The RoBlog

Starting Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:29:21 PDT

Inspired by having finished (at long last) Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future, I decided to pull another book out of my futures-of-the-past library: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, written in 1970.

I’ve been avoiding reading this book for quite some time (although it should be said that I’ve not read ANY book in quite some time) primarily because it seemed to fall into my least favorite of three broad categories of predicting the future. As I see it, those categories are:
• Theories and How-Tos about predicting the future
• Predictions of the SOCIAL future
• Predictions of the TECHNOLOGICAL future

Future Shock seemed to fall into the category of social future predictions.

Social futurism is much less interesting to me as it tends to be based on how we SHOULD behave and why they way that we DO behave will lead us to overpopulation, mass starvation, environmental collapse, and the like; all this from a heavily moralistic point of view.

It’s not that these aren’t valid, or even interesting problems, and I can easily imagine modern books on these topics being a fascinating read. It is a peculiarity of what I like to read (books more than 20 years old that attempt to predict the future) that means that most books that I’d pick up about social future predictions are typically written in the 1960’s or ‘70’s, and are very preachy and/or impenetrable.

Based on the book cover summary, this is what I thought I was in for when I finally decided that it was too well known a book to ignore.

I’m happy to say that, SO FAR, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’ll let you know if that changes over time, but here are a couple of things that I thought were interesting:
• Introduction (p5): “Writers have had a harder and harder time keeping up with reality. We have not yet learned to conceive, research, write and publish in “real time.”” Perhaps this is now a skill that modern writers may more readily possess?
• I forget where this was and how specifically he addressed it and how much I just wandered into it myself, but it seems that we should probably get good at making broad predictions as a way to help improve how we get to more specific predictions. The pace of any technology or field of study does seem to begin with a coarse understanding and get finer as we learn more. I suppose there’s no reason that making predictions of the future shouldn’t go through this same series of refinements except that it is so much more fun to come up with (and read about) very specific predictions.

Profiles of the Future: The Rest

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:23:04 PDT

I started reading Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future way back in 2003. I've finally gotten around to finishing it, and wanted to add in some comments to those I originally wrote on earlier chapters. So, here we go!

P 198
While he’s not making a prediction here, the following comment is amusing for probably self-evident reasons:
“We seldom encounter really impressive feats of memory these days, because there is little need for them in our world of books and documents.”
I wonder if he ever reflected on this in the Google era.

On the same page, and of interest for similar reasons:
“When we discover how the brain manages to filter and store the blizzard of impressions pouring into it during every second of our lives, we may gain conscious or artificial control of memory. It would no longer be an inefficient, hit-and-miss process; if you wanted to reread a page of a newspaper you had seen at a certain moment thirty years ago, you could do just that, bu stimulation of the proper brain cells.”
While it wouldn’t discount Mr. Clarke’s points about the vividness and completeness of recall that could be accomplished this way, I’ll be curious to see if the Tivo-ing of our lives through external monitoring (always on cameras, microphones, etc) will provide much the same experience (with handy multi-faceted search interface!) sooner than the level of vivid recall that he imagines. Of course if you could turn on perfect recall 10 years after perfect life Tivo-ing, then you still have the added advantage (on top of the deep immersion) of being able to go back to a time before technology was recording you. Nonetheless, we could have a lighter version of what Mr. Clarke imagines long before we get the full experience.

P 200
“Yet the mechanical educator – or some technique which performs similar functions – is such an urgent need that civilization cannot continue for many more decades without it. The knowledge in the world is doubling every ten years – and the rate itself increasing. Already, twenty years of schooling are insufficient; soon we will have died of old age before we have learned how to live, and our entire culture will have collapsed owing to its incomprehensible complexity.”

P 200 – 201
“It has already been demonstrated that the behavior of animals – and men – can be profoundly modified if minute electrical impulses are fed into certain regions of the cerebral cortex…Electronic possession of human robots controlled from a central broadcasting station is something that even George Orwell never thought of; but it may be technically possible long before 1984”

P 203
“The pilot of an aircraft, fathering data from his scores of dials and gauges…identifies himself with his vehicle, intellectually and perhaps even emotionally. One day, through telemetering devices, we may be able to do the same with any animal.”
It’s interesting that he doesn’t take the opportunity to apply the telemetering devices to the airplane itself as we have started doing in the last decade. Of course he may address this later (or did earlier, since it’s been a while since I’ve read the earlier part of the book), but it just struck me how directly he could have gotten there in this passage (despite that what he’s really talking about is connecting to the experiences of other animals directly in our brains).

Age-Dependent Age Units

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:17:58 PDT

I occasionally think about how the speed of time passing is dependent on the age you are. The basic premise is that the older that you are, the smaller a percentage of your life any increment of time is.

With this in mind, and the fact that my daughter firmly corrected me for saying that that she was six ("six AND A HALF"), today's shower thought was about when we should switch what units we refer to people's age as.

This addresses the question of when you switch from days to weeks when talking about a baby's age, and extends it on to old age (where I take a bit of a back-track; see below).

What I've done is assumed that age 30 (years) is about when years start going by really fast, used the percentage of your life a year is at that point (about 3%) and used that fraction as the point that we should change age units starting with minutes after birth. I adjusted things slightly to better fit with units of time that we frequently use (rather than, say, 3 minute increments I went to 5).

So here we go:

At birth, count age by minutes (i.e. "she is 14 minutes old")
At 30 minutes old, count age in 5 minute increments (i.e. "he is 55 minutes old")
At 150 minutes old, count in 10 minute increments
At 5 hours old, count in half hours
At 15 hours, count in whole hours
At 30 hours, count in 2 hour increments
At 2 days, count in quarter day increments
At 7.5 days, switch to half days
At 15 days, switch to full days
At 30 days, switch to 2 day increments
At 8 weeks, switch to 1 week increments
At 6 months, switch to quarter months (i.e. "she is 7 and a quarter months")
At 7.5 months, switch to half-months (i.e. "he is 13 and a half months")
At 15 months, switch to full months
At 2.5 years, switch to quarter years (i.e. "she is 6 and three quarters years")
At 7.5 years, switch to half years
At 15, switch to full years

Now check this out:

At 30 years, switch to 2 year increments (i.e. you will never be 37, you'll go straight from your 36th birthday to your 38th 2 years later)
At 60, switch to 5 years.

After a while individual years become important again (as a sign of achievement), so I'm suggesting:

At 90, switch back to 2 year increments
At 100, switch back to 1

And there you have it.

So my daughter will be, no doubt, happy to know that she is 6 and three-quarters, my wife that she will be 36 for an additional year, and my parents that they are 60.

No need to thank me. Your eye-rolling will be quite enough.

Group Story Telling on Twitter (Concept)

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:55:38 PST

Here's an idea I had yesterday about using Twitter as a mass-story-making system. I've been enthralled with story telling through Twitter since nearly its inception (when I tried to get some people to do an arc of Lost during its off season, which each person tweeting from a character account).

Usually my interest is in the blurry line between reality and fiction that you can play with. This idea, however, is more about how to create a story as a group.

Feel free to steal this as I'm unlikely to build it. Let me know if you do.

So here's the idea, as a series of 140 characters or less.

TwitStory
Core
The parameters of a story are set up and made publicly available.
Interested participants follow the TwitStory account on Twitter.
The first line of the story is sent through the account.
Participants have a period of time to respond with an @ message to that account.
The reply message should extend the story.
One response is selected from all received during the timeframe.
The selected response is published through the TwitStory account, and the cycle begins again.

