Technology360

The End of Customer Service

The March 24th issue of Time has a feature, "10 Ideas That Are Changing The World," one of which is "The End of Customer Service" by Barbara Kiviat.  This is presented as an inexorable and vaguely positive thing, but I don't know.

A trip (two, actually) to a Maryland Ikea store this past week to buy some furniture for my new apartment sure brought this home.  Ikea has features nice design, inexpensive prices, and great Swedish meatballs with lingonberries for $5.  Well, maybe I should reverse the order of those attributes.  They make it easy for a decorating doofus to match things. 

I swear that every time I go to an Ikea store, which is only about annually, I see fewer employees.  The ones that are left are always very helpful, but sometimes you have to look a bit to find one.  This time, all the check-out lines were self-service.  A single employee worked all the lanes to assist people like me who couldn't find the barcodes and to keep us from scanning both Box 1 and Box 2 when they're part of the same item or you'll pay twice.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now, you'll walk into Ikea and see only customers.  There will be a couple of guards on the way out, Costco style, to check your receipts against your cart, and maybe some people behind the scenes converting dollars into kronor.  Go to the cafeteria and hold your plate under an opening and your dozen meatballs will drop out.  Rotate the plate quickly and you'll get a splat of lingonberries and a blob of mashed potatoes (or is it the other way around?).  Can't find something?  Go to a kiosk and talk with a helpful operator named Bruce or Christine from Bangladesh (unless you're in an Ikea in Germany, in which case they're named Helmut and Helga).  I'd rather they automate their self-service furniture pick up so I don't have to go for the Advil when I get home.

Bringing this back to media a minute... It's probably not too far off the mark to say that self-service is one of the defining characteristics of new media vs. old media.  The legacy media are full service media.  We think about what programs you want and when you want them so you won't have to.  Just turn on your radio and television and sit back.  New media are self-service.  Search for this podcast or that video or that streaming link.  Decide both what you want to consume and whether it's MP3 or Real or Windows Media or QuickTime.  Which of the several players I have do I want to use?  Want to use one of the new IP radios?  Then sometimes be prepared to manually enter the URL of your favorite audio service.  You get the picture.

So we who want to succeed with distributing programming over emerging platform choices need to design those services to make them simulate the full-service environment as much as possible.  --Dennis

The importance of leadership with vision

Consultant Paul Jacobs writes:

... We're often asked why, in the face of declining overall listening to radio, Public Radio continues to thrive?  It's simple - everything about Public Radio programming is long-term.  And they cherish their audience relationships.  They're patient, they nurture their programs, they research their listeners' needs.  ¶  Their conventions and meetings are more frequent, better attended, and more considerate of the values and qualities that contribute to product development, brand building, and audience relationships.  While admittedly they don't suffer under the pressures of Wall Street or profit goals, they are in fact businesses that need to pay bills (with a lot less government support than people think).  The bottom line is that Public Radio succeeds because they think long-term.  ¶  And while Public RadioPublic Radio's core values doesn't have "celebrity" program directors you've heard of, most have been in their local communities for a long time and understand how to connect with the locals.  Additionally, are brilliant, concise, and imbedded in the minds of every person responsible for the creation of programming.  They are the guiding force behind their emotional attachment with their listeners. ...

Link:  JacoBLOG.  --Dennis

Key To Recession Survival: Master Consumer Media Habits

Diane Mermigas writes:

... According to the North American Technologies [Technographics®] Benchmark Survey published by Forrester Research, all adult consumers still devote more than twice as many hours in a typical week watching television as using the Internet.  Gen Yers 18-27 are moving toward parody [parity] in spending as many hours online as watching TV.  But they also spend nearly as much time watching DVDs–a hybrid activity on TVs, PCs and video-game consoles.  It suggests what other surveys also reflect: Young consumers move fluidly from one media-related activity to another (whether interactive or passive) because a screen is a screen is a screen.  ¶  However, as interactivity becomes more pervasive and all of television goes digital in a year, more Boomer consumers will follow suit.  So the increasing interactive attention and spending of consumers ages 42 to 62 is key.  These 78 million Boomers (the single largest demographic segment) already make a healthy showing in an array of interactive activities–from managing and printing personal photos to conducting finance and security checks.  The focus should be on how to increase maturing consumers’ routine use of interactive devises for potentially profitable social networking–e-commerce, entertainment and communications –not a comparison to younger early adopter habits. ...

Link:  MediaPost.  Link and corrections added.  --Dennis

The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007

Blogger John Bracken, whose day job is at the MacArthur Foundation, sent me and a bunch of others a request to name the most influential media writing of 2007.  In spite of a reminder, I couldn't come up with anything on a par with Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that I and many others nominated last year.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur was quite influential, largely as a provocation to the new media cognoscenti, and David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous has also been influential for more positive reasons.  Both are in my to-read stack, but I hadn't gotten to either of them so didn't feel comfortable nominating them.

