Apr

10

Its an Ideology, Stupid

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Like the KISS principle, the obvious sometimes evades me entirely until some kindly soul points it out. So it was out on the road this morning, listening to a BBC Radio documentary about start-ups while waiting in line for my share of the privilege of using Britain’s highways, that the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, the world of the Network is indeed an Ideology. While it is not nearly as advanced as the Church of England or the Communist Party once were, it is still more all-embracing than the insipid political parties of the day in Europe and the US. Think for a moment. What do you really believe in? The inalienable right of Old Etonians to rule England? Or your ability, through a protocol you and I barely understand, to use a tiny device to reach and speak to anyone in the world. The ability of a Bush or a Clinton to hold a post-imperial power together? Or the ability to find and check any information anywhere? Will the EU save us, or Open Access? What is more important to the future of Mankind – the UN or the W3C?

We can take this to extremes, of course, but just at the moment I would judge that if you threatened Europeans and Americans with loss of network access, even to a service like Twitter, as happened two weeks ago in Turkey, then the great and the good would simply refuse the command, find alternate access points, use satellite internet, and find every possible way of remaining in contact – as so many middle class Turks did, until it was obvious even to their government that this would not work. And this goes even more to the point for business access: arguably there is no going back from immediate communication for anyone making, buying or selling anything above the purely local level. And the great thing about the Connectivity faith is that, like previous religions, it subsumes everything that was there already. Some of the most passionate capitalism on view is displayed by network start-ups. Some of the most idealistic exponents of Open Access, Data and all other Opens, belong to sects that would make the Diggers and the Levellers look right wing. All human kind is here, subscribing to the basic rules of connection, mark-up, content organization and retrieval. This is probably the greatest number of people all subscribing to the same rulebook that planet Earth has ever seen.

Within the world of connectivity, dynamic networked new businesses will be built, and you do not need to be in Shoreditch or Silicon Valley or any other “cathedral zone” of the new order, to succeed. But we all need to recognize that the nature of business in the new order may well be different, so perhaps we now need to gather up some of the lessons, after 25 years of observation of how a networked society increasingly behaves, and see how we may apply them to what comes next. Here are some contributory thoughts in that direction:

* Many of tomorrow’s businesses will be smaller than their real world expiring counterparts, both in terms of revenues and staffing. This is partly because they are virtual, partly because we are paying small amounts for fractions of transactions in the network.
* Very many of today’s real world businesses will not survive the real world convergence with the network. Permanent job loss will scar many lives.
* Network trading will be very profitable, with smaller enterprizes realizing better margins than their real world counterparts. Increasingly network margins will stay in the network, and by the time we reach Bitcoin III the network will have moved from a microcosm of the real world into being the …real world.
* When the history is written, we shall note that by 2014 net citizens were already reading, per person, a great deal more than any previous human generation. This trend continues as more and more people realise that they need a far better basic education to survive in a networked world, and that those educational outcomes could be achieved very effectively by self-learning in the network.
* New levels of public and private trust will need to be created as more and more people “meet” for the first time online – and never meet in person. Close work colleagues may never physically meet. The signals given by voice and video will be closely examined as each of us strives to recognize “trustworthy” behaviour and indicate it to others. This will be part data analytics, part screen and keyboard performance analytics, and part, as now, pure hunch.
* Collaboration is the order of the day on the network. As individuals, as companies, we seek to get closer and help. This is because no one is vertically self-sufficient any more, and in a networked world that demands solutions we have to band together to create them. Knowing who your potential collaborators are becomes more important, for the first time since the Neolithic, than knowing who your competitors are.  As competition becomes more of a contest for public (aka user) trust and attention, and less a struggle for product and pricing differentiation.
* There is no part of human life on the planet that, in an Internet of Things as well as concepts and ideas, is beyond the range of the networked world. The priesthood which emerges could pose a threat or expose an opportunity, but at present we seem to have opted to live in an “ungoverned” network world. Certainly we will want to avoid any nation “controlling” the network , but there will be increasing clashes with nation states, both the most sophisticated and the most primitive, as their proponents seek to restore nineteenth century notions of rule and control. Only the mass can resist this, and only by acting as a mass.

The triumph of the network is not inevitable – and yet there seems at present no counter force. And already we have icons – all hail, Steve Jobs – and soon, no doubt, we shall have that priesthood mentioned above. I think I shall apply for a minor archimandrite-ship, or even a role as a Hermit!