Options
For story parameters:
"Christmas" in 84 cycles (a short story over a week (12 updates a day for 7 days))
"Liberation" in novel length (an interesting experiment in long-form cohesiveness)
"He said, she said" (story telling using only inter-character dialog)

For selecting the next line:
The first @ reply received becomes the next line. Fastest wins, but this can be gamed and may not lead to the best storyline.
Prospective respondents have some period of time (5-10 minutes) at which point people can vote on which of the received lines should be the next one.

For voting:
Everyone can vote (can potentially be gamed by having friends vote for you).
Lines are occasionally chosen at random. Everyone who has been chosen with a line gets to vote. Decreases fraud, may decrease interest.

For publishing:
Publish new lines once an hour from 8am Pacific to 8pm Pacific. Allows people to continue with their life. Hits most active time periods.

Extensions
Every line that comes in becomes its own branch of the story. While not updated through the TwitStory account, they can be updated online.

Fairy Story for an Older Audience

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:07:58 PDT

Here's the same story as in my last post (well, the beginning anyways), only written for a much older audience. Not sure if it succeeds any better than the children's version.

---------

It's a little known fact that, upon the final hour before your death, all of the colors of the world become slowly more saturated, and all the sounds more distict and resonant, until, the moment before your death, you may become overwhelmed by them.
It is a little known fact not because it is not common, but because we don't want to see it, the way we don't want to see a vagrant, or a mugging. Few of us are brave enough to wonder at it unless our death catches us wholly unawares. And those that do? Well their time for pondering is limited, now isn't it?
I say these things not because they were apparent to me, at least not the first time, but because I came to see - see in that same way - in time.
It is a myth that rats are dirty in and of themselves. They have ever been associated with disease and evil. Such is their lot in this world. That is, to be misunderstood, not, in fact, to be bad.
The rats have had their own evil incarnate as long as their collective memories can dwell backwards: fleas. It is the flea who is the spawn of the underworld, spreading plagues amongst the innocent and unknowning. It is from the fleas that the rats are given their burden. Ever to be chased. Ever to be reviled. Ever to be destroyed.
Somewhere, just now, a group of small baby rats are being born. Somewhere dark, somewhere warm, and somewhere safe. For a time they will play and nip and run and, once they have weaned, shall assume their role here. To be chased, to be reviled, and even to be destroyed, all while doing their service, and trying to protect.
The rat is not alone in its dual role of vilification and protection. The crow too carries this burden. But, unlike the rat, who accepts his burden with resigned acquiescense, the crow accepts it under great protest. For the crow is endowed with wings that allow it to sit within view while it scolds (ever scolding), and flit away once its dissatisfaction is satisfactorily delivered.
Unlike the rat, whose early days are marked with a joviality soon to be forsaken, the crow is trained early from the start. A crow is delivered the accepted propaganda from the moment its egg is laid. Once hatched, it knows its mission. Once fledged, it undertakes it. Again to be reviled. Again to be disdained. Again to protect.
The squirrel, the final player in this, our opening volley, plays a different role altogether from the rat and the crow. Encased in disarming cuteness, moving with apparent impish glee (and the analogy here is more than skin deep), the squirrel sits on the same frontline in our story as the crow and the rat, but on the opposite side. For the squirrel, you see, is the scout. Able to get close without raising alarm, they watch us, passing their information through complicated networks masked in chasing games and nut hoarding. "To whom?" you may ask. That we shall soon enough see, but the "whom" in this tale is certainly no friend to you or me.
You may have deduced that the story that I am about to tell you has cast the role of evil to the cute and good to the loathesome, but rest assured that this is not so in every case. You may wonder about your playful dog, or skulking cat. Whose side are they on? You can take an easy breath on this count as the animals whom we have domesticated (and they who have domesticated us) are with us (by and large). They sit on neither the side of the rat nor the side of the flea. They sit, as helpless as we do, in the middle, as largely unwitting pawns in the grander game of the squirrels and the crows and theirs.
Let us begin this story proper by introducing a character through whose eyes you will better see the world in which we now find ourselves. As a brief background, suffice it to say that there are special places in this world where the overworld and the underworld meet. By "special" I do not mean to imply that such places are few (as they are not), but that they have an indefinable quality about them that you can feel when you are there, but don't know is missing when you are not.
You may be surprised when I say that this is our world. Or, rather, your world. The very one in which you live now. Such special places are confined to no one corner of the Earth; they exist where ever there are men. The particular one that I will take you to is not special in and of itself save that it is here that we have someone to meet.
She sits on a concrete step, with her legs dangling over the edge reaching nearly half the distance to the tread below. She sings softly to herself, but only because she presumes herself to be alone (she is far too young and inexperienced to see us quite yet). The late spring sun has proven too attractive to resist, so she suns herself here. If you did not know better, you would think that she was waiting for her long absent love to return and sweep her up in his arms; she has that air about her. But she is too young even for that fantasy. What she is expecting is us, though she does not know it. And as we get close enough to make out the curly brown hair hanging like lazy vines down her face, and note the artful orange stroke applied to the length of her otherwise simple white dress, we can also see that she is now positively buzzing with excitement.
But it's about now that you really fixate on the things that are off about this description (perhaps you already were). The scale is off; she is very small relative to the 13 steps running down to the sidewalk. Perhaps you initially thought she was some sort of animal given how this story began, but the mention of curls and a dress, though not entirely unlikely in a story like this, has lead you to think this is more of a person that we are looking at. It is at this point that you might realize that the use of the word "buzzing" in the previous paragraph was somewhat more than just a metaphor (I like to think I'm clever like that, occasionally). It is when she pauses, apparently straining to hear some hint of us (though who we are she has quite no idea), every fiber of her silent, that you can see her wings. For this girl I have chosen to show to you is a fairy, and, so that you will not think of her as an abstract being to whom you cannot relate, I will tell you that her name is Amelia, and she is just on the cusp of turning 5.
Now I realize that you may have had no idea that this would be a tale about faries, much less with a main character so very young, but I do implore you to hang about for just a bit longer. Perhaps it would help that I remind you that this is no fairy tale of yore in some place long shrouded in the mists of time. Amelia lives on Flanders Street, in the Laurelhurst Neighborhood of the city of Portland, Oregon, on the western edge of the United States, and the vehicles that are driving by decidedly horseless.

Children's Fairy Story

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:05:44 PDT

Wow, after reading this for the first time in a while, I realize that it needs a lot of work yet. But since it probably won't get it, here it is for you! It was written to be read to children of about 3-4 years old. It was intended to be a simple first meeting story, with the word choice being slightly challenging.

