"Business leans on science the way Ginger Rogers leaned on Fred Astaire - for legitimacy and cachet. Science lent 20th-century business the aura of quantitative certainty, starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management and Ford's assembly line. As science moves away from Newtonian notions of cause and effect to study complex systems like global climate and the human genome, which have too many variables to accurately predict, business follows. If there were a Hollywood Stock Exchange for business buzzwords, "complexity" would be trading high."

CIO.Com Chaos Control

"WHENEVER WE FORGE new strategies, devise new policies or create new services, we are dabbling in the world of complex adaptive systems. Authors Robert Axelrod and Michael C. Cohen define a complex adaptive system as one in which a single action?such as putting up a website?can lead to unforeseen, even unpredictable consequences. Their new book, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier (The Free Press, 1999), aims to help readers understand how to design organizations and strategies in a complex environment. Borrowing ideas from scientific and biological research in which three factors?variation, interaction and selection?shape complex environments, the authors have devised a framework as a way of guiding readers to pose new questions and ponder new possibilities when confronted with complexity."

"In the following excerpt, the authors use the development of Linux as an example of variation. The question they ponder: When can an organization or population do better with more variety as opposed to uniformity? The answer revolves around the principle of exploration versus exploitation, a trade-off situation between creating strategies that are untested but may be superior to what exists versus copying proven strategies."

redux [11.05.00]
New England Complex Systems Institute Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile

"Since time immemorial humans have complained that life is becoming more complex, but it is only now that we have a hope to analyze formally and verify this lament. This article analyzes the human social environment using the "complexity profile," a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system. The analysis is used to justify the qualitative observation that complexity of existence has increased and is increasing. The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilizationthe increasing interdependence of the global economic and social system and the instabilities of dictatorships, communism and corporate hierarchies. Our complex social environment is consistent with identifying global human civilization as an organism capable of complex behavior that protects its components (us) and which should be capable of responding effectively to complex environmental demands."

The National Academies Can Knowledge of Human Behavior Be a Competitive Advantage?

"Industry in the past two decades has gotten better at applying research results in natural sciences and engineering. The gains to society (in better and cheaper products and services and more competitive companies) have been immense.

The social and behavioral sciences may offer benefits at least as great, in product and process design, marketing, forecasting, and planning. But business has found it harder to integrate the results and methods of these fields systematically in day-to-day operations. As a result, many of our technical systems and business practices fail to take advantage of knowledge of individual and social behavior and capacities. But business is increasingly demanding a more sophisticated approach to questions of demographics, human performance and learning, and the interactions of humans and machines, which can be addressed only through these disciplines.

The rewards of better utilizing such knowledge would be great and pervasive."

"In the next year, however, those Buddy Lists could become less like personal phone books and more like interactive Yellow Pages. With close to 100 million people now using instant messaging software, according to industry estimates, many companies are itching to take advantage of what they consider an untapped market."

""This could become very powerful," said Peter Levitan, the chief executive of ActiveBuddy, the New York start-up company that designed the Radiohead program. Imagine an I.M. system, he continued, "that would tell you exactly when tickets have gone on sale for the next concert.""

ChannelSeven.Com Instant Messaging: The New Marketing Frontier

"While an instant message from a company (rather than a person) may be welcomed if you are sending an instant message to warn a person that his plane is delayed, a fine line exists between a welcomed message and spam. Security and privacy protections must be firmly in place if advertisers hope to reach their intended audience without alienating a large percentage of people. Opt-in advertising will certainly play a large role in this arena."

"Instant messaging and the marketing attached to it is certain to be a growing phenomenon as the platform swells on the desktop, and translates itself to set-top boxes, wireless phones, PDAs and interactive television. The future of advertising and instant messaging has "neat potential," says Alex Diamandis of Odigo. "It's a wide open landscape out there.""

News.Com Will instant messaging become instant spamming?

