Internet Ready Music

I love music. I love listening to it, and I love creating it.

I used to buy Vinyl records, then switched to CDs and now I buy mostly online. I have created mp3 files of most of my CDs so I can listen to them in one big huge playlist without ever putting in a CD.

A couple of months ago, Google invited me to use their new Google Music Beta. It's awesome. With it I can easily place all of my music on their servers and then access that music from any of my computers or Android devices.

But I haven't done that. Why? Because the record companies have been attacking people use the internet to enjoy music. And, while I don't think it breaks any laws to use Google Music Beta, I am not 100% sure. Even if it's 100% legal today, with the music industry lobbying governments and influencing law makers and suing students, and now getting the laws changed so that ISPs are required to spy on us, it's not inconceivable that they could convince law makers to make my uploading of music to Google Plus illegal, retroactively. And since once I upload music, there is really no way to make sure it's removed from wherever I upload it, uploading is an action that I can't really undo.

It seems more and more that the vast majority of digital music that I have purchased thus far is becoming legally incompatible with internet technologies and it's actually becoming increasingly risky to own it at all. My iTunes purchases have declined as I have become more aware of the associated risks of owning music that's incompatible with the internet.

Just like driving a horse and buggy on a modern freeway today would be considered dangerous, using music locked into outdated copyright schemes that prohibit uploading on something designed for uploading and downloading is dangerous.

Some of the music I own, however, is compatible with the internet. Bands such as The Charlatans, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and others have been making their music available for free on the internet for some time.

I have also recently (re-)discovered Jamendo which is a music site that contains 300,000+ songs from all over the world and in all genres, all of which are available for downloading and can be uploaded and shared freely with others using the Creative Commons license.

With Jamendo I have discovered some new music that I am totally hooked on, such as the fantastic Canadian artist Brad Sucks, who you can currently find me listening to most days.

Since the internet is all about sharing, I am starting to call this new music, "internet ready". I can upload it to Google Music Beta without worrying about any scary legal incompatibilities down the road, and I can share it with Friends.

Incidentally, I still pay for much of this "free" music. Usually $20 an album. I like that the whole $20 goes to the artists because I want them to be able to continue to create great music. But mostly, it's worth more to me than the risky legacy "recording industry" music because it's internet compatible and as such I am free do so much more with it.

Government as Platform - An Example

Tim O'Reilly uses the words "government as platform" to describe an interpretation of what Government 2.0 is. I am often asked what "government as platform" means. I think the question arises because much of government already operates as a platform. People don't distinguish it as something new because it's routine.

To explain what government as platform is, you can look at an example where it's already the norm such as our public roads. Our three levels of government are involved in the construction, maintenance and regulation of roads. Together they deliver infrastructure upon which we ride our bicycles and drive our cars.

We are used to the idea that we can hop on our bicycle or get in our car and and transport our selves on public roads. As a platform we are left to decide where we are going, when and how to get there. The outcomes of the platform, the actual transportation conducted, is not determined beforehand. The roads are built to certain standards and the drivers are left to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

And because the system is open, people and companies can and do invent innovative new ways to use the platform. Because they are free to choose their route, people optimize the routes they use to get from point A to Point B.  Inventions like automobile GPS are created to help with navigation.  Every year the entire vehicle industry (bicycles, cars, buses) releases new versions of their transportation products and introduces innovative new ones. Several huge industries can rely on the fact that our roads systems is a platform that they can build on.

And for travelers, the system works so well we can travel almost anywhere and we're usually not even aware of which level of government is responsible for which roads. We can even travel to different countries and travel, because all of the public roads work pretty much the same way. Done well, the platform becomes transparent. We don't even notice it.

I am convinced that this what we need with our public data. Our data – all of it – made freely available on the internet, with standard licensing, in formats we can use - would provide a platform for innovation like we've seen with transportation. Entire industries could grow on such a platform, providing jobs and value we can barely imagine right now.

And though only a few people will use the data in the beginning, like the few people building cars and bicycles, those people will create huge value for their fellow citizens all built on a platform managed by our governments.

