When reading quantitative research papers on the subject of crowdsourcing, open source software, and online communities, you don’t quite get the feel of the personal stories behind the projects and successes in these organizations.  Clay’s work does a great job of pulling out personal stories, from a blogger who covered a military coup when traditional outlets were shut down, to someone retrieving a stolen phone by assembling an angry mob of supporters online, to (of course) Wikipedia, and the founding story that is frequently repeated of the failure of Nupedia.  Shirky does a great job of comparing this shift in technology to similar past shifts, such as the “layoffs” among the scribes when the printing press was created, or the pushback against calculators when they began to arrive in schools.  The new social web is not something we can all ban together and vote against, it is coming, it is here, it is changing things.

One useful categorization scheme I gleamed from the book was the three different types of online organization paradigms:  sharing, collaboration, and collective action.  Sharing takes place on sites like delicious, or flickr where the product really is a collection of things people have shared online, requiring little coordination or extra effort.  Collaboration is closer to Wikipedia, where argument, process, and group opinions matter, and people come together to create something that none of them would have created alone.  Collective action, such as MoveOn.org, or Voice of the Faithful (a Catholic reform group), use the web as a platform to coordinate large actions in real life that would not have been possible to form without the web.  I think most of the attention in research has focused on the first two categories, and largely ignored the third.

While there are many other insights I gleamed from the book, the one that probably relates closer to my research is the concept of the “bargain” online organizations have with their users.  Shirky argues that for an online organization to be successful it has to have a meaningful promise to it’s users, the right tools for the job, and a bargain of what the users can expect, and what the organization should expect.  Part of my research deals with the psychological contract users have with online organizations, especially as they become more central to the organization.  This bargain piece sounds very similar to a psychological contract, and it’s good to hear that others are pointing out it is necessary and interesting.  One example of a poor bargain that caused a failed community was Microsoft’s attempt to encourage user contributions to it’s encyclopedia Encarta.  Unfortunately, the bargain was that Microsoft had permission to “use, copy,distribute, transmit, reproduce” etc etc with Microsoft making money from the product, and the user having no further rights to their creation.

I would describe Jaron Lanier as pretty much the antithesis of Richard Stallman the figurehead of the free software movement (and more generally the open culture movement) .  Stallman believes “information wants to be free” in the sense that music, video, and software should be free to remix, edit, and compile as you see fit.  That is, with respect to software, everyone should be able to view, edit, and redistribute any change they make to software regardless of where the software came from.  While I’m generally an advocate of open source software Lanier points out many good reasons to be skeptical.  Stallman presented some of his ideas recently at the University of Pittsburgh and I was able to attend, and I have to say his solutions to the issue of creative professionals receiving payment for their work was lacking.  The most convincing argument I found that Lamier had against the “free software” movement was that the premise that those creating digital goods should not paid for their work is truly a Maoist  philosophy:  intellectuals should not be paid for their intellectual work, only those plowing the fields and “dancing for their dinner” should be paid.  The open source model leaves professionals being paid to support it, and to customize it, but they can’t make money from their actual software development.  I find this the most difficult hurdle to overcome if one is to buy into the free/open culture movement.  Musicians need to eat, as do actors, as do software developers.  If it is all free, there is only so much money you can make touring the country, signing autographs, or giving technical support.  Lanier makes the point that sometimes paying a little can result in much better results for everyone than paying nothing.

Another interesting thing he points out is how open source lacks real innovation.  He makes a statement along the lines of “if you would have said in the 1980’s that in 30 years we will have computers that are a million times faster, and have millions of times the storage we have today, and the greatest accomplishment will be a new version of Unix (referring to Linux), a web server (Apache), and a new encyclopedia (Wikipedia), it would have sounded like the future is not very bright.”  Indeed, I’ve commented on this before, although I love the idea of open source software, all the innovation has come out of closed source systems, with open source trailing behind trying to catch up.  If you’ve ever used OpenOffice, you know what I am talking about.  He points out that Apple has done the innovating with the iPhone, and on the desktop Windows and Mac are the only ones pushing operating systems forward.

