Personal Democracy - Technology is Changing Politics

The title of this post is not original (it is the tag line for the Personal Democracy Forum), but there is no other way to describe the changes that are happening as a result of President Obama’s memorandum on transparency and open government on his first day in office. We can call it “Government 2.0” or we can call it “Open Source Government” - or just call it an irreversible political shift. Micah Sifry, who I have quoted in the past, is a founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, holding a summit in NYC this week. A thousand people are attending, and from what I understand, it is standing room only.

The movement toward “integrating the public into the government” and into policy is not a mandate, but an irreversible change. Building and utilizing infrastructure to accommodate it is a priority, being worked on constantly to enable the paradigm shift.

I was not there, but from what I understand (thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s blog), there are three recurring themes so far.

1. The prerequisite – the power for change lies with the public

2. The platform for democracy – infrastructure we all need and is being developed and worked on by many

3. Tune in, we can’t tolerate static.

I will make another post about these topics when I have more time, but it is quite an event and Twitter streams are available for anyone with real interest. If you visit the Twitter stream, you will understand number 3 quite well. Filtering the noise. This is another issue solvable with technology.

I was glad to hear that Esther Dyson had some constructive (as always) comments on how we are “focusing too much on health care and not enough on health”. This seems so obvious, but for many reasons (and I need to get my husband to write a post about it) it just isn’t happening – yet. It is a great issue for Government 2.0 to tackle.

There was one common theme referred to by many. The public has to make the promise to “show forbearance” (in the words of Jeff Jarvis) when the government fails, and to grant it a mandate to do innovation. They need to be permitted to fail without risk of recrimination because right now, technology and the changes are provisional, emerging, and scattered. Innovation takes time, and we have to give these efforts the same patience we would with any new technology.

Interesting stuff. Much more later.

New Voices

<<Now the world is opening up and there is transparency and ongoing discussion between the elites and new voices.

Perhaps we can eliminate disregard for nameless others that we may or may not ever meet by being sure we are connected. A social web without boundaries will increasingly make us think as a world brain. Social connection can hinder many bad things that happen in the world. Perhaps, with that connection, we can encourage the wisdom of the crowds toward positive goals>>

That was from a post I made on June 7th.

The link below from the New York Times shows how our global community is changing as a result of the new voices. Very interesting. Thanks to my friend Bobak who is in China right now and brought this to my attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/asia/17china.html?_r=1&hp

Amazing Analytics

There have been many interesting articles recently about Google and how, with our new “real-time web”, they have flawed search technology. Most of it relates to earlier posts I've made about Linked Data and the ways we now search for data instead of documents, yet the applications are not yet fully developed. Now Google is working on a real-time search integration tool with Twitter. We will hear more on that (and I will probably do another post on it), but my knee jerk response on this is both positive and negative. Positive – they need to do it. Twitter’s search capabilities (even with acquired “Summize” and # subject search) are limited but there is no other way to see what is happening in the moment. Miracle on the Hudson, attack in Mumbai - the genesis of the news is always via Twitter as somebody actually witnesses the event. Negative – the noise factor on Twitter! Now once they are able to filter the Twitter noise and give high quality real-time search results, it will be great for Google. An interesting piece in the NYT today had the first non-trade journal article I’ve seen that addresses the topic, although as recently as April there were rumors that Google would buy Twitter. That doesn't seem to be the case now. They are developing their own real-time engine, and while integrated they still plan to check the links before indexing them (unlike Twitter), although this is all still in the planning phases. Google claims they will have higher quality real-time searches, even if they take a few more seconds to process.

Another thing that gets better and better is Google Analytics. Other people who use it have probably noticed it as well but I don’t see much press about the quality and quantity of useful, analytic information available to anyone with a website. The depth and detail is just remarkable! Google Analytics posts every domain who ever visited, the time and date, every individual company that visited with its own server (domain name), every carrier used to get there, the city and site of origin, the time of day, how many seconds were spent on each page, how they explored the site and what attracted them, where they searched (or linked from) to find the site - with everything broken down into percentages, quantity, graphs and charts. It really is amazing. At minimal cost, a web site can be optimized so easily. The owner can see everything happening. This will get better and better, and as more people realize and use the capabilities, they will flourish. Learning to utilize this information to generate more business is the ultimate goal. The more easily sites can be tailored (in terms of price, products offered, and communication with customers) to enhance the user experience; the closer we get to our Hybrid Economy.

