Announcing a slight blog change; hopefully combining both of my blogs will be an easier way to combine interests and fragmented content than defraggregation.

July 2008:

In an effort to split out a couple of different interests, going forward, this site [Taylor Davidson Photography, Travel & Culture] will remain focused on photography, travel and cultural musings, and all business, entrepreneurship and innovation thoughts will be posted at Unstructured Thoughts.

After nearly a year, today I’m recombining the interests. Here’s the details:

• Unstructured Ventures, my site about my business and consulting endeavors, is not going away. All the old posts will stay on this blog, but going forward I’ll be writing everything on the Taylor Davidson site.
• All the “Unstructured Thoughts” posts will be in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship category.
• The RSS feed, email subscription and Twitter link bot will still work; if you’re reading this through RSS or email do not change anything to continue to get the same Unstructured Thoughts posts. Click here to get the full details on how to follow the sites and categories by RSS, email and Twitter.
• If you want to search for posts across both sites, I created a new search page to make it a little easier (especially for me).

Why am I doing this?

• I’m combining the blogs to find a better way to link interests rather than divide them into different silos; frankly I’m finding it harder to truly separate the interests and conversations.
• Depending on the ranking or measurement metric you prefer, this blog is one of the top 30 to 100 blogs about venture capital, which I find somewhat odd since it’s increasingly less about venture capital and more about the broader world of entrepreneurship and innovation. Combining this with my photography blog (oddly, one of top 20 to 100 blogs about photography in its own right) should be an interesting experiment.
• And honestly, simpler is better…

A selection from a recent post on ambient intimacy on my blog about photography, travel and culture:

Intimacy without being Intimate.

Intermittent, one-way, more of a “crush” than love; the feeling of a shared relationship without it being shared, a benevolent form of stalking; ambient intimacy is what happens when we strengthen our loose ties, by keeping in touch with people by following, reading and caring about another person without telling them you care.

… The Paradox.

But here’s the paradox: as much as I want to decry our expanding loose networks, fracturing attention and fake friendships sustained through our ambient connections, maximizing the power of loose networks and loose ties is the real opportunity; it’s where I’ve met the most interesting people, learned the most interesting things, connected to new opportunities; it’s where we find growth and create new value, it’s where we find new edges; it’s the source of innovation and insights we would not have seen otherwise. It’s why we care about serendipity and discovery; we’re hooked by the positive variable intermittent reinforcement baked into all successful, widely-adopted tools; an insight, an opportunity, a confirmation, a life-changing connection behind every click.

Why is this important?

As Jim Mitchem (@smashadv) pointed out in the comments, “there are amazing opportunities that exist behind each of these human collisions“.

Balancing the benefits and costs of human collisions is the core of discovery, search, serendipity and filtering; it’s why we care about Google, Twitter and the fail whale, journalism, public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, et. al; at the core of every consumer, user, customer, marketer, developer and salesman is a person responding to the incentives that frame their worlds. Deep within the birth, rise, decline and death of any industry or product is a better way to create, understand, structure and balance the human collisions in our worlds.

With that, here’s to maximizing collisions…

Comment on the original post to keep the conversation flowing…

Next time you need to dig through a massive amount of publicly-available information to find prior art, research copyrights or patent filings, would you hire a) a team of experts* or b) an intern and spend $1,000 on Mechanical Turk** (or, more possibly, c) both)?

Quoted deep in an article by Blaise Alleyne in Techdirt, Music Fans And ‘Amateur Musicologists’ May Impact Coldplay/Satriani Copyright Battle, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP discuss the role of “amateur musicologists in Joe Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay for copyright infringement:

What makes the Internet commentary regarding the two songs particularly interesting is that much of it replicates the type of expert analysis that both sides will likely use if the case goes forward. In music copyright infringement cases, it is rare for parties to rely solely on bare assertions of copying or independent creation. Instead, they frequently engage “musicology” experts to undertake detailed analyses of every element of alleged similarity between the two works and conclude whether all or portions of one work were copied from the other. The parties and their experts in [this case] should consider the analyses of the “amateur musicologists” that have weighed in via the Internet and other media, if for no other reason than they may be informative of how a jury might ultimately view the case…