-------

In the twilight of a summer night, in the neighborhood of Laurelhurst, on a street called Hazelfern Place, a boy named Jack played in theback yard of the red house where he lived.
The sun had just climbed down from the sky, and the full moon was peeking up over the horizon, when he heard a familiar sound.
A brown squirrel was racing, as it often did, down the fence that connected the back yards of all of the houses.
Its claws were scraping loudly on the wood of the fence and it shouted happy squirrel talk as it ran.
Chasing the squirrel was something Jack hadn't seen before. A glowing, yellow . . . something.
The squirrel ran across the back fence of Jack's house so fast that he could only see a blur of brown as it passed.
The yellow something went by just as fast, but as he watched it disappear down the fence, Jack thought he saw what looked likepeople arms, and people legs, and wings that didn't look people-like at all.
And now that he was looking at the something, he heard a new sound too. The something was laughing.
"Cool," said Jack softly at the fading glow.
An excited look appeared on his face and he shouted "Again! Again! Again!" jumping up and down with each word.
The sounds of chattering squirrel, scraping claws, and the laughing something got quieter and quieter until Jack almost couldn't hear them any more.
And then the sounds started getting louder, and louder still until he could finally see the pair running down the fence towards his yard.
When they crossed into his yard, Jack waved his arms, jumped up into the air, and yelled, "HEY!".
Surprised at the unexpected sound, the squirrel stopped its chattering, ran to the nearest overhanging tree limb, and disappeared up it.
The yellow glowing something suddenly became a dark blue something and fell off the fence into a fern in Jack's yard.
Jack ran over to where the something fell, and even though it was getting dark out, and even though the something was glowing only alittle bit, he could see it . . . and it looked like a very small, scared, crying girl.
"Are you okay?" asked Jack. "Did you get a owy?"
The little girl only sniffled, her glow growing darker yet.
Jack's face lit up with a smile. "You want to see what I can do?" He asked. And before the little girl could answer Jack jumped straight up into the air, and landed crouching with his arms out to either side.
The small girl, who Jack could see a little bit better now, was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. She seemed to be waiting for something.
Maybe she was waiting to see Jack do something else.
"Watch this one!" yelled Jack, taking a long run and then leaping into the air again, tucking his legs under him before landing with hisarms and legs extended like a big X.
The little girl's glow changed from blue to green at the same time a smile burst on to her face.
"How about THIS one!" Jack shouted, now smiling himself. He ran up the two stairs to the deck, turned around and jumped off of it with his arms pointing straight ahead. He tried to land on just one foot, but fell over and rolled a couple of times.
The little girl began laughing, her color turning bright yellow again. "That was funny," she said in a tiny voice.
Jack smiled the smile that he smiled when he got ice cream. "You want to try?"
The little girl, still giggling a little, nodded and stood up.
The wings that Jack had seen before unfolded themselves from behind her, and Jack could see that the glow that followed her everywhere was coming from them.
She flapped her wings quickly, and then faster and faster until at last she leaped into the air.
For a few seconds she hung in the air, her wings flapping furiously, before she finally fell back to the ground panting.
"I'm not big enough to fly yet, but soon I'm going to fly up so high I'll touch the sky," she puffed.
"I'm Jack," said Jack, still grinning.
When the little girl with the big wings didn't say anything back, he asked "Are you a butterfly?"
"I'm not a butterfly. I'm Amelia!" said Amelia proudly.
Her face suddenly went still and she looked scared again.
"Oh no!" she said, "It's dark. I have to go home now!"
She turned around part running, part flying towards the back fence where Jack had first seen her.
She bounded up the fence and stopped at the top, looking back at Jack.
"You want to come over and play later 'melia?" asked Jack.
"Ok Jack," she said, and waved and turned to run back across the fence that connected all of the houses.
"Bye 'melia!" he yelled after her, watching her glow disappear down the fence.
Jack watched until he couldn't see her any more, and then started running and jumping as high as he could.
He flapped his arms as fast as he could, but landed on the ground just like always.
He tried again and again until he couldn't run any more.
"Maybe I'm not big enough to fly yet either,' he said, and then went up the deck steps, and inside to have some dinner.

Back at it

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:53:40 PDT

Hi.

Yeah, so this is a little awkward. I realize that we haven't spoken in a couple of years, but I wanted you to know it was mostly me, not you. I got distracted for a while, and, as happens with me, I ended up flirting with other interests. I hope you will understand.

In any case, I'm back (for a bit anyway).

I wrote up a couple of posts criticizing work that other people had done, and thought it might be time to toss some more of my own stuff out there for the same treatment.

The next two articles are stories that I've written (in the first case) or started two write (in the second).

Here's some context:
The first story is one I wrote as a colaborative effort with some friends. We were playing with the idea of creating an illustrated children's book. That didn't end up panning out so I share the last draft that I can find with you. I have some wonderful editting comments from one of the friends, but I can't find a draft that incorporates them, so you're stuck with a rawer form until I can find them, or become unlazy enough to fix it again. This book was to be part of an ambitious series of books, movies, and more, designed to grow up with the children. The stories would get more complicated and sophisticated as both the children in the stories and the children reading them grew up. There was a plot big enough to sustain this epic adventure, with the opportunity for many side trips along the way.

When the book stalled, I toyed around taking the same story to a much older audience with a more distinct writing style. That's the fragment you get in the second story.

I have a couple of other stories that I've started over the last few years that I'll share from time to time.

Since they're all in very raw places, and I'm more of a starter than a finisher, I submit them to you to do with as you will. I expect most people will ignore them, but perhaps someone would be interested in correcting, elaborating, rebutting, or prodding me into working on one that particularly interests them.

Thanks for visiting, regardless. Let's not spend so much time in silence again, shall we?

FutureGrinder: Participatory Panopticon with Jamais Cascio

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:56:12 PST

Conversation with Jamais (35MB, 49mins)

Jamais Cascio, co-founder and Senior Contributing Editor of WorldChanging.com gave a presentation at the Accelerating Change 2005 converence where he described his idea of a "Participatory Panopticon" - a society where everyone is constantly recording their experiences because so doing helps make their life easier.

As I've been interested in that idea myself for quite some time (and was, in fact, recording constantly at the conference), I was immediately intrigued. I was not disappointed. I found myself nodding heavily in agreement with his thoughts.

After his presentation, I asked him if he'd be willing to talk a bit more about the world of always on recording, and this conversation was the result.

The RobCast: Roadtrains with Bruce McHenry

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 09:04:21 PST

Interview with Bruce (53MB, 58mins)

I met Bruce McHenry at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference where we got to talking about the future of transportation. As it happens, he is a transportation consultant helping to bring about (among other things) "roadtrains", which are collections of physically coupled cars travelling together to make better use of both the road and fuel.

I thought it would be fun to record a conversation with him, and he agreed. After many months of schedule jockeying, we finally were able to connect. Our conversation not only covered the direction Bruce thinks we should take passenger transportation on the roads, but touched on collaboration systems and mental illness.

You can find Bruce on the web at DiscussIt.org.

I'd love to hear any comments on the discussion if you care to leave them.

NTalk 3: The Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 07:29:49 PST

An introduction

Accelerating change and system complexity as a braking factor

Magic and the man from 3000 years ago

The N-Type brain

Modern tribes

Left brain versus right brain and personality type

NTalk 2: Internet TV, Africa

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 15:14:18 PST

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about where TV is going and what relationship the Internet has to it, and how Africa may be an economic force of power faster than you might think.

NTalk 1: Zero, Election Systems

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 07:05:34 PST

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about the fabulous-ness of zero, and a couple of different ways of holding political elections that might do a better job of representing the will of the people.

Kurzweil and Transportation

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:30:51 PDT

If Kurzweil's general observations - that "progress" is made on an exponential curve - hold for transportation, would that imply that systems like PRT, or fleeting, or other systems that would increase the average throughput of daily transportation systems, must come into play soon?

It would be interesting to see a plot of the average trip to work time as far back as it could be traced. In the US, at least, I wouldn't be surprised if the time had been getting longer throughout most of the last century. My guess is, however, that the average throughput (people per second?) of a particular segment of land transportation infrastructure has probably gone up. This may indicate that you have to choose your metrics wisely if you're trying to get one of Kurzweil's curves.

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:16:28 PDT

Transform the Ubiquitous

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 06:54:18 PDT

Create the Dominant Paradigm

London Bombings and Wikipedia

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 08:49:18 PDT

It's impressive how fast the Wikipedia is keeping up with events. Check out the article on the London bombing, and, more interestingly, check out it's change log.

I haven't read the entry yet, but, at long last, there may be a good community maintained resource for events as they happen.