Book: Rework

I just finished reading Rework by the 37 Signals team (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson), a Christmas gift from my youngest son.  If you are not familiar with 37signals and their work I recommend checking them out.

The book provides an outline of the 37signals philosophy including tips and opinion.  It is aimed at small businesses, however, I think everyone from small business to large business to government organizations should read this book and think about how it might be applied to their work.

They don't say this explicitly but what the book is really about is rethinking some of the dogma of business-as-usual.  I have often thought that any organization that has an "innovation" branch is already in trouble.  If you read this book you'll find out why.  An innovative culture isn't something you can install, or force directly.  Innovative cultures happen by consistently rewarding innovation.  Sharing cultures happen by consistently rewarding sharing.  Organizations that consistently treat employees as untrustworthy, end up with a culture of fear and lack of trust.

For examples of how to do it right in a government context, I think the Province of BC is on the right track with their new B.C. Government Social Media Guidelines and their public statement of Open Data as Defining Principle No. 1 of their Citizens @ the Centre: B.C. Government 2.0 strategy. The very fact that these documents exist sends a signal to employees of a relatively large organization that they are trusted and empowered to engage citizens and empower citizens to create value from open government data.  This kind of positive reinforcement will go a long way to creating a culture of learning and trust as people come up to speed with the new tools of social media and open data.  Kudos to the folks that made this happen and the executives that supported them.  I look forward to seeing what they do next.

Creating an environment where innovation happens, where sharing is rewarded, where great work is recognized and where trust is leveraged is the hallmark of an organization that gets it.  37signals definitely gets it.  Rework is an easy and worthwhile read.  If you're interested in innovation in the workplace, I recommend you read it.

Facebook Steps Out of the Way

Like most people, I was a bit surprized with Facebook's recent changes with regard to privacy.  I don't think they have done anything wrong, but as a user I allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security.  Like most people, I believed that they wouldn't mess with the privacy settings of my account much, allowing me to control who got to see the personal information I put on Facebook on my terms.  I had agreed to their user agreement which stated they could change the terms at any time, but I didn't really pay attention to that fine print.

When they made the more recent change to allow my friends graph and my content to be harvested I realized something.  Not that Facebook is evil or bad, but that they offer a service that I thought was one thing, but it is something else.  I thought it was a way for me to connect with my friends and share my data with them, but actually it is a way for Facebook to profit from our personal data.  Or, as Tim Spalding so eloquently put it, "Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you're their product."

For me it's not a big deal that my Facebook content is now available to anyone, I don't store anything particularly private there anyway.  But now, my behaviour has changed and I find myself using it even less than I did before.  Not so much because of the loss of control over my data or the fact that they didn't give me a cut, but because this is a company that is volatile with respect to its user policies.  Frankly, I just don't want to put in the time required to keep up with their changes.  So, I take my privacy into my own hands and limit what I place on Facebook.

On the other hand, I find the recent changes to Facebook pretty exciting.  I think an awesome opportunity has opened up now for a service to emerge that allows people to connect with their friends and at the same time protects their privacy.  400 million facebook users sharing information is a testament to the fact that people want to connect online.  The recent outcries and Facebook account deletions point to the fact that people also value privacy...i.e., there is clearly a market for connecting AND protecting privacy.

Facebook doesn't offer that service, but until now people were not sure if they did or they didn't.  And that ambiguity prevented other firms from offering that service because competing with Facebook was just a non-starter.  Now, thanks to Facebook's recent changes, it's clear.  They don't.

And in that gap between what people want and what is available, lies opportunity.

It's now clear, Facebook is not in the privacy business.  By stepping out of the way they make room for others that want to offer privacy as a key value proposition.

Personally, I would like to see a new type of social platform emerge.  Something taking ideas from status.net and webfinger and Diaspora.  I want a distributed social platform that I can host with any hosting provider that would allow me to connect with my friends. The difference is, I own it.  So long as my friends and I  have this system installed somewhere, our systems would talk to each other seamlessly.

