For those who need to understand how the Web is transforming the way businesses work, yada yada yada

JOHO Declared Obscene!

We received the following in response to the previous issue of JOHO:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
... This e-mail message has not been delivered because it has been found to contain offensive text and its delivery has been stopped. Please check the contents of the message and amend them if need be before you try and resend it.

Hmm, this netnanny apparently has a problem with the word "fuck." We hereby make two pledges. First, we will never use the word "fuck" to arouse sexual passions that only perverse or forbidden acts of love could dissipate. Second, we are adding the word "fuck" to our boilerplate at the end of every issue ("Editorial Lint") to make sure that issues do not fall into innocent hands.

It's a JOHO World After All

Techmailings, a service of Andover.net, has reviewed JOHO using words such as:

The JOURNAL OF THE HYPERLINKED ORGANIZATION is one of those quirky, eclectic newsletters and Web sites produced by the kind of person you think you might enjoy knowing. At least, I do.

While this newsletter deals with "heavy lifting" as regards the Web and business, you'll also find whimsical/philosophical commentary ... That's why I opened this review with the word "quirky." I like quirky.

I know this may seem like an e-zine that comes dangerously close to the edge of Terminal Coolness, but it doesn't quite fall over. It stays just within the bounds of not Taking Itself Too Seriously. Recommended.

http://www.techmailings.com/review_090299.html

Hey, what does a 'zine editor have to do to push past the edge of Terminal Coolness anyway? Wait, I know! Here's my new chiclet:

Is that *terminally kewl* or what, dudez!

Traffic and commerce

Now that the scientists at Los Alamos National Labs have figured out the cooking directions for roasting every living human to a crisp golden brown without basting, they've turned their eyes towards understanding traffic. According to an article Post by Alan Sipress in the Washington, Los Alamos is using its supercomputers to try to understand why traffic acts the way it does. "Scientists said they are closer to comprehending the birth of the universe than the daily tie-ups along the interstate." And after that mystery is solved, perhaps they can figure out why Julia Roberts is a star even after her first on-screen smile.

The scientists are struggling with the basic models to use. Some think of traffic as a fluid with waves rippling through it. Others think it exemplifies chaos theory. (Well, what doesn't if you just keeping asking "Why?" long enough?) Others look at traffic slowdowns as phase changes. And Chris L. Barrett, who heads the traffic project, says "Traffic is particles with motive."

What a great phrase! How awful and how accurate. It captures precisely the attitude of most of ecommerce. Commerce itself is conceived as a type of traffic. Customers are particles with motive.

Now, there are lots of ways to expand this obviously sere model. We can say that commerce is actually about more than going through the checkout lane at maximum speed. We can say that the particles with motives are in fact individuals and thus personalization software could keep each person's existential authenticity in mind, or at least remember to ask me if I need more batteries for the vibrating wallet I bought last time.

But I think the most important point is that customers aren't particles any more. We're groups. We're wired one to another and we tell each other the truth.

For example...My brother has an Audi. He noticed that he was suddenly able to open the trunk without the alarm going of. After two weeks in the shop, the service people told him, "We checked and that's the way it's supposed to work." So my brother found posting on an Audi devotee's site that said "Don't let them tell you that the trunk isn't supposed to be alarmed. There was a run of locks with a bad solder job that cuts off the alarm system."

So, suddenly each particle is as smart as the collection of all particles. And we haven't even moved from collective knowledge to collective power. Someday soon, preferably before the giant experiment in microwave cooking designed by the Los Alamos guys gets its global field test, being a "particle with motive" will describe you not as a customer but only how you feel on your very worst days.

How to be smart

We'd all like our businesses to be smart. But not smart in the bookish, horn-rimmed way in which you know everything except what counts. In fact, it turns out what we usually mean by being smart is knowing what matters. And knowing what matters is damn hard.

"What matters" is one of those loose but clear concepts that are indispensable and irreplaceable. It's slippery because what matters is so context-dependent. For example, what matters to a teenager is different from what matters to a baby. (Hint: the baby's demands are usually more rational.) And what matters to your business changes from day to day and workgroup to workgroup.

