mind this - by Lars Plougmann

London, England, to Austin, Texas: The pursuit of happiness

A fifth of the circumference of the Earth. From an urban zone of some 13 million people to roughly two million. From not really needing a car to needing two cars. It took my bicycle (and everything else) eight weeks to get here; our stuff was delivered yesterday. From a cool job to a cool job. It doesn't get better than this.

Exploring the games-are-good-for-you point of view

As a parent, one of the decisions you have to make at some point is the degree to which you allow your child to play online games. Oops, let's rewind and try again: .. the degree to which you guide your child when it comes to playing online games. I suspect that the default stand-offish attitude to games prevalent in my generation is a left-over from earlier generations and I am not sure it is the best position from which to help our children develop a harmonious relationship with games.

The "default stand-offish attitude" usually promulgated by mass media goes something like this:

• Playing outside with other children: Good
• Reading books: Good
• Watching television: Ok in limited doses
• Playing online games: Bad (as in leading to anti-social behaviour, speech impediments and obesity)

I would like to see a bit more nuance in the latter three categories which are all about media experience, my point of view lumps the three types of media together to focus on the content:

• Reading books, watching television and playing online games that are not appropriate for the child's age: Bad
• Reading books, watching television and playing online games that are appropriate for the child's age: Good

A proper discussion of the topic would examine many more aspects of the argument: learning, impact on behaviour, content ratings and censorship etc. I don't yet know enough to form firm conclusions. As a parent I need to understand the topic better in order to be able to guide my child and increase the likelihood that they have good experiences with games.

That is why it is a pleasure to be able to dip into well-informed and inspiring viewpoints in order to inform my own. Two thought provoking pieces that I have enjoyed are:

• The recent talk given by Jane McGonigal at TED where she argues that attitudes formed in games can be productively applied to real life.
• "If gamers ran the world" by Tom Armitage, my former colleague, who outlines some of the useful things that games teach us: dealing with complexity and making smart, informed decisions.

I look forward to explore different viewpoints in future. I think a danger for the next generation is parents who don't understand games. If games can give our children meaningful experiences - or provide new ways for parents and children to interact - that would qualify as an epic win.

Five years of flickr

Today, it is five years ago that I started using flickr, the photo sharing service. Flickr has brought about a resurgence in my interest in photography, the site has provided a way to stay in touch with friends and family, it has allowed my photos to be seen around the world and used for purposes I would otherwise never have learned about. 

When I heard about flickr (launched in 2004), I was wondering why anybody would want to make their photos public. At the time, I was using Ofoto and other sites that allowed me to make albums available to people on an invitation-only basis. As people in my social network joined flickr in increasing numbers I decided to try it out. And I got hooked.

The user interface was simple and elegant. Tags were central to the way the site worked. The tone of voice playful and personal. The site stored photos without increasing compression to silly levels. Above all, the way it allowed people to interact and connect was meaningful. Simple but effective controls allayed privacy concerns. I soon discovered photo streams from which I could draw inspiration. People would leave helpful comments on my photos. This sparked a desire to become a better photographer, a journey I am still enjoying. 

A huge milestone was when flickr incorporated support for Creative Commons licenses. Realising that I am not going to make money off my photography, I decided to apply a liberal license (CC BY-SA) to my photographs. That has resulted in more than one hundred of my photos being used on other websites, in magazines and books, in Wikipedia, in print calendars even as an album cover. This kind of reach is something I could never have achieved as an amateur photographer without an agent. I use the tag ccpublished to track which photos have been used elsewhere. (I have actually sold one photo, it was discovered on flickr by an image agency; their client wanted to use it without attribution so they couldn't use it within the terms of the Creative Commons license.)

With more than 10,000 photos on flickr and a network of connections I am not going elsewhere for photo sharing anytime soon. I wish flickr made it easy to export statistics and comments for my photographs - in case Yahoo decided to call a stop to flickr. I am also concerned about falling foul of flickr's moderation policies which have reportedly resulted in people having their account cancelled with no prior warning. But most of all, I would like to sign up for an account that doesn't expire, even when I die. My father left behind a collection of wonderful photos; our generation has the ability to do the same, all neatly tagged and categorised and available on the web so that our children don't have to store it all in the attic.