A Social Web Without Boundaries

Joe Ito and Larry Lessig both feel that the next innovation explosion will come from a new Hybrid Economy. There is huge potential for social and economic wealth to compliment our commercial society which is still largely untapped.

In the "Read Only Economy", there is efficient technology for people to buy and consume culture created elsewhere (iTunes is a perfect example). We are constantly increasing the capacity and market of culture and content, and by doing so produce more niches by buying even more culture, which produces an efficient market. The result is not only the capacity to generate revenue, but there is also more control about how producers allow people to use the culture (again, iTunes on iPods). Increased control over how people use and consume culture defines the Read Only Internet.

In the "Read Write Economy", those who generate content want you to consume it, but they are also interested in creating. Digital technology has created a Read Write culture of remixing the content to produce something different and perhaps more powerful. Tools of creativity make them tools of speech and expression in today's society. These tools and creative content are part of the vast Creative Commons (which I will talk about in another post).

"Free" is a technique - the argument being that in many situations volunteers do not exist. Larry Lessig uses the example of Wal-Mart, since nobody volunteers to work at Wal-Mart. The store exists in the commercial economy of its market. But Read Write is not the commercial economy. In the Read Write economy, thousands of volunteers do endless work for free. It may be a passion, it may be as a service - it is unclear why people really do it. But what IS clear is that if you introduced the norms of the commercial market into the Read Write market, you would get less, not more work out of the volunteers. The logic of the community prevails, not the marketplace. We know that in a share community, there is tremendous opportunity.

If one considers both the commerce and sharing economies working together, we can think of it as a Hybrid. We can figure out a way to build a volunteer community project that is part commerce and part sharing. Joe Ito (President of Creative Commons) describes it as a way for both the free and commercial aspects of the community to work together, allowing users to remix and reuse commercial content. As costs of production go down radically, he feels that commercial content costs will go down and willingness to share resources increases. In a Hybrid Economy, there will be smaller pieces of the pie, but the pie will be bigger.

Increasingly, defining a Hybrid Community holds the biggest potential for growth in a network environment.

If you have a firm or enterprise with a problem, you can add more human minds to attack as the problem scales. In the same way you would get new servers to scale a physical system overload, our goal should be to subvert the crowds of innovative thinkers to improve the security and capabilities of internet applications. We need to give people the freedom to create and maintain a Digital Democracy. With mutual respect and the balance of both DRM (Digital Rights Management) and freedom which allows groups to maintain neutrality, these ethics might promote both a continued cascade of generativity, which Jonathan Zittrain refers to as a "collective hallucination that assumes people are reasonable and nice" while at the same time promoting the Hybrid Economy that he feels is critical to our future.

Over the past year we've seen a huge uptick in the infrastructure, development tools, and projects designed to build the social web. Perhaps with the help of that infrastructure, we will work on a collaborative basis (both in terms of our local communities and on a global basis) to develop frameworks that will keep people focused on the greater good.

Micah Sifry has pondered whether the Internet is fracturing or uniting us. His conclusion is that with recent tools that facilitate collaboration across boundaries, we have changed the world. Until recently, only the elites talked to the elites. Now the world is opening up and there is transparency and ongoing discussion between the elites and new voices.

Perhaps we can eliminate disregard for nameless others that we may or may not ever meet by being sure we are connected. A social web without boundaries will increasingly make us think as a world brain. Social connection can hinder many bad things that happen in the world. Perhaps, with that connection, we can encourage the wisdom of the crowds toward positive goals, including a productive Hybrid Economy.

Bing's the Thing (and more....)

If you told me a month ago that I would have 2 posts in a row about Microsoft I would have thought you'd been Rickrolled a few too many times.