So, you can't tell just by looking a something that it matters. It matters only if you have some business interest that it addresses. And that's why it's hard for software to find what matters. For example, search engines can easily find you every document that contains the word "yak spleen" but they can't know that yak spleens matters to you — even though you don't know it — because it's been discovered that the coating of the yak's spleen has properties that would make it a great material for lining the wax lips that are at the heart of your global manufacturing empire.

That's why search engines are so bad at doing relevancy ranking, i.e., putting the 12,000 documents that match your query in order of importance to you. Instead, they rank them by how likely it is that the documents are *about* the terms you're searching for (and even that is a tough challenge). So the first 11,999 documents you're shown may be yak spleen recipes, and the document that matters most to you may be at the very end because it only mentions yak spleens once, in a footnote, as a low friction material Yaklanders use to coat their figure skating blades.

Search technology can't solve this problem. Even if it solves its own problem of galactic magnitude (understanding not just what documents say but what they're about), that's only half the equation. To be smart, your intelligence support systems (sorry, I'm getting tired of writing "knowledge management") have to also be able to ascertain your business interests.

The problem is that you don't know what your business interests are. Oh, you can copy some material from the mission statement and come up with some ideas, but you're interested in a much, much broader range of topics than that — so broad that you couldn't possibly write them all down (or build a comprehensive "topic tree"). For example, you may turn out to be interested in Malaysian politics if one of your suppliers is affected by new governmental regulations, or in transfractal numbers if a competitor has figured out how to use them to turn wax red.

So, how can software figure out what you're interested in? Well, it can watch what you write, what you search for, what you read and what you share. This may be enough over time to build up a base that can be mined and used to make some guesses. Imagine the interior dialogue of a piece of software: "Ah, I see that Mary has written many internal reports on long-lasting, low-friction materials, and these reports have been widely read and shared. And here's a research paper on the Web that talks about yak spleens as a long-lasting, low-friction material. I bet this matters to Mary!"

Of course, even if we had such software, we'd be more than a little nervous about having it look over our shoulders. Yet, virtually all businesses already have software in place software that "knows about" vital and personal information: email systems, document management, KM, search engines, web browsers, even desktop apps and the desktop itself. Each of these stores data that could be embarrassing and invasive if it were gathered. (Software interior dialogue: "Smith has done 2,800 searches in the past 12 months for pages that contain the word 'without panties'... I'd bet he — and his entire workgroup! — would be interested in this new web site I've found!")

We could insure privacy by keeping all the information on the desktop. But when trying to make an organization smart, watching the behavior of groups is even more valuable. Ensuring that the information is aggregated anonymously would help. The trust issue is there, waiting to be solved. (Business, as always, should learn from the pornographers who have, by necessity, solved the hardest of all the privacy and personal humiliation issues.)

Until the thankful day when software relieves us of all our burdens, there are other steps we can take to find what matters and thus become smart.

There's more to being smart than just knowing what matters. You also have to be able to learn as a normal part of business life, you have to have the courage to change (i.e., become what you're not) as rapidly as required, you have to appreciate the many styles and types of intelligence. But being able to find what matters would sure be a good start.

Pornographic Intranets

Pornography is fascinating by definition: it's what draws our sexual gaze even though we know it shouldn't. That's what differentiates pornography from erotica; pornography is always "dirty" whereas erotica is pornography we tell ourselves isn't dirty.

Pornography is all about drawing the line between the public and the private. Acts we do in private would be pornographic if shown on the titles-of-films-are-not-shown-in-your-bill channels in hotel rooms across the land. Pornography is about crossing the line that's been drawn.

Clearly, the line that we draw is at least to some degree arbitrary. We've seen the line drift over the past twenty years, for example, even on network tv. Even so, the line continues to serve its main purpose: to exist so that there can be a private and a public sphere.

The problem with pornography on the Internet is only secondarily the ready availability of it to children. The real threat is to the line itself. You may be a minister in the Divine Church of Abstinence, but you'll still eventually receive obscene offers via email. Mis-type a letter in an URL and you'll find yourself staring at pictures of twisting genitals. Go to a Web page with an innocent-sounding name and you may discover positions you didn't think were possible without hip surgery. The Internet routes around censorship, but also around decency. And privacy.

In short, the Internet isn't just moving the line. It's changing the nature of the line. It's making the line permeable, osmotic. And that means that the nature of being public and private is changing.