Another point he makes that I really agreed with was that it is unfortunate that Google has made the model of the internet be based on advertising for revenue.  All the free services we’ve come to know and love are based on advertising.  While I don’t have a better business model for everyone, it seems unsustainable, and to me one of the wide open areas for truly innovating in technology is to come up with a better model for web services than ad based revenue.

While it would take too long to delve into every topic he covers, I will go into a couple more that I found interesting:  what happened to virtual reality?  In the 80’s and 90’s this seemed like it was just over the horizon, eventually we would have headsets or glasses and be fully immersed in virtual worlds.  It seems like the technology should be there, or close, but VR just hasn’t happened.  This seems like somehow we forgot about it on the way to Web 2.0 and the Internet boom, and smart phones.

Lastly, I will leave some food for thought.  If I played a song from the last decade, and then played another song from the 1990’s, how could you tell the difference?  One point he makes is that our current “mashup” and “retro” culture has created a musical decade in which no one is doing anything truly new.  Every decade of the 20th century had it’s own musical style, but somehow the last decade missed forming one.  Lanier posits that this is because although now we have the tools for production and distribution, we have developed a “hive mind” that is continually rehashing old styles without truly developing anything new and original.  With this new system in which we don’t need music labels, don’t need fancy recording studios, and don’t need all the middle men and radio hits to be a successful musician, what successful musician can you think of that truly came out of the web 2.0 era?  Because we now expect our music to be free, musicians are expected to tour and sell t-shirts to earn their living, but it’s not working.  Only those coming out of the old model of labels and radio play are putting food on the table, the rest are touring in a van with the buddies, crashing on couches, and promoting the ideals of the new internet culture while still earning the money of a starving musician.

Simply technology will trump all others in this market.  Sites like Pandora, where all you have to do is type the name of a song or artist and it does all the rest will be money makes of this group.  Discovering new music that is similar to music you already like used to be difficult, and I would just give up if I had to sift through the garbage on the radio to find it.  Maybe I’m missing what software is designed for complete simplicity, but I haven’t seen targeted software for the elderly, or those not-so-tech-savvy in any place of prominence.  This seems like a very simple business case analysis, huge target market, easily definable needs.  What software or technology would you recommend?

I should say I don’t mean to characterize all baby boomers, or elderly as non-techno-savvy.  In fact many of the great technologists of all time are in that generation.  I will say that on average, they are less techno-savvy, and less willing to spend tedious time configuring technological devices and software.

Blockbuster video was booming, but he predicted it would be nearly collapsed in 15 years because there is no money in delivering “atoms” (physical goods) when you should be delivering “bits” (digital goods).  Online video has taken over, and Blockbuster has taken quite a hit.  Still, I think the fact that Netflix still takes the time to mail you a physical copy of a digital good is a little silly, I thought we would be past that by now, and onto the iTunes type of market for everything.  He discusses thoroughly the point of the computer isn’t to make it easy for your to directly interact with it and tell it exactly how to do everything, the point was for it to be a digital butler, or an agent for you to do things for you in an automated way based on your preferences.  While we still haven’t gotten there, I think technologies such as Google Voice, which can put some calls from certain people straight to voicemail, ring many different phones, and route calls based on the time of day as a step in the “digital butler” direction.  Similarly for RSS readers such as Google Reader.  He mentions we won’t have to read a whole newspaper to get the columns by the authors we like, and the news will be much more personalized to the things that interest us.  Well, selecting the writers you like to follow, and the friends and family you will follow is pretty similar, and he mentions you won’t have to keep coming to a site to get new content, it will come to you.

There are a few things we haven’t gotten right, or at least I haven’t seen it done right.  He mentions the interface needs to move away from people at a keyboard with a computer screen.  You need to be able to shout commands across the room and have it understand you.  Some of this technology is available in phones, but voice is still not a central part of computing.  One thing he mentioned that I frankly don’t think will ever happen, is that every electronic gadget in your home will be linked on the same system.  Your refrigerator will tell your car when you need more milk.  The camera in your house will tell your heating system that no one is home, so turn the heat down, and turn off the lights.  Your toaster will burn the Dow Jones numbers into your toast on the go.  I just don’t see that happening.  I’m ok having my refrigerator never need to be connected to a network.