But try Microsoft's answer to Google. It's called Bing and it is downright impressive. Roll your curser down the right side of the results. Watch the window's preview pop up so you can see it before you click. And it is aesthetically beautiful. The company's new priorities are search and netbooks. This might make sense after the Vista calamity. But the anticipation of Windows 7 doesn't excite me (although getting rid of Vista does). Here's a great memo from Best Buy. When all is said and done, as Steve Ballmer says, the growth is in mobile computing and that's where they hope Bing will fit. 10-20 million iPhones and Blackberries are sold per year vs. 300 million PCs. Marketing Math 101. In five years, as he says, we will look back and say the market has tripled or quadrupled. We will not be saying that about PCs.

Walt Mossberg thinks the Palm Pre is beautiful with some drawbacks. Nobody is a big fan of the very sharp (it can slice things?) edge of the keyboard, but he had mostly good things to say about it. I haven't seen it yet.

Walt Mossberg thinks the new iPhone is wonderful - although it looks very similar to the older model. I don't get the feeling we're getting candy colors this time. Increased processing power and video capabilities will be the upgrades worth paying for.

My opinion? I don't know any Sprint fans, and for 6 months it is the only option with the Pre.

I say forget them all and get a phone you can type on easily with a full, tactile, QWERTY keyboard, has a beautiful clear screen, works well as a phone, has an app store, Wi-Fi, easy messaging whether it is text or email, and immediate push notification of messages, and even Evernote, Twitter, and Facebook applications. Go back to the beautiful basics of communications and if you want to, you can also buy a Netbook or better yet an Apple Tablet if they introduce it. I know I am not alone in feeling this way (@fredwilson and @howardlindzon and my buddy @greenskeptic are all loyal Blackberry users). We just need to communicate and love our Curves.

SIMS3 is now for sale. Another virtual world. We'll see how it takes off. At least there is no monthly subscription fee. Doesn't this make you want to run out and get it? Sorry to the kids in my household, not me. Are we still doing "virtual worlds" or can we finally say our lives are virtual, whether they are on the screen or our phone or in our offices?

I was never a big fan of BPL (Broadband over Powerlines). If somebody gets how this will work with our already overtaxed Grid, I am open minded and happy to hear any thoughts or defenses.

In Awe of Microsoft (yes, Microsoft)

I've mentioned before, while I see the demise of any Windows based OS (cloud based customizable apps of your choosing will be the OS of Web 3.0) - I believe the future of Microsoft is in home entertainment. Xbox. It has been the platform of choice for my family (and any gamers who needs sophistication beyond the Wii - which is many people) but they just hit the ball out of the park with new plans announced at E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo).

- No more disks. Everything downloadable. Ouch to Gamestop. Full retail games on demand.

- FULL BODY motion detection. Not a handheld controller like the Wii that you wave at the TV. Whole body motions are detected. They now call it "Project Natal" and it looks amazing.

- Netflix will let you add to your cue of movies on Xbox and play them on demand (and as we know, Xbox is HD). No more PC involvement with Netflix (and I can only assume what will happen to the Roku unless they give it away). The Xbox video store is now called Zune Marketplace, and can stream 1080p instantly.

- Last.fm on Xbox - I love it! Not sure if it multi-tasks with games because games usually have their own soundtrack but it takes the unit a step further toward being a one stop entertainment center.

- Facebook and Twitter on Xbox. People are excited about this - I am not so sure people want their Twitter streams or Facebook wall displayed on the family room 50 inch flat screen, but that's just my opinion.

- New avatars they will charge for. Another revenue stream. They actually make money with these! Hard to believe unless you are already an Xbox fan and have seen and created the avatars. It's a major part of the fun. I would pay for this.

The only thing missing (or not yet announced?) is Hulu or Boxee (and Boxee may be a better choice because of the social component of Xbox which is not a part of Hulu). Either one would be a major bandwidth hog and Xbox is only perfection, which might be the reason for the absence. Or Avner is not ready to sell or do an exclusive joint venture yet. E3 is just starting, I have a feeling we will hear more. Gamers have seen this coming for a while. Microsoft rules home entertainment, and Xbox households (like mine) knew it would not be through a PC. Is this finally the true meaning of convergence?? It's through a small box that almost resembles an Apple Mini :)