Intranets, by definition, are about drawing lines. An intranet uses passwords to keep some people in and most people out. And what's so private about this private realm? Not dirty pictures or unusual sex acts. What's private is the truth about the business: the products are not on track, there's disagreement about how much to spend on marketing, a big customer is unhappy, no one is yet quite sure how much to invest in a Linux, the industry standard the company lauds publicly is considered internally to be nothing but a dumb, pointless waste of time. These are the types of secrets intranets preserve from the eyes of the "public."

There is, of course, a realm of genuine secrets a company needs to keep, some for legal reasons and some because it would actually hurt if competitors found out. But those are the exception as the line becomes osmotic. Customers are finding direct routes into the organization. Employees are refusing to insult customers by handing them canned corporate responses and are instead engaging in conversations where doubt is permissible and certainty is arrogance.

We are — thankfully — approaching a time when the intranets are the same as extranets. Already on intranets, permissions vary from person to person: Joe in the HR department can access salary information but cannot access the list of possible acquisition targets, whereas Carla in engineering can see the bug database but not everyone's salary. Why not treat "external" folks, your partners and customers, the same way? Let them onto your intranet but keep them away from the information they really shouldn't see. But presume openness. Let them eavesdrop on the marketing conversations about which features are going to be in the product and which standards deserve nothing more than lip service. Let them listen to engineering discussions about the trade-offs that may have to be made. Let them do more than audit: let them join in the conversation. They are going to anyway, one way or another.

The line is becoming osmotic because the Web makes connections so easy. Your choices are either to fight a losing battle to patch all the holes in your roof ... or to learn to enjoy driving with the top down.

Misc

I'd be much more interested in selling off old knowledge I no longer need if I could be certain that it'd be removed from me when transferred to the high bidder. Hell, how much do I hear for everything I learned from Miss Winkler in the 7th grade?

We have bad news for the Marketing Director: I don't know about bugs, but your product is pure crap. Need a spoon?

Dave Baker wrote to us about something. His signature includes the following lines:

Links I like

Chris RageBoy Locke, publisher of EGR, points us to a anarcho-syndicalist pinko socialist article: Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright

Greg Cavanagh, ever vigilant in his search for the validation of Linux, sends us a link to information about a "Beowulf-style" cluster of 1,000 Pentiums.

Oh, sending virtual crack to RageBoy is such a good idea, like dangling a small annoying child in front of a velociraptor.

Michael Heim, the philosopher of virtual beingness, points us to an article about what he's up to:

Knowledge Management journal, the best thing to come out of Antwerp since the invention of ants and twerps, has a new issue out:

I admit it. I clicked on a banner ad that asked me to catch a monkey or something, and I got taken to www.treeloot.com, a site that has calibrated to within the width of a synapse the amount of positive reinforcement people need to keep poking at a picture of a tree hoping to find a square that will win them money. As you fail, the site starts heaping abuse on you for not clicking on any of the banner ads. This is a site almost Dostoyevskian in its understanding of the dark regions of the human soul where guilt, sin and the purifying effect of punishment live. Either that, or it's like a really good scratch-and-win card.

Email, Arbitrary Insults, and Suspicious Hacking Coughs

Jamie Popkin of The Gartner Group responds to our musings about browsing and portals:

If the portal is listing interesting links that bounce the user out to CNN, a competitor's site and the Gartner service, then one of the reasons you might choose to browse is precisely to get your contexts switched. Sure, context switching decreases efficiency because there are some moments of confusion. But switching contexts is how you learn, stay interested, broaden your perspective, etc., right? (I wish I knew more about the actual research on context switching. I'm just making stuff up, as usual.) So, I think I'm agreeing with you

Dylan Barrell writes in response to our comments in the same article about the corporate attempt to distract us from browsing:

Hmm, try as I may, I have surprisingly little disagreement with this. (By the way, when Dylan talks about project libraries, he's covertly touting his company's product, Open Text Livelink. But since he has the good grace not to make that explicit, I'm throwing in the plug for him.)

Gosh, that's an easy one. An open standard is a standard that isn't determined by any one commercial entity. Open standards therefore better serve the needs of the market because random groups of standards-crazed geeks are far more in touch with market needs than companies that rise or fall on their ability to deliver products suited to the needs of customers.