Mar

23

The Odd Future of Aggregation

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment

Mr Bezos and his cohorts at WaPo (the Washington Post to you and I, earthlings) have decided, we are told, on an aggregation model. As far as skilled translators of Bezos-speak can tell, this will mean bringing together licensed news content from all over the globe – spicy bits of the Guardian, a thin but meaty slice of the London Times, a translated and processed sausage segment of FAZ, a little sauerkraut from Bild, a fricasse of Le Monde… well, you get the picture, and the fact that I am writing this before dinner. These ingredients will get poured into a WaPo membership pot, heated and served to members who want to feel that they are on top of global goings-on, from the horses mouth, and without having to read the endless recyclings and repetitions which characterize the world media at source.

Well, I see the point, and the idea of membership and participation seems to me one which has endless energy these days. But I have been thinking for several years now that the Aggregation business model as experienced from 1993 onwards on the Web is on its last legs. Believing that “curation” is too often a word which we use when we are trying to maintain or defend a job, I have tried to steer clear of imagining that storage, the ultimate network commodity, was a good place to start building a business. In the early days of the Web it was certainly different. Then we could create the whole idea of the “one stop shop” as a way of simplifying access and reducing friction for users. All of the things we were collecting and storing, for the purposes of aggregation, were in fact “documents”, and their owners wanted them to be stored and owned as documents, bought as documents and downloaded as documents. The early reluctance of STM publishers to apply DOI identity beyond the article level and make citations, or references or other document sub-divisions separately searchable seems in retrospect to demonstrate the willingness of IP owners to manipulate the access to protect the business model.

Three clear developments have comprehensively undermined the utility of content aggregation:

* the desire of users to move seamlessly from one part of one document through a link to another part of a different document seems to them a natural expression of their existence as Web users – and in the content industries we encouraged this belief.
* the availability of search tools in the Web which permit this self-expression simply raises the frustration level when content is locked away behind subscription walls, and increases the likelihood that such content will be outed to the Open web.
* the increasing use of semantic analysis and the huge extension of connectivity and discoverability which it suggests makes the idea that we need to collect all or sufficient content into a storehouse and define it as a utility for users just by the act of inclusion a very outdated notion indeed.

It seems to me that for the past decade the owners of major service centres in the aggregation game – think Nexis, or Factiva, or Gale or ProQuest – have all at various times felt a shiver of apprehension about where all of this is going, but with sufficient institutional customers thinking that it is easier to renew than rethink, the whole aggregation game has gone gently onwards, not growing very much, but not declining either. And while this marriage of convenience between vendors and payers gives stability, end users are getting frustrated by a bounded Web world which increasingly does not do what it says on the tin. And since the Web is not the only network service game in town, innovators look at what they might do elsewhere on internet infrastructure.

So, if content aggregation seems old-fashioned, will it be superseded by service aggregation, creating cloud-based communities of shared interests and shared/rented software toolsets? In one sense we see these in the Cloud already, as groups within Salesforce for example, begin to move from a tool-using environment to user-generated content and more recently the licensing of third party content. This is not simply, though, a new aggregation point, since the content externally acquired is now framed and referenced by the context in which users have used and commented upon it. Indeed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, all of the great Aggregators mentioned above have sought to add tools to their armoury of services, but usually find that this is the wrong way round – the software must first enhance the end user performance, then lend itself to community exploitation – and then you add the rich beef stock of content. For me, Yahoo were the guys who got it right this week when they bought Vizify (www.vizify.com), a new way of visualizing data derived from social media. This expresses where we are far more accurately than the lauded success of Piano Media (www.pianomedia.com). I am all for software companies emerging as sector specialists from Slovakia onto a world stage, but the fact that there is a whole industry, exemplified by Newsweek’s adoption of Piano this week, concerned with building higher and harder paywalls instead of climbing up the service ladder to higher value seems to me faintly depressing.

And, of course, Mr Bezos may be right. He has a good track record in this regard. And I am told that there is great VC interest in “new” news: Buzzfeed $46m; Vox $80 m; Business Insider $30m, including a further $12m last week: Upworthy $12 m. Yet I still think that the future is distributed, that the collection aggregation has a sell-by date, and that the WaPo membership could be the membership that enables me to discover the opinions of the world rather than the news through a smartly specialized search tool that exposed editorial opinion and thinking – and saved us from the drug of our times – yet more syndicated news!

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