The RobCast: RealityFlythrough w/Neil McCurdy

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 13:10:42 PDT

I recently saw an article on Roland Piquepaille's web site about a project called RealityFlythrough. The project aligned so well with where I see pervasive cameras taking us that I just had to talk to Neil McCurdy, whose doctoral candidate project this was.

Fortunately, Neil was gracious enough to spend 45 minutes to talk with me via Skype about what RealityFlythrough is all about, and to touch a bit on where it may be taking us.

Here's a link to the audio interview (~45 mins, ~21MB). Be warned, I noticed at least one drop out at the very end, and there may be more. If you find a significant one, let me know and I'll see if I can recover it from the raw audio.

Here are links to some of the things discussed in the interview:

Neil's Web Site

The link to the RSS feed for his site

Neil mentions the Human Pacman game developed at the National University of Singapore (hmm, I'm getting a DNS error on my original link to the project, so if you find it broken, try this link instead and scroll down)

I mentioned an augmented reality project concerned with projecting virtual objects into real space. I was probably talking about this, although here I mention something that seems in the ballpark as well (the destination link on this page also goes to the Singapore server that I can't see at the moment).

Neil mentioned an Intel research project called Place Lab which is an effort to provide location data both inside and outside, and in a privacy-aware manner. Very interesting.

As an aside, Neil brought up privacy as a potential hurdle to enabling ubiquitous cameras to perform interesting and useful functions. Certainly we'll be running in to this issue of the creeping loss of what we have traditionally seen as "privacy". I think this warrants a series of discussions all on its own. I'd love to hear any opinions out there.

And while you're giving me your opinions, I'd also love to hear about any other cool, forward-looking, potentially tranformative projects going on out there, and also where you think they might be taking us in the future. Feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me an email.

The Internet in an Emergency

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 08:02:33 PDT

[NOTE: This is the first article that's come out of an experiment I'm doing using Wiki's as a way to formulate thoughts. This one came out fully formed, so it's kind of a cheat, but the Wiki space will hopefully help thoughts grow more organically rather than having to come out complete. Check it out if that seems interesting.]

I've been doing some work on an information system for my neighborhood, so issues relating to information flow in a geographic area have been floating around my head a bit.

It occurred to me that if there is an emergency in a neighborhood or city, that restoring Internet access is increasingly critical.

Given that people are already using the Internet as a primary means of communication, with VoIP capturing an increasing number of users every day, restoring Internet to an effective area has become at least as important as restoring phone service.

Given it's ability to coordinate groups and disseminate information, it is becoming as important as restoring power (though there is a ways to go yet), and it's importance will only increase over time.

I wonder if our neighborhood emergency plan (or the city plan covering our neighborhood) includes an emphasis on getting some semblance of the Internet back up after a disaster. I'd guess not given the wide range of providers and mechanisms involved. For example, do you bring up cable first? DSL? Cellular?

Probably it makes better sense to create a few satellite uplinks where people could bring their increasingly portable computers and connect in pre-determined locations.

Does your community include a plan for restoring communications in an emergency? Does it include the Internet?

Let me know. I'd be interested to hear about it, how it works, and how it got in to the plan.

Neighborhood Information System

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:57:39 PDT

Here's an idea that's been circling in the back of my mind for the last couple of years: a Neighborhood Information System. Basically, this would be a place where all members of a community could contribute information to a central location for the benefit of other people in the neighborhood.

I have some pretty ambitious plans for what such a system might be like, and what it could do...which means it will probably never happen.

The GOOD news (depending on who you are, I suppose) is that it occurred to me that there are plenty of useful tools out there right now to do a pretty good first pass at such a system without having to build it from scratch. Wikis, for example are a good place to host information that is relatively static, like neighborhood history. Blogs are a good way of providing news, and message boards are a great place to share dynamic information, among other things.

My short term vision is that the best of breed open source versions of these tools would be combined into one system for the primary purpose of providing a single login for all of the tools. This would then be released as open source for any other neighborhoods that wanted to put it in to place, and potentially add their own improvements.

The driving force, however, is to allow ANYONE to contribute to ALL aspects of the system. This means add/change historical information, create news items, and create a new topic in the message board. I believe this system will work best if there is no centralized control (though I DO think it's appropriate to have oversight committees for such things as taxonomy, design, and contribution guidelines). Instances where a single person, or group of individuals should have absolute control over some portion of the system should be exceedingly rare.

It is in this spirit that I've started a Wiki for the Laurelhurst neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. This is a test set up on a hosted wiki service that uses ads for revenue. Ultimately the goal would be to get on a system that was not ad supported and ran an integrated system, but at this point I'm thinking baby steps.

If you live in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, feel free to drop by, sign up and start adding stuff. If you are interested in the concept and think it would be interesting, drop me a comment even if you don't live in my neighborhood. As I said previously, I see this as being something that every neighborhood could use for free (though you may have to provide your own hosting) so there's no reason it has to just be about where I live.

I've looked around to find if such a system already exists and didn't come up with much luck. But if YOU know of such a project in progress, leave a comment with a link. I'd much rather not rebuild the wheel if I didn't have to.

Underground Automated Highway System (UAHS)

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 20:20:21 PDT

John Smart recently included a vision paper on a possible future mode of transit in the most recent issue of the Accelerating Times newsletter. Note that this issue references the availability of the audio portion of Peter Thiel's presentation on Virtual Money at last year's Accelerating Change 2004 conference, where yours truly can probably (I haven't listened to the audio yet) be heard asking the one question I worked up enough nerve to ask during the conference.

He provides a vision for a form of transportation that would relieve the most crowded cities of their surface traffic burden. He envisions a network of underground tunnels in which vehicles can travel in a completely automated fashion. The details of Mr. Smart's vision will not be explicitly repeated here. His short paper on the subject is very consumable, so interested persons should get the PDF here.

Mr. Smart's paper was not intended to be a thorough treatise on the subject of underground travel, but rather to lay out a vision of a
possible future that he believes is likely to unfold.

Similarly, my thoughts are not intended to be a result of a thorough survey of the available literature. They just happened along the way, and I'd guess that these (and probably more) questions would pop up in the brain of the average reader of this paper.

While I am yet un-opinionated ;) on the topic, I did find that it left me with many questions. What follows (in the tradition of my first PRT entry, which seems to have generated some conversation) are my notes and questions as taken during my reading of the paper.

I should note that any errors that show up in quotes I pulled below are probably mine. As for the errors outside the quotes...well I'm still looking for the person that put those there ;)

UAHS Capacity
In what ways does the Underground Automated Highway System increase the "...capacity of goods and transport in our largest and highest
density cities..." that the automation of existing roadways would not?
Would it be due to additional automation that is unlikely on existing roads?
Would it be because of the supplemental real estate devoted to transportation beyond the existing infrastructure?
Or does it simply by the addition of usable lanes?

How does this system increase peak traffic capacity beyond the additional lanes it provides, that are unlikely for on-surface, or
above-surface transportation alternatives?
How does it do so by an order of magnitude?

UAHS System Architecture
Is this system strictly oriented around major hubs, or does it work for more distributed trip patterns?

Where would entry/exit points be on the UAHS, and is there potential for congestion at these points?

If you were going to have a fully-controlled environment, could you regulate the flow of air so that a one-way tunnel had air flowing through it in the same direction, reducing drag?

If an "automation test lane" is required, how much lead space is required from an exit point (from a regular highway) for a vehicle to establish its autonimity? Would the driver have to cross existing lanes from, say, a regular freeway onramp, to the far left lane? Obviously this would create its own problems if the freeway was under heavy traffic load. How does this lead space (to establish the autonomous nature of a vehicle) compare to the average commute distance? How much of the original commute waiting time might still be experienced?