While Satriani v. Martin may not go to trial for a variety of reasons, it is clear that user-generated content sites like YouTube have the potential to alter the way music cases — and other types of copyright case — are developed. Because advances in technology allow the public to participate in real-time infringement debate, future parties would do well to monitor this “chatter” as it could uncover evidence and theories that may be helpful to the case of the copyright owner, the alleged infringer or both. [emphasis added]

Alleyne adds to the commentary:

The online discussion is largely what has made this case so unique. There have been successful copyright infringement lawsuits over melodies in the past …, but never has the public been able to participate so much in the debate.

…The melodies are undoubtedly similar, but the legal question is whether or not Coldplay copied from Satriani. It’s not just Coldplay’s word against Satriani’s, but music fans and “amateur musicologists” are gathering evidence and providing theories which are having a noticeable impact on the proceedings.

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Obviously experts and amateurs have their place: the opportunity is using combinations of both in the right ways and situations.

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* Even “experts” have their odd deficiencies.
** Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: a “crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.”

Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed and Andrew D. Henderson, Harvard Business Review April 2009, Are “Great” Companies Just Lucky?:

Studies that examine high-performing companies to uncover the reasons for their success are both popular and influential. … But there’s a problem: The “great” companies from which these studies draw their conclusion are mostly just lucky.

The issue is about…

… the folly of attributing outcomes arising from systemic variation (the random nature of coin tosses) to the supposedly unique attributes to a few individuals, who are really just the luckiest coin flippers. Similarly, we can credibly claim that a firm is remarkable only when its performance is so unlikely that systemic variation alone cannot account for its results. Most success studies don’t address this fact, relying instead on the “self-evident” nature of exceptional performance.

Meaning: simply out-lasting one’s competitors is not a sufficient justification for claiming a firm is “great”, and that any attempt to figure out why those firms have succeeded (by “staying in the game”) will misinterpret the true causes of success.

Case in point: have you looked at the original list of “Good to Great” companies? How are they doing now?

A smattering of recent quarter-thoughts (half of a half-thought) on the different incentives between a custodian and an owner, what “original” really means, the power of asking questions in public, if decentralized responses are really the best strategy, and how much attention we really pay to everything.

• Fred Wilson, Use the Public Channel For Better Customer Service, my comment:

  Point #4 is the most interesting part; in essence, “defaulting to the public channel” would be a way to flip customer service from a one-to-one response channel (cost center) to a many-to-many interaction platform (profit center).

  Private data sits stuffed inside a data center or company waiting for the owner to make sense of it, but public data is open for anyone to make sense from (and ultimately, profit from); the owner becomes a custodian, a massively different relationship.

• Why do underdogs fail to adapt and test “better” strategies if they can’t adopt the “best strategy”? Malcolm Gladwell, Annals of Innovation, How David Beats Goliath.
• Nothing is truly new;

  #1: “The trick is realizing that the success and failure of everything is all in your head”

  #2: “In the end, I live and die on the inside of my head.”

  Culture reverberates around, similar ideas voiced in different ways; it’s the way it’s always been and always will be. Even the “original” is influenced by the past, consciously and unconsciously; the new is shaped by the boundaries, possibilities, conventions and taboos of the past.

  But current copyright law simply doesn’t recognize what “original” work really is in today’s content-rich world; intellectual property law has failed to catch up with how culture has adapted to new technological realities. Whatever can be copied will be copied; instead of fighting to suppress copying and remixing, shouldn’t we focus on learning and promoting how to do it right?