From connection to transaction

The other evening I observed the following sequence of events.

My wife was using Facebook to introduce two people to each other. One of the people had in his timeline some messages from Shaun White of whom he is a fan. Having only heard about Shaun White because of the Wii game that carries his name I encouraged her to click through to Shaun White's facebook profile. Once there, we watched an impressive video with amazing slo-mo snowboarding stunts. The last ten seconds of the video featured a different song on the soundtrack than the rest of the video. Leilani thought she knew the song but couldn't quite place it. I got out my iPhone and we Shazam'ed the piece to learn that it was an 80s song, Pop goes the world by Men without hats. We looked up Men Without Hats on iTunes and learned that some of their songs were featured on an 80s compilation album: 60 songs for £4.49.

And she bought it.

Probably a pretty normal story, trivial really. From connection to transaction. After all, most of our purchases are the result of some influence or other. But the dynamics of the story are compelling in two ways:

• The chain of events traverses social networking, video streaming, a smartphone app and an online music store. Multimedia in the original sense of the phrase with all the big players represented: Facebook, Google and Apple.
• The underlying mechanics are large scale and complex in order to deliver a relatively simple experience: Server farms, pattern matching, payment processing, multi-party legal agreements.

How are you preparing for the boom?

The cycle of boom and bust is part of the market system. Bust follows boom, boom follows bust. (It is inevitable, but the timing varies and that's the tricky bit.) 

How are you and your organisation preparing for the boom?

What are you doing to make onboarding new colleagues efficient and effective? 

How are you preparing for increased demand for your products and services? 

Are you investing in innovating your products and your processes? 

Are you building capacity? Capacity for dialogue with your customers, for decision making, for internal and external collaboration, capacity for learning and adapting? 

Are you strengthening your network of suppliers and delivery partners so you can take on bigger jobs? 

How are you making sure that you can deliver more while improving quality? 

Who is going to take on new tasks? 

Have you developed useful skills or processes or habits during the recession that you want to stick to when economic growth accelerates? Which habits should be the first to be kicked? 

Which criteria are you going to employ when choosing projects that have been waiting for the go-ahead?

How are you going to respond to increased competition? 

How are you going to build flexibility into your plans with respect to timing? Which indicators are you going to monitor so that you know when it is time to set your boom plans in motion? 

Thinking longer term, how are you going to plan your preparations for the next recession? (It is inevitable, remember?)

How to impede progress, a simple three step guide

The world is moving ahead with breathtaking speed. Evolution. Innovation. Projects. Ideas. The difference between progress and status quo could very well be you.

Use this simple three step guide to halt progress in its tracks whenever it surfaces:

1. First time you hear about a new initiative, ignore it.
2. The second time you hear about it, ignore it but start thinking of reasons that it should be stopped. 
3. Third time, fight it with well-prepared arguments; prove that it does not make sense or it is impossible (hint: it only has to be impossible in your organisation, not everywhere).

These steps are especially powerful if you have skills that would help the initiative along; the arguments you have prepared may even serve to boost your reputation in the field. Or if you are a manager. 

The process has proven successful in stopping 98.6% of innovation. I have heard suggestions on how to increase the success rate but I am ignoring them.

Tags: innovation guide irony

Wikipedia as inspiration for enterprises

It has always been useful inside organisations to refer to Wikipedia as a successful example of a self-policed open community with an ex-post moderation policy. The proposed change to the Wikipedia moderation model is akin to allowing 'trusted' editors to continue with the ex-post moderation model while imposing stricter control for people who are not signed in or just created their account. (How, and if, Wikipedia may implement flagged revisions is still being discussed.)

In an organisation employees are, by default, trusted. They have been approved as part of their recruitment, they are given access to buildings and logins to systems, they are trusted to do work and make decisions, handle confidential information etc. Many are trusted to advise the clients of the organisation. In light of this, the proposed changes for the Wikipedia moderation policy have no impact on the parallels we like to draw.

Another angle that may enter the discussion when debating the openness of social tools inside organisations and the trustworthiness of information is that of transparency. If a false statement is made in an email, the process of correcting the error is more convoluted than in the wiki world where the "many eyes" effect is put to work. (The controversy resulting in the review of Wikipedia's moderation policy is about a false statement that was corrected a few minutes later.)

