Matt Jones

Alice Taylor

Tom Coates

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Matt Webb

James Cronin

Clay and Leo Shirky

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At ETCON this year, I thought I’d buck the trend and use some ‘receding’ media to document the trip. I’m a 50/50 gadget/old tech fiend, and there’s two areas where I’m resolutely non-digital – photography and music. All my music is on vinyl, and I’ve got a lovely old linn sondek turntable and leak tuner. I’m even thinking of buying a valve amp, but that might be going *too* far.

So I took my medium format camera to ETCON – a Mamiya C330 – with the idea of taking quite formal pictures of the people there, trying to get people to pause for a minute for something a little different from the usual snapped digital pictures. I found a nice blank wall that looked like the kind of cheesy background school photographers use, and persuaded a few friends to pose. I’m quite pleased with the results, and will post them up here over the next few days. My only regret is that I stopped after the first few days, and so missed many people, including Danny & Phil, and also that a film I took of Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive seemed to get fogged going through x-rays. I guess that doesn’t happen to digital cameras…

Still, it was a lot of fun – maybe Tim O’Reilly will be looking for a ‘school photographer’ for next year?

😉

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Last Friday, I went over to the Internet Archive and met Brewster Kahle. I remember Danny interviewing him for the Irish Times and being blown away by all the projects Brewster’s involved in and his sheer energy and enthusiasm. Its all true. I don’t really have heroes, but Brewster is definitely not a mortal.

Where I work, there’s been a culture change project with the slogan ‘cut the crap’. Its great, but its aim is pretty modest – to try and cut down the stifling gas of bureaucracy inside the organisation. Is that as high as we can aim? Cutting down on meetings and cynicism is one thing, but trying to get a million books available at a dollar each to people all over the world – now *thats* something to wake up for in the morning.

Danny’s Oblomovka piece is a much better description of the projects than I could write, so go there to learn more about the man. In the light of Cory’s talk at ETCON, this quote jumped out at me:

“The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I’m not anti-government: I’m a librarian, not a libertarian. But that’s the truth.”

A new definition of Public Service: make sure the stuff we make can’t get burnt. Its not enough to just make stuff anymore – we can’t just fire it out into the ether and sit back feeling smug. All the radio and tv broadcasts since Marconi are still out there somewhere, beaming past the solar system decades after they were made. News coverage of 9/11? Just past Jupiter last time I checked. The Moon Landings? probably halfway to Alpha Centuri. But that’s a fat lot of good if you happen to be stuck on planet earth, and still want to see them.

We can’t send a thousand Tivos into space to catch all this stuff, but we can make sure the stuff is still available down here. The blocks to doing this are normally either rights issues or cost of digitisation and storage. Larry Lessig has answered one question, Brewster Kahle the other. Lets cut the crap and do it.

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Away from the ETCON flock, Tomski unearths this nugget:

“Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives.” -James Flint on Brian Eno

This reminded me of some things I’d been thinking about on the ‘sublime’ in digital art. The sublime – the ‘shock and awe’ of aesthetic experience – was, in 19th century culture, normally represented by nature, as in the paintings of Caspar David Freidrich. The sublime is a vertiginous moment – the moment when an excess of visual pleasure leads to a kind of terror, or awe – usually interpreted as a humbling realisation of God’s power.

In a Godless world, the sublime is invoked by the achievements of science of technology. Its understanadable that contemporary artists will reflect our vertiginious, ambiguous responses to technological progress – this is not so much the infinity of our archives, as the infinity of the spaces we can describe through the application of logic.

My favourite ever piece of digital art is an excellent example of this kind of sublime infinity. In Every Icon, John F. Simon Jr created a Java app that systematically explores every possible combination of black and white squares on a 32×32 grid. Starting at the top left in January 1997, the app has been cycling through combinations every since.

It took about 16 months to cycle through the entire first line of the grid, so how long do you think it would take to go through all the possible combinations of the 32×32 square? 100 years? 1,000 years? a *million* years?

Not even close. more like several hundred trillion years.

That’s what the digital sublime looks like.

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Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ‘small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote – ‘The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world’ – this is the most believable description of the ‘last mile’ problem I’m talking about – how will digital networks make the real world better?]

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Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ‘small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote – ‘The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world’ – this is the most believable description of the ‘last mile’ problem I’m talking about – how will digital networks make the real world better?]

Matt asked yesterday if I’d written up a version of a recurring rant about why Ebay is not a good model for reputation systems. I think I first started ranting about this at a work foundation conference on social software, and then have subjected various people at the beeb to versions of it. And then today, Clay mentioned the same idea in his talk about the conditions for succesful social environments.

It’s an important point, as Ebay is continually cited as a model for digital reputation, but its not a model that can be transferred outside of the context of Ebay itself. In a way, we have a version of the problem that Clay mentioned elsewhere in his talk – there are very few working reputation systems of a meaningful scale, so we build theoretical models based on this scarce evidence. This is as dangerous as earlier theories of identity based on activities in MUDs and MOOS – a small survey size will give misleading results.

The problem with using Ebay as an example is that its not intended to be a reputation system at all, but a part of a very efffective economic system. Sure, its about trust, but only in as much as trust will help faciliate an economic exchange. I use the reputation system to judge whether to buy a record, but I wouldn’t use Ebay to make new friends.

As Clay said today, reputation can’t be quantified and transferred (perhaps the term ‘social capital’ needs to be revised?) but is an emotional, fuzzy construct. We can help people find ways to recognise and represent this fuzzy warm feeling about each other, but we can’t abstract it altogether. Reputation is not a ‘thing’, but a feeling.

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Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.

Continue reading →

Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.