""This is a really bad idea because instant messaging physically is like a private conversation. This is like you're talking with your boyfriend over the phone and 1-800-Flowers jumps in and says 'I see you're having an argument, why don't you buy some flowers?'" he said."

""The instant messaging marketing is in its infancy now, but its life span will be short," said Big Champagne's Garland, asserting that the company is only dabbling in this form of marketing while its primary focus is online market research. Garland called the Aimee Mann promotion a "stunt" because "instant messaging is such a powerful communication tool that it very quickly devolves into spam. It is going to have to be opt-in.""

"Wall Street analysts are known for a lot of things--being too optimistic, failing to warn investors about the dot-com crash, and being the latest target for Congress--but they usually aren't known for their apologies."

"Morgan Stanley analyst Jeffrey Camp cut Exodus to a "neutral" from "strong buy" and gave his clients an apology.

"There are few moments in my career that rival this one in its difficulty and unpleasantness. Elbert Hubbard said, 'The line between failure and success is so fine, we scarcely know when we pass it.' But passed it I have, and it is time to own up," Camp said."

redux [06.11.01]
News.Com Did so many get it so wrong?

"As pundits rush to explain what happened on Wall Street, fingers point to the thought leaders. We read exposés on Mary Meeker and Frank Quattrone--once dubbed geniuses--and wonder how they could have sponsored initial public offerings for the nth online grocer or women's portal. Or we ask ourselves how stock analysts could ride a stock all the way down from $150 to $3, all the while touting it as a "strong buy.""

"These are people who were supposed to be making smart decisions. How did they get it so wrong? The answer is, they didn't."

redux [05.31.01]
The Standard The 'X' in What's Next

"With great fanfare, Forrester Research announced last week that the Web is dead. With so many failing dot-coms, that news wouldn't be so hard to believe - if it weren't that Forrester has spent the past few years touting it as an engine of unrelenting hypergrowth."

But Forrester may be doing more than just trying to unhitch itself from the crazy train of the Web. In some ways, the veteran research firm's latest move shows the analyst business at its finest: giving the industry a rosy spot on the horizon to focus on, a clever name for that spot and a forecast with lots of zeroes in it to throw investors and entrepreneurs into a frenzy."

redux [03.12.01]
Salon Do you kick Yahoo?

"Remember, Yahoo still expects revenues of $800 million this year, and has been consistently profitable while other dot-com flashes-in-the-pan burned through their venture capital with nothing to show for it but some outré TV commercials. Yahoo isn't perfect, but it has maintained its lead as the top Web portal by consistently putting its users first, and its sites remain models of simplicity and service.

All of which raises the obvious question: Plainly, the market's pundits were way off a year ago, at the pinnacle of Net stock mania; so why should we put any more stock in them now? Their downside is looking just as insane as their upside."

redux [03.13.01]
The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."

"The smoke of today's AOL/Microsoft war obscures a secret agenda the two companies will never admit to publicly: They don't like the Internet -- and never have."

"Both companies, you can bet, would be far more comfortable in a world without the Internet -- a world in which they governed who could post content on their networks and taxed anyone who made money from it. Seven years ago, only one thing made them accept and embrace the strange new notion of a network that nobody owned or controlled: the overwhelming enthusiasm for the Net on the part of masses of users and developers.

A kind of online "people power" forced open Microsoft's and AOL's doors seven years ago. Today both companies are itching to turn back the clock. Can they do it? They'll certainly try. But if these companies push too hard, those who care about the survival of an independent Web may simply vote with their feet and wallets, as they did once before. If they don't -- and only if they don't -- it will be time to sing a requiem for the Net."

BusinessWeek A Cold War in Cyberspace?

"Do consumers stand a chance in a market carved up by two corporate superpowers? Surprisingly, the answer may be yes. For the first time in a decade, AOL and Microsoft each face an adversary with real clout."

"Clearly, a digital world dominated by these titans is a long way from the wide-open markets that many analysts were predicting only 18 months ago. The not-so-bad news is that the new battle for the Net is between two well-oiled machines, with lots of cash and plenty of incentive to innovate and keep their competitive edges sharp."