Fortunately, others on John's list weren't as lacking in imagination as I and this year he's put together another great list.  I look forward to exploring the ones I've not yet read.  --Dennis

Myth, Media and Meta podcast

As I noted in the previous post below, audio files and presentation decks from the 2007 Iowa DTV Symposium have now been posted online.  This includes my own presentation from Oct. 2nd (and intimidating it was to be presenting the same afternoon as John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) titled Myth, Media and Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean for Broadcasting.  Here is the agenda description:

Humans have always created information faster than we create humans. And, consequently, humans are in a constant struggle to extract value from the "noise" of too much information in their environment. The title refers to epochs that are characterized by the techniques we've used. "Myth" being story-telling, poetry, music, etc. "Media" dates from Gutenberg and encompasses traditional broadcasting. "Meta" is the digital age, characterized by use of metadata, compression, "pull" distribution, and distribution systems that can learn user preferences. Broadcasters use all these techniques and social systems may enable them to be successful in "many-to-many" distribution in the future.

Links:  MP3, PPT or for Flash version of the deck click here and scroll down in the Content Track to 4:30 on Tuesday.  Also, I've placed both the MP3 and PPT links permanently in the Files section to the left.

For a written version, see these four posts from early June.  Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.   --Dennis

Myth, Media, Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean For Broadcasting

I was happy (though I had to follow two of my tech heroes, John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) to give a presentation again this year as part of the Iowa DTV Symposium, a national event held annually in Des Moines and organized by Dan Miller's great staff at Iowa Public Television.  My topic was the title of this post and attempts to use information theory to find a middle ground between legacy media and new media, the former group too often suffering from hubris and the latter often characterized by naïvté.  I made a preliminary series of four posts on this topic back in early June (here's part I and you can get to the other three from it).  My wife the professor and I are writing a book expanding on the topic.  Stay tuned.

I think they'll be posting audio to their web site, but for now, you can look at my PowerPoint deck which I've posted in the Files area on the left of this blog's main page.  Here's the direct link.  --Dennis

Jumpstarting Innovation: Using Disruption to Your Advantage

Lynda M. Applegate writes:

... Disruptions in the business environment cause economic shifts that destabilize industries, companies, and even countries.  They allow new entrants or forward-thinking established players to introduce innovations—in products, markets, or processes—that transform the way companies do business and consumers behave.  ¶   These disruptive innovations are not just novel inventions.  Successful innovators take ideas and turn them into opportunities by adding a business model that creates sustainable economic value for all stakeholders.  They then go one step further and exploit the opportunity by creating a sustainable business. ...

Link:  Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

Why "Good Enough" Is Good Enough

In an article that reinforces one of Clayton Christensen's observations, Stephen Baker writes:

... Are communications getting worse? Not by a long shot.  We're surrounded by miraculous machines and services, most of them calibrated to a level software engineers have long called "good enough."  In the right circumstances, good enough is great for the entire economy.  A marketplace that's not hung up on fail-safe standards is open to risk and innovation, and drives down prices. Ever since the dawn of the PC--the archetype for a good-enough machine--inventors have been freer than ever to piece together and launch their visions.  Some are brilliant, some are half-baked, many are a blend of the two. A precious few are up and running 99.999% of the time--Bell's old standard. But they cost far less to build.  ¶   The rise of good-enough technology raises different questions for do-it-yourselfers and major corporations alike.  It's no longer whether we can afford a technology, but more often whether we can afford the disruption if and when it fails.  Is it critical?  Do we have backup in place?  Many of us face this question every time we venture from our office with a cell phone.  We don't have "one machine that works all the time," says Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda Inc., a New York advertising company.  "We have lots of alternatives that work most of the time. ...

Link:  Business Week.  --Dennis

Adoption of Social Media is tough in Public Radio - what about a virus?

Rob Paterson has a continuation post of sorts of one to which I linked earlier this week (If markets are conversations - if media will be conversations - then what will we do?) and to a new report on public radio social media experiments to which I also linked.  Check it out.  Link:  FASTForward Blog.  --Dennis

Is Web 2.0 a Manifesto for Anarchism?

David Jennings has a interesting review of a fascinatingly prescient 1973 book by anarchist Colin Ward.  Anarchists have always been symbolized by the round bomb and seen as short on theory.  But read this sample:

... Anarchy in Action is no call to guerilla direct action to undermine the state apparatus. But it was both radical for its time, and prescient. "Anarchists are people who make a social and political philosophy out of the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit," writes Ward near the start of the book. He goes on: "we have to build networks instead of pyramids." So are we all anarchists now, and what does it mean to be an anarchist in the era of Web 2.0? I read this book because I had a hunch that there was a common thread running through old theories and current practice, and I wanted to see how strong this thread might be. ...