• Ask a simple question like “How would you compare StockTwits and Covestor”, and in a flash, you get a long answer, StockTwits vs. Covestor. I love it when the Internet works the way it should.
• “Bill [Gates] stole my girls”; stories and motivation from Mark Cuban.
• How Jennifer Aniston hit on Malcolm Gladwell (or not); part of an epic conversation over email between Bill Simmons of EPSN and Gladwell. Dig in to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for more about “inliers”, running the full-court press, using a roster efficiency by playing a different game, eliminating the NBA draft, and how the force of individual personalities can shape teams, leagues and strategies.
• David Brooks, Globalism goes Viral:
  

  In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.

  A network of diverse, decentralized actors might be the best foundation for dealing with decentralized events such as swine flu, given the advantages that credible, empowered local actors have to create faster, “test-and-learn”-based responses; but we’ve also seen the downside: massive hype, misinformation and a failure to understand the bigger picture (context) behind these global events, a massive misallocation of time, resources and energy.

  The real question: which type of method for organization, centralized or decentralized, has more room to improve?

• Ed Cotton, People will give you 56 seconds:
  

  The average time for a site visit in March of 2009 was 56 seconds. This puts tremendous demands on the efficiency of web design, meaning designers have to make sure people get what they need as quickly as possible. Perhaps this is why most websites look the same.

  It also calls into question the depth that people want to go into to learn more. It’s not uncommon for clients and agencies to think about putting long form content and long copy into areas of their website, but with this research, one has to wonder if any of this material ever gets read or watched.

  All of that may be true, but my guess is that the average is meaningless; instead, what’s the median? What’s the distribution of site visit times?

  More interesting is the average of 111 domains visited per person; but again I’d like to understand the distribution of site visits over those 111 domains.

  In fact, I’d be impressed if you read this far…

Not to rehash the debate over “free”, but the economics behind free underlies nearly every conversation and business decision today. Let’s focus on one small part of the debate.

The economics behind “freeconomics” blurs the distinction between “customer” and “user”; even though the user may not bear the cost, someone does. Companies that provide services to users for free still bear the marginal costs of the free services, therefore their business models are based on finding people and companies to subsidize the free services.

If the people subsidizing “free” go away (and that includes cash cow product lines, investors, venture capital, advertisers, paying users, buyers of aggregated and structured data, etc.), then what’s free right now may not be free in the future.

While the debate around “free” tends to center on the web, the web is merely one of many networks in use today. Take the examples of telecommunications (fixed and wireless), transportation (automobile, train et. al.) and energy networks: each network contains an embedded technological and economic structure that dictates the rules and incentives behind each interaction over the network.

But these networks aren’t static, and as each network becomes structurally more like the web their fundamental economics will change.

An example? Let’s start with the “mobile web”; Aaron Chua starts the discussion with Can Amazon be the default payment API for the Web? and I add in my comment:

Touching back to the piracy issue, is the [different economics behind the "regular" web and the mobile web] a failure of pricing mechanisms or is it a failure of distribution networks and transaction costs (including non-priced transaction costs)?

The digital economy isn’t forcing prices to zero; it’s forcing prices to their marginal costs. Marginal costs are higher in mobile (and virtual) at the moment because they have different pipes, different gatekeepers, different marketmakers, creators have substantially different access to the tools of production and distribution, low standardization of interfaces, etc. All of those create higher marginal costs, and combined with the “controlled” nature of mobile and virtual, there simply isn’t the same level of competition as in the non-mobile Internet… for now.

A day will come when the difference between the “mobile web” and the “real web” are framed less by the pipes and more by the access devices and their interfaces. Viewed more broadly, as innovation changes the structure of our networks, new technological possibilities and constraints will re-frame our economic structures, behavioral incentives, business opportunities and usage behavior.

Viewed simply, tomorrow will not be like today, tomorrow’s strategies will not be today’s, and what’s free today may not be free in the future.

And what’s expensive today may be free tomorrow: literally.

A respite from the next round of esoteric impractical thinking…

• Zach Klein, commenting on the Feltronification of Tumblr:

  It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me, rather it’s the trend of emphasizing a user’s popularity on the network. Lamentably, I think this metric will come to define the experience for the next generation of social networks. The internet’s utility for many people will equate to constant awareness of one’s value, and the play of meaningless games to increase the sum. This in turn will render many networks impersonal and irrelevant.