The current discussion does not detract from the usefulness of using wikis for process support or project collaboration inside organisations. But perhaps a bit of the magic surrounding Wikipedia as the flagship example will have worn off.

Tags: Wikipedia moderation trust

Headshift on Madison Avenue

My Headshift colleague and friend Christoph Schmaltz is leaving London in the early morning to head for the United States while the election votes are still being counted.

Christoph will be opening the first North American Headshift office in New York City on 11 Nov 2008. From then on you can call him 'Chris'.

This adventure is the second time Christoph moves his work to Manhattan, having previously worked for the United Nations there.

I have had the pleasure to work with Christoph on a number of projects in London and I know he will bring a lot of insight and value to new and existing Headshift clients in New York.

You can contact Christoph via email christoph@headshift.com and follow him on twitter as @christoph.

Tags: Headshift New York social software consulting

Local area World Wide Web

New York's 311 non-emergency hotline service struck me as a brilliant idea when I first heard about it. Imagine that on your way to work you spot a bollard that has been knocked over. Who do you call? The cost to the individual of researching where to direct the information is high and expectations of the call being handled efficiently are probably low. 311 introduces a single hotline where reports like the bollard example can be logged right away and routed to the proper authority.

An obvious expansion of the service, given that phones with GPS and cameras are becoming more widespread, would be sending a geotagged photo of, say, a nasty pothole or a broken swing at a playground to a 311-style email address. Often no explanation would be required, the picture would reveal the nature of the problem being reported.

While waiting for that service to become available in London it was a delight to learn about FixMyStreet. The site allows you to describe a local problem, which once it is logged on the site will get forwarded to the appropriate authority.

Looking at what had been reported in our local area of London I found this report detailing a problem that I had noticed but never really considered doing anything about:

The mix of mobile phone cameras, geotagging, easy reporting via the web and many eyes roaming the streets is promising.

Tags: FixMyStreet 311 geotagging

When social network fatigue sets in

Buzz and bandwagons usually lead to an oversaturation of a market before the bubble bursts and activity levels out at a sensible equilibrium. What happens when everything becomes a social network?

I have been getting frequent pings from Plaxo over the last six months or so, a service I stopped using a year or more ago. Looks like they are up to something new. Should I re-join before my invitations expire?

Tags: Plaxo social networks

Big companies use the cloud to innovate

Photo sharing service SmugMug received much attention when they published their business case for using Amazon's S3 storage service. The 2002 startup describes how the service saves them between half a million to a million USD per year.

At Headshift, we have made use of the S3 service too, most recently on a project where video is a part of the user experience.

But it is not just startups that benefit from Amazon's cloud computing services. Techcrunch asks who the biggest users of Amazon Web Services are and quotes an Amazon source who reveals that big companies make up a large proportion of the 60,000 customers.

In my view, the reason for large companies to use cloud computing is not just the potential cost advantage, it is the ability to do new and exciting stuff - such as introducing social software. Like many other FTSE100 companies, one of our client's IT operations are optimised for steady state stability. Provisioning a server for a project takes several months and costs tens of thousands of dollars. They now have a two day process to approve and set up a virtual server using a combination of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, with user identity provision tied to existing systems.

Look to the cloud to help innovation along.

All join in

In December, I had a delightful conversation with the BBC's Peter Day and his producer Rosamund Jones at the Headshift office in front of a microphone. The In Business programme about social networking aired on Radio 4 this week.

The interview touched on a host of subjects, but featured in the programme are:

