As the old Chinese saying goes……may you live in interesting times. Better still, interesting times of betterment and advancement. My first blog entry for 2007 is not about alternative energy. Though indirectly it is about alternative energy and everything else. It’s about why I am here and how I got to be here.
All ages would have had their versions of advancement and what passes as captivating and interesting. For our age, Computers and the Internet have got to go down in history alongside Electricity, Telephone, Cars and Planes as a turning point that compelled and propelled us into fundamental change. I feel remarkably fortunate and fantastically gleeful to be part of the age that saw the initiation of the Internet, the blogosphere, the rapid shaping of its young, nascent life and its mighty thrust into our day-to-day lives. I am not one for a broad status quo. I like to see things change and mold. New requirements to compel us. And new ideas, innovation and invention to meet them. Even the invention of a new requirement: things and ways we did not know to be needs for us unless someone showed us a great idea and soon it became a need: much like the internet. I believe that change and innovation is in our nature. And if we don’t receive the compulsion for change then we usually end up inventing it. Nothing is quite as fascinating as engineering an invention or change that fuels a completely new culture or market. One that had not existed before. If necessity is the mother of invention, then desire is its guardian angel. Even the most exciting of alternative car energy may not be in the same class of invention as the motor car itself. Blogging, however, I beg to disagree. Blogging holds inside it a tremendous shift in our world. Its beginnings appear basic enough. Using the internet as a broadcast tools just about anyone with a computer and an internet connection (a figure that I would imagine to be around one billion today) could broadcast their thoughts, journals, essays, articles and what else took to their fancy. A few may have realized at the time that this stood to shake the very foundations of broadcast media itself. Those few would be well rewarded today.
Some 70 years ago, the channeling of Television took its place along side print media in our hearts and minds. Despite what some pundits may be proclaiming at the time, TV never looked to replace print media which is alive and well today. The arrival of TV must have had the generation livid and buoyant at the technological-marvel that could receive transparent signals and convert them into living, breathing images. The vastly superior enhancement over sound signals was fascinating enough and purchase of the wonder box was inevitable for everyone. Soon there after if you didn’t have one then you were just strange and weird. As with print media, TV sought to report, inform, entertain and titillate. But in TV character would not just subscribe to prowess in articulation and style but also appearance, movement and delivery. Given the magical quality of video image few people at the time may have stopped to think over the similarities and disadvantages it carried to print media. Like Paul Graham, the Internet guru, says ‘You don’t realize how bad something is until you have something else to compare it to’. And that my friends, is the kind of invention I am talking about: the Blogosphere. The greatest similarity that TV and print share is their institutionalization. And the characteristic that decision formulation in terms of what programming or articles the subscribers get to choose from will flow mostly top down. Even if this did not happen and let’s say a popular news anchor or writer could sway what stories he or she wanted to cover then instead of the institution we are placed at that person’s disposal who themselves could never exercise with complete detachment from the institution. In either case, the end subscriber has no say in the content that is delivered. Nor can they challenge it in any form or investigate it. This may be the greatest single benefit that internet and blogging bring to the merit and process of the business of media. News has taken up another dimension. Already in motion and soon to dominate: the business of News will continue to be crafted by its makers but not delivered. It will be acquired. News makers will be delivering their contents on to internet portals where the public will choose with a variety of criteria what they wish to receive and view. Not only that, they will rate it on quality, veracity, bi-partisanship and whatever else the community decides upon. Commercial institutions, despite the fact that they perform in a competitive environments do hold some inherent disadvantages. They are run by powerful men and women and while some have benefited from good judgment others have been ruined by a lack there of. Most of these power beings hold terrible egos which inevitable end up clashing with one another at some point to the detriment of all. Large institutions not only have their weight of internal politics but also sway to the political will of influential government figures. All of which are factors that can fly right into the face of efficiency and purity. When such impurities occur they funnel all the way down and right into our living rooms. Print, in fact, may be the purer of the two mediums in the sense that at least it avoids a level of brevity. With a magazine or a newspaper, I can browse and choose which story I would like to read and when I can read it. I can skim over various headlines and headers. Choose the depth to which I want to read a particular story. Options that TV never permitted. Even before TV content was available over the internet I felt the annoying notion that I was stuck with whatever programming was on offer and would miss the shows I really wanted to watch. This must be an arch reason for the success of the TEVO device that allows scores of hours of recorded TV transmission that you can watch at your leisure. The internet promises a whole lot more. In a matter of a few years, the Internet will become the default medium and channel for the distribution and acquisition of Radio programming, music and television programming and even movies (of course theatre will live on unharmed). Google’s $1.65b acquisition of YouTube, which will appear cheap in retrospect, marks the beginning of this awesome future. While Google forges ahead with a portal where aggregators and programmers can deliver material for acquisition, Microsoft with its Vista operating system and Apple with its iTV are laying the ground work for the platform in our homes. There are 2 great prospects here: one is that you see and hear what you want to, when you want to which can be geared to your specific interests. Secondly, we will not be limited to the large institutions and their domination of the airwaves. The brave new world is about to step it up a few notches for the cause of meritocracy and talent promotion. Institutions have done well to search and promote talent but they have carried grave inefficiencies and sins in the process. A large institution that does an overall better than average or better-than-its-competitors job of talent search and promotion can afford for a lot to slip through the cracks. For one thing, layers of middle managers are a problem. An individual writer or journalist may be high on talent and low on form. Such an individual could easily earn the dislike of the recruiting chain. Or sometimes an institution that is largely favored may get bottle necked with a large tide of applicants to join its ranks. Sometimes it will resort to a seemingly cruel process of computers searching through resumes looking for key words and criteria while real talent get shunned down the algorithm circuitry. Unable to absorb the volumes adequately talent easily spills over the wayside. In the new world, the chances of this happening would be far less as individuals have a direct access to the audience. Talented individuals can publish writing, reporting, movie scripts and even video on their own. And their content is fully exposed to anyone who cares to view it. They can generate their audience on their own and get a favorable recruitment response which otherwise may not have occurred.
I can validate a lot of this from my own experiences and of several people that I come into contact with. As the world of blogging and Internet aggregators grew my subscription to Print media and TV news subsided. Most of the time I would be accessing a professional source or news media organization on the internet but I would do it through an aggregator like ‘del.icio.us’ or ‘newsgator’. I can sift through dozens of headlines in minutes and pick only the ones I want. I can then want to go ahead and and check out the blogs on the subject. I can use the news item tags and easily pick out probably 10,000 bloggers on a given subject. Is that a silly thing? NO! That’s good. If there are 10,000 out there some of them are likely to be really good and it don’t take much to find them. For example, I read a number of conflicting reports that conditions in Iraq are either improving or deteriorating. I then have the option of further investigating and looking up blogs of Iraqi villagers in the cross fire or a US soldier in the battlefield. A far more fulfilling and less polluted process than the ghastly and old worldly way of submitting and subverting oneself to the mind and heart of an authority projecting newscaster who really bleeds and bumbles like the rest of us. Ever since the popularity of YouTube and a number of websites following suite I acquire almost all of my news content on the computer while the TV box has taken to a fire-place like back drop item that adds color and sound to the living area. That is less there is a compelling episode of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ on. I even look to entertainment on the net and follow some YouTubers whom I know will pick out the most hilarious clip out of a talk show or comedy. I would say that with entertainment I watch half the content coming from established institutions and the other half from amateurs. And guess what, the two are competing. Another plus for me cause I can really use the save in time. I don’t have to manage myself to the TV schedule. Another brilliant feature of acquiring your content online is that you can communicate with other viewers/readers by leaving