Thinkcorps

Lately, I’ve begun digging into research and academic theory on craft as well as communities of practice for a possible project. The discussions and papers I’ve discovered so far have been very illuminating, and point to the tremendous value of thinking outside of the context of business and the marketplace.

I’d even go so far as to argue that because of the Web (blogs, search, etc.), businesses (of all sizes) have more of an opportunity to engage academia than ever before, and that the value and importance of academic research has grown as magazines and newspapers hone their focus on “sexy” articles (designed to attract readers to advertisers, which is after all, the business of their business).

It’s increasingly rare to find well-researched articles with depth in traditional media, and I’m not sure that situation will change in the future. For “street level” views, you can easily find online communities, blogs, etc. where real people are willing to dish the straight dope. For the 30,000 ft. view, we have better access to high-level academic papers and discussion.

There is still a broad gap between these two worlds, and it’s a bit of a shock coming to grips with the differences in vocabulary. But I believe you’re far better off blending the two extremes. Your perspective will certainly be better informed, and your discourse (and by extension your thinking) will be more accurate. I think sometimes we forget that words can be very precise, powerful tools—not just clay we mold to our individual social contexts.

The problem lies in the availability of tools to increase our capability to understand foreign vocabulary and the concepts built from it. That’s where the Wikipedia comes in. I don’t believe it had occurred to me in the past how well Wikipedia serves as that bridge, and it really stands as testament to the power of the product they’ve put together.

The press and many others, typically see Wikipedia as a reference product, a repository of knowledge, and it is that, of course—but is its value really tied up in some vague notion of “final authority”? Or has the concept of value in knowledge shifted to weigh participation and access more heavily, as more achievable and more useful than authority?

What’s critical to the Wikipedia experience, as I see it, is how easily I can slide among strange concepts and foreign words, very quickly accumulating a rudimentary understanding that serves as a gateway to new knowledge. Without the online component, the hyperlinking, I wouldn’t be able to overcome obstacles like learning new vocabulary. Without the human, participatory component, these ideas would not be fleshed out as completely and as currently as they are, and there would only be limited linking to different viewpoints and positions.

It’s like a Stargate to the universe of human ideas. There’s a million places it can take you, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll always be safe. Sometimes, you’ll run into danger, sometimes, you’ll screw up. So what? That’s what exploration and learning are all about.

I guess I’m suggesting that the Wikipedia’s “authority” is less of a problem that the media would have us believe. When you’re researching, you’ve already put yourself in a skeptical mindset as you work to accumulate information. It’s not authority that you’re after really, it’s completeness and currency. You’d like to pull together as much relevant, up-to-date information as you can—on which to formulate your own conclusions. You’re acting as your own authority.
In addition, this is casual, informal learning at a much higher level than we’ve seen before. It will be very interesting to see how this affects our ability to learn, as well as our definition of what learning means. In one sense, much of our early schooling is about “learning how to learn,” training our brains to navigate new concepts (At least, it used to be before Bush overhauled education, for the worse, IMO). Wikipedia helps make learning a life-long process.
For example, I don’t remember phone numbers anymore, since they’re all stored in my phone’s memory. What happens when I can quickly bone up on any topic (via cell phone, probably) within a few minutes? Helicopters, Carrie-Anne Moss and The Matrix, anyone?

I am part of SMITH, an online magazine of personal stories, and we’ve been working on a serialized graphic novel based on reporter Anthony Lappé’s experiences in Iraq called Shooting War. Well, we had the good fortune to have BoingBoing link to us late today. Thank you Mark and the BoingBoingers!

Anyway, the server started having a fit almost immediately. I logged in and top had the server load at around 25 (highest I saw was 78), which is bad. I had already turned on the Wordpress Staticize caching plugin. (Oh Mommy.)

I quickly worked to resize the comic’s images, compressing them about 50% further. Then I realized I should offload all images entirely. So I signed up with Photobucket (thank you Web 2.0), and uploaded all the images to them, and rewrote the chapter pages, with the new image urls. Luckily, I already wrote a script to create the code for each chapter, so I only had to make a few tweaks, and then paste up the new code.

This seemed to placate the universe, as the load went down to about 15. The problem seemed to be MySQL (I’m guessing). Since Wordpress relies on MySQL for storage, I needed to see if there was a way to export a static html version of your site. I guess I was trying to get back to how Movable Type used to publish out html. I went looking for a plugin and damned if I didn’t find a better solution.

