Jan
30
Someday, when I’m dreaming …
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Apologies first for linking blog entries with song lyrics. Memo to Self – kick this silly habit. Response from Self – but your whole information behaviour is just a series of silly habits, so why quit a comparatively harmless one? (That’s the trouble with Self, I find. Such a smart ass. Makes the whole idea of an interior dialogue so pointless and frustrating.) But habitual information behaviours is not a subject to be given up lightly. The way we learn, absorb, research and find content contentment is intimately bound into habitual patterns of finding out, and some internet innovations work with those patterns – while others work radically against them. I remember returning from the US some years ago, newly signed into Twitter and LinkedIn, and wondering if these would ever become parts of my habitual behaviour, and, lo, it comes to pass that they are lungs through which I breathe. Yet I thought the innovation which would most change my life was going to be StumbleUpon, and I find that I have changed machines and not re-installed it.
So here I am, back in the US again (an experience that happens most months, admittedly) and once more we are in a firestorm of service innovation. During a trip which will take me to New York (twice), San Diego and Nashville, I find a constant reminder of the atmosphere around the internet boom of the early years of this century – and the way it continued despite the dotcom bust. I heard an investor yesterday talking about the “new bubble”, while governments and bankers are still meeting to resolve the last one (whose predecessor was the one whose subsequent regulatory adjustment would bring to an end, in our lifetimes and forever, the cycle of boom and bust…)
So what will this round of hyper-invested, hyper-hyped internet launches do to my habitual behaviours? Quite a bit, perhaps. I have now encountered three, new to me as a user, which could fit that category. I am sure they will be familiar to many of you already, but here are some random reactions from a new user:
- I was really impressed by Qwiki (www.qwiki.com). Loved the Vimeo. delighted to see the return of Dr Louis Monier of AltaVista fame. I have signed up to the Alpha because it seems to me that the idea of defining topics and people in short clips, and then turning them into audio as well as text and maps and video equates very well with the way people learn, and with the demands of mobile access. If you are English, enter the topic “Eustace Folville” and you will see what I mean. If this catches on then it becomes an instant referencing point for learning processes. At present the charming American computerized voice lacks all pronunciation skills, but the service does answer the teacher who said to me at BETT that “my kids are too lazy and don’t read well enough to copy Wikipedia”! And if you are a Publisher and reading this blog, go straight to the “For Publishers” section on this site: you have around a day to decide whether you catch at the new bandwagon – or not!
- I shall certainly use www.unsubscribe.com to hoover away all of the persistent marketeers who still litter my email with unwanted marketing messages. Yes, you know who you are! Toner Giant, the Kiawah Island marketing department and others! I have tried to unsubscribe but you seem not to hear. Now we have a service that will message you back until you desist, and remove you from my inbox. I can do as many of you as I like for $20 a year, and the whole thing works on a downloaded extension to the email client which produces an “unsubscribe” button alongside each email. The internet world creates its own vices and compensates with its own correctives (the founder calls his service “email hygienics”). In October they raised $2.1 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures.
- And I would love Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) to work – and globally. I know that it will recreate the privacy wars , and that what it does is probably illegal in most of Europe, but I think that we all want to be able to work in a directory context where we enter one piece of information and get all the others in terms of directory access. How often I lack an email address, and even the invaluable LinkedIn cannot help, or urgently need a street address, or a location map, or to know which email address is current. I am often less concerned about social network membership, personal wealth, or photos and videos showing the individual on the web. But Spokeo searches and combines all this, and frighteningly well in the US, so that if I resided here I would want to be able to specify exactly what connections it made, especially between personal and business connectors. But what it is doing is something that the phone companies never managed to do online, and it is a solution, again, which fits a mobile access world like a glove. And £2.95 per month.
My previous generation having reached maturity with the LinkedIn IPO last week, I shall be interested to see how this new generation fares. Qwiki may be the StumbleUpon of my new crop, of course, but I would not bet upon it. Service innovation succeeds on the network because specific behavioural requirements are met, because service pricing and conditions of use are appropriate and because users recognize its place in their own personal “workflow” of active transactional engagement with the world around them. All that and something else too – they must feel good using it and feel that others think they look good as a result. Get to that last homebase as well and services score. I shall watch my new trio like a hawk!
Jan
25
Let’s do it – anonymously…
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In 1988 , after much selling effort , we received a contract from the government departments involved ( the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office and the Department of Trade and Industry – neither of whom exist now ) to create model terms and conditions through which the public sector could release to the private sector in the UK all government information which was neither personal to named individual citizens or retained for security reasons. We produced a model contract, founded a company called Information Agents Ltd to do the trades, and predicted in our final report that the two departments would face a stiff, at times impossible, battle with the rest of government to implement this. The model contract was agreed, the agency company contracted – and almost no trades took place.
Why? We were working on the basis that the information economy becoming increasingly important in the US, founded on the confluence of the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and could be recreated in UK plc, helping to give British companies a global marketplace in information products and services in English established on the platform of a successful domestic industry resulting from public-private partnership.
And now, 22 years later and to a blaze of media triumphalism, it is here. Following the intervention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee , and the Prime Minister saying ” Let’s Do It !”, www.data.gov.uk has arrived as the agency for access and licensing. Those who want the full story should go to the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, and then remember the long campaign fought by that newspaper in support of this cause. I am hugely happy that this has happened, and hope that the private sector, and all of the “accidental” publishers flourishing on the web, will grab this opportunity with both hands and use the data now available creatively to demonstrate what can be done.
And I am very worried. In the intervening period I served for five years on the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information. I know that the government site is still only carrying a thin slice of what is available for re-use. I know too that the last 22 years have been marked by two things: the extreme reluctance of the UK Treasury and so-called trading funds to abandon or downscale the idea of earning fees and royalties to defray the cost of collection, updating and then selling data that they have a statutory duty to collect at the taxpayer’s expense; and the whole psychology of power retention and the implicit government servant vow of omerta that surrounds the reluctance of government to divulge anything but the most basic of information for fear that it could be used against the giver.
So will the Berners Lee initiative work? We had better hope so, since our information economy in the UK badly needs it to do so. But Sir Tim and his colleagues need to go on a Billy Graham-style conversion campaign to re-educate government in the collaborative nature of the Web. And win over those bastions of protected trading rights, the Meteorological Office, the Ordnance Survey, and, neither government fish nor private sector fowl, Royal Charter operations like the Environment Agency or the BBC. The resistance already have a hefty victory over postcodes(http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22222 ) And then they tackle an even more difficult issue: local government.
There is certainly no scope for self-satisfaction in all of this. Sir Tim has now made the issue real to all players, something which has taken 22 years to achieve. It would be dreadful if the political element in all of this became a casualty of the forthcoming UK General Election. It needs all party support. It would be pointless to spend the next 22 years expanding the base of available content so slowly that the benefits identified by the changes were imperceptible in their impact. And above all, we need to be aware of how easy it could be for opponents to win back some of the ground that they have lost. A report in the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper, indicates search analytics in the US being used to ” de-anonymize” anonymized personal data, presumably by finding patterns of activity which equate to prior behaviour. Thank goodness few UK civil servants read the Observer: the idea that names and addresses might be re-attached to medical records, for example, would shut down epidemiological research overnight in our risk-averse culture.
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