  Displaying social data changes social behavior; most of our statistics publicized by our various social networks, blogs and other websites measure and encourage talking rather than listening; with the increasing ease of broadcasting or “contributing” via sharing, “liking” or reblogging, is the discussion getting dumbed down? In response, should we raise the bar of the conversation, make it harder to create and publish, or find better ways to filter through the noise?

• Mike Speiser, Diversification = Mediocrity:
  

  Proponents of diversification argue that it takes the edge off of making a mistake. That would be a good argument if people acted the same way independent of their ownership in an outcome. But human beings do alter their behavior based on how much skin they have in the game. When costs and benefits are divided amongst too many, accountability is lost. Excessive diversification makes participants passive, dependent on the actions of others who are dependent on the actions of others, and so on. A free rider at best and a sucker at worst.

  Read the rest of the post; also, vaguely reminds me of one of the lessons I’ve learned through failure.

• Noah Brier, Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections:
  

  Essentially it’s been my feeling that the best ideas really just come from people paying attention to the stuff that doesn’t make any sense. While most of the world ignores or gets angry when things don’t work, inventors see an opportunity to fix a problem (or at least think about why things are the way they are).

  How do we rectify the need to focus and the need to explore?

• My comment, reblogged, in response to a video about Jay Parkinson describing Hello Health:
  

  Very cool indeed; instead of changing the entire system, [Jay Parkinson]’s creating a new system [via Hello Health] that works around the existing; it will start in current un-served and under-served segments and spread to the currently mis-served segments once they realize how much better the solution is; a “quiet” revolution from the quiet masses; I’m excited.

  Very meta.

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Continuing the conceptual thinking around a “personal API”…

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, Defining Common Collaboration Tensions:

Loosely versus Tightly Coupled: One objection you might reasonably raise relative to the collaboration curve is the n-squared problem, in which the expense and effort required for participants to interact in a given environment rises exponentially with the number of participants. In a pull-based creation space, loose coupling provides a way around the n-squared problem by modularizing (and standardizing the interfaces between) resources so they can be flexibly combined and recombined. This sharply contrasts with more hardwired approaches in which the activities people do and the connections between them must be redefined each time the activity or connection changes. Said differently, loosely coupled collaboration scales; tightly coupled collaboration does not.

Sound like a “personal API”?

As I explained the concept of a personal API last month,

…when I talk about “personal APIs” I’m not only talking about accessing or receiving content, I’m also talking about delivering content and context to people; using the term API is a conceptual approach to thinking about how we can “scale” our time, thoughts and value stored inside ourselves to deliver more (quantity) and deeper (quality) interactions to other people; how can we reduce inter-personal transaction costs of interactions to deliver more value?

Right now my websites and my template financial model are the only “personal APIs” I have, but in their current unorganized, unpersonalized, untargeted and “noisy” state they are only a glimmer of a way to “scale me”.

Even worse, my efforts to create signals merely adds to the noise; the web of duplicative content aggregators and republishers hinders our collective ROI on attention and increases our collaboration transaction costs; by trying to help I’m helping make it worse.

Solving this paradox by moving the idea of a “personal API” from conceptual to actual is going to be fun…

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(Thanks to Nicolas Gabard [@NicolasGabard] for the link.)

It’s simply too much fun to skewer convention, especially a convention that might be more ephemeral than we think.

Matthew Stewart in The Atlantic Online, The Management Myth:

The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills—one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call “problem solving”). But do they manage to teach such skills?

What they don’t seem to teach you in business school is that “the five forces” and “the seven Cs” and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think. Case studies may provide an effective way to think business problems through, but the point is rather lost if students come away imagining that you can go home once you’ve put all of your eggs into a two-by-two growth-share matrix.