Does a megalot become a location where many people would depart from the UAHS, and thus become a bottleneck?

Does a UAHS suffer from congestion for its feeder networks (roads)?

What is the trip length that UAHS would be designed for? The way it's talked about makes it sound like you'd be traveling in it for a while.

If it is true that cities saturate as described, might it be the case that UAHS' order of magnitude more supply might be overkill should it be attainable?

Future Traffic Patterns
Do we believe that traffic patterns will get more focused on fewer destinations over time, or more distributed over a wider range of
origination and destination points?

"Nearly all population growth for the foreseeable future will occur in urban areas...". Does this necessitate that they will happen
primarily in the urban core, or will they be distributed around urban/suburban areas of a city.

Crikey! 8 lanes each direction? Will future demand be that high? What does the world of transportation demand look like 100 years out?

Wouldn't increasing real estate prices in the urban core tend to drive businesses into the suburbs, thus decreasing the number of travelers to that area? Is that effect measurable? Does migration away from the suburbs create new focal destinations, or do they become relatively distributed? Presumably the latter case would be harder to service with something like a UAHS.

UAHS Alternatives
How are existing non-car alternatives to a UAHS inferior? What about those on the horizon?

Surely automated aerial transportation systems are not the only viable alternative to a UAHS? What are the design requirements driving this as the selection set?

Issues with ridership of transit alternatives may be due to the format of existing forms of transit: Linear, multi-stop trips, with limited flexibility in departure time and destination. Perhaps alternative transit forms like PRT or dual-mode transit would increase ridership with less financial impact.

If there is evidence that the cost ratio between surface vs. elevated vs. underground transportation costs is improving for underground transit modes (from 1:3:6 to 1:2:4.5), does the evidence support that elevated transportation costs will also continue to gain? If elevated transit took the form of small guideways (e.g. PRT), could that improve the costs to the extent that they are BELOW costs for surface transportation?

If the same dollars that it took to create UAHSs were, instead, put to improving existing road systems and dedicating lanes for automation where possible, what kind of effect might it have? Would it be enough to offset the benefits of an underground system? What if the ground-level automation included significant numbers of busses? What if this money was diverted into other transit options such as LRT, PRT, or dual-mode transit? How does one establish the average ROI for each transportation alternative?

Costs
Would the costs involved in underground construction truly become advantageous over on-surface or above-surface transportation?

Costs per cubic foot quoted ($1.50) for "mining and lining" should be reduced to costs per square foot to be more directly compared to other forms of transportation, and all supporting infrastructure costs should be added to this to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of finished, working surface area.

Is the disposal cost of tunnel ejecta included in the per cubic foot dollar figure? What is included in this figure?

What would the average cross-sectional area of a tunnel be in this system, and would that account for one-way or two-way traffic?

At $1.50/cubic foot, assuming a square tunnel 16ft on a side (which is probably an order of magnitude too small), the linear cost of digging is $384/ft. At 100ft on a side, it's $15,000 per foot. That's $2,027,520 - $79,200,000 per mile before you lay any infrastructure (e.g. roads, ventilation systems, etc).

Lane widths in the US appear to vary between 9' and 12'. Using 10' widths to make calculations easier, a 4-lane road would be about 40' wide. Assuming that shoulders would be 5' each (again for ease of calculation, 4' appears common) to provide enough ceiling clearance for vehicles traveling in the outer lanes (would be interesting to see if normal long-haul vehicles would be able to travel in these lanes, but not critical for a number of reasons such as the fact that such vehicles may not meet emissions standards enough to use a UAHS, may be redesigned to have a lower maximum height in order to use a UAHS, or may be required to travel in the middle lanes), the total width is 50'. Assuming a circular bore, with a 50' diameter, the cross sectional area would be (pi*(25)^2)), or ~1963 sq.ft. At $1.50 per cubic foot to tunnel, and 5280 feet/mile, the cost/mile is: $15,550,884 for just the tunneling.

The low cost to convert existing roadways to an Automated Highway System (AHS) ($10,000/mile) seems largely irrelevant to the UAHS argument as all savings is lost in the initial construction costs of the tunnel and roadway.

What would the average cost of a "megalot" be?

Emergency Systems and Safety
How would emergency access to such an infrastructure work?

How do various types of emergency plans (that is, for various types of catastrophic failure) compare? Also, how does the probable incident rate compare with each transportation mode?

AHS's are probably safer in general, but, to the extent that non-automated traffic runs in the same area, this safety may be
somewhat compromised. Also, there is an open question as to whether significant numbers of individuals (1 in 100 perhaps) would break out of the automatic control to try to game the system, or just plain speed. Similarly, the extent to which an automated system can handle unexpected obstacles will heavily determine how much emergency response is needed (and, potentially, the limit of wide-spread
adoption of the system). If an animal wanders on to the automated roadway, for example, how does the system react? All in all, it is
not yet apparent that any reduction in law enforcement/emergency response could actually be experienced (although it does seem likely).

Granted that automobile accidents do account for a significant number of deaths each year, but if there is no public outcry, even in the face of general knowledge of the danger, then it would seem that safety cannot be a primary motivator of change in that other safety issues will always gain priority for the dollars.

Misc
By "...eliminating visual blight and noise pollution of freeways.." is Mr. Smart suggesting that existing infrastructures will not just be supplemented, but replaced? If so, how will vehicles not presently equipped to run in an automated mode make trips that would otherwise have required a freeway?

"Productivity loss" has always seemed like a weak reason to improve transportation infrastructure. Is this productivity loss to business (in which case it would seem a result of poor worker planning than anything else; if we're talking about people arriving late on the job), or to the individual (in which case it would be tough to assign a dollar figure to the time of non-working individuals)?

How does a digging rate of 20 ft/hour compare to other transportation alternatives when all prep-for-build requirements are taken into
account?

Are there rights-of-way that need to be purchased/otherwise accounted for for underground construction? Can underground construction be built directly from point-to-point if there is no engineering reason not to? Said differently, are there places that a Tunnel Boring Machine can't go because of political/social reasons that it might otherwise be able to navigate just fine (e.g. below a residential area)?

Among the stakeholders should be those who have a stake in alternative forms of transportation. The automobile industry. And potential system component manufacturers.

What is the likely timeline for UAVs? Likely the biggest hurdle would be social as even automated cars are likely to be able to be
overridden by a human operator in case of failure. This will probably be an issue more of perception than anything else.

How do we prevent - or is it even undesirable - reclaimed roads, should there be any, from becoming more buildings as they would seem
likely to do if real estate continues to become rarer?

It would seem that other possible futures include: the emergence of attractive transit options such as dual-mode and/or PRT that have a good deal of the positive effects (and some added ones, like less reliance on owning a car) of a UAHS with potentially smaller costs; telepresence and telecommuting taking hold requiring fewer people to go to point destinations (like the urban core) simultaneously; and the possibility that trip destinations become more diffuse rather than more concentrated, making the value proposition of UAHS less appealing.

Sony Data Tiles

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:28:47 PDT

A very cool integration of physical objects and computing interfaces, and similarly cool integration of conceptual objects with eachother.

Basically a screen you can put various tiles on to to interact with the computer. Much cooler than I can make it sound.

sony revolution (the newest crazy technology from sony - nifty) - video

Via Gizmodo

The RobCast: GeoWiki

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 09:06:26 PDT

Here's an idea(~16 mins) I had about how geographical information can be maintained, wiki-style, by everyone as a way to jump-start the Internet's connection to the physical world, and to ensure no one company owns the data.

The RobCast: Wikipedia, Time Lines, and Our Stories

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:19:03 PDT

This is another "commutecast" (10 min), which largely consists of me huffing and puffing noisily after I get out of the car and walk the few blocks to work.