Link:  D J Alchemi.  --Dennis

WKRN's web woes

A lot of us have held up WKRN, Nashville's ABC affiliate, as an example of a station that really got it.  Former GM Mike Sechrist hired the best consultants -- Gordon Borrell, Terry Heaton and Michael Rosenblum -- and put together innovative local news and community-centric web entries.  However, Mike and some of the other architects of this exemplary effort are now out, casting a shadow over these innovations.  Michael Malone has the story.  Link:  Broadcasting & Cable.  --Dennis

David Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous

Phil Windley and colleagues have an interview in the Technometria podcast series with David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.  They describe it as follows:

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines a number of topics to illustrate this change.  He joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss the book.  ¶  He first discusses his background, as well as his previous books (The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined). He assesses the new methods of organization and how they are changing how information is used.  David also reviews how the changes affect the gatekeepers and what the future might hold for them. He shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

Link: ITConversations.com.

Gorman and Shirky on authority vs. openness

The Britannica Blog has hosted a very interesting exchange of essays between librarian Michael Gorman (ex-Dean of Library Services at California State University, Fresno) and Clay Shirky, teacher (New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program), writer and consultant.  I've been reading Shirky for years.  It's the openness vs. authority argument; Wikipedia vs. Encyclopædia Britannica (though of course, not just that); or, in book length, David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (reviews) vs. Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture (review).

Gorman begins with The Sleep of Reason, Part I (11 June) and Part II (12 June).

To which Shirky responds with "Old Revolutions Good; New Revolutions Bad" (14 June).

Gorman continues with The Siren Song of the Internet, Part I (18 June) and Part II (19 June).

To which Shirky responds with The Siren Song of Luddism (19 June).

Gorman continues again with Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part I (25 June) and Part II (26 June).

The Britannica Blog follows up with other responses:  Publisher Roger Kimball (The New Criterion, Encounter Books) also contributes to this debate in Technology, Temptation, and Virtual Reality.  Doctoral candidate (U. C.-Berkeley) danah boyd in Knowledge Access as a Public Good (27 June).  Reference librarian Thomas Mann in Brave New (Digital) World, Part I: Return of the Avant-Garde and Part II: Foolishness 2.0?.

I've not gotten through the essays in the last paragraph yet, but so far it's good reading.  --Dennis

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain

I'm not big on business books, at least of the airport bookstand variety, but Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and its siblings have been hugely influential on me.  Jean McGregor has an interview with Christensen on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of that book.  Link:  BusinessWeek.  --Dennis

Marc Andreessen's guide to personal productivity

Marc Andreessen has begun blogging and so far it's a remarkable effort.  Of broad interest will be a post about some unorthodox personal productivity practices that he follows.  Link:  blog.pmarca.com.  --Dennis

Building conceptual bridges to a new media world

Jon Udell writes:

When Ryan Sholin’s manifesto on the future of newspapers appeared the other day, the blogosphere cheered loudly. “Great summary,” said one commenter, “Too bad they’re not listening.”  ¶  “They” are the newspaper writers, editors, and journalists — and the J-school teachers — whose attitudes and skills require a major overhaul:

Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing…

…you and Mr. Notebook need to make some new friends, like Mr. Microphone and Mr. Point & Shoot.

Although everything on Ryan’s 10-point list is devastatingly true, it’s important to consider all the reasons why “they’re not listening.” ...

Link:  Jon Udell.

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 4 of 4)

Meta

This is the last of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

With the rise of mass media, information flow quickly exceeded the attention capacity of humans.  Information has value to many (e.g., American Idol) or to a few (e.g., this weblog), but if you don’t have the attention or the interest or the need for that information, it’s really high-entropy “crud,” not information at all.  So now we have a subjective definition of information.

Only among humans has there been a power curve of information growth such that managing a surplus of information becomes a problem for our species – maybe the central problem.  Or, to quote a popular version of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s Law, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”  Of course, each of us has a different standard for the useful 10 percent – hence, the secret of Chris Anderson’s long tail meme describing the power law distribution of content popularity.

In response, in the recent human past, we have developed information about information – metadata (e.g., the library card) – and very recently we’ve developed a powerful peered network – the Web.  We’re learning now how to dynamically add metadata to nodes on the Web to make them more valuable with each usage.  These techniques are often subsumed under the Web 2.0 label, but they date at least from the start of Amazon.com.  This is the “meta” epoch of information – the “selfish Web” where each user can find low-entropy value.  And, in contrast to the media epoch, both dissemination and origination are democratized.

Is it our ability to individualize information – to live within multiple communities of interest – that makes us human today?  When this, too, exceeds our attention limits, what will be the next means of extracting value from disorder?

See also part one (intro), part two (myth), and part three (media).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 3 of 4)

Media

This is the third of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

The problem is, “myth” by itself doesn’t scale.  When humans spent most of their time in family or other social groups, this did not matter much.  But as humans began migrating and congregating in larger populations, the transmission of myth became more difficult, and conflicting myths began contending with each other for primacy (e.g., the Crusades).