Fortune The Beast Is Back

"All that said, even the cleverest copycatting won't make those shares redouble again. For sustained fast growth, Microsoft will have to pioneer new markets, as well as compete and win in sectors where its desktop dominance does not guarantee a free ride: in videogame consoles, with its multibillion-dollar Xbox machine bet; in PDAs, with its PocketPC architecture; and in cell phones and Internet appliances."

"The inventiveness blossoming on the company's rambling, coniferous campus in Redmond, Wash., is truly something new. "We're doing some of our best work ever," declares Gates. "In the last couple of years, a lot of our work hasn't been that visible. The lawsuit dominated the news. Then there was the whole thing about dot-com companies knowing it all. Not that we planned it this way, but there's actually a wave of products coming that will show we are at the beginning of a new era distinct from the Internet era." Or as Microsoft strategist David Vaskevitch puts it, "We are about to hit the golden age of software. The company is reinventing itself--let's call it Microsoft 3.0--so we'll be ready.""

Dan Gillmor Big business, big government face "the power of everyone"

"Not everyone likes the idea that we all have power. The people and institutions holding it today want to maintain their authority. That's one reason that Hollywood and the record companies have gone so far overboard in their crusade against unauthorized use -- as they define it -- of copyrighted material. It's gotten to the point where they're killing technologies that have other valuable uses."

"Big business and big government have every intention of dominating tomorrow's computing and communications. They will use divide-and-conquer tactics, or outright warfare, to hold on."

"But they're facing something different this time. The power of everyone may be their ultimate challenge, and our liberator."

"Are you watching your television set or is it watching you? The same technologies that are threatening privacy on the Internet ? including consumer data collection, profiling and targeted advertising ? are now being adopted by the U.S. television industry, according a report to be released Tuesday."

"To advertisers, the development of a technology that combines the Web?s interactivity with television?s element of dedicated spectatorship is a dream come true for they will now have access to a new breed of couch potato, one that both enjoys the warm glow of the tube and craves the personal touch of the Internet, the report finds."

redux [09.11.00]
Salon When Big Brother knows you watch "Big Brother"

"Even if you've always wanted to be a Nielsen family, ensuring that your television watching habits help shape programming, would you really want a company to know each and every time you flip to "Felicity?"

TiVo's CEO Mike Ramsay wants to use that information to sell targeted advertising and aggregate data to the networks about TV viewing habits. Sure, you'll get some benefits when you buy TiVo's set-top box ($399), and sign up for the monthly service ($10) -- like the chance to search for programs you want, save up to 30 hours of programming and even fast-forward through the commercials. But don't forget: While you're watching your favorite programs, the TiVo is watching you, recording every channel click and timing how long you spend watching "Family Feud" and noting every Pampers ad you skip.

Many people don't seem to mind. In fact, some like the service so much that they're cracking the box open and adding more memory. And Ramsay, a thick-throated Scot and former Silicon Graphics senior vice president, remains convinced that the TiVo will radically change the way advertisers, networks and viewers interact. All this from a glorified VCR?"

The New York Times Magazine Boom Box
[requires 'free' registration]

"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know."

First Monday Economics of Personal Information Exchange

"Personal information has become the new currency of online commerce. Decentralized Internet protocols have made computing resources increasingly pervasive, empowering individuals with an unprecedented amount of control. One result is that very few Internet consumers actually pay for network content, instead offering up personal information as they go. Content providers then collect, buy, and sell this information. To bring the Internet economy into its next stage of development, complementary software and legal architectures must be created in which personal information is regarded as a commercial property right, and accorded corresponding monetary value."

redux [09.02.00]
The Washington Post 'Opting In': A Privacy Paradox

"Some big computer out there knows all about Joan Schram. Its massive memory has stored the birth dates of family members and friends, the fact that she drives a Ford Explorer, and the names and birth dates of her American shorthair cat and rare Brazilian fila dog.