• Negative feedback about a company's products and services on social network sites: Market signals are weak insofar that if demand dries up you don't necessarily know why. By listening to the discussions happening on blogs and groups on social networks you can get useful information about how your products and services are perceived and what aspects matter to your customers (I made the same point in August when I appeared on BBC News 24... well, I hope I did, it was aired live).
• The rise of the consumer-advertiser: A recommendation from people you know and trust is the most effective route to transaction. Social networks offer a powerful transmission mechanism for recommendations. It happens by itself but advertisers and social network providers are keen to monetise it.
• Declarative commerce: When you search for something on Google you are met with advertising linked to keywords because searching is one of the closest proxies to declared intention. But what if you could unequivocally declare your intention to buy a certain type of product or service? Imagine what companies would be willing to pay to offer you theirs. (The inspiration for this point is from Doc Searls and his thoughts on VRM and from John Battelle with his coining of the database of intentions.)
• Collaborating on ideas: Organisations can boost their innovative capability by sharing their ideas and inviting contributions from a wider group. This can happen internally as well as externally.
• Twitter in the enterprise: While a fair bit of traffic on Twitter could be considered mundane, I believe the use of ultra-short from-any-device-to-any-device no-action-required messaging inside the organisation has enormous potential to tie people together and spark relevant conversations. Let the stream of information flow by and engage when relevant. Low cost attention-wise. (Since the interview was recorded I have had the pleasure of reading similar thoughts much better phrased by JP Rangaswami.)

The programme also features Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Peter Cunningham of Viadeo, Stephen Millard of Clearswift, Penny Davis of T-Mobile, Dan Black of Ernst & Young and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffmann. You can download an mp3 of the half hour broadcast from the BBC website.

Tags: BBC social networks consumer-advertiser declarative commerce twitter Peter Day podcast radio mp3

The shape of a Downturn 2.0

There have been no recent R-word stats published that I have seen, but predictions that we are headed into a recession are becoming more frequent. No doubt that the prophecies of doom are true: after a boom follows a bust.

Timing the economy's cycle is difficult though, and so is predicting geographical distribution. As for sectors, here is a stab at how a Downturn 2.0 might be different from the previous one.

The technology sector took a tumble in March 2000 followed by the rest of the markets and at the same time the housing bubble was building.

Is the next growth recession going to be different? Consider the following shape:

Tags: economics recession technology property housing bubble downturn 2.0

The iPhone without the 'phone

"An iPod Touch and two MacBook Pro, please." During an errand to the Apple store to get MacBook Pros for new Headshift starters I gave in to the temptation to get an iPod Touch. When I first saw it last week, I knew I wanted one. I don't often listen to music on the go, but something that works better with podcasts than my small mp3 stick was welcome.

Something else I have been on the lookout for is wireless internet access in a small device,  so the Touch turns out to be a 2-in-1 device for me and I expect that I will be using it without headphones half of the time.

But add a photo viewer, video viewing and an address book into the incredibly beautiful and sleek device and it just gets better. It seems to do what the iPhone does, except the phone and camera bits. For that matter, GPS, Bluetooth and a Geiger counter are also missing.

Amidst the fascination, there are also irritating limitations. I can buy music directly from the iTunes store from the Touch over wifi but if I want to download a podcast/videocast (such as TEDtalks) I have to do it via a proper computer and sync it across. The elegant interface makes photo zooming a blast but I can't work out how to rotate a photo and the software does not recognise the orientation setting in jpeg files. But the biggest question is why there is no access to install applications. I am itching to use it for instant messaging but perhaps because the Touch shares so much with the iPhone that the likes of Skype is kept away from the platform to protect mobile phone companies' revenue. Some of the limitations and quirks will probably be addressed with software updates (the first one has been released and it is 150 Mb) while others remain except if you hack the device.

Does this mean that I won't get the iPhone when it becomes available in the UK on 9 November? Possibly. No doubt that there is a 3G iPhone in the future, so the iPod Touch may just be able to tide me over until such a device becomes available. Well, if I can live without the Geiger counter, that is.

Tags: Apple iPod iPod Touch iPhone

Babies, time, t-shirts and everything

With a newborn at home and a slew of interesting stuff going on at Headshift it is rare for me to have a chance to explore the social side of social software; in other words: events. This Friday it was MiniBar in London's East End and next week I plan to be at Wiki Wednesday hosted by What If.

MiniBar is set up by Christian Ahlert and a gang of volunteers. I have attended a couple of times before. The format allows for networking and features a few short presentations, typically by start-ups. This time we learned about:

• Spreadshirt, which I knew about beforehand from Konrad Marx, wants to open a shop on your website. By offering their shopping interface as a widget, some 270,000 websites are already selling their own t-shirt designs via Spreadshirt. Go to their site and you will see that the first choice in the menu is "sell" (not buy). The model of combining user generated content with a distributed sales network and centralised fulfillment is interesting.