This way we would not be dependent or at the mercy of any one vendor or their privacy policy changes.  We would be able to move our accounts to another host of our choosing, anytime we want, and we would be able to lock down or even delete data any time.

The software would be free and open source as well.  If anyone wanted to add some functionality or just contribute, that would be possible too.  Think self-hosted WordPress, but with social networking instead of blogging.

Rather than one massive "walled garden" users would each have their own garden in a community with other garden owners.  They would be able to share their data with whomever they choose.

I am grateful to Facebook and everything it has done to connect people.  It's truly an awesome service.

Ultimately though, it IS my data.  And I still want to share it on my terms.

Innovators Isolation

One of the things that all innovators face at some level is a sense of isolation. By definition innovators are working on things that have never been worked on before. And they make up only about 2.5% of the population. If they participate in a specialized industry, it's pretty unlikely they'll get to work with other innovators in their field, never mind find someone who understands what it is they're so passionate about.

About four years ago I made a decision to attend four conferences per year. I consider it part of my ongoing professional development in two ways:

1. Training - there are no formal training courses available for the skills I need for my work. I read any books that are available. Conference workshops and sessions provide me with the most current and relevant information about what other innovators are doing in my field.
2. Connecting - when I attend a conference, I consciously choose to meet and connect with other attendees and presenters. I often get to connect with other inventors of some of the most exciting new technologies. It's typical to find folks exchanging ideas, talking about what we've actually done, what worked, what didn't work and we're thinking about for the future.  There are people who talk and there are people who ship. These people ship.

Next week I will attend Google I/O and later this year I will attend OSCON and possibly FOWA. Although I don't expect to find a workshop covering specifically what I am currently up to – such as privacy enhancing distributed enterprise service topologies or dataset forking technologies or probabilistic data linkage techniques - at these conferences, I do expect to find lots of people interested in the cutting edge of whatever it is they're passionate about.

I expect to find people who are daring to think differently. I will share my crazy ideas. I will hear other folks’ crazy ideas. I expect we'll have thoughts about each other's crazy ideas and I expect that after all that, we will acknowledge some of the ideas as crazy or just dumb. And some will seem not quite as crazy as they did before.

But more importantly, we will get the sense that we're not the only ones with crazy ideas, and we're not the only ones that have no idea what's on TV anymore, because we are working on something that we think is cool and could possibly even change the world.

freedom debt and the decline of lock-in

Early adopters are starting to notice there's a cost to cool when it's supplied by a single vendor.  At first it's all fun and games.  Then you realize that you no longer own your music collection, you no longer own your social network, and you no longer own your data.

Time after time we see organizations start out challenging the status quo, getting huge, abusing their user base, breaking trust, declining, and finally becoming the legacy they fought against.  Facebook innovated past MySpace, Microsoft innovated past the IBM mainframe and Apple innovated past the IBM PC.  Years later, Facebook's commoditization of users and user content,  Microsoft's crushing domination of the PC market, and Apple's rigid control over anything that comes into contact with its products, including the internet, are all examples of lock-in in action.

They all start with great innovations and intentions but eventually the temptation to use lock-in as a strategy becomes too much to resist.  

It's the classic Innovators Dilemma.  

To amass a huge user base, organizations start out providing something of value or at least perceived value.  That's what gets people to join up.  The more compelling and universally recognized the value is, the more users.  Having first mover's advantage is great here because it means there is no competition.

Once people have joined, there's a need to retain them as customers.  

Option one is continuing to provide value over and above what their competitors offer.  Now that their competitors know what they're up to, it's only a matter of time before the innovation is imitated and possibly exceeded.  Continuing to innovate (taking risks) after they've already captured an audience can be difficult and something that doesn't come natural to large organizations.   

Option two, which is what most organizations default to, is the strategy of intentional 'lock-in'.  Lock-in is the practice of structuring the customer relationship so that it's difficult or impossible for users to switch to another vendor.  Such as holding user data hostage so that it can be entered but not retrieved, or preventing people from moving their purchased music to another platform.  Creating a walled garden environment, so if you want to play, you have to play within the walls, and leaving means leaving your toys behind.  These are just a few of the tactics used to discourage people from using their freedom of choice.  