Writing is a medium and has a long history, but for our purposes I really want to consider the impact of mass media.  And, again for our purposes, I’d like to date that from the mid-15^th century invention of movable type printing in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg (by then it had existed for 400 years in China, but its use with the more limited European alphabet made it successful).  Instead of one copy of the Christian Bible per scribe per year, humans now could reproduce information at some scale.

Not only books but polemics like the Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (1517) got wide distribution.  In only 80-100 years after its European invention, movable type resulted in a flip to Protestant Christianity for much of the continent.  In the modern world, the “power of myth” (to borrow from the title of the classic Bill Moyers PBS series with Joseph Campbell), is the power of the mass media.

Of course, mass media also power other information as well.  Science and democracy have flourished with wide dissemination, but so have totalitarian ideologies and pornography.

Arguably, mass media have enabled content creation on a scale and of a quality not possible without it.  It’s doubtful, for example, that Halldór Laxness would have written his amazing novels (see the reference in part two) if his distribution was initially limited to a single copy on vellum.  But then that’s exactly what his fellow Icelander, Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda and other works did some seven centuries earlier.

If ideas were beginning to bump into each other before the invention of movable type, their conflicts became orders of magnitude greater afterward.  What hadn’t been replaced from pre-media days was the role of the information disseminator – though one-to-a-few became one-to-many.  Distribution was democratized but origination was still in the hands of the few.

Is it our ability to scale information through mass media that makes us human?

More about this in the last post in this series (part one was an introduction, part two covered the role of myth, and part four will conclude with what I’m labeling “meta”).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 2 of 4)

Myth

This is the second of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

Myth – which I’m using here very broadly – is the most persistent method of lowering entropy, originating from the necessities of passing on information by oral means, and continuing to the present day – even in educated Western societies.  Poetry, song and legend are the building blocks of myth.  Easy to remember, crafted in metaphor, they have served through millennia to transmit culture, religion, history, law, social mores, and pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena.

I’ll pick an example from Norse mythology.  My maternal grandmother was born on the island in Denmark which is home to the city of Odense.  Its name comes from Norse words meaning “Odin’s sanctuary.”  My surname comes from the family farm in mid-Norway.  It has several ancient stone-pile graves and the name is likely a kenning – “Hár’s acre” – “The High One’s field,” from one of Odin’s many nicknames – for this field of graves.

Odin was effectively the Nordic/Germanic god of information –credited for eloquence, poetry, music, wisdom, magic, prophecy and inventor of the runes – writing.  His myth has it that he pawned one of his eyes in exchange for wisdom.  Each morning, he sent his two ravens, Hugin and Munin – thought and memory, respectively – to fly the world bringing back what they had seen and heard.

One of the poems in the Poetic Edda, preserved in Iceland in the 13^th century from the oral tradition, is Hávamál, The Sayings of Hár where Odin provides advice for wise living.  Examples below from the translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor:

No. 27
The ignorant booby had best be silent
When he moves among other men,
No one will know what a nit-wit he is
Until he begins to talk;
No one knows less what a nit-wit he is
Than the man who talks too much.

No. 58
Early shall he rise who has designs
On another’s land or life:
His prey escapes the prone wolf,
The sleeper is seldom victorious.

Pretty benign stuff, but myth derives strength by being close to power – the shaman or priest or official or family head.  Even today, otherwise sober people are demanding that myths be substituted for science in the education system of scientifically sophisticated countries.  Tragically, deaths from stoning or decapitation are still happening in other parts of the world when the codes that myths engender are violated.

But myth can also be sublime.  It would be hard to convince me that any form of information provides more “value per bit” to humans than literature, poetry and music.  To me, the music of Johannes Brahms and the novels of Halldór Laxness touch my soul – to use a very unscientific word – like nothing else.  From the latter’s masterpiece, Independent People, these words about the principal character’s step-daughter:

When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks:  Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth?  Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe?  No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja.

The essence of his subtle and complex novel is captured in this one paragraph in a way that a similar number of words of, say, business writing, cannot replicate.

Is it our ability to create myth that makes us human?  Myth hasn’t been replaced by media and “meta.”  To the contrary, myth was an early adopter of, and has arguably thrived under, each.

More about this in part three on media (part one was an introduction, part three deals with media, and part four will conclude with what I’m labeling “meta”).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 1 of 4)

Introduction

The Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen that ended today had as its theme the word, “human” – that simple and that complicated.  Until last week, I planned to attend and to do a talk on what one might call a human information theory of value.  The following from my notes for that talk takes a look at three successively-layered epochs of human information dissemination, which I’m labeling “myth,” “media,” and “meta.”

Note:  This is the first of four parts.  Links to the other three parts come at the end of this post.