And she's thrilled about it.

Schram gave out the information herself, answering screen after screen of personal questions from LifeMinders Inc., a Herndon-based company that collects such data from consumers and e-mails them information in return ? reminders of important dates, tips on when it's time to treat the cat for ticks, and news and advertising targeted to their interests.

But like many Americans, the Kennedy Center employee also says she's uncomfortable with the thought that when she goes online, other Internet companies could be monitoring her wanderings and gathering the same kind of personal information that she freely gave over to LifeMinders. If somebody else knew about her Explorer, she says, "I'd be a little disconcerted."

It's one of the more puzzling conundrums of online life. While companies that capitalize on the Internet's powerful potential to invade privacy are denounced as villains of the information age, millions of people type out highly personal data and send it off to Web sites they've barely heard of, with no strong legal protection against misuse of the information."

"Financial firms are scrambling to hire companies such as EMC Corp., Oracle Corp., Compaq Corp., Veritas Software Co. and International Business Machines Corp. to create storage and retrieval systems that can manage the tons of information received each day and make it usable in an instant, 24 hours a day seven days a week. This focus on data mining started to gain momentum among financial companies five years ago, consultants say, but it has accelerated significantly in the past 12 to 18 months.

"The goal is to have what's known as a 360-degree view of a customer, so that anyone -- or any machine -- that interacts with a client knows everything there is to know about that person. The systems are so sophisticated that before company representatives pick up a ringing phone, for example, a computer display can tell them who is calling and, given that caller's history with the company, churn out a statistical prediction of what he or she might want -- to raise a credit limit, check an account balance or verify that a payment has been received."

redux [04.12.00]
The Standard From Selling Goods to Commodifying Relationships

"Instead of thinking of products as fixed items with set features and a one-time sales value, companies now think of them as "platforms" for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services. In the Age of Access services and upgrades are what count. The platform is merely the vessel to which these services are added.

In a sense, the product becomes more of a cost of doing business than an item in itself. The idea is to use the platform as a beachhead, as a way of establishing a physical presence in the customer's home or place of business. That presence allows the vendor to begin an ongoing "relationship" with the customer."

redux [03.30.00]
BusinessWeek Weblining

"You may think that getting graded A, B, or C ended with graduate school. Try getting Sanwa Bank to waive its $20 fee on your bounced check. Customer reps are trained to treat everyone politely. But your luck will depend on a little letter that pops up on a screen as soon as your name is punched into a computer, or when your e-mail arrives at Sanwa's server. If that letter is a ''C,'' customer reps don't exactly hustle on your behalf. That's because machines whirring at Net-speed have lumped you--often in seconds flat--with other customers whose accounts don't make much money for the bank. But if you score an ''A,'' you're right up there with the cream: Customers who generate hefty profits get bounced-check waivers, no questions asked. And B's? They're harder calls. They actually get to negotiate with the rep before their case is decided."

"Scientific or not, high-powered computing increases the incentive for businesses to Webline customers by making human behavior appear predictable. Visa International, for example, is using neural networks to build up elaborate behavioral profiles. Over months, these systems--which emulate the learning power of the brain--track a person's behavior online and off, then match it against models of similar personality and behavior types to predict how people will act in the future. The initial incentive was to recognize and thwart fraud. Now Visa is testing the software with 12 member banks in an effort to anticipate loan defaults. ''This gives us smarter data, and with Web-based technology, we can get that to our member banks in real time,'' says Martin Izenson, a director in Visa's risk management and security group."

"The Internet is used by almost three-quarters of U.S. teen-agers, a new report says. And nearly all of them are using instant-messaging technology in ways that may be transforming the manner in which kids deal with one another.

"It's kind of like having lots of telephones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducted surveys late last year that were used in the 46-page report. "Because it's synchronous conversation, it's the quick-hit kind of stuff that a phone conversation would have, except you're having it in many cases with many, many people.""