Notice there's a common thread in option two: none of these tactics are in your best interest.  They are in the best interest of the organization.  

Jim Zemlin said it well at LinuxWorld a couple of years ago.  He likened using a certain well known set of products as volunteering to go to jail.   He pointed out that the  Jail looked a lot like a 4 star hotel room with video on demand, a great view, was clean and neat, and that most of us would find to be rather luxurious... but it's still a jail.

Freedom Debt

By offering you something shiny now, organizations get you to give up a bit of your freedom in the future.  "Take this shiny phone.  It's free", they say. "Don't concern yourself with where your data is stored; we'll take care of it."  

Right.

As we continue to wake up to what lock-in means and to become aware that what we are doing when we choose products and vendors that lock us in is essentially borrowing freedom from the future, I think we'll start to make different choices. 

The New Organization

The trends around open source, open data, open government, open protocols, open API's and open communications, indicate that more and more organizations are recognizing that people are aware of the consequence of giving up their freedom.  These organizational models point to lock-in as something to avoid, and use it as a lever to distinguish themselves from the legacy organizational models they disrupt.  

This not only makes those organizations more competitive, it also means their goals are more aligned with ours, and gives us something more valuable for the dollars or attention we give in return.  

And the big upside for them is that openness and our knowing we can leave at any time builds a kind of trust and loyalty that the old model can't hope to compete with.

Data.gov

I have been checking out the US Federal Government's open data site lately.  Imagine a country where citizens vote and elect a party to run the country.  Now imagine that the party decides where to spend money and one of the places they decide to spend money is in information technology and data and data warehousing and infrastructure and all sorts of other great things so they can track how the rest of your tax dollars are spent and what you got for it.  Now imagine they make that data available for free, no strings attached, to you, the citizens that paid for it.  It might not be as far off as we think.  Check out Data.gov.  This site belongs to the US of course, so it might be a while before we get a crack at something like this in Canada. (We don't even have Skype yet!)

OSCON 2009

As many of you know I had the privilege of attending OSCON 2009 last week. I just want to say, for the record, that it was easily the best conference I have ever been to. From the presentations, to the speakers to the BoFs, the whole thing was well organized, well executed and totally worth the 3,200 clicks I put on my motorcycle to get there. :-)

One of the things I got by going was the sense of community and the sense of contribution. Here were people from all walks of technology, from people just starting out to veterans of 20+ years, from database to Web 2.0 to Gov 2.0 to algorithm fanatics to social media creators all gathered to talk about their passion for creating, improving, using and championing free software. I am thrilled to do my part as a contributing member of these communities and am grateful for the opportunity.

The main takeaway though for me was the sense of leadership. The open source community is chock-full of leaders. People who dare to see and meet the call of something bigger than themselves and who are willing to stand for the result while it is only a possibility and who will act to make it real.

It's completely unreasonable to get an idea, collaborate with people all over the world in your spare time for months or years at a time, create world class software and then give it away for free to anyone who wants it, with no strings attached. And, that's exactly what is happening 24 hours a day 365 days of the year, all over the world.

It's completely unreasonable.

And it's so much fun.

Thanks OSCON for the excellent week. See you in 2010.

Ps: see some of the OSCON action by going to the OSCON site and viewing their videos of some of the talks.

Bring Out Yer Dead

Palm's tenacity reminds me of that old Monty Python movie, I think it was "Life of Brian", where the guy is roaming the streets collecting bodies for his cart saying "Bring Out Yer Dead" and one of the guys on the cart says, "I'm not dead yet.".

Palm has recently released the Palm Pre handheld do-it-all, which is great, but the really interesting thing I just found out is the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes - Apple 2.0! Good on them for making bold moves. I think that's the right strategy in their position.

I like Palm and they remind me of Borland. Borland Software, was a company that created software development tools that blew the doors of of all of the competition in terms of innovation and performance. (They invented little things like what to do with the right mouse button).