This time, an older idea of mine (one of my "mental whittling" projects) - The Web of History - given new inspiration by Wikipedia and a recent article in New Scientist, and a new idea about collecting human stories on a global level to add depth, perspective, and color to encyclopedia, and other fact-oriented mediums.

What happens when all IP is copyable?

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Mon, 30 May 2005 14:53:48 PDT

What happens when the product of all intellectual property (IP) is trivially copyable? Not just for digital goods, but for physical ones?

This podcast (the first I've done while commuting, so it's rougher than usual, if that's possible) doesn't answer that question. It merely poses it.

Climb on the Clue Train. A Retort...of Sorts.

noreply@blogger.com (The Rob) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 21:35:56 PDT

DISCLAIMERS

The following post does not reflect the opinion of anyone. Not of any companies I work for or have worked for, not of my friends or family. In fact, sometimes they don't even reflect my opinion.

I have not read the book; have not sought out conversations about this topic; have not looked for any criticism. Therefore, what follows may be off-base or worse.

This entry is long. Go get a mug of your favorite beverage if you plan to read it all at once.

I recently attended the Portland Podcast Meetup, where I met some very interesting people.

One of these people was Josh Bancroft who runs tinyscreenfuls.com. Josh was espousing something called The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'd heard of it before, but had never taken the time to delve in to it, so I figured now was as good a time as any.

I found the web site and read through the manifesto, and found I agreed with a good deal of it, but there was something about the tone that just didn't sit right with me. It's a manifesto, so it can't be faulted for using strong wording. Nonetheless, it put me in the mindset to write a response to it.

What follows is a point-by-point retort to the original Cluetrain Manifesto as found here. Since I agreed with the broad strokes of what the Manifesto was saying, it was difficult for me to find a counter argument in several cases. I'll leave you to find where those places are. I tried to answer each point in the tone it was written in, pretending I ran a very large company. Tongue, more or less, in cheek.

Don't take this too seriously, but hopefully it will be interesting.

Here we go:

Markets are conversations.
True enough.

Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Yes, this is true. However, companies cannot gear all (or even most) of our communications to each human. Technology does not yet enable us to make the salient points to a sub-section of the audience in a language that is easiest for that individual to understand.

Yes, companies can tailor a message to be sent to an individual at a time unique to that individual. Yes, they can include elements relevant to the individual at a fairly high level.

But they cannot talk to every individual in precisely the way they want to be talked to, and cannot say those things to them that would be of most interest to them. Companies' resources don't yet allow it.

Further, not everyone wants to wade through the entire conversation to get the bits important to them.

Companies used to talk to the entire group of interested individuals all at once, saying only those things that were easily consumed by the lowest common denominator (meaning they said the things that would impact the most people, even if a good deal of people weren't impacted heavily).

Then they talked to demographics. And psychographics. And survey sub-groups. And customer lifecycle cohorts. These groups had increasingly more in common that allowed companies to say increasingly more relevant things in ways that matter to that group.

Everybody is an individual. Companies want to talk to each person individually. They're getting there, and you can rest assured that those that remain ignorant or silent will be woken up soon, or not survive.

Technology is making these conversations efficient, and enabling new dynamics. Companies are heavily incentivized to get there. Change takes time.

Companies don't expect you to wait around, but probably most individuals are still trying to figure this out too.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Many human conversations sound like mating weasels being attacked by a blow torch.

Companies don't want to sound like that. Market participants don't want them to sound like that.

Humans can afford to sound like that. Companies can't...at least not yet.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

It is as open, natural, and uncontrived as it is joyful, inspiring, and irritating depending on who is using it. Not all people are born public speakers, and marketing is public speaking.

The Internet is a quickly moving medium which often means that judgments are harsh and quick, and research and patience is shorter supply than when people talk face to face.

Companies have an incentive to tread carefully so that they are not dismissed by the accidental, unconsidered, natural slip of the tongue by a key player.

So they are finding the people who can best represent them in the ways that most of their customers or potential customers want to hear it.

Make no mistake, however. When they are finally talking to the market how it wants to be talked to, they will still be marketing. They are going to get very good at this very soon. At some point it won't feel co-opted, but it will still be the message they want you to hear.

People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Companies are not people, legal fiction aside. And while the market may want companies to be humanistic, to have a side that can be plugged in to, the market also doesn't want companies to be human in every aspect.

Individuals want even a company's best customer support organizations (and there is plenty of work for them to do in this arena) to react politely when they are yelled at them for a problem regardless of whose fault it was.

Individuals want to return goods for a refund even when it's obvious it was not the company's fault.

Individuals want companies to source American materials while at the same time being intolerant on price.

Companies can do these, and other things demanded of them. Just don't expect that they will always seem like mere humans.

The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

As it is among companies and individuals, and even, to some extent, between companies and workers. It is something companies are figuring out as are market participants. Companies just have a bit more skin in the game.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Hyperlinks without consideration subvert trust.

In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

As are companies with their suppliers, partners, regulatory bodies, investors, employees, and existing and potential customers.

For a company, the nature of these conversations is about money, which is ultimately about survival.

These conversations are all over the place in terms of their risks and their rewards. Conversations with customers and potential customers would seem to have an inherent risk, with an uncertain reward. As these factors become well established, companies will change their behavior accordingly.

These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

They are also enabling new forms of business process, organization, and networking. Members of the market that think that they are the only ones playing with the new toys have clearly spent too much time writing manifestos.

As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

The same holds for companies (which are, after all, only collections of individuals, frequently participating in other such markets). Companies are getting faster, smarter, and understanding individual members of a market much more thoroughly. The logical end point of this process may give individual market participants pause when well considered.

People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

Yes, some companies do not provide very good support where they should. But adding value to a commodity is not just about support. It's as much about providing and supplying the context for the commodity as anything.

The fact that people CAN be better informed, doesn't mean they ARE. And being better informed does not always lead to better decision making. Not all decisions are rational, for good or ill. The goal of advertising is to lend credence to people's irrational feelings of affinity and trust.

It has been well known for quite some time, for example, that raising the price on a product for no good reason will attract certain buyers even when two products are shown to be equivalent in every meaningful way.

Look at bottled water; companies have been selling that for years at higher prices than the soda they use that water to make.

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

Unfortunately it is increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction in the networked world, and well-intentioned participants in the conversation from would-be saboteurs.

The information is out there, and there are some good hubs, but lay people, and many experts, are relatively unskilled at the tools (and effort) that separate assertions from reality.

What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

Where "Company" is interpreted to mean "arbiter of work-time resource allocation"; agreed.

Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

True. And some companies can get away with speaking more humanly without practice, or be better at it, and other companies cannot or are not. However, most companies are in the process, or soon will be, of figuring it out.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business - the sound of mission statements and brochures - will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Perhaps. Language serves the purpose of its time.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

No, these companies are speaking to each other, and that's important. Those that confuse their peer companies with their intended customer audience, however, may be in for some work.

It is the potential and existing customer that are the influencers of what organizations say and how they say it, but it is the customer's implicit needs at least as much as their explicit ones that drive the action of those who would attract them.

Individuals must ensure that their actions match their words, and that the words of the loudest individuals match those of the rest of the group. As organizations can increasingly tune their message to the recipient, they can discern between those individuals who are noisy, and those that are either representative of valuable customers, or those who create change amongst them.

Individuals should not expect that their one voice alone will make change (though it can now more than ever), and that loudness is all that is required.

Organizations will increasingly know who their customers are and accurately determine whether or not to listen to the noise-makers.