• The Babies in the title of this article does not refer to our recent arrival but Babyfy, a website for expecting couples and new parents, primarily in the UK. Because it matches our current situation, I paid extra attention and visited the site later that evening. The three aspects of the site are hospital information + reviews (like Patient Opinion but focused on maternity wards); product reviews and blogs on different topics. A social network feature would have been a clever thing to add given the type of community the site caters for.

• Just like Google Maps has become the de facto interface for geospatial content and Wikipedia for topics, Miomi hopes to be the attractor for temporally related content. A timeline with events is the main interface. Your content can be attached to the timeline and related to other users' entries plus a bunch of events already entered as a kind of background layer. Thomas Whitfield, one the founders, told me that Miomi is hoping to license their patented technology to others to generate income besides advertising revenue. (A quick search of EPO and USPTO to satisfy my curiosity did not return any patent applications related to Miomi but it could be that the applications are not public yet or that they are filed under a different name.)

• The School of Everything launched their public site at the event. A Seedcamp graduate, they match supply and demand for tutoring by connecting pupils and tutors interested in the same subject. Creating a marketplace by connecting people: Exactly what the internet does well, as proved by eBay. The site has yet to build volume but I managed to find a potential Arabic tutor in London by searching for the language, and using the map interface I located a nearby tutor who could teach me 3D imaging for £50/hour. A great idea with great potential.

MiniBar evenings are typically scheduled for the last Friday of the month, but Christian hinted that October may offer a mid-month special event.

Tags: MiniBar Christian Ahlert startup Spreadshirt Miomi Babyfy School of everything seedcamp baby

Google rolls out unified paid-for storage

People who are running out of storage on Gmail can now pay Google for additional capacity. Annual fees range from $20 for 6 Gb to $500 for 250 Gb, offered as a selection of four capacity choices. Currently, Gmail offers 2.8 Gb storage with every free account and 10 Gb storage with every paid-for business account.

When you buy extra gigabytes the capacity applies to both Gmail and Picasa photo albums. Later on we should expect to see Google Docs & Spreadsheets included in the same storage scheme. As integration between Google's services gets better (e.g. opening a Gmail attachment in Google Docs), offering unified storage capacity across all services makes a lot of sense.

The market leader in storage, Amazon's S3, offers a more flexible service where you are only charged for storage actually used (at $0.15 per Gb per month) with no requirement to decide on capacity or plans up front. Amazon also charges for traffic although the cost is only significant when massive amounts of data is transfered.

I had previously (wrongly) predicted that consumer email would offer unlimited free storage. Google's move suggests that email is no longer seen as the competitive frontier it once was; instead the applications arena is where competition is rife. It also means that the company protects itself from the hassle of policing fair use agreements while getting a (probably insignificant) revenue stream out of their previously free services. Most importantly, for users of Google's services it means that the risk of running out of space has just become a lot less likely and so a potential barrier to adoption has been minimised.

Tags: Google email Gmail storage capacity Amazon S3 Googlemail Google Apps

For everybody else's eyes only

Traditional access control or authorisation regimes allow you to set up rules so that content stored in a particular place can only be accessed by people with particular permissions. The approach has never quite met the requirements of professional services and other businesses and it is likely that the model will need radical rethinking to cope in a world where tags and other metadata, rather than folders, are used to navigate information.

In knowledge-based industries the value of sharing information is so immense that a 'for your eyes only' approach to authorisation impedes productivity and innovation. Requirements for confidentiality in professional services and other businesses is often linked to information barriers (aka Chinese walls).

Authorisation rules based on information barriers are very different from the traditional drive/folder/group permissions. We need access controls to deal with rules that can be expressed as 'content tagged with client A cannot be viewed by people tagged with client B'. The underlying exclusion principle and the dynamic nature of this kind of authorisation regime make it difficult to represent in permission schemes that follow the file structure paradigm.

The collaborative tools that are put to inspiring use on the open internet need authentication and authorisation in place before they can migrate to the enterprise. Or better still, they need to integrate with existing authentication and authorisation infrastructure. But what if the organisation's existing permissioning infrastructure does not reflect the way information barriers are put in place and content is profiled?

Tags: enterprise 2.0 permission information barrier professional services authorisation tagging compliance

"It will never catch on"

With a few quotes about technology predictions to help get the audience in the right state of mind, Peter Day of the BBC and David Richards of The Stationers' Company opened this city livery company's summer forum.

