Uncategorized – Page 4 – iCrowds, the intelligence of crowds

October 2, 2007

Who do you call

When I start to work on something new the first thing you do is find a lot of information about the subject you are going to deal with. However, information only gets you started. In order to really understand a subject it is essential to talk to people that have dealt with it before. You can read a wall of books on how to cure diseases but there is no substitute for a talk with the real expert. In every field the amount of knowledge to make the right decisions is so vast, you simply can not write everything down.

In the past I did a project for bakery’s and my task was to write down how they make the bread. One of the issues was how we could describe the moment the dough is ready to be laid down to rest. Terms like stickiness, feel, elasticity and many others where mentioned but there was no way to get a good description to tell someone knew when it was OK. The only way to learn this was to work together with an expert and be shown how it was to be done.

(this reminds me of a story from Winnie the Pooh. Someone asks Winnie what he likes most in the world. And he thinks in his mind that honey of course is very nice. But the moment just before eating the honey, that was the best….. but he did not know the word for this moment.

For me this leads to the conclusion that we can not rely on written information to understand the complexities of real life. We need the knowledge and interpretation of experienced people to understand what it means.
There I think there are quite some risks in a project like “kindbeeld”, a government project in the Netherlands where all information regarding a child is stored in a system so it is easier to see when something goes wrong, even though the child has moved quite often (the idea is a nationwide implementation). When we all lived our lives in the same villages there was no need for such a system since people knew each other. But the risk with a system like this is that people using this information will give a totally different interpretation of what is meant.
In a project we did some time ago we did not provide people with the information itself but gave back the contact information of the people that wrote down this information. The idea is that it is better to call these people and really get their opinion than to misinterpret the written words.
People (and children …) are a lot more complex than making bread. We should be careful not to overestimate the power of information without context.

October 2, 2007

Symbiosis

I think the most interesting new adaptations of technology are the ones that make clever combinations of the real and digital world. You might say the ones that live in symbiosis, where the digital world feeds on the physical world and vice versa.
Second Life I do not like since it merely involves the digital realm. Meeting somebody from a discussion group in real life creates great physical meetings and makes the discussion later on more interesting, knowing the other person also in real life.
At the moment I am talking to an organisation involved in the safety sector. Practice for them is extremely important. Problem for them is that practice in real life is difficult and expensive. Not all situations can be created in real life (too costly or physically so destructive that it can not be done). On the other hand practice in the digital world does not feel real. It is hard to substitute loud noise, a roaring fire and wind and many people putting pressure on you. In a game you also can get the adrenaline working but different …
The idea of the project is to set up an environment where digital and physical practice is completely intertwined. A group of policeman can be training in a special trainings village while their physical coordinates are transferred to a simulation environment. The commander can than command the real people who are training as well as digital troops. These two world you might say feed on one another, like the fish help the turtle to stay clean buy picking of the algae and getting a good meal by doing it.

September 29, 2007

Long tail, small earnings?

Struggling producer? In a post from “The long tail” a small movie director has written an interesting e-mail to Chris Anderson.

But the reality at this time for me and my company is that I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis. In short, I am a much smaller and more struggling version of the giants that have preceded me.
Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.

The general idea of the e-mail is that the long tail with niche content is nice for the consumer but that it is hard for the producer. Fundamentally there are only a few customers in the long tail so it is hard to make money for producers. Since when you produce it takes almost the same amount of time and money to make a blockbuster than to make a niche product. It is a great niche product when you have three really dedicated fans but how much money will you make.
Most of the success stories in the long tail are from distributors for whom it does not matter what item they sell since their business model is based on the total amounts of all products sold together (in the end they are all bits on a platter). And fact is that due to small world effects it is the big “hub-distributors” that are getting bigger and bigger. This might mean that in the end we end up with only a few and powerful distributors since they are the only one with a large enough audience to make your niche product profitable. Somehow that has a familiar smell to it…

September 27, 2007

Are you linkedIn?

I think we all know the sorry feeling that we lost track of people we knew and worked with in the past but lost sight of. In the past it a was always very hard to find them again. Since some time now there is a new social network called LinkedIn. The idea is that you can find people by name and that they themselves keep their profiles up date. Meaning you can find them on their current e-mail address.
By using it I already found some old friends from the places I worked, colleagues, customers and partners. It even integrates into outlook and recognizes people you may know from all the old e-mails you have sent (I have an archive of all my mails from 1997 and on)
This linking to each other creates an interesting web. You can normally see the acquaintances of other people and and have a look at their network. Potentially you can get an introduction for people you wish to contact. One of the other interesting features is that you can pose a question that others can try to answer.
It seems to be growing explosively, especially in the Netherlands…
I think one of the reasons it works is that the identity of the people involved is (on average) accurate. People are who they say they are. After all, the network is also meant for finding real people and real jobs. So there is no use in providing false identities. I am really curious in how this network is evolving. Another interesting aspect is that the network that people build based on their role is becoming more their own instead of their employers. This may create a feeling of independence (which is a good thing in my book). Potentially the added value for the users is much bigger than it is in networks like facebook since it keeps track of how your career evolves after graduation.
I sent them an e-mail to find out if it is possible to get (anonymously) their data on the linkages between people. This of course is a small world network but it is interesting to find out what kind of people are the connectors, what is the average separation, and so on. I have not yet received an answer…
You can find me on linkedIn .

