For those who need to understand how the Web is transforming the way businesses work, yada yada yada
Meta Data
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October 25, 1999 Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: On a panel at a conference, I mentioned our upcoming Cluetrain book while making a point about how talking-head panels suck and why information ought to be free. New height of hypocrisy or just middle age? Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
ContentsThe right information: There's no such thing
as the right information when it comes to making decisions...and looking
for it is a sign of deep fear. |
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The Former New Look and Feel of JOHO I've posted a draft of a new home page for JOHO. And so far the reaction has been fantastic, with the vast majority of people feeling that I've successfully made the transition from incredibly ugly to deeply boring. So, if you want to see the new home page, you better hurry because it's not going to be there much longer. |
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Shilling for the Cluetrain It's just 3 months 'til The Cluetrain Manifesto: The Book comes chugging out of Perseus Books. Thanks to the miracle of v-Commerce (hint: the V stands for what rises from heated water), you can pre-order your very own copy at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738202444/dweinbergers/ And while you're there, you may wonder along with the rest of us how a book whose authors are listed alphabetically ended up at Amazon with Chris "RageBoy" Locke's name first? Just a coincidence, I'm sure... |
The right information
Please raise your hand if you're a software vendor and you've ever once said that your "solution" delivers the right information to the right people at the right time. Add ten points if you ever added, in a knowing tone, "...and in the right way." Now go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.
The fact that it's impossible to deliver on the "right information to the right people," etc. claim isn't what annoys me. The real problem is that if you were to succeed at delivering only the right info at the right time to the right people, you'd be right out of business. In fact, our infatuation with the "right info ... etc." phrase betrays a deep-seated fear of the Web.
Here's the implied world in which the promise is made. Y'see, we live in a city overcrowded with information. Some of it is Good and True but, ever since the Web, we're being overrun by gangs of information that wear black t-shirts with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. Why, it's gotten so that a decent, hardworking man can't walk down his own street without being assaulted by undesirable data elements — uneducated ruffians and women of easy virtue. At best, these lowlifes are distractions from our job, and at worst we may take a toke — the first one's free — and end up as dissolute hopheads, listening to bebop jazz and thinking the Homosexual Lifestyle is perfectly acceptable.
Behind the idea of the Right Information is fear — the fear of losing control. And it rests on a cheap pun. "Right" sometimes means "not wrong" and "right" sometimes means "right for some purpose." No one wants wrong information, stuff that is just inaccurate. But the "right info..." phrase isn't simply promising to filter out inaccuracies. It's also promising to provide you with nothing but the information that's right for making a decision. And that's where it goes wrong.
There literally is no such thing as The Right Information in that second sense. Let's say you're trying to decide if it's time to open up an office in Hong Kong. Clearly, you don't want to rely on market data that's inaccurate. But what is the right information required for these decisions? You can't know this until after you made the decision. In fact, the decision itself determines which information you think is right — you decide that the Hong Kong housing-start data is irrelevant, the demand from globally-based customers has real potential, and the lawyer's report on the threat of new Chinese regulations is overstated.
Humans don't work by taking the right input and pumping out the right decisions as output. Deciding which information to listen to is a crucial part of the decision itself.
The cult of rightness — of efficiency, of infallibility, of cause-and-effect decision theory — is more dangerous than a CFO with a "really great product idea." Good decisions aren't made by having "right information" delivered to your desktop. You need to be out in the bustle of the information city, talking with street corner toughs and working class stiffs drinking coffee from a metal thermos, as well as with museum curators and librarians. You need to "waste your time" arguing into the wee hours with someone you think is totally wrong about a point that beer has erased. You even need to get laid now and then.
Spare me the right information and protect me from the right people. The Web is the new world of conversations and if you protect me from it, I will become a wizened, frightened, self-important little person hanging onto the right information at the right time to shield me from the real clamor of the newly-excited world.
Hermetic Microsoft
I've griped about Microsoft's Digital Dashboard (DD) before, but, heck, the right to gripe endlessly about the rich, powerful and obnoxious is the very basis of democracy.