In 2000, Michael Lesk, now a professor at Rutgers University, estimated that there were 12 exabytes (12 x 10¹⁸ bytes) of recorded information in the world and that it was increasing at 4 exabytes per year.  Another study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 5 exabytes of recorded information was produced in 2002 alone.  Five exabytes equals 37,000 libraries the size of the Library of Congress’s book collection.  That would put the aggregate amount of recorded information in 2007 in the 45-exabyte range – 6.8 gigabytes (6.8 x 10⁹ bytes) of recorded information for each of the 6.6 billion persons on the planet.

Roll back the calendar 2,000 years and the world’s population was the same as that of the U.S. today – 300 million.  Information then was largely recorded on scrolls.  The largest library of that era was the Royal Library at Alexandria, Egypt, a collection variously given as 400,000-600,000 scrolls at its peak.  I don’t know how much information was on each scroll, but let’s assume that each one was the equivalent of 100 typewritten pages – 200 kilobytes of information each – 100 gigabytes total.  This was a very comprehensive library, but let’s figure that it missed 90% of the world’s recorded information.  So a rough guess, then, that is the aggregate was one terabyte (1 x 10¹²) – just over 3 kilobytes (300 words) of recorded information for each person on the planet.  In 2,000 years, population has grown (mostly in the past century) 22-fold, but recorded information per person has grown some 2 million times!

Of course recorded information is not the only information in the world.  The information coded in Earth’s physical and biological structures no doubt dwarfs recorded information.  Atoms assemble from atomic subparticles and likewise molecules assemble from atoms through information.  Information also determines the development path of each organism and organisms make use of information to survive.  But these information systems are stable enough that one can treat them as effectively closed systems.

The late comic Buddy Hackett affected a bumbling on-stage demeanor and was once invited to replace Curly Howard in the Three Stooges, but his humor sometimes had an intellectual foundation.  My favorite was a classic explanation of entropy – a measure of disorder in a closed system.  While staring intensely at a glass of water, Hackett was asked what he was doing.  Hackett replied, “Someone told me that I could bring a glass of ice water to a boil just by staring at it.  I’ve already got it up to room temperature.”  The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes how the temperature of both ice water and boiling water tend to reach an equilibrium over time – in this case to room temperature – through increasing entropy.

Two thousand years back, an individual could get the equivalent of his or her share of aggregate recorded information – 300 words – in conversation at breakfast.  Today, an individual’s exposure to his or her 6.8-gigabyte share takes considerably longer, even with the New York Times next to the plate and the Today show playing in high definition in the background.  Entropy is still inexorable, but for humans, the “information room temperature” is increasing as we invent ever-more sophisticated ways of extracting information value from the disorder around them.

Part two takes a look at the first of these inventions – the role of myth in human extraction of value from information.  Part three will look at the role of media and part four will look at what I’m labeling “meta” – information about information in a networked world.  --Dennis

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The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth

Clay Shirky has a terrific short essay on the advantages of youth in the entrepreneurial sphere.  He writes:

... Young entrepreneurs have an advantage over older ones (and by older I mean over 30), and ... age isn’t in fact a mindset. Young people have an advantage that older people don’t have and can’t fake, and it isn’t about vigor or hunger — it’s a mental advantage. The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things. ...

Link:  Many2Many.  Thanks for the tip to the advantaged Andrew Haarsager.  --Dennis

Learning about change on a Normandy farm

Last week, my wife and I retraced (too quickly) part of my father's 1944-45 path across western Europe, spending a couple of days in Normandie (we spell it Normandy), France and counting coup with the Ardennes in eastern Belgium on our way back to a flight home from Amsterdam (from October through the end of the war, he was with the 28th Infantry Division in the Huertgen Forest, Ardennes Forest ("Battle of the Bulge"), and Colmar Pocket areas, among others).

My dad's initial unit, the 2nd Infantry Division, landed on Omaha Beach at the village of St.-Laurant-sur-Mer on 7 June 1944 (D-Day+1).  The previous day's initial invasion had cleared most of the resistance from the Germans on the beach, so as the division moved inland, it passed through two villages that had already been liberated, but engaged the Germans a few kilometers inland at Trévières, liberating that small town.  From there, they kept moving south, fighting what became known as the Battle of the Hedgerows -- the nearly impenetrable walls of stone and tall hedges that surrounded the many small fields. 

About 20 km south of the beach, they then engaged in an assault from 11 June to 12 July on a German installation on Hill 192, so named because, at 192 meters above sea level, it gave the Germans a very wide overview of the entire invasion area.  Hill 192 is a large feature with a gradual slope, the top of which is about a kilometer north of the highway which connects Saint-Lô with Bayeux and a kilometer west of St.-Georges-d'Elle.  That little hamlet changed hands five times during the battle.

A more peaceful and bucolic setting you couldn't find.  The viewpoint is about a kilometer west of St. Georges d'Elle.  It's located between the top of the hill, about 200 meters to the south, and a farm, about 200 meters down the hill to the north.  The sign there provides a visualization of the final attack in which the 2nd Division passed right through the farm in the orchard where the cow above is standing.