But you may be confusing open standards with The Open Standards Gambit, which is as follows: A company such as JetForm or UWI.com announces an Open Standard that they have devised on their own in order to meet the needs of their software, um, their market. The proposing company hopes that the market will univocally accept the new standard with a loud Huzzah!, thus confusing its enemies so that the company can slay them during the six month "window" before the competitor can implement the new standard.

Robert then highly recommends using PDF for your eforms, and conveniently points out that his company (Cardiff) and Adobe "announced a strategic partnership in this area at AIIM in April..." (Please keep the cards, letters and press releases comin', folks.) Well, ok, but PDF is a de facto standard where the integrity of format counts, but it isn't when it comes to eforms, and, because it is a proprietary standard, it is unlikely to achieve de facto-ness in this arena, IMO.

Joshua Newman responds to my writing: "...JetForm (the market share leader in eforms — by virtue of having bought its major competitor a while ago)..."

We are happy to run anything that returns Leibling's name in print. As for me, I can write gooder than anyone who can write slower and slower than anyone who can write English. And I'm damn proud of it.

Sharon VanderKaay responds to my writing: "we might say that knowledge workers are people who get paid to sit on their fat asses all day." She suggests that knowledge workers are:

I like it! Everyone knows that exceptions are where the fun is. I'd only add: "while sitting on their fat asses," to exclude Red Adair and the brave staff of ER.

Jon Pyke writes, in response to last issue's coverage of the great Dunkin Donuts Rebellion:

As a bonus for our transatlantic neighbors, allow me to explain how to dunk a donut. Pinch the torus between thumb and forefinger and rip out a chunk. Dip the end of the chunk into your coffee. You now dip one of the severed ends of donut and eat the newly-moistened morsel. Now it's a race — the fun part! — to finish the dipping of the donut before it dissolves back into the mucilage from which it came, coating the coffee with a quarter inch oil slick.

Richard Brockhaus, my former philosophy teacher and author of one of the best books on Wittgenstein ("Pulling Up the Ladder"), writes:

Phenomenologists? Heck, "pro-lifers" have built a political movement around this idea!

I'm a little familiar with Oxygen. On the surface (i.e., I'm already over my head) it sounds like another MIT/PARC vision that will never see the light of day. With luck, I'll never have to really understand it.

Dalit, if I said "hypnogogic" then I damn well meant "hypnogogic." Please adjust your attitude. Now pardon me while I give in to an uncontrollable urge to act like a chicken.

Continuing the International Festival of Correction, Glenn "Clinton Glenn" Clinton writes about our Dunkin Donuts article. In particular, he is concerned about my comparison of donuts with what it takes to grease a fleet of aircraft:

Oh, Glenn, I wouldn't underestimate the perspicuity of our nation's donut-fed masses. And ever since Spielberg's megahit, "Saving Private Fryin'," tens of millions of people around the world understand the heroic role dough soaked in hot fat played in saving the world in 1945.

On a surprisingly similar note, I received the following from Dr. Michael Tulloch in response to my saying something about a Bruce Willis scene in one of the Die Hards where he says to himself "Think! Think!" I said: "Yeah, the last resort when your ammo clip jams." Dr. Tulloch writes:

I accept the correction but maintain that had I said "Yeah, the last resort when your magazine jams," there would have been no fruitful laughter engendered, only confusion, given that JOHO itself jams so frequently.

Bogus contest: : Comparatives

Famous philosopher, logician, pacifist and thin guy Bertrand Russell created a game beloved of Philosophy 101 classes around the world who view it as less boring than a lecture and more interesting than a film strip on Socrates' Greece. The challenge is to find three terms that have the same denotation but three different connotations, one positive, one neutral and one negative. For example: I'm dedicated, you're persistent, he's pig-headed.

I have lots of friends	You broadcast information	He is a spammer
My site is dynamic	Yours is under construction	His site sucks
I publish a zine	You post your writings	He blathers on
I use a knowledge management systems	You make tacit knowledge explicit	He just blew$1.5M
I have a corporate portal	Your company has an internal home page	His company put up an internal billboard
I surf	You browse	He's lost on the Web

Contest Results

The previous issue's contest asked you for names for mailing lists consisting of ex-employees of a company. The real-life example was Interleaf's mailing list: interleft.

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