At KMWorld '99, Charles Stevens, Microsoft's VP of Business Solutions (the meaningless CorpoSpeak title apparently actually means that he's in charge of Microsoft's partner relations) gave a keynote presentation on Redmond's position on Knowledge Management. It sounded as if someone said "Ok, let's see what we have that we can say is a component of a KM system. Ok, we've got email, we've got scheduling ... does Flight Simulator count as KM?" To be fair (much against my better judgment) the history of KM has been marked more by this type of re-labeling than by innovation. How many KM systems or widgets exist that wouldn't have existed if KM hadn't been invented?
The centerpiece of Microsoft's KM strategy continues to be the DD judging by the amount of time they spent on the rest of the pieces. Too bad. While there will certainly be many useful applications of the DD — no, really, there will be — in two ways it's a step backward.
First, the stifling, hermetic demo Microsoft did from the stage showed four apps running inside of Outlook (including a bar chart, the mark of a gen-yoo-ine business application) as if we've been dreaming of living inside of The Outlook Correctional Institution. Microsoft seems not to have noticed that there's been a move towards supporting browsers, not "thick clients" (despite Stevens' outrageous, Orwellian claim that there thin clients are actually thick clients because Microsoft has larded up IE5 with crap no one wants; definition of chutzpah: a kid who kills his parents and pleads "Have pity on a poor orphan"). But not every machine runs Outlook 2000. Some of them don't even run Windows. Microsoft seems genuinely blind to this, or maybe the PR handlers have simply over-trained the Microsoft execs.
Second, DD might as well be called "Microsoft Windows Tiler." I thought the point of windowing systems was to provide multiple windows. It'd be different if there were some integration among the apps, but that doesn't seem to be part of the DD story.
The DD is, Mr. Steven said, "the best sales tool we have...". Why? Presumably because it visualizes a world in which information is calm, orderly and in its jammies ready for bed at 8pm sharp. But the world is bigger than Outlook and even bigger than Microsoft. The Redmonians seem genuinely not to understand that. It's, frankly, sort of depressing. And, worse, not at all surprising.
IQport.com and the price of info
At the recent KMWorld '99 conference in Dallas I was able to spend some quality time with two of the key people behind www.iqport.com. I liked the implementation and could see many advantages to the site, yet I found myself becoming withdrawn and belligerent, a state I usually only achieve when someone says something nice about me or if other people are having fun.
IQport.com enables people to post information objects for sale. If you find something you're interested in, you put it in your "shopping basket" and have the amount deducted from your account. The author is then credited that amount, minus a fee that goes to IQport. (The fee is much less than an author pays to a book publisher and less than the 50% that fatbrain.com — the Amazon of technical books — says it's going to charge for its vanity publishing service.)
IQport isn't an information eBay; the "information flea market" position is occupied by www.inforocket.com. No, IQport is an alternative distribution channel for people who make money by selling information, including consultants, authors, financial services, etc. Authors are encouraged to join "knowledge communities" which act as intermediaries and, in some sense, as publishers. For example, an industry association might form a knowledge community and approve any offerings made under its aegis.
So, what's my beef? It took me a while to admit that the more I talked with the site's representatives (Freddie McMahon and Penny Heyes), the more bummed out I was getting, and then it took me longer still to figure out why.
It has nothing to do with Freddie and Penny. No, it goes back to my hippie roots. You see, information wants to be free, man! In fact, information wants to put on patched jeans, take a few hits from the bong in my friend Skip's rec room and watch the Lava Lamp of Knowledge (you know, that lava lamp is really *deep*, man) until the 'rents pull up in the driveway and suddenly you're spraying meadow-scented Glade all over the room until a rosewood incense stick turns the spray into a flame thrower which you let run for longer than necessary because the purple tongues of fire look like dragons and the dragon flames are themselves breathing dragon flames, like wow, man, until you realize you're scorching Skip's father's ophthalmology diploma on the wall.
Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. From one point of view, IQport is simply giving professional publishers the ability to publish more efficiently and effectively on a truly global scale. From another, it encourages people who might otherwise have given information away to offer it for sale. The first is Good because it lowers the hurdle to publishing. The second is Bad because it raises the hurdle to information. In fact, the site is likely to do both.
So, I don't trust my negative reaction to IQport. It comes from the atavistic hippie in me. But it's the hippie portion of our brains that built the Web and that's preserved much of what's important about it. Am I suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome? Maybe. But the question of how to motivate people to contribute information to your intranet divides people rather sharply between those who think you'll have to pay employees for contributions and those who think employees will speak out because they like to be famous and/or helpful. Where you stand on this issue probably has a lot to do with your personality and your politics. And for what it's worth, my heart is with the optimists.
Ask Marilyn why search sites suck
Marilyn Vos Savant, the World's Smartest Person (according to the Guinness Book of World Records), ran a puzzle recently the answer to which depended on there existing a town by the name "1986." So, in her Oct. 10 column in Parade, the World's Smartest Sunday Insert, she writes:
At least one Internet search engine (Excite maps) locates "1986" in Kansas, all right. But it also locates other numbers in that same place — even when you're searching in other states!
Ah, the exclamation mark of the newbie. The rest of us are just not surprised enough to use the shift key.
Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com), the first Internet float in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade — shouldn't that honor really gone to Netscape's IPO? — shows you other questions people are asking while you're typing in your question. This list looks like it's being drawn in real time from the Web but in fact it's downloaded with the Ask Jeeves page and then is cycled via a simple Java script. One recent question was "Who is God?". Jeeves responds by taking you to www.religioustolerance.org, the one group that will refuse to answer the question, for fear of hurting someone's feelings ("Well, yes, I suppose this Brittney Spears *could* be God, if you sincerely believe her to be.")
On the other hand, the fact that someone would pose such a question to a crappy little search site has renewed my faith in humanit .... Whoops, sorry, now it's gone.
Links I like
Dan Kalikow points us to a site that maintains that an "under construction" sign on a Web site is a sign of cowardice moral turpitude.
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gk/atwork/
Prof. Bob Morris, who has an unfortunate tendency to keep us honest, sends us to a site where there's some XML to play with:
play with the link on XML at http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg. You gotta use IE5 until Netscape releases something that understands XML....
With Netscape 4.7 looking as shoddy as it does, I wouldn't wait for XML support. In fact, I wouldn't wait for 4.7.1.
Bill Bly sends along a column called "Whaddya, STOOPIT? or, How Could You Not Know That? — Stupidity vs. Ignorance in the Age of the Steep Learning Curve" that begins with the following wonderful quote
Ignorance is a delicate flower. Touch it, and the bloom is gone. — Wilde
You can read the entire stoopit, entertaining article at
Chris "RageBoy" Locke, editor of EGR and the Scourge of JOHO, writes:
I think this pretty much wraps it up...
The Microsoft Knowledge Management Strategy http://www.microsoft.com/DigitalNervousSystem/km/KMpract.htm
Yup, there's the complete story, including insights such as: "Its [KM's] essence involves fueling what knowledge workers do best—what Microsoft CEO Bill Gates refers to as 'thinking work.'" Wow! What a phrase maker! Let's see, then people who manufacture things are engaged in making work, and air traffic controllers are engaged in avoiding work.
If you send me your entry, I'll declare this a mini bogus contest!
Jim Montgomery points us to a dank little column in PCWeek that says the Internet :
"has made us all strangers (and more strange) to one another."
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/columns/0,4351,2335594,00.html
Well, sure, but *good* strange. I mean, things were getting entirely too normal, don't you think?
John Maloney points us to the "pamphlets" at http://www.amorenaturalway.com by Diane Olson and Tom Heuerman. Their self-description:
We help others discover and live an ecological worldview, learn new ways to think, new ways to relate to oneself and others, and new core competencies appropriate for each person's role in the organization.
The first few pamphlets nicely develop a metaphor or parable and then draw a jejune conclusion from it such as "Embrace change, and don't we all deserve a big hug?" (I'm paraphrasing). The later pamphlets may be different but I got bored.