As I was viewing this scene, there was a clank-clank-clank sound coming from the farm and I noticed a farmer crouching in front of a shed hammering on something metallic.  It's likely that his grandfather was the farmer in 1944 and that he and his family were driven temporarily from the farm and that the farm largely destroyed by the month-long operation -- cows killed, apple orchards uprooted, buildings shot up, crops trampled. My dad was on a Howitzer crew until he was wounded on 23 June, so he no doubt launched countless shells into the farm and German outpost, now a barley field.

There were big things at stake in WW-II -- liberation from a foreign power, ethnic genocide -- about which few could question.  Yet the justification for the good guys and the bad guys at Hill 192 blasting each other might have seemed pretty remote to the farmer whose family and farm was being destroyed (many "locals" throughout Europe, including I'm sure some whose physical assets were being destroyed, joined the resistance and provided valuable assistance to the Allies).  And this is no doubt only one of many wars fought in the area over the centuries since the top of the has so much strategic importance.  Go back some 40 generations and a different group of bad guys who were my cousins and some of this farmer's ancestors sailed up the Seine nearby to the east, took over the area, and gave their name to it.  So dozens of generations of farmers have had to put up with these interruptions of their livelihood.  It would be tempting to put aside whatever issues caused these battles and just wish that people would leave them alone to farm.

I thought first how remote is our experience with resident wars as Americans.  The various Indian wars of the 19th century are the most recent example.  Our distance from that time might have contributed to our outrage over the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.

In that reflective mood -- and I'm now finally getting to the point of adding this to a technology blog -- it also occurred to me that this was maybe a good metaphor for why change is so hard.  I've been discouraged of late by how slow real change within the media -- particularly within the public media sector where I make a living.  I'm a natural optimist, but it now seems to me that change will come too late for many of us.

But maybe the natural way for humans to respond to disruptive activities -- whether it's the disruption of battle or the disruptions of innovation -- is to stick to the knitting.  "Just let me do what I know and enjoy," whether it's our mode of production or our linear programming tradition or our business model, is probably a very human way to react to big but but lumbering external forces.  "Yes, we'll probably suffer under the bad guys' regime, but it will be awhile before it really hits home."

--Dennis

Public broadcasting and statin drugs

I attended a meeting of National Public Radio station execs this week to which Alan Deutschman, author of Change or Die, spoke.  I'll let Andy Carvin take over from here:

Someone in the audience suggested to Alan Deutschman that maybe public radio is doing just fine, and that change could actually be a bad thing. Alan replied by asking a question and telling another story.  ¶  First, the question: if you could take a pill that would solve all of public radio's problems, would you take it? Even if it had zero side effects? Alan said you probably wouldn't, and he explained this by talking about statin drugs, which are taken by millions of people to prevent heart attacks. ...

Link:  Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth.  --Dennis

More thoughts on the CRB rate decision

The recent Copyright Royalty Board ruling about streaming rates has sure stirred things up among those who are streaming music online, both traditional radio stations and Internet-only radio operations.  I've posted about it here, here and here.  In what one of my colleagues called an "obdurate" (that's for sure) ruling, the CRB has now reaffirmed its ruling (see Copyright Royalty Board Upholds "Disasterous" Royalty Rates).  But also see Stephen Hill's post on this.  Even if you don't want to heed Stephen's call to "get over it," he provides some important information about how we got here, including this:

   

... If you want to understand the rights holder's side of the issue I recommend the interview BRIAN ZISK of the Future of Music Coalition did with JOHN SIMSON of SoundExchange in Royalty Week. (.pdf)   Simson is a very clear, very practical guy as you will see from what he says. One thing he mentions that is sure to be even more controversial is that SoundExchange and the RIAA intend to fight to change the law as it applies to legacy broadcasters so that ultimately...the rates are uniform.  ¶  This means that terrestrial broadcasters would no longer have the 'carve-out' they've enjoyed since the 1920's, where they pay only the music publishers, songwriters and composers for use of recorded music. With the radio industry already under pressure from changing advertising models, you can bet the screams about this will be much louder, and the lobbying from the NAB should be nothing short of tactical nukes. ...

Which prompts the first thing about which I'd like to comment, that the exchange of values in the music business isn't always obvious.

As we navigate these waters, it will be useful to analyze the historical exchanges of value in the music and broadcasting business.  This was brought to mind by the FCC's recent $12.5M in fines against four large radio broadcasters for accepting pay for play payments -- payola, something most of us thought was part of radio's adolescence, not its adulthood.  Yes, broadcasters have a "carve-out" from the rates, yet they're considered to add so much value to record sales that rights holders are willing to pay us to promote their products.  So powerful is that "reverse value" that we have to make rules against it.   Ironic, huh.  Likewise, many -- perhaps most -- artists don't make much money on record company sales, they make it on performance tours and merchandising.  Reform of this complex set of payments needs to recognize where true value is extended and where it is received.