Their marketing efforts were terrible but their software was amazing. (life lesson: superior technology doesn't win). What I always found fascinating about Borland was that they always seemed to be going out of business. It seemed they were going out of business for 20 years!

But what they did right was they made bold moves. They were innovative and they were not a company to ask permission. They would just add some crazy awesome new functionality and their fans would love it. They were the rock stars of development tool developers.

I can remember breathing a sigh of relief every time they released a new version of Borland C++ or Delphi because I wasn't sure they were going to make it to the next version. But they always did...

Until they stopped making those bold moves. Borland is no more. Okay, there is a company around called Borland, that does some of the same things, but the old innovative Borland is gone.

So, good on Palm, for continuing to innovate, to make bold moves. I think playing in Apple's recently acquired playground (embrace and extend) is a smart move for them and it's good for us as for the last year or two there hasn't been much competition.

They're clearly not dead yet.

Open Source Vancouver

The City of Vancouver, BC is making a fantastic bold move toward openness. A move many governments would do well to notice. It's the future. Facebook for government is an interesting idea but, it's not nearly enough. This, on the other hand, is game changing. This is government 2.0.

Help for Vista

When I purchased my Dell M1330 last year it came loaded with the Windows Vista OS. Yeah, I was one of the lucky ones who got to run the first version of Vista. It was quite an adventure. Imagine buying a new car that looks really cool but as you are driving down the road you can't help but notice the odd part falling off. "Oops! There goes the rear view mirror. I don't really need that. Oops! There goes the trunk lid. That's just for looks. Oops!... ". You get the idea.

Well, I am pleased to report that I have found a way to run Windows Vista very reliably AND improve it's performance. My solution is to add a bit of open source software! I switched my M1330 to Linux about 9 months ago and have been gradually weaning myself off of all of my Windows software. Once in a while though, I need to be able to run something under Windows (less and less often as it turns out). So, for those occasions I have created a virtual machine with Sun's VirtualBox software and installed the latest version of Vista. The result is nothing short of amazing. I find that Vista runs seamlessly inside Linux so much so that it seems even faster than when it is running natively. Not only that but I can run all of my other old operating systems as well ( even at the same time if I want to! ).

Microsoft is alpha testing their new Windows 7 OS now. I don't know if it's going to be any better than Vista but I am sure it will look great and like a boy scout helping someone cross the road, I bet open source will be there to help.

Best Practices?

Joel recently wrote about the use of menus in applications saying that developers shouldn't hide or disable menu items. He writes that we should leave menu items enabled, whether or not they are available.

I have to say, I couldn't disagree more.

Maybe Joel wasn't around when standards for user interface behaviours were being established. I am all for innovation but to change the behaviour of such a basic interface element so late in the game makes no sense without a compelling reason to do so and will only frustrate users.

It reminds me of one project i worked on where the developer had come up with an innovative interface design. He had developed an application so that rather than having a user press and release the left mouse button on a menu item to select it, users would instead left click to pull down the menu and then right click on an item to select it. The idea being that it helped prevent users from selecting the wrong item if they let go of the left mouse button accidentally on the wrong item. True story.

I think, realistically, most experienced developers will disregard this post from Joel and will instantly forgive the author because he makes such a huge contribution in other ways so this is not meant as a personal attack on Joel.

I am writing this post because Joel's article points at something else. There is a tendency within IT organizations to use the word "Standards" or "Best Practices" when they want to enforce conformity and by definition rule out any innovation in the area addressed.

In my business have been very interested in the use of these words because my work is about innovation and the words "Standards" and "Best Practices" are by definition the antithesis of innovation. They basically mean "this is how we do it" and "the matter is closed for discussion".

To be clear, I am a big fan of standards and even some "best practices" but many of the organizations that use these words also say they want to "encourage innovation". If it's true that we want to encourage innovation, then where we set the boundary of what's a standard or not, or what can be called a best practice or not, is critically important if we truly want to encourage innovation.