Mark Kuharich, author of The Software View (http://www.softwareview.com/), reports on philosopher and cybernaut David Gelertner's interests in moving beyond the desktop metaphor.
According to Gelernter, the desktop metaphor is obsolete. He wants to move beyond space - to time. The project that Gelernter and several of his graduate students were working on was called Lifestreams, and it may completely change how we manage information. Today, our view of cyberspace is shaped by a twenty-year-old metaphor in which files are documents, documents are organized into folders, and all are littered around the flatland known as the desktop. Lifestreams takes a completely different approach: instead of organizing by space, it organizes by time. It is a diary rather than a desktop.
Twenty years is a long time for a metaphor? Jeez, metaphors are what keep cultures together, and papers have been going into folders for a lot more than 20 years. The reluctance of humans to move to new metaphors is of epic proportions — epics being yet another metaphor we can't duck.
No, the way to radically extend the desktop metaphor without having to switch from space to time is to supplement the concept of the folder with that of the single most common way of organizing paper: piles. Hyperpiles™: The desktop of the future.
You can learn a little more about Lifestreams technology at http://www.mirrorworlds.com.
Misc.
Greg Cavanagh, our resident disciple of King Linus, writes to tell us about
Linux beowulf clusters made from sony playstations. Also note the new playstation will be based on linux. http://www.wulfstation.org/
Excellent! Playing Goldeneye by typing into a command line should finally give adults just the advantage they need!
Greg also forwards the following from nandotimes.com:
The Defense Department unveiled its latest arsenal of high-tech crime-fighting tools Friday, a $15 million [Linux-based] computer lab where it can trace hackers across the Internet, unscramble hidden files and rebuild smashed floppy disks that were cut in pieces.
Ah, remember when our fighting forces would spend the day storming hilltops, returning to the barracks with barely enough energy to harass some busty WACs, instead of working from 9 to 5, sipping double lattes, and figuring out how to hack into www.davidbowie.com?
Frank Vernon found the following:
The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'The Transmission of IP Over the Vertical Blanking Interval of a Television Signal'
as a Proposed Standard ... a method for broadcasting IP data using the vertical blanking interval of television signals.
So, the same signal that brings you Bridget Loves Bernie can also connect you to the Web. Of course, if the synchronization goes awry, you could end up ogling Yahoo jiggling along a beach and typing a query into Baywatch.
RageBoy found the following from Edward Vielmetti:
Valdis Krebs sent a pointer to a very interesting article in the current Harvard Business Review by Henry Mintzberg and Ludo Van der Heyden on "organigraphs", a functional replacement for traditional organization charts that acknowledges that modern companies are not strictly hierarchical and that people in them need tools to visualize how people and processes are connected. They identify four philosophies of managing and the graphs that go with them: among a _set_ of independent actors, allocate resources over a _chain_ of actors that depend directly on each other, exert control with a _hub_ of activity around which actors cluster about, coordinate activities within a _web_ of related actors who interact in many patterns, energize the network.
This sounds like an advance. But how about the other common management constellations? For example, how can we graphically portray, say managing a small, cowering marketing department dominated by a petty tyrant's genital-shrinking reign of terror? Or managing a vast set of feuding, arrogant technoids who are each heading in what s/he is snarlingly certain is the only non-brain dead direction? Or how about manging people who are all running from any set, chain, hub, web or galaxy that includes you?
And while we're discussing attempts to make sense of the world, we ran into Andrius Kulikauskas at a conference. He's trying to help people think about thinking by building a standard for expressing all thought. He postulates are three basic structures that need to be captured: hierarchies, sequences and webs. And he has some rules about how they interact. He thinks a standard for these 3 schema will enable all info-aggregating programs (e.g., Notes, outliners, etc.) to interchange content without loss of thought. Say what you want about this project, you have to admit that it has an admirably short url:
(Yes, this is JOHO's first link to a Lithuanian site.) You can read the initial data of his project investigating what kids say gets them to change their minds:
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/structureuses/990930change.html