The second thing is a point about this ruling's impact on innovation.

It's tempting to argue that the recording industry's true target is innovation.  Pandora, to name one, and its fellow innovators are the future of music online, not streams that mirror our broadcast services.  For our own survival, broadcasters need innovation that the CRB's ruling manifestly discourages.  I agree with Stephen that we ultimately must focus on business models that work, but innovation by legacy players is already handicapped by the need to continue to treat good legacy customers well and by the broadcasting culture.  The CRB ruling adds even more reasons not to make the innovative investments and related changes in our m.o.  Seems to me that's exactly what its proponents want.  --Dennis

Future Games

Bob Stein sent me (thanks) a link to a fascinating profile by Eliza Strickland of San Francisco game designer Jane McGonigal.  I've long thought that games were a logical expansion of public media.  McGonigal, without calling it that, has probably developed this concept further than anyone else.  Strickland writes:

... McGonigal wants to harness the power of the communal cerebellum her games create, and put it to work solving real-world problems. Maybe young folks in warring countries could play games together, and would be less inclined to shed each other's blood. Maybe players could analyze real scientific data in the course of a game, crunching numbers and looking for patterns just as they always do, but with a payoff that goes beyond advancing to the next stage of a game. ...

Link:  SF Weekly.  --Dennis

Reboot 9.0

A colleague on the NPR board suggested that I consider attending the Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen/København May 31-June 1.  I've heard really good things about past Reboots, so I'm game and have made arrangements to attend.  Quickly scanning the list, I see a few names that I recognize, but only one person that I know personally (Rob Paterson). 

Are any readers of this weblog planning to be there as well?  --Dennis

Meet the metaverse, your new digital home

Daniel Terdiman writes:

The Internet in 2016 will be an all-encompassing digital playground where people will be immersed in an always-on flood of digital information, whether wandering through physical spaces or diving into virtual worlds.  ¶  That was the general picture painted in a draft report obtained by CNET News.com that summarizes the conclusions of several dozen pundits who met at the first Metaverse Roadmap Summit last May to prognosticate the "pathway to the 3D Web."  ¶  Within 10 years, the report suggests, people may wear glasses that record everything around them. They will likely see little distinction between their real-world social lives and their interactions in digital, 3D virtual worlds. And they'll increasingly turn to services like an enhanced Google Earth that are able to present data on what's happening anywhere, at any time, as it unfolds. ...

Link:  CNet.

Giving It Away

Bob Lefsetz writes:

I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free.  Oldsters can’t understand the economics!  ¶  I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!  ¶  This is your worst nightmare.  People who can follow their dream on sweat equity.  Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you.  It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death.  Same deal in Iraq.  ¶  It’s an eye-opener.  That your model is IRRELEVANT!  ¶  YOU need to pay the mortgage.  YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean.  But the new musicians?  They’re willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen.  Hell, they’re in their twenties, they’re not on the corporate track, they’ve got different ambitions! ...

... To believe that the majors will be the logical filters in the future is to be completely ignorant.  They’re only necessary if you want to reach the masses INSTANTLY!  Is that a good thing?  Furthermore, as every day goes by, it’s easier and easier to reach more people for almost free. ...

Link:  The Lefsetz Letter.  He writes about music, but it's equally valid for other businesses.  --Dennis

Community 2.0

John Hagel has a very thoughtful and lengthy essay on the challenges in building virtual communities.  Link:  Edge Persepctives.  --Dennis

Living history

It turns out that Terry Heaton and I have been in broadcasting the same amount of time.  He writes some lines about the change we've seen.  I especially like how he wraps it up.  Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMoBlog.  No one will label him a dinosaur.  --Dennis

VOX and The New Gravity

Stephen Hill writes:

... A dozen years into the Internet era, The only limitations left are the speed of broadband connections, and the ability to hit users in motion with wireless services. Both are the subject of intensive development and will be eliminated in time.  ¶   More important, the Internet levels ALL previous types of media: text, pictures, graphics, animation, audio of all kinds, and now video.  So great has been our focus on the old organizing centers of media that print, audio and video still remain largely separate online — a result of differing skill sets, craft traditions, unions, rights regimes and audience habits.  ¶  Nevertheless, we now have an emerging paradigm which still lacks an elegant one-word name. The closest would be "web multimedia."  This paradigm is now emerging on blogs. At 50 million and counting, blogs are the first web mass medium that allows individual creators to engage audiences online with a common multimedia format. ...

Link:  Spatial Relations.