Next to analysis, communication skills must count among the most important for future masters of the universe. To their credit, business schools do stress these skills, and force their students to engage in make-believe presentations to one another. On the whole, however, management education has been less than a boon for those who value free and meaningful speech. M.B.A.s have taken obfuscatory jargon—otherwise known as bulls***—to a level that would have made even the Scholastics blanch. As students of philosophy know, Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure.

Spot on.

There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Before you protest, having completed an MBA gives me the right to make fun of MBAs.

(Thanks to Will Dearman (@wtd) for the link.)

Pardon me for a brief three-part rant, starting and ending with why Facebook and Twitter are ultimately mere signals of broader cultural and technological shifts; signposts without directions, stopovers instead of destinations.

Lost in the woods? Blaze a trail.
Facebook was designed to be closed, created its terms of service around the promise of privacy, developed a user interface and a set of “privacy constraints” that created a false expectation of privacy with its users, neglected the fact that the technological reality didn’t meet the promise, fought through numerous user interface (e.g. Newsfeed) and business model changes (e.g. Beacon, App developer platform) that challenged this misunderstood notion of privacy, implemented technological changes to bring openness to a closed platform, and now faces the unrealized realization that their path will be their own. Time to stop following and start blazing.

Will we still light fires once we’ve all been burned?
Deep within the conversations about Facebook and Twitter is a reminder: privacy is a cultural interpretation, a philosophical question rather than a technological answer, government mandate or legal certainty.

Privacy is a cultural expectation codified into law; technology creates new possibilities for culture to exploit, frame new realities, refresh our governments, rewrite the rules of law.

(A relevant digression: do you think copyright law will remain unchanged by a remix culture?)

What will happen once we’ve all been burned by a private foible becoming unexpectedly public?

Will we still rake our public figures through the coals? Or will be put our hot irons away and as a collective society merely shrug our shoulders, an unceremonious acknowledgment that humans make mistakes, a recognition that we are all public figures in our own spheres?

It’s not about what it does but how it’s used.
Why does this matter? Facebook, Twitter, email, macro-messages, micro-messages, data, the web, the Internet: it’s not about what it does but how it’s used.

Focusing on Facebook and Twitter on their own is a nauseating endeavor; Twitter and Facebook are the latest case studies to be misunderstood and misapplied, the latest incarnates of the broader technological and cultural shifts framing our lives:

• The shifting roles (and power) of individuals and companies, the clash between the economic returns available to individuals, non-structured groups and hierarchical organizations;
• The fundamental economics of scale butting up against its new technological realities, creating new strategies to capture the shifting returns to scale and scope;
• The mixing of the online and the offline, a rationalization of what a “real life” truly means;
• The increasing importance of ideals, the shift of returns from hard assets to soft assets, the decreasing returns from controlling differential access to an asset and the increasing returns from understanding what to *do* with access to an asset;
• Shifting transaction costs reframing the value created by communication, demonstrated by the shift of the time and attention spent between work, entertainment and communication, human nature’s hardwired quest for stimulation reaching the next plateau;
• Some things getting easier to create (content), some things getting harder (making sense of content), reframing our notion of experts, leaders, people, networks and connections.

Yet all trend lines break once we stress systems to their breaking points; as humans, we’re exceedingly good at tearing down our own systems.

Will economic returns always flow towards openness? No. Will we always care about privacy? Not in the same way. Will being connected always be important? Not in the same way. Will everything we believe to be true ultimately prove to be true? No.

Depression, recession, expansion, growth, decline; these are mere manifestations of greater subtexts, proofs of the continued existence of humanity. Facebook will not be the last social network, Twitter will not be the last communication platform; we have needs we have to realize, there are moguls and captains of industry we haven’t met yet, markets yet to be created, bubbles and bursts yet to be experienced, shocks to systems we have yet to create.

More importantly, why and how are people changing? Where is the value flowing? And where are you headed?

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Updated 5/5: Yes, I changed the title; the initial title “A brief rant: Three notes on privacy, communication, technology and culture” simply wasn’t that good.