The full title is The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers; it dates back to 1403. The Stationers' Hall is a beautiful building near St Paul's Cathedral in central London. During a brief tour I learned about Caxton (who introduced the printing press to England) and it was explained to me that books would sometimes be burned in the courtyard (in previous centuries of course, alternating between books of protestant and catholic observation - depending on the persuasion of the regent).

This year's summer forum looked beyond the printed word representing a departure from earlier forums that rarely strayed far from the 'ink-on-paper' history. "It will never catch on" was chosen as the tongue-in-cheek title of the forum. With speakers from The Daily Telegraph, Orange and Apple, the discussion touched on the digital newsroom, mobile services based on IMS and podcasting in education.

I was asked to speak about the changes that use of the internet is bringing about and the implications for existing means of communication and sources of information. "It should all be done without slides or overheads, merely an eloquent and persuasive address", I was briefed. Presenting without using slides as a crutch was something I hadn't done before, but compared to being asked to share my thoughts on ideas barely a decade old with an organisation of 600 years' standing that part of the challenge faded in significance.

Using what I see as the main trends today (open, free, social, simple, mobile) I described how technology and an ever more connected world is leading to decreasing barriers to entry and increasing choice. Those tools that prove themselves on the open internet get adopted by organisations allowing them to tap into the benefits brought about by decreasing transaction costs; not just cost of mechanical or financial transactions but complex ones involving people connected to each other in formal and informal social networks. The cost of experimenting with technology is also coming down and as such it is easier to test if something is likely to ever catch on.

Reboot mind maps

The Reboot conference in Copenhagen last week managed to create a relaxed atmosphere for connecting and reconnecting with great and curious minds from around the world.

I have published notes from the sessions I attended in mind map format on flickr, but I am also making the mind map files available for download (available under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license). The notes are in Mind Manager format, they work with MindJet's software and can be imported into the online MindMeister service.

To download, right-click on the links and select save:

Microblogging - Jyri Engeström

Social anything - Ross Mayfield

A town called Kozarac.ba - Lee Bryant

Flow - Stowe Boyd

Trusted space - Robert Paterson

Prediction Markets - Jesper Krogstrup

Travel and serendipity - Matt Jones

Contradictions of a sharing economy - Michel Bauwens

New interaction rituals - Julian Bleecker

Dave Winer interview

Reboot9 opening - Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and Tor Nørretranders

One session that I was sad to partiallly miss (a client voice conference got in the way) was Matt Webb's Products are people too, but it is a great help that Matt has posted the presentation online.

Tags: Reboot Reboot9 Reboot9.0 mind map MindManager MindMeister Creative Commons

Assisted serendipity and the digital side of travelling

Twelve years ago, on a trip to San Francisco, two friends of mine passed by a one-hour photo shop and stopped to marvel at the photo printer in the window. The printer was spitting out freshly printed photos in plain view and that is how Rodney recognised his uncle in a series of photos, posing in front of famous San Francisco landmarks. Rodney did not know that his uncle was in San Francisco but after the discovery they managed to meet up. Small world.

What is the probability of somebody you know being in the same city as you at the same time? What is the Bayesian of finding out about it or actually meeting up?

The familiar anecdotes about the world being small are about to go out of fashion if a new fusion of social networks and the geographic web takes of.

Dopplr is a web based tool that allows you to publish your travel plans to people you trust. Log in, and the main page will show you who will be at any of the future destinations you are planning to travel to.

For years, Plazes has enabled you to find out who is close to your current position. In the new version launched this week, you can also input your future travel plans and see friends' future locations.

Whether boosting serendipity or just lending a helping hand with the logistics of a meeting, services like this would come in handy both for social purposes and business (of course, business is a social activity too).

The same way sharing a physical location ties people together, assisted serendipity makes sense in other dimensions as well. Adoption of social tools within organisations would, say, help a team in Finland find the people in China with an idea that solves a problem they are grappling with, and identify the influencer in Turkey who will sponsor the project to apply the idea. Without any of them ever having heard of the others before. Big companies like a smaller world too.

Tags: Dopplr Plazes serendipity geographic+web social+tools