Elliot Beck wrote a plugin called Digg Defender. It rewrites requests that come with a referrer from the big sites (Slashdot, BoingBoing, Digg), and redirects them to the Coral Cache. What’s the Coral Cache? Yeah, I didn’t know either.
I tweaked the plugin to rewrite everything, since the BoingBoing link only went to the homepage, and everyone was clicking through 15-page chapters. (One things calm down, I’ll change it back to only rewrite certain referrers.)

So, within about two hours, and with almost no idea of what I would do, I’ve now got our site completely cached through free services on the Net. I love the Internet.

[Note: Each comic chapter was set up as a number of ‘pages’, using the ‘nextpage’ tag in Wordpress. I wonder if that adversely affected caching performance? I’m not sure, but may investigate later.]

UPDATE: I thought for a moment this morning that I’d spoken too soon. But I did what I had to do. Coral Cache is not perfect and we had an update to the site (a new chapter) to publish this morning, which took a few hours to show up properly. And there was a separate problem that required a MySQL restart.

After freaking out, and having friends calm me down (thank you Ted and Alex), I realized that I’d done the most important thing, keep the server up. There’s really nothing else to do when you get Boing’d or /.-ed, except wait it out.

Moving to a dedicated server would have taken a week at which point the Boing effect would be gone, and our server’s already pretty good and almost dedicated. Publishing a new chapter wasn’t a mistake really, but trying to do that while a cache is in effect is going to be messy.

Extra Tips for Digg Defender: Make sure you add lines in the digg-defender-phase-1.php file (to the if statement) so that you’re not rewriting any admin pages, or the login page, or maybe the comments-post page. Mine looks like this now:

if(
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'wp-comments-post.php') &&
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/wp-login.php') &&
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/wp-admin/') &&
strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Coral') === false ) {
$url = digg_defender_coralify('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
header("Location: $url");
die();
}

I found this great free 3D figure modeling program the other day. It’s called Daz |Studio (http://www.daz3d.com/) and so far, I’m loving it.

I just wanted something to use as a digital mannequin to help me model figures for some drawings that I’m doing. I tried Poser, but I couldn’t figure it out. Why is it that so many 3D programs have to create some original “artistic” user interface? I honestly don’t care what your program looks like, I just care if it’s easy to use and produces good results.

Maybe I got lucky, but I found Daz pretty intuitive. The interface is more like a typical PC/Linux style program (I’ve used Lightwave in the distant past, and it kinda reminded me of that).  I was pretty easy to just knock about, clicking things and stumbling upon their functionality. In maybe an hour over the course of a few sessions playing around, I think I have the basics figured out, and have already created a useable rendering.

Cory at BoingBoing posts about how restrictive the music industry has been in limiting the evolution of legal music services, denying features like searching by artist. As the RIAA and its cohorts continue to stand their ground: kicking, punching and wrapping everything in sight with new flavors of DRM —like some bizarro-land Christmas presents you can’t actually open unless first stripping down to your skivvies, getting down on all fours in a dim, empty and windowless room, and peering through the one loosened corner with only your right eye—I wonder what impact this will have on the music culture at large, the listeners not the labels.

I suppose you can fall back on hubris and assume that no matter what happens, there will always be music consumers to sell to, but I don’t know. This is the digital world, and there’s always something new and disruptive coming down the pipe. Adaptation is the name of the game. Remember Netscape? Lycos? A thousand dot-coms? They were huge and now they’re not.

Just because you guys own music today, doesn’t mean you’ll own it tomorrow. Worse, I’m not sure you realize that your product is changing.

The kids are online, and they’re chatting, creating, sharing with each other, building their own digital personalities, ecologies. They are building homepages with their favorite bands integrated into a player on the page. They are blogging and posting cool mp3s to share. They are remixing and podcasting. They are downloading, ripping, and burning.

The consumer is evolving the market and you aren’t there.

First, I think it’s clear that this is a market. It’s just not one defined by profit motives; it is instead about individual obsessions and passions. The only real difference between markets and communities is that communities aren’t limited to trading in dollars. And that makes communities much more powerful, doesn’t it?

If I were a music executive today (or a shareholder), I’d be very worried whether the music market was even going to exist in 10 years. Will the music consumer still want what you’re trying to sell? Ownership and possession are very late-century American concepts in my opinion. Ubiquitous connectivity and cheap technology are slowly breaking down those ideas with consumers, even if they don’t completely realize it.

For example, combine two current trends, participatory remix culture and the celestial jukebox (i.e., the Net), and you’ve got a very powerful combination that doesn’t rely on the record industry we know today.

Be afraid.

Just a few things I wanted to jot down today.