Pew Internet and American Life Project Teenage Life Online: The rise of the instant-message generation and the Internet's impact on friendships and family relationships

"The Internet is the telephone, television, game console, and radio wrapped up in one for most teenagers and that means it has become a major "player" in many American families. Teens go online to chat with their friends, kill boredom, see the wider world, and follow the latest trends. Many enjoy doing all those things at the same time during their online sessions. Multitasking is their way of life. And the emotional hallmark of that life is the enthusiasm for the new ways the Internet lets them connect with friends, expand their social networks, explore their identities, and learn new things."

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king

"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

"Labs all over the globe are working on advanced, brainlike AI. That includes labs at Carnegie Mellon University, IBM and Honda in Japan. "We're getting a better understanding of human intelligence," Kurzweil says. "We're reverse-engineering the brain. We're a lot further along than people think.""

"But can AI actually get close to human capability? Most scientists believe it's only a matter of time."

"In many ways, an artificial brain would be better than a human brain. A human brain learns slowly. Becoming fluent in French can take years of study. But once one artificial brain learns to speak French, the French-speaking software code could be copied and instantly downloaded into any other artificial brain. A robot could learn French in seconds."

The Third Culture FRANCISCO VARELA: The Emergent Self

"Francisco Varela died on May 28 at his home in Paris"

"Francisco, an experimental and theoretical biologist, studied what he termed "emergent selves" or "virtual identities." His was an immanent view of reality, based on metaphors derived from self-organization and Buddhist-inspired epistemology rather than on those derived from engineering and information science. He presented a challenge to the traditional AI view that the world exists independently of the organism, whose task is to make an accurate model of that world - to "consult" before acting. His nonrepresentationalist world - or perhaps "world-as-experienced" - has no independent existence but is itself a product of interactions between organisms and environment."

Daniel Dennett Review of F. Varela, E. Thompson and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind

"Cognitive science, as an interdisciplinary school of thought, may have recently moved beyond the bandwagon stage onto the throne of orthodoxy, but it does not make a favorable first impression on many people. Familiar reactions on first encounters range from revulsion to condescending dismissal--very few faces in the crowd light up with the sense of "Aha! So that's how the mind works! Of course!" Cognitive science leaves something out, it seems; moreover, what it apparently leaves out is important, even precious. Boiled down to its essence, cognitive science proclaims that in one way or another our minds are computers, and this seems so mechanistic, reductionistic, intellectualistic, dry, philistine, unbiological. It leaves out emotion, or what philosophers call qualia, or value, or mattering, or . . . the soul. It doesn't explain what minds are so much as attempt to explain minds away."

"Francisco Varela, an immunologist-turned-neuroscientist, Evan Thompson, a philosopher, and Eleanor Rosch, a psychologist, are radical critics of cognitive science, calling for what they consider to be more of a revolution than a set of reforms, and they have pooled their skills to execute what is surely the best informed, best balanced radical critique to date."

N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

"Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form."

"Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman."

"Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister has warned the internet threatens democracy and people's sense of patriotism.

Lee Hsien Loong says governments must find new ways to build a consensus on national issues and strengthen national identities."

"The internet "opens up societies and helps individuals link up with like-minded souls anywhere in cyberspace," he said.

But it "may weaken the bonds of place and circumstance that have always tied citizens to their home and nation," he added."

redux [10.26.00]
Center for Strategic and International Studies Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age

"The world is changing fundamentally. Images and information respect neither time nor borders. Hierarchy is giving way to networking. Openness is crowding out secrecy and exclusivity. Ideas and capital move swiftly and unimpeded across a global network of governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. In this world of instantaneous information, traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance."