September 20, 2007

The Times are changing

Isn’t it funny how more and more things are being paid for by advertising while at the same time we all get more and more irritated by advertising being everywhere.
The New York Times have stopped their paid subscription service in favor of free access. This is a subscription service that made them 10 million dollar a year. They now feel that they can make more money on advertising.
Somehow I sometimes get an uneasy feeling about all those things that are being paid by advertising money. Somehow I still think this business model has it’s limits. Let’s do a thought experiment:

Imagine that more and more companies are making money by mixing ads with the service they deliver to us. OK, let’s be really wild: imagine that all services are being paid for by advertising. Would that not be great: all services are free, all we have to do for it is accept some adds (and many we can block them?).

Problem is: who is going to pay for all these ads. The companies that make their money by selling ads together with their services will of course not be advertising, at least they will advertise less than they sell ads or they will lose money. So if everybody will give their services away for “adtention”, who will pay for the ads?
I can understand the business model of Google search. Since through the search I am implying what I am interested in I can imagine that an ad on that subject is worth money. But only if the one advertising his services is getting paid cash when he sells his product or service. When the advertiser is also getting paid by ads than it is starting to look like a pyramid scheme.
And we all know where these end….

September 6, 2007

Virtual children

Children grow up sooo fast. My son said that he wanted a blog too so I made one for him. He made his first post (and he referred to his dad’s blog on it, nice 🙂 ). Than he asked that I made a link to his blog. I said to him that he should first write some posts.
His reactions than was that iCrowds deals with social networks so that linking to each other is something that should be done. Duh…
11 years …. here you can find him.
Willem, now you have a moral obligation to write, often.

September 6, 2007

Conversation

The Athens Agora Some books are very helpful in making you understand developments. This summer I have read a book called “The Cluetrain manifesto”. Central theme of the book (which by the way is written in 2000 but started as as website in 1999) is the statement that markets (and a lot of other things) are conversations. The way companies use corporate communications and PR to tell us how we should think about them simply does not work anymore.
It makes you think. When I go to the market each Saturday to get the ingredients for a nice dinner I am in constant conversation. I tell the girl that always helps me with the vegetables how they were last week and she tells me what kind of specials she has this week. Sometimes we discuss how the ingredients are best used for the recipe I will be making. I learn from her and sometimes I can tell her new things. Same with the small butcher that I go to. In essence this is a weekly conversation that accompanies the business we do together. The one greatly enhances the other.
In a way this is the natural way people started doing business. Democracy and debate became of age in the Agora of Athens that was established as a marketplace. It is only with the establishment of big companies that we lost the conversational way of doing business. And because of this greater distance we created corporate communication to tell people what we think they should think of our company. But we stopped listening and forgot about two way conversation.
Internet and especially the social networks it supports again creates the opportunity to be in conversation with the market. Not to tell people why your product is so great but to be in conversation about the features people want. People love to help companies to improve the products they like, all they ask is that they listen and take them seriously.
I think here is a message for a lot of companies. More and more it will be needed to open up the company and invite people from the outside to help. With the development of new products, with how the product can be implemented.
The market is a conversation and conversations go in two directions (at least the nice ones, don’t you think?).
One of the other great books I have read this summer is linked, a book about the theory of small world networks. Many know about the famous Milgram experiment where he showed that most people in the world are connected by not more than six handshakes. Linked shows that this is because society has a “small world” topology, meaning that we have many closely related groups that are coupled by “connectors”, people that have many long range connections. The funny thing is that this type of network is also fairly common in nature, e.g. the way neurons are connected in the brain and the way fireflies synchronizes their lights. He describes many forms of these networks and simulations he did with this topology. I think this work has a lot of design rules in it how to create successful social networks. Somehow I think for example that the dunbar number (which relates to groups size and dynamics) is related to this. I will get back to that some other time.

August 29, 2007

Cookie jar

I remember as a small child that, when you had taken some cookies from the cookie jar you were not supposed to take, your mother somehow always knew. I suppose this must feel the same for the people that got caught by the Wikiscanner.
This is an application that relates the IP adresses from the people who did edits on the Wiki pages. Surpringly (or maybe not so surprising really) a lot of edits come from organisations that are involved in the wiki-article and their intentions are not always without self interest. The page of George W. Bush was edited from the home security office (removal of the fact that he had a drinking problem) and the best of all about the edit from the queen’s home address where information from her daughter-in-law Mabel was edited to make her look a little better.
This all is of course not surprising. When information can be edited there is no reason to think companies and people will not do so in order to make them look better. The interesting part is that it turns out that many of the un-truthful edits had been discovered very quickly and have been repaired withing hours and sometimes even minutes.
Also, the wikiscanner is a new step that “the crowd” can and will use to make the information more trustworthy. More transparency will lead to better information. Not perfect but still a little bit better and better to judge.
These are for example the edits from the Telematica Instituut (looks like we have a lot of mathematicians in the company or are these the edits of one person?). Interesting…

August 26, 2007

La Dolce vita

It has been a long time since last post due to vacation and various other activities. But even in vacation time you can still enjoy the possibilities of all the new channels of communication and communities.
There is a (closed) discussion group I am member of that deals with various political subjects. Many of the members are educated as philosophers and the discussions are on a very interesting level. One of the people in this group is an American living in the Bourgogne in France. During the vacation I sent him an e-mail to suggest to meet for drinks when I would be traveling through France on the way back home. He was so nice to invite us to his house and stay the night there. Imagine: in the middle of the beautiful country side in the Bourgogne in a water mill dating back to the year 1300. Great company, great place, great food, great wine (probably the best red wine I ever tasted) and great conversation. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
One of the other surprises was how my son of 11 years was able to converse in English. Due to his playing games on Internet and chatting with other children all over the world he could really hold a conversation.
This to me shows that it is the combination of real and digital life that makes the current development on communities so interesting. It is not either the one or the other but the possibilities of intertwining those two to create new surprises.
Thanks Bill and Nala for a rememberable evening.