Does the Web Need Unions?
With the growth of online video, everyone’s looking for new ways to exploit its popularity. I think its current appeal is its focus on user-gen video—individual participation. Levelling the playing field is also fun—The Dixie Chicks have to compete for attention along with everyone’s funny little video clips. It’s a meritocracy the audience controls—and which the studios are negotiating an escape from even now.

Since studios have money, they believe they should get special treatment from the MySpaces and Youtube’s of the world, and will blur the lines between advertising and content to get it. I imagine that by the end of this year, we’re going to see a lot of “new features” and content deals from Web companies looking to capitalize on or “monetize” their popularity. But it will likely come at the expense of their users and the meritocracy.

Promoting studio content above others because they paid is like forcing regular users to use the servant’s door, and once the screen real estate tips past a certain ratio of paid to user-gen content, the community will begin to fall apart.

It’s a delicate balance, and I believe the Web companies would be best served by adopting a variation on the editorial guidelines for magazines set up by ASME. Users need to be protected, especially now that they’re your suppliers. You might even consider hiring someone as a “user representative”, like a union boss, to protect their interests.

Citizen Journalism: Misses not Hits
Mark Cuban’s invested in citizen journalism site sharesleuth.com (nothing live yet). This site sounds interesting. They will focus on stock fraud and executive malfeasance. I can definitely see a demand for this, or rather an obsession. But I wonder, given this example, whether the goals of citizen journalism might be very different than traditional journalism.

Journalism is a specialized job designed to create “news” for a (general or niche) public. I see citizen journalism being more of a community fueled by the stories that don’t quite make it into the papers: the inside pages, local incidents, people, city government, etc. Issues are driven (like online video above) by users, not by advertiser-driven business concerns. I’d bet that “citizen journalism” will be co-opted by newspaper companies within 2 to 3 years, it’s the perfect way to get their readership back.

Myspace: Here Today …
Michael at TechCrunch writes about some staggering MySpace stats (created by Paul Kedrosky). The thing that gets me about these figures is that I’m completely convinced that MySpace is a flash-in-the-pan, and that they will not be what they are now in 5 years.

What these numbers say to me is that: Kids are very comfortable living online; an Internet “hit” will soon dwarf a TV “hit” in terms of raw numbers; and that old media companies will continue to salivate over these properties, paying top dollar while failing to monetize them over their ever-shorter lifecycles.

So the clock is ticking for Fox, which had better bust a hump making some cash off MySpace, because the writing is already on the wall. I don’t think the site is still as popular with young kids as they think; it’s also being overrun with small businesses and spammers looking for customers on the cheap. A victim of its own success.

To me, MySpace represents the amazing fluidity of the Internet. It is not easy to create an audience that large, the medium has to be almost frictionless to support that. Of course, being frictionless means that your audience never truly stops. You may slow them down for a while, get them in orbit around your service, but eventually, they will escape your gravity and move on.

There are two truths that MySpace cannot contravert: New and Cool. The march of time erodes both, and soon all the kids will move on and create something even bigger and more spectacular.

Update: Fox announces that it’s outsourcing its ad biz to the highest bidder. Fox may have its own ambitions in the ad space, but I think this announcement makes it clear that they realize there is a (currently open) window to capitalize on MySpace’s popularity.

Briefly following up on my previous notion of “unionizing” your user communities, Michael at TechCrunch posts about an issue between Flickr and a new competitor, Zooomr, regarding giving API access to a competing service. It’s a portability issue, really, about whether you should offer users an easy path to export/transfer their data.

Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield initially responded in their forums:

We’ve been extremely open and we have no problem with people building tools to export their data from Flickr (there are several already). There is no lock in.

With respect to granting a commercial API license to a direct competitor: we might not. ... And I don’t see that as malicious on our part: why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?

But this issue evidently sparked some internal debate, and Stewart soon modified his stance:

... this is something that we’ve never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn’t matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric’s position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that “fair’s fair’ and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we’ll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

First, I think this is a fantastic example of how a company should react to community dischord . Even after being acquired by Yahoo, it’s pretty clear that the Flickr team has maintained its razor-like focus on its users (as evidenced by other examples Stewart mentions in that same thread). It also shows that often the “business of community” is about protecting your users over whatever internal concerns you might have.

Stewart’s “fair is fair” reciprocal API access may seem at first like a hedge, but in essence it’s about extending portability and benefiting all users. And that’s Flickr influencing the market in all of our interests (something cellphone carriers couldn’t do on their own). If Flickr does give Zooomr a commercial license, then that implies that both Flickr and Zooomr users now enjoy portability. Everybody wins.

Hmm, architecture is politics. :>