"The prime mover of change is information technology. When Gutenberg shattered the old order by mechanizing printing five centuries ago, the democratization of literacy and knowledge irresistibly followed. As the millennium ends, the microchip is again revolutionizing information gathering and transmission and will bring even more profound changes in the next century. The critical elements are the international networks created by computers and electronic connectivity. Exponential growth in computing power and plummeting international telecommunications costs are having profound consequences for finance, business, education, medicine, civil society, and government. Nations once connected by foreign ministries and traders are now linked through millions of individuals by fiber optics, satellite, wireless, and cable in a complex network without central control. The Internet, with 100 million users today, will reach one billion people by 2005 and will be available to half the world's population by 2010. The network will become the central nervous system of international relations."

redux [05.10.01]
First Monday The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar

"In the present paper, I explore how the Internet has affected the flow of information between in and outside Myanmar (Burma). I show that there is a strong difference between the way information was presented before and after the introduction of the World Wide Web.

Within the last century, the country has been marked by political instability (Eliot, 1997; Freedom House, 2000). Particularly since its separation from British colonial rule in 1948, Burma has witnessed significant political change, violence and unrest. Since the early 1960s, Burma has essentially been an isolated state, with closed borders and a military government. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War seem to suggest that isolationism is growing less common worldwide. Importantly, meteoric advances in communications have also paralleled the fall of isolationism.

In my study, I examine two political events in Myanmar connected to student uprisings, in the hope of documenting how the Internet - as an easily researched symbol of modern communications - may be affecting the political strategies of one of the last isolated states."

redux [01.20.01]
The Guardian Unlimited Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution

"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to the streets of the capital, Manila, in scenes reminiscent of the 1986 uprising which ousted the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos."

"Most people heard about the planned swearing-in of Ms Arroyo via the text messages, the same means that galvanised a spontaneous uprising on Tuesday evening, when Mr Estrada's impeachment trial collapsed after he bullied and bribed senators to block the admission of vital evidence."

"The text message doing the rounds late last night said it all: "I guess we've won again."

redux [10.10.00]
MediaChannel.Org A Tower Aflame: Media, Metaphor and Revolution

"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.

Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols ? indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment."

"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."

"So who is Stratton Sclavos, and why do so many Netheads think he's the archfiend? The answer is that Sclavos and his company, Verisign, increasingly run the Internet. Think we're exaggerating? Consider this: Virtually every time you surf the Net, you run into one of his servers. Has your Website failed or been hacked recently? There's a good chance his company knew about the problem before you did. Do you have a domain name? He probably sold it to you. Bought anything online lately? He owns the business of making sure that no one steals your credit card number. And once you made your purchase, his company was probably responsible for aggregating that payment with other transactions and funneling them to the right banks and payment processors.

It's all part of Sclavos' master plan to build what he calls cyberspace's "first utility"--a company that handles all the boring but complicated and necessary details of life in the Internet Age."

"If the nineteen recent books and fifteen-pound stack of articles that confront me as I write are any measure, then nothing is more productive of food for thought than thoughts about the production of food. The introduction of methods of genetic engineering into agriculture has caused a public reaction in Europe and North America that is unequaled in the history of technology. Not even the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were sufficient to produce such heavy and effective political pressure to prohibit or further regulate a technology, despite the evident fact that uncontained radioactivity has caused the sickness and death of very large numbers of people, while the dangers of genetically engineered food remain hypothetical.

Whatever fears I might have of possible allergic reactions to food produced from genetically modified organisms, they are not more unsettling than the allergies induced in me by the quality of the arguments about them."

"According to a report released Monday by the Surgeon General's office, 67 percent of U.S. citizens have gigantic fat asses, with that number projected to climb significantly in the next decade.

The report is the latest in a string of dire findings from Surgeon General David Satcher concerning the high percentage of Americans who suffer from fatness of ass.

"The state of the American derriere has reached crisis proportions," Satcher said. "Without immediate steps to rectify this problem, we can only foresee even more hideously huge backsides as we continue to blimp out into the 21st century.""

"JOHN SEELEY BROWN, a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, turns to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger for a description of the next frontier in software: a blind man is not conscious of the cane he uses as a separate entity, Heidegger wrote, but regards it as an extension of his hand.