Another thing that I think he got pretty close on, but not exactly right is the prevalence of small electronics.  However, he thought everyone would have powerful computers on their wrist like a watch, while it seems (at least for now) we have these computers as smart phones.  The things smart phones can do amaze me, not having one myself, sometimes they seem indistinguishable from magic.

I would highly recommend this book as food for thought.  I am sort of a closet reader of outdated “futurist” books (read:  Bill Gates – The Road Ahead), so perhaps I am easily impressed, but I think we need more books like this in present times to think beyond the current tech paradigms and into what changes may be happening in technology and society.

Edit: I found this video of Negroponte making predictions of the future in 1984, very interesting.

Writers I will read whatever they produce:

-Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, The Tipping Point)
-Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness)
-Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality)
-Peter Drucker (too many to ever list)
-Steven Levitt (Freakomics, Superfreakonomics)
-Chris Anderson
-Steven Covey
-Eric Von Hippel
-Jim Collins
-James Surwowiecki
-Jack Welch

Along comes KeePass, a very simple program that creates a secure place to store all of your login information.  You create one master password to encrypt them all.  While I’m sure there are several programs out there to do this, KeePass seems to be a standard fixture among geeks, and is open source.  I’ve found this cuts a lot of time out of my week, especially when paying bills online, or when logging into a web site that I haven’t logged into for several months/years but I know I have a login for (I don’t know how many times I’ve had to request my login information to be sent to me via email, or have my password reset).

A quick note on security:  it is not a great idea to (1) have the same password for everything, (2) have very simple passwords (such as words that would be found in a dictionary), or (3) have passwords laying around in random folders or emails throughout your computer.  This program assists with all these problems, allowing you to have different passwords (since you don’t have to remember every one off the top of your head), have more complex passwords, and to have one secure repository for all your passwords.

Another minor note on security, if you think the passwords you save in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome are secure, they are not.  I could be wrong about IE and Chrome (but I don’t think so), but by default Firefox passwords are stored as plain text unless you choose to create a master password that will encrypt all your website passwords.  There are many extensions you can get for your browser to integrate with KeePass.

Lastly, I’ve found a handy trick for managing passwords across computers.  If you install Dropbox which synchronizes files across computers, you put the KeePass database in your Dropbox, and have access to your passwords at work and at home.  Using this option, I would recommend using both a master password for KeePass, as well as a “Key File” (basically a small file that is one long password) so that in the event your KeePass database was hacked from Dropbox, your passwords are very protected.

I am part of a student blog team in the OCIS division of Academy of Management.  I recently posted part four of an interview I conducted with Dr. Mike Smith here at Carnegie Mellon.

Check out part four the interview with Dr. Smith here.

Check out part three the interview with Dr. Smith here.

Check out part two the interview with Dr. Smith here.

Check out part one the interview with Dr. Smith here.

If you work in front of a computer you know the internet can be a distracting place, especially if you are working on something you really don’t want to be doing right now.  I’ve found myself trying to get a project done, and losing several chunks of time throughout the day to pay bills online, check Facebook, or just browse the news.

Someone brilliant soul out there has come up with what I think is a pretty good solution to this problem:  Leechblock.  In short, Leechblock is a plugin for Firefox that can block certain pages so that you cannot visit Facebook, Youtube, or any other distracting site during the business hours of your choice.  It can also limit the amount of time you spend on these sites per day (or week).  For example, if you want to catch up with people on Facebook for 20 minutes, without zoning out and losing two hours chatting and looking at pictures, you set the limit to 20 minutes a day and the plugin will not let you go past that.  You can also set it up so that you cannot change the settings during your business hours, so if you are tempted to turn off the blocker to do some shopping, you are stuck getting your work done.

For my setup, I recommend uninstalling all other web browsers if possible (or at least make them difficult to get to).  If it is too easy to switch to Chrome or Internet Explorer you will find that you just stop using Firefox during business hours.  I have several blocks of programs blocked during business hours:  social networks, news, online video, shopping, financial management, and then a catch all block of “other” sites.

For more information on Leechblock, Lifehacker has a pretty good writeup of the add-on, and you can download the add-on directly from here.

I will be posting one every few days, as I never really have the time to sit down and create a blog posting of any significant length.  I hope you enjoy, and feel free to leave feedback on any you like and use, or any other free software you’ve found helpful.