As companies can no longer be lazy about their communications, individuals cannot be lazy in their actions.

Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Things have changed a lot since this was written in 1999.

In any case, companies are getting much better at determining what is the right use of which media, though there is plenty left to figure out.

Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Probably. And they are likely avoiding participation for fear of the unquantified risk.

Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Exactly why many companies choose to proceed carefully.

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Market participants need to realize that, for a company, being laughed at by individuals who continue to buy your products is not such a bad thing.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Fair enough. But individuals may do well to take themselves a bit more seriously and actively vote with their dollars.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Just as it is difficult for the bloggosphere to have a single point of view, a multinational corporation may have a difficult time creating a single point of view that reflects its disparate operations, products, and employees.

Allowing individual employees to speak on its behalf will only make this more difficult.

A single point of view for many companies requires speaking in a way that represents the entire organization. This kind of point of view, especially for companies that are not the reflection of a single, visionary, individual.

This is the problem with all large groups where one person speaks for them. It is, therefore, unreasonable to require a single point of view for a large organization and expect it to sound like a human.

Of course it's only unreasonable for now, and certainly a single entity can have multiple points of view.

Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

The kind of "positioning" that is happening in this sense often has to do with issues not directly related to things the market will care about. Being a sole supplier, for example, is one way a company might position itself for success that has little to do with public statements the company might make for the benefit of the market.

Bombastic boasts - "We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ" - do not constitute a position.

Correct. Though statements such as "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." are probably equivalently valuable.

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

For those of companies where the "Ivory Tower" mentality still remains, it is likely that they are too big to get killed by mistaking PR for a consumer dialog a couple of times. Those that can get killed by that probably have many other problems as well.

Companies are still trying to figure out how best to deal with the flood of voices that they now have access to. They don't necessarily have the tools to handle it well. But once they figure it out, they won't have to be directly how good they're doing. They'll see it in the bottom line.

Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

People that write manifestos about companies would seem to be concerned about, or afraid of the direction they're heading. They might otherwise abandon such rhetoric and allow the companies to find out the hard way.

By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

Manifestos would not seem to be the best vehicle for tearing down walls. Vote with your dollars; companies know how to listen to them.

Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

Most marketing programs are based on the idea of making the company's excitement about its products or services known. At the very least, they are about getting the company's brand into the ever more crowded brain of an individual.

Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

"It's a two-way street, it a two-way door..." - Ginuwine

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable - and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

So long as there is a valid alternative supplier (one that is equivalent to less desirable choices in terms of product, deliverability, support, trust, and a dozen other ways). This is turns out to be fairly rare; especially for non-commodities.

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

Who constitutes "Your"? Who is "us"?

We are you. You are us. This is just as much a result of the internetworked world as anything else.

Networked markets can only switch suppliers is there is an equivalent supplier available. And the cost to switch is rarely zero.

Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

And smart suppliers will learn to speak the language of the market is that lends them an advantage.

Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

Not yet.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

No, to speak with a compassionate voice, companies must understand the concerns of their communities (or individuals). Humans infrequently share the concerns of other humans.

But first, they must belong to a community.

Belonging to a community is not a requirement for speaking like a "human", though it may be a requirement for speaking like that particular group of humans.

Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

Manifesto writers must consider the tradeoff between brevity and clarity.

If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

Now who's speaking in confusing jargon?

Human communities are based on discourse - on human speech about human concerns.

In fact, many human communities are based on an active program of discourse repression, and what is a concern varies from human to human.

It does not follow that if an individual does not understand the point or meaning of discourse, that that discourse is either pointless or meaningless. Of course it is also true that people will not make the effort to understand you if there is no reason for so doing.

Companies can't (and typically don't) expect individuals to come to the message, but neither should an individual expect that every message will be made plain to them.

The community of discourse is the market.

While it may be true that markets are conversations, this does not mean that all conversations are part of a single market or that all markets are composed of a single conversation.

Companies communicate in many markets and in many ways. Each conversation needs to adapt and grow as is appropriate for the market.

Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Agreed, insomuch as they would not be able to acquire resources, distribute products, or gain customers. However, to believe that there is a single community of discourse that a company participates in, or that it necessarily must participate in all of them, is folly.

Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

What damage can the workforce do that does not involve a competitor? What competitors are there that are not in a company's own market?

By what means has this observation been made? What evidence comprises it?

Are readers supposed to take statements like this on trust? Where are the actions against ideals touted in this manifesto that a company can model its behavior on?

As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company - and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

As it ever was.

Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

Companies are increasingly trying to make those conditions right, and to find a balance between participating in these conversations and doing the work of the company.

Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

Companies that install intranets top-down should be commended for making information generally more available. They should also be encouraged to take the next step with the infrastructure they have created.

Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

It is not enough to merely allow these conversations to build. Companies must be able to assimilate this information and take action on it (non-trivial tasks, both) or little benefit will come of it.

Further, organic, bottom-up networks are inefficient and messy. This is not an excuse not to build them, but it is a reason why a company may proceed carefully with it's resources (which include an employee's time).

A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

The problems arise when these self-organized networks are not healthy.

While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

What also scares companies witless is the possibility that, in addition to emails to family, instant messages to friends, and phone calls to potential new mates, that workers will spend more time "communicating" than actually doing work.

Even critical knowledge has an acceptable price.

When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

Confused, bitter and impatient? That DOES seem the same.

Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

Org charts are just a tool. Anyone who depends too much on a tool is likely to be one.

Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

Hands-on knowledge is not the same as complete knowledge of the situation. Workers at different levels of a hierarchy typically have different views of what's going on, and different takes on priorities. It is not true that a spectacular technician also makes a spectacular strategist. Listening should occur at all levels and in all directions, but hierarchies are not evil in and of themselves.

Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

Hands-off management styles derive from utopian beliefs that everyone, if given the change, will make the best decisions on behalf of the company. In practice, this is not true. Surely there's a middle ground here.

Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

Companies that are run by idiots will be undone by absolute transparency. Most people feel that they are idiots.

There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

There are a vast number of conversations going on. Between workers. Amongst markets. Through suppliers and subcontractors, to distributors, retailers, affiliates, partners, and even the competition. Not to mention the conversations going on between distinct factions of these audiences, that can be sliced a myriad of ways.

Companies must become conversant in all of these dialects to excel.

In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

Companies must strike the balance between no change and radical change. Both paths lead to premature death. Notions of command and control may be obsolete, but the alternatives are still unfolding, and adopting the wrong attitude can be devastating.

As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

Everything is met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers. Companies might as well stick with what they know.

These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

Some of them recognize some of the other voices. The rest they still think are idiots.

Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

The only things that are inevitable are death and corporate taxes. All other futures can be guided, even if not controlled. Merely jumping out of the way and letting everyone talk to everyone is an interesting experiment. And when some company proves that it can be done well, others will follow, but jumping into action whenever someone posts a manifesto is not a good way to run a company.

If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

"Willingness to get out the way" is not a measure of corporate IQ; profits are. By this measure, many companies are wise indeed.

However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

The phrase "However subliminally..." sounds overly vague and convenient. What evidence is there of this, and what real meaning can you ascribe to this if it's true?

This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

And companies want to talk to markets. Companies, however, have a limited amount of resources to listen, so they try to make wise decisions about who they are listening to. Those who do a good job of this survive. Those who try to listen to everyone inevitably fail.

Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false - and often is.

Happily, where it makes sense, this is changing.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

Of course they do. And they want each of their voices to be heard. They want each of their visions to be fulfilled, and each of their demands met. This may not be unreasonable in the long run, but companies with true vision may not feel the need to succumb to the average voice of a market. Visionary companies are such because they surpass the average in unexpected ways.