Dr. Brown led the legendary Xerox laboratory in the late 1980's and early 90's, when researchers there pioneered the idea of pervasive computing, in which connected microprocessors are embedded into virtually every office tool. For him, Heidegger's vision is a powerful guide for future software designers."

"Within IBM, there?s an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.

In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."

Outsights Knowledge Management -- Emerging Perspectives

"Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not."

redux [05.28.01]
The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
[requires 'free' registration]

""Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper

""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

redux [05.24.01]
Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.

"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?

"Knowledge is power.

"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management

"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."

"As pundits rush to explain what happened on Wall Street, fingers point to the thought leaders. We read exposés on Mary Meeker and Frank Quattrone--once dubbed geniuses--and wonder how they could have sponsored initial public offerings for the nth online grocer or women's portal. Or we ask ourselves how stock analysts could ride a stock all the way down from $150 to $3, all the while touting it as a "strong buy.""

"These are people who were supposed to be making smart decisions. How did they get it so wrong? The answer is, they didn't."

redux [05.31.01]
The Standard The 'X' in What's Next

"With great fanfare, Forrester Research announced last week that the Web is dead. With so many failing dot-coms, that news wouldn't be so hard to believe - if it weren't that Forrester has spent the past few years touting it as an engine of unrelenting hypergrowth."

But Forrester may be doing more than just trying to unhitch itself from the crazy train of the Web. In some ways, the veteran research firm's latest move shows the analyst business at its finest: giving the industry a rosy spot on the horizon to focus on, a clever name for that spot and a forecast with lots of zeroes in it to throw investors and entrepreneurs into a frenzy."

redux [03.12.01]
Salon Do you kick Yahoo?

"Remember, Yahoo still expects revenues of $800 million this year, and has been consistently profitable while other dot-com flashes-in-the-pan burned through their venture capital with nothing to show for it but some outré TV commercials. Yahoo isn't perfect, but it has maintained its lead as the top Web portal by consistently putting its users first, and its sites remain models of simplicity and service.

All of which raises the obvious question: Plainly, the market's pundits were way off a year ago, at the pinnacle of Net stock mania; so why should we put any more stock in them now? Their downside is looking just as insane as their upside."

redux [03.13.01]
The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

redux [07.27.00]
Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property

"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy

"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the ?90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers?not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They?re yours?they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And ?intellectual property? is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

"However, being first-or even one of the first-doesn't necessarily confer an overwhelming advantage. Just consider the early personal computer pioneers, such as Atari. Where are they now? Even the recent history of the Internet abounds in counterexamples to the thesis of first-mover advantage. Look at the market for Internet search engines. Five years ago, AltaVista achieved a technical breakthrough that propelled it to dominant status on the world's desktops. Today, AltaVista is a distant also-ran."

" The main reason the first-mover advantage is much less potent than is commonly claimed is that Internet time, the dominant theme of the dot-com bubble, is false. Yes, product development cycles have become noticeably shorter. This is true not just in software, but also in such old-economy products as cars. But consumers do not operate on Internet time. Novel technologies do not diffuse notably more rapidly than they did in the days before dot coms strode the earth."

redux [02.17.01]
Internet World Nielsen on Usability: First-Mover Advantage Is Overrated

"Most of the successful Internet companies were not anywhere near the first to market. There probably is some first-mover advantage, but it has been much overrated and used as a poor excuse for foisting poor-quality services on the public."

"I do not advocate delaying release until you have the perfect design, but I do think that history shows that it is not necessary to rush low-quality products to market as the only way to win. Higher quality that takes a little longer can often be a better strategy."

redux [11.07.00]
Fortune Getting Beyond the Innovation Fetish

"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.

"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""

"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.

"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."

Inc.Com Best Beats First

"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."

"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.

"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."

"The blockage that stopped traffic flowing between two of the top 10 networks in the United States for more than four days stemmed from a relationship called "peering," in which two networks agree to swap traffic back and forth without charge. In this case, Cable & Wireless has stopped peering with PSINet, saying the struggling company no longer had enough traffic to make the relationship worthwhile."