For example, I am a big fan of having standards around say... the character representations we use. I know that sometimes it's hard to tell a "1" from an "l", and to solve this problem we could come up with an innovative solution. We could choose a different shape for lower case "L" so it doesn't look so much like the number one. Perhaps a small square? That's not being used. So, from now on in all of my programs I could just use a small square instead of a lower case "L". I would explain in the documentation that I have implemented this innovative new feature and before too long my users would get used to it.

Innovation in the area of the characters we use, or the network protocols we use on the internet, or what a dial tone sounds like, or how a basic menu functions, doesn't work. I think the reason it doesn't work is because these are areas where we have solved the problem sufficiently that the cost of innovation is outweighed by the cost of implementation of that innovation. Basically, there is not a high enough benefit in the innovation to recoup the high cost of switching to the innovation.

As an alternative example, some companies have standards around the operating system or application frameworks they use. Switching from say Windows and .NET with an Oracle back end to something like a LAMP back end would be against the "best practices" rules of many IT shops but when you really think about it, the cost of making such a switch can be very small in a world where applications are delivered via the web and where the user is for the most part unaware of the delivery platform.

The benefit of moving to an open source server platform can be phenomenal and the costs are comparatively small for large numbers of users. To rule out an entire genre of technology simply because of a "best practice" makes little sense when essentially, the user can't tell the difference except perhaps increased performance and reliability.

Here's my best practice: Use standards and best practices only where they foster innovation and generate real measurable value.

Google Apps Engine

In case you haven't heard, Google has just released it's new Google App Engine, which is basically a way to run your own applications on Google infrastructure. When I first read about this I was literally shaking just thinking about the implications. Having built several application frameworks that enable regular folks to write extraordinary web applications it's clear to me that the implications of this technology go far beyond simple hosting - though that alone is awesome.

No, this is going to usher in a whole new world of technology. Google has once again taken something that most consider complex and out-of-reach for most people and have created a platform that I think many, many people will be able to take advantage of with ease.

Basically, you can write your web applications in the open source Python programming language and Google will host it for you... for free of course. If you haven't programmed in Python, now would be an EXCELLENT time to give it a try. It's been my favorite language for 10 years or so and though it's quite popular in it's own right, getting a nod like this from the big G doesn't hurt.

Once I have had a chance to play with Google Apps I will report back. It will no doubt have a significant impact on my company's own DataZoomer project so I am excited to see what's there and to begin to create what's possible in this new realm.

XO Arrival

I am writing this post on my new XO laptop. If you have been reading this blog you may know that a couple of months ago I took advantage of the opportunity to purchase a new XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project. Purchasing this laptop for myself and donating one to a child in a developing country was just too great of an opportunity to pass on.

So, my first impression?... WOW! This thing is cool. It's cute as a button but don't let the appearance fool you. This thing is running a great operating system and comes packed with cool software and the device itself is packed with hardware features.

Now the timing is not great for me because I am busy working on the upcoming release of DataZoomer, but I will write some more about this nifty device in the upcoming weeks.

Innovation?

When MapQuest came out with their mapping system on the web and I was able to type in my address and see a map of my area pop up, I said... WOW.

When Google released Google Maps and I could use the whole darn screen and I could drag the map around and put markers on it and see my house from a satellite photo... yep, that was another WOW moment.

After having a look at Microsoft's entry into the online mapping world I have to say... WHY?

No offence, but really, why would I use this. I don't get it. It's just a map. And, I can't even find my house with it. Even MapQuest did that.

I am realizing that thanks go companies like Google and Skype and thanks to the open source movement, I have become pretty picky. I need a WOW to even spend more than a few minutes at a site. It's like one of my heros, Seth Godin, says... where's the free prize inside?

Is this too harsh? Maybe I didn't spend enough time there to "get it".

Google Calendar

OK, before now, I just suspected it, but now I know. Google's been keeping it's eye on the DataZoomer project and has probably been checking out www.coparentcalendar.com in particular. Their new calendar system is just too similar to the one we created just over a year ago.