In a recent post at Gizmodo, I found someone who had expressed the same sentiment in a much more detailed and hilarious style than I ever have been able to.  Here are a couple of points I find particularly funny and true:

For many years one of the biggest difficulties in owning a Mac vs. a PC was in compatibility.  For example, a majority of the software and hardware devices were not compatible, and thus you had to buy special hardware and software that you could not easily swap with friends.  While previously Mac used SCSI hard drives and RISC processors that were very different from interfaces and processors used by PC’s and thus caused many compatibility issues, the emergence of USB has a universal standard for devices on both PC and Mac as well as the adoption of Intel processors in Macs has lowered these network externalities by making hardware (and subsequently software) much more compatible between the two.

I prefer a PC for many reasons, but the biggest for me is still these network externality reasons.  I use fairly esoteric software that is not widely distributed and built for Macs, mostly for research and statistical analysis.

In a recent conversation with a college student they seemed confused by why there are compatibility issues since “everyone they knew used a Mac.”  They were somewhat astounded to discover that Mac is far less than 10% of the market, roughly 6% as of this writing.  When your peer group is hip college students, Macs may indeed be ubiquitous, but in the real world, especially businesses, PC’s still continue to dominate.  Which brings me to wonder whether this “niche” market of college students perceive high network benefits from their friends owning Macs, and thus assume the network externalities of owning a Mac are greater than a PC.  In their case it may be true for now, but not later when they graduate and enter the real world, or have to run software other than Word, Safari, and instant messenger.

Are we in for (A) a group of very disappointed college graduates in the future, or (B) a change in greater marketplace as students and other artists and hipsters demand more compatibility from their Macs.  Software already exists such as Boot Camp and Parallels for Mac to run Windows applications, but my thought is that if you buy a Mac and still have to buy Windows, something is wrong.  You are not running an alternative system, you are running an additional system.  You are paying for two operating systems, with all the difficulties and problems of both.

While the previous two movies were released in the 1980′s, film makers have apparently decided that movies that begin with years in the title do well, however, they are less ambitious about how far into the future they are predicting.  The book 1984 was written back in 1949, while the new movie 2012 was just release this year.  Perhaps this works as a good marketing ploy, you better see this movie soon before its futuristic visions don’t come true and you lose the suspension of disbelief.

Part of my interest in this is close to home, I have family that work in the telecomm industry. Other interests arrived from a podcast of one of my favorite NPR programs, On Point, discussing the end of landlines.  I also recently came across this article about AT&T asking the FCC to set a date to end land line service.  I’m sure there is some game theoretical argument about why the FCC should shut down POTS rather than waiting for the market to take care of it, but I fail to see why the government should need to intervene in this case.  I understand their intervention in the recent digital television conversion this year, but why the FCC should shut down POTS is beyond my understanding.  It seems to me there is a great opportunity for someone somewhere to take advantage of this small but significant amount of bandwidth going to every home that will eventually go unused.  Entrepreneurs of the world take note!

In general I disagree with the “flattening” power of cheaper supercomputers, for those with technical knowledge to query and analyze data from supercomputers they have always had access.  Those without the knowledge would not benefit from it to begin with.

NYT – Shared Supercomputing and Everyday Research

Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by élite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your edits to stick, you’ve got to learn to cite the complex laws of Wikipedia in arguments with other editors. Together, these changes have created a community not very hospitable to newcomers.

I am continuing research on Wikipedia Administrators and I find the organizational problem of how to “manage the crowd” a very interesting area.  Is it really inevitable that any organization must get more bureaucratic as it gets larger?  What organizational levers exist for Wikipedia to be able deal with its current issues as the contributor base grows?

Time Magazine – Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

See the posting here.

In the book I’m reading now about writing your dissertation (Writing the Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, a terrible title if you ask me) the author suggests a similar idea.  The first phase of writing is the zero draft, in which your goal is to write 5 page a day, everyday.  The idea is to establish a strong connection between your thoughts and the paper by dumping everything that is in your head to overcome block or self criticism.  Later, several rounds of editing the zero draft put it into more finalized form.  I’m not sure how this works exactly with literature reviews, methods sections, and theory sections, but perhaps it is beneficial early on in the project.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Social Isolation and New Technology