"Because of the complicated set of histories and relationships that make up the Internet, this had far-reaching ramifications. Cutting off this link prevented either network from seeing the other, though both could use different routes to get anywhere else on the Net."

The Standard Who Owns the Internet?

"That no one owns the Internet is taken as a truism. But the infrastructure on which the global network runs is owned by a handful of powerful corporations that can, and often do, use their control over the Internet backbone to their advantage in business negotiations. The influence these companies exert, some industry insiders fear, is strangling smaller companies and reducing customer choice."

""I can give you an example that shows that the Internet is owned by someone," says Jilani Zeribi, a senior analyst at market researcher Current Analysis in Sterling, Va. "Look at old peering arrangements, which were basically, 'I'll connect to your network, you carry my data and I'll carry yours.' The carriers started to realize that smaller ISPs were free-riding on their network, so they started charging for peering arrangements. Just the fact that someone wields that kind of power shows that someone owns the Internet.""

Telecommunications Online New Issues for Internet Interconnection

"The traditional world of Internet peering is undergoing radical change with the commercialisation of the Internet. The result may be the emergence of a running battle between the Internet backbone providers and Internet service providers (ISPs), before the two agree on the creation of a new value system and so new interconnection regime."

Gilbert & Tobin Internet Connectivity: Open Competition In The Face Of Commercial Expansion

"As a consequence, the rules for Internet interconnection are still in the process of being worked out - and in this uncertain environment, Internet interconnection is an inherently risky business. The new technology presents its own interconnection complexities, with multiple layers of virtual networks built one over the other - so that an operator at any layer of the infrastructure will have its costs determined by the prices charged by the virtual network below it, while its prices, in turn, will determine the cost structure of the layer above. Furthermore, while commercial principles would suggest that money should flow towards those operators which produce value, this does not always happen in practice (a hangover of the historical expectation that Internet access should be free for all). The uncertainties of the environment are aggravated by the fact that there is currently no consensus on the issue of how to attribute "value" to the various elements of Internet interconnection."

Citeseer On the Economics of Internet Peering (1999)

"We discuss economic rationales behind peering decisions in the Internet. In the first part of the paper we analyze the decision about a bilateral peering agreement between two commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) who are in Cournot competition. In the second part we discuss multilateral peering between commercial ISPs and an academic research network (ARN). The latter is organized as club of academics who share the cost of their network. It is discussed whether peering threatens the existence of the ARN and under what circumstances a commercial ISP would want to use strategic pricing to win all ARN-members as customers."

"Microsoft Corp. is preparing to launch a new instant-messaging service, using the leverage of its dominant operating system to catch market leader AOL Time Warner Inc. in the latest in a string of clashes between the two technology titans."

""This is not just about instant messaging," said Greg Sullivan, lead product manager of Windows XP, Microsoft's new operating system. "This is a whole new category of communications.""

MSNBC Instant Messaging's true value

"Last July, IMUnified, a coalition of technology and instant messaging companies comprised of AT&T, Microsoft's MSN, and others, launched with the intention of establishing an open standard for instant messaging technology so users of different services could chat with each other."

"NOW THAT GROUP'S Web site looks like a ghost town, its press area unchanged since August. (A call to a spokeswoman listed on the Web site wasn?t returned in time for publication.) But is that surprising?"

The Chicago Sun Times Getting the message out

"'The value is only as good as how many people you can talk to,'' said Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president for sales and marketing. ''We believe instant messaging should be as seamless as making a phone call or sending e-mail.''"

"Warren Carithers, a Rochester Institute of Technology professor who has used e-mail since its early days, said technicians agreed on e-mail standards in the 1970s because they were the ones driving the advances."

"With instant messaging, though, delays stem from a ''desire on the part of service providers to attract and keep a user base,'' he said."

"In other words, large companies driving the technology advances don't want to give up market share."

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."