OK, it's not all that similar. They probably had a bigger budget than I did, but it's the same basic idea. And it's cool! I don't want to lose users of course but I just had to point this new app out. And I can see that Google is definately going to try to compete with DataZoomer now. ;-)

But seriously, it's pretty cool to finally be ahead of one of the big guys, even a little. We've had many great ideas that were just a little too late. By the time we got to actually doing them we realized someone had already done it.

But not this time. We actually released coparentcalendar a full year before Google Calendar! So what? Well, we happen to have a bunch of other ideas in the works that we haven't released yet so we'll see if we can beat Google to the punch on those ones too! ;-)

Anyway, check it out. It's really cool and it's all Ajaxy and stuff, if you like that, and of course, it's free.

LINQ

Here's a video about a (new?) project at Microsoft that will make SQL statements first class constructs in any .NET language. This is amazing news. This is one of those ideas that was completely off the radar screen but then once you hear it, it's like a no brainer. Here's the link: Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ.

Anders is one of my favorite developers of all time so it was cool to see him talking about it. Anders, BTW, is the guy that developed Delphi for Borland and C# for Microsoft. This guy is no joke, as they say, and this idea he is talking about will be amazing.

Incidentally, this same functionaliy has been in FoxPro for about 10 years. It's amazing to me that no one else has done it. If it works, and if IronPython shows up as an official product at MS, I'm going to be a happy hacker.

Fair Use

Lawrence Lessig makes a brilliant argument about Google's Book Search service and whether or not it should be considered "fair use" of the works. Naturally some book publishers are threatened and are suing Google over this service. He talks about the mp3.com case in this talk also. It appears that if the book service is deemed to be not "fair use" then Google's entire search engine could be threatened (along with Yahoo, MSN and every other search engine). If it is found to be "fair use" however, I think this will be a huge win for innovation and freedom not to mention cultural history.

a beautiful thing

Seth Godin had a blog entry pointing to a very interesting new service with the strange name Amazon Mechanical Turk.

You have to check this out for yourself but basically what they are offering is work doing small tasks called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs. These are tasks that are very difficult to get a program to do but easy for humans to do.

I love the idea. I will be signing up to try out the HITs as well as learning how I might use these web services in my programs.

Am I the only one that thinks it's a little bit creepy though? Is this one more step toward the Matirx where humans are servants of machines?

What do you think?

Good Job

ksblog has an entry about getting a "good job", which I loved.

My experience working within a large organization was that in order to really get things done, to innovate in new ways, it had to be a secret. As soon as people popped their creative heads above ground they would be squashed by the machine. (wow, that was kinda descriptive and yet vague at the same time!)

My point is, it has been my experience that often if you want to be innovative, just be innovative, and don't tell people that's what you're doing.

In my old job we used all sorts of creative methods to hide our innovations, like creating new phrases to describe what we were doing (only if asked), downplaying the good we were doing (kinda like the opposite of marketing), and co-operating by jumping through hoops whenever asked so as not to raise suspicions (hoops are inevitable).

As a result, we were able to do some really great stuff that if we had asked permission for, would have been rejected. We got our work done much faster and produced way more than was expected and our automations had positive spinoff benefits for the entire organization. Soon we were asked to take on other people's work in the same way.

It grew from the ground up so by the time the old school power keepers of the organization figured out what was going on, it was too late, the organization had already adopted our work and was loving it.

My advice is:

• always keep your boss informed, without actually asking permission.


• use creative names (i.e. we called our LAN a "File Sharing Device" for years because we weren't supposed to have a LAN. Fortunately, they didn't actually know what a LAN was.)


• always jump through the hoops with pleasure (if you don't, you will be seen as a risk)


• if you get attacked you can always use the bureaucracy against itself to slow down the people who are trying to stop you (i.e. "Let's schedule a series of focus group meetings to talk about how we might move resolve this.")


• get buy-in from people you need by giving them lots of credit and sharing the love (i.e. "I would like to thank my boss, the IT department and the security folks for making this wonderful thing possible") even though they were in fact causing you the most friction.

And most of all, have fun. Life is too short to get the life sucked out of you by a big organization. Even innovation hostile environments can be fun places to work if you understand how they work.

Remember, they move slowly. You move fast.