Rosenblum on public broadcasting

Television production innovator Michael Rosenblum gave a terrific keynote at last week's Public Media 2007 conference in Boston and writes about his close encounter with pubcasting in his weblog:

... once you move to the web, the architecture of the web itself suddenly dictates a radical change in how you work and what your product looks like. Up until now, we have been living in a world of a broadcasting model. One signal to many people. Whether we were publishing newspapers, magazines, radio shows or TV, the model remained pretty much the same.  ¶  But the Internet is different. The Internet is about connecting communities. Ebay, one of the most successful sites on the web, is about connecting a community of sellers with a community of buyers, one strand at a time. Amazon, another success story, is also about connecting a community of sellers - bookstores, warehouses or small shops, with a community of buyers, all over the world. Google if you think about it, is also about connecting a massive ‘community’ of content with a community of users. ...

Link:  Rosenblumtv.  Check it out.  --Dennis

FCC kills Morse Code requirement for hams

I'm a man of useless talents -- balancing the end of a broom on my finger, wiggling my ears, Morse code -- but not all at the same time.  After a couple of years of studying, I got a ham license in 1965 (WAØKKR then, but N7DH since 1975) and have kept it ever since, but my last period of sustained activity ended in 1976.  However, when I was active, it was primarily on Morse code.  I got so I could copy about 50 words per minute in my head and about 40 wpm on a typewriter (remember typewriters?) if the sender knew what he or she was doing.  Over about 25 wpm, Morse becomes another language instead of dots and dashes, and it's elegant -- beautiful even.  But this week, the FCC finally killed off its Morse requirement for amateur radio licenses in order to let in the riff raff broaden the appeal of this service and make life a little easier for themselves.  I guess those are laudable goals.  Matt Largey had the story for NPR's All Things Considered.  --Dennis didididahdidah

Change or Die

I spent some time at a hospital this week (not as a patient), left for an hour or so, and returned after 8:00 in the evening to find that all the entrances were locked except for the ER.  On the sidewalk outside the ER were three couples, each including a blanket-draped patient in a wheelchair, taking smoke breaks.  I thought of that when reading the following article sent to me by Tim Eby (thanks) that talks about just how difficult change is to accomplish.  --Dennis

Alan Deutschman writes:

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon -- a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?  ¶  Yes, you say?  ¶  Try again.  ¶  Yes?  ¶  You're probably deluding yourself.  ¶  You wouldn't change.  ¶  Don't believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds? ...

Link:  Fast Company.

Hope is not lost: Radio and TV and Everything

Rob Paterson is writing about this week's sessions at the Public Media Conference 2007.  This compelling insight is from a post about a two-day pre-conference meeting for public broadcasting CEOs:

... For me, motive and hope is the key to change. As Alan Deutschman shows us in Change or Die, being told you are going to die - the substance of much of what we heard in the last 2 days - is not the great activator for change that we think it may be.  90% of seriously at risk patients do not act on their doctor's advice.  ¶  So why don't we change, even if we know that if we don't we will die? To make a big change - to think web versus terrestrial, to think collaboration versus me alone -  often means to change our identity.  If our identity and our personal story is attached to these things, then in 90% of the time we would rather die than change the identity that we had come to rely on.  We martyr ourselves for this identity.  This is what is the real barrier. ...

And then:

... Ideas do not change us. Only experience changes us. Changing experience has to be deep and repetitive to change the habits of a career. ...

Link:  Rob Paterson's Weblog.

In a later post, Hyperlocal - Saving the World, Rob addresses mission directly:

One of the powerful trends that I am witnessing is the growing recognition in Public radio and TV that There is a huge opportunity for public media to secure a viable future by serving the hyper local community. I will post more later about what I have seen and heard about how this can be done for very little money. Please take it on faith for now that the how is now known.  ¶  The big idea is that in a hyper linked global world - the hyper local becomes the most important place. If the 20th century was about nationalism and the nation statee. The 21st will have to be about a shift in power back to the small local community.

Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog.  Bingo.  While we're all scrambling to see how we can make money on the web, mostly by monetizing repurposed legacy programs in new ways (and there are ways to do that), the truth is that the real power of the web is to help us be more significant institutions in our community.  It's way better than our time-limited hit-dependent broadcast delivery.  For non-profits, it's about mission.  Show me the money! the mission (and the money will take care of itself).  --Dennis

Why Do You Want Interactive TV?

Interactive TV has turned into the electronic media version of Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot.  Baris Karadogan writes perceptively about why the big media players have never been able to bring it off, even while it's happening on a different platform all around them:

... So while we were waiting for interactive TV, a massively interactive device, your PC, has found its way right next to your PC, and it's game over.  You can get HD content on your laptop.  You can get, or will soon, all kinds of on demand content on your PC, and over time the quality will get better and better and better. ...

Link:  AlwaysOn.  And be sure to read the comment by Ray Podder appended to Karadogan's piece, which includes the following quotable bit of wisdom that goes far beyond this [emphasis added]:

I don't think there is much use for still thinking in terms of "reach" and "consumers".  We are all part