to place filters at the point of receipt rather than at the point of dissemination, at the “subscriber” level rather than at the “publisher” level. This is no random thought, it represents something I have believed in ever since I took up blogging: you will find it a recurrent theme in the kernel for this blog. There are a number of reasons for it, and I’m going to try and articulate them as succintly as I dare.

Michael Polanyi, in helping us understand what he meant by “tacit knowledge”, is reputed to have said something along the lines of “there are things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, things we don’t know we know and things we don’t know we don’t know”. That fourth bit, the things we don’t know we don’t know, has always intrigued me. As a result, I used to walk around telling myself: “filter on the way out, not on the way in. Let everything come in, you don’t know what you don’t know.” What I was trying to do was to minimise the building of anchors and frames that would constrain or corrupt what was allowed to enter my head, what Einstein called “common sense: the collection of prejudices collected by age eighteen“.

When I see words like “connected” and “channelled” they conjure up different meanings, heavily laden with my own prejudices, despite all my efforts to avoid such prejudices. “Channelled” suggests a one-way street, a broadcast model, a structure where I am a recipient of a signal with all the choices made by the sender of the signal. “Connected”, on the other hand, has a sense of being two-way, interactive, with some sort of parity or equality between the things that are connected.

There’s also something else, something darker, harder to put my finger on, evoking a deep sense of distrust. And it’s rooted in some modern variant of Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand. What do I mean? Well, let’s take terrorism laws. Come, perform an experiment with me. Open a separate tab or window in your browser, bring up Google and enter the term “UK terror laws used to snoop”. Just look at what you get. Here’s a sample list of the things that local councils have used terror laws for checking whether:

• nurseries were selling plants unlawfully
• a child lived in a school catchment area
• fishermen were gathering shellfish illegally
• alcohol was being sold to under aged
• benefit claims were fraudulent
• people’s dog’s were fouling
• people were littering
• cows were meandering
• calls were made to 900 number phone lines

It’s a much much longer list, with over 470 councils invoking the laws over 10,000 times in a nine year period. Why do they do this? Because they can.

Coming from a family of journalists, and having lived as an adult through the “Emergency” years in India, and having been on the receiving end of some of the power that such states wield, I’ve felt more strongly about such misuse than most.

With all this in mind, I want to remain connected, not channelled. I want to be able to choose what I can know about, learn about, be told about. I don’t want to block out what I don’t know. I don’t want the technology to have tools for censorship built in, which in effect is what happens when filters are designed into publishers. It is too easy to game the publisher end of the market, far harder to game the subscriber end.

So I try and avoid filtering at source. I have no problem with tags, with providing people the metadata that simplifies filtering at subscriber level. But the mechanisms for tagging at source should be designed in a way that they can’t become choke points used by the unprincipled.

Avoiding echo chambers, groupthink and herd behaviour

When social networks are used to share information upon which decisions may be made, you will always hear someone bring up the echo-chamber risk. After all, if you put a bunch of like-minded people together, you will get repeated assertions of the same thing. Or so the theory goes.

Wrong. Now this is not deep research, but anecdotally the results have been positive enough for me to want to assert this. Social networks bring together people who have a few common interests, rather than people who hold common views about those interests, or who replicate those interests. My twitter followers are not clones of me. Very few of them are into chillies and capsaicin in a big way; very few have the same “retarded hippie” tastes in music I do; very few are as crazy about cooking (and eating) as I am; very few are Indian and 53; very few go to church every Sunday. Some do. But not all.

Social networks create value because people in the networks come together, drawn by what they have in common, but creating value because of what they don’t have in common.

There have been a number of discussions recently about the “dangers” of direct democracy: how could we possibly run anything, manage anything, lead anything,  based on the statistically expressed will of the Great Unwashed?

Surely what will happen is that people will keep on asking for faster horses.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

But who are we to decide that everyone else is wrong?

The tools we have today allow for greater dissemination of information than we’ve ever had before. Attempts to control, suppress or subvert the free passage of information are becoming harder and harder to pull off, there’s a Wikileaks waiting to happen in every command-and-control centralised hierarchical set-up. These tools are becoming ubiquitous, affordable, effective, and the empowerment of the edge continues apace. Snap polls are no longer about random sampling, not when there’s a Facebook around. [Incidentally, don't underestimate the value of having good polling mechanisms in systems like Twitter and Chatter].

Democratisation does not yield dummification. Except perhaps in the eyes of elitist experts.

Signals, not trails: improving our work lives

Some of the comments I’ve received, some of the references I’ve been pointed towards, have a tendency to veer towards a trail-like analogy for lifestreaming and workstreaming. This is possibly due to my use of the pheromone analogy. If that has happened I am sorry, that was not my intention. If anything, my use of the wikipedia article in the first post was an attempt to avoid just that, by showing that the pheromone classification went way beyond the concept of trail.

Since then, on a the-physics-is-different basis, I’ve tried to bring in the time dimension as well. The signals we share as we workstream are separable by time, and each “layer” of time does not in any way corrupt other layers, contiguous or not. And I feel the very existence of these signal histories helps us improve our work lives dramatically.

How?

In four ways.

Firstly, they give us institutional memory as to what happened, what was done. This allows us to break away from blame cultures, move towards an environment of “We have not failed, we have found ten thousand ways that do not work”…. but with a difference. By being able to record the conditions under which something did not work, we learn something about the conditions under which something will work. And we can form the equivalent of seed-banks under the icecaps of organisations, storing the seeds we need for conditions that do not exist today, but could exist at a future date.

Secondly, they give us the ability to trend behaviours and forecast with somewhat more accuracy than has been the case in the past, based on data rather than political connections. It used to be said that history will always be written from the perspective of the hunter until lions learn to speak. Well, lions can speak. Now. Histories are less likely to be corrupt if they are constructed by bringing together squadrons of disparate tweetstreams. This sort of crowdsourcing of information has been happening for some time now; I could not hide my glee when I learnt that 18th century ships’ captain’s logs were being used to conduct climate change research. [And thank you, everyone involved in the project, for making sure the output was not behind a paywall, that it was searchable and retrievable. How wonderful.

Thirdly (and this may be my most controversial point) I think they make our work more interesting. Humour me on this. One of the most depressing things about the Industrial Revolution, assembly-line thinking and division of labour was the way human beings were somewhat dehumanised as a result, becoming narrow specialists good at doing mind-numbingly boring things well. Five or six years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to John Seely Brown and John Hagel at a Supernova conference (thank you Kevin Werbach) talking about motorcycle factories in China and how collaboration took place because people weren't working sequentially. And it got me thinking.

It got me thinking about the new generation, and how they seemed comfortable multi-tasking, how they were being accused of being ADHD as if ADHD was an epidemic [if you have not watched Sir Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms, stop everything you're doing and watch this 11 minute video. Then watch the whole thing, the hour long version, link provided below the summary. Thank you RSA!]

It got me thinking about knowledge workers and the lumpiness of knowledge work, the implications for the generation of cognitive surplus in the enterprise.

And it got me to a point where I saw the possibility that division of labour was a thing of the past. That for the millenial knowledge worker in a social network with workstreaming, switching costs were tending to zero.

More to chew on. I’ll be back. Comment away.