Finding which voices in a market are exceptional is non-trivial. Markets are not one voice, but many. Not one ear, but an ocean of them. Not of one mind, but individuals in the best and worst senses of the word.

Flacks and hucksters will be upgraded to better converse with the market as necessary, but not every worker wants to or is able to converse directly with the market. And certainly not every employee is appropriate for officially representing the company.

De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

As we do you. You are our reason d'etre.

We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

Though a company's strategies and best thinking might be of benefit for society and general, how can they trust you to do with it what's in our best interest?

We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

How does a company prevent a disgruntled shipping employee from blogging a negative image for a company? Workers need to be sure they've tried having a conversation internally before bringing it in to the market.

The market needs to understand that shit happens and occasionally the company and an employee are not able to see eye-to-eye. When fewer such exposures make massive headlines in the bloggosphere, more companies will allow the dialog. Conversely, when more companies allow this dialog, the market will get the idea that not every unhappy employee represents bad or unfair practices.

The question is which companies are going to take the first steps and get burned. Clearly, not all companies are suitable for this adventure.

As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

You don't, but just as you can't know everyone in a big city, nor is a one-to-one relationship between the market and workers possible for every member of both groups. Tools such as these help each group better understand the other in a short period of time. This should be the beginning, however, not the end of the relationship for interested members.

COMPANIES are run by people. People frequently make poor decisions. Companies have a stronger incentive than people to make better decisions.

Making demands is not opening a dialog. It is building a wall.

As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

Where in the organization do people stop becoming "workers" and start becoming "you"?

The inflated self-important jargon you sling around - in the press, at your conferences - what's that got to do with us?

Sometimes a lot. Sometimes nothing. Different "human" conversations require different dialects. We try to speak the dialect that is appropriate for the conversation at hand. Sometimes we forget which dialect goes with which conversation. We have many different skills, and not all of us are able to speak the language of your market. If you want to talk more directly to us, you are going to have to be tolerant of these mistakes.

Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

Impressing investors is one of the conversations we are having. Impressing the market is another. In a truly internetworked world, you get to hear much more of all conversations. The challenge is taking the time to appreciate the context.

If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

They don't "let" us talk that way, they require us to. It is their money that we are managing, just as it is yours we are trying to convince you to spend. They have different needs than you do; want to hear us say particular things, as do you.

Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections-perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

We aren't describing you for you.

We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

We are creating parts of it as well, but we're sneaky, so you might not recognize that it's us behind the curtains.

You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

We'd rather see you getting on your camel. If the new level of our eye-to-eye conversation unsettles us a bit, at least we can all travel a bit more efficiently.

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

In fact, you are not immune to advertising, you just have a different taste for it than you used to and than your parents did. And it shouldn't surprise you that a good deal of advertising actually works.

Despite all the press, you still watch TV commercials, and we can measure the impact. Despite all the press, you still listen to radio, and we can measure the impact. Despite all the doom-saying press at the turn of the millennium, you still click on banners, and we can not only measure that, but we can measure the impact of just SHOWING the banner regardless of whether or not you click on it. You even click on spam. What the hell are we supposed to do with that message?

Of course, when you speak, we listen. We try to make commercials more entertaining so that you'll watch them because they have more value to you that way. We roll our ads into content like video games because that's what you're doing these days. And we fund lots of your favorite activities on your block, in your city, and around the world because we go where you are and we want to not just participate in the things you do, but help make them available to you in the first place.

We admit it: we want you to like us. We'll figure out how to make this relationship work for both of us, but don't deny our effect on you. We're willing to give for what we get, and whether or not you want to admit it, you are too.

If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

We're finding that all we have to do to get you to talk is to ask. And when we do ask we get far more information than we're able to handle right now. Technology is great, but not all of the pieces are there yet.

We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

Darned tootin'! But don't be surprised that if we discontinue the things you say you will pay for but aren't actually willing to when we make it. And expect that once we've done that a time or two and gotten burned at it, we'll approach with a bit more caution.

You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

Was your email in ALL CAPS? Were you coherent? Was it something that we could actually help you with? Were you telling us how our CEO should be fired because he drives an SUV?

We suck at email response. There, we admit it.

But part of what makes that hard is that so often we have no idea what it is you are saying, or, when we do, there's really nothing we can do about it. An email is not at all like a telephone conversation. When we send you a response, and you send us a response, we can't guarantee that the same person will respond next time. This means that each new person that touches it has to figure out what's going on, and misunderstandings of what has already transpired are very likely.

It's a problem we know about and are working on. Meanwhile, if you wouldn't mind formulating your email like you might any other conversation (with all the annoying nouns, verbs, and adjectives), we'd appreciate it.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

If you don't pay, we'll pay attention.

We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

We're all for partying. Just as soon as we finish this pile of work over here.

Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

What else should we be focusing on? If you believe that some of us are active, generous givers to their communities, ask yourself why that is. Sure, you like them better for it, but doesn't it smell like MARKETING to you? And even if it does, do you really care?

Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

Companies are money making institutions. If you want good conversation, join a salon. Any other conversation you are going to have with a company is about money, whether you realize it or not.

Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

Will you be asking your questions individually? Should the CEO set aside 50 million 1 hour meetings? If you want to tell the CEO something, organize. Good companies will help.

We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

Sure, when you have something specific to say.

Most companies have far fewer customers than one article in the WSJ will put them in touch with.

We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

Sure. Just don't get pissed when they have to come in and do their homework.

When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

Excellent. Glad to see you're organizing (can we help with that?). What can we do for you?

When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

Will you forgive us if we have the occasional worker who is excellent at his job but may have impulse control issues when speaking on our behalf? If you don't believe he's "speaking on our behalf", and if we, in fact, deny that from the get go, will that matter if he pisses you off?

We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

We'd like to get it too. We're making efforts, and we're studying. Those of us that have to move fast will, the rest of us will try to make sure we don't screw things up first.

We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

Indeed. And if change is needed, we'll make it. If it's not, don't be surprised if we don't change. You are our primary interest, but sometimes we are still trying to figure things out, and sometimes we know more about you than you do.

We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

If being fun to play with is a path to success, you can bet business will be fun to play with.

Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

Trade shows are mostly by us and for us, and, for the most part, we find them boring too.

As for the corporate web site, if you tell us what you want, we'll build it if we can. These things cost us money and we want to make sure we invest it where it will make you the happiest.

Our allegiance is to ourselves-our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

We understand where your allegiance is. This is why we try to create content that you will tell your friends about. This is why we offer you incentives to talk about things that aren't inherently interesting on their own with your friends. This is why we create exclusivity by only allowing other people to join when they are invited by existing members.

You, as a gateway to your personal network of friends, acquaintances, and sparring partners, are one of our greatest assets. Expect to be treated as such.

Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

If you don't think companies are spending billions of dollars on this problem, you are not paying attention. This is practically the only problem companies have EVER paid attention to. But unlike Y2K, this is a conversation, and conversations are fluid, and evolving, and require investment in the right places over time.

We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

Meanwhile, we will be tearing down the walls to getting to know you better and have one-to-one conversations. This will involve knowing your date of birth, your gender, and other information you are concerned about but give us anyway for the chance at a 10% off coupon.

We're removing the barriers to our information flow both internally and with our corporate partners. We're working hard to protect your anonymity, but don't get freaked that it's not just barriers to OUR information that are being torn down.

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

Welcome to OUR party. We expect that you'll form your own companies to meet your perceived needs. Those of us that are big or fast enough will adapt and assimilate.

We think that you'll discover that there are, in fact, some rules.

And if you bypass them? Well, we anticipate attending your seminar at the next trade show.

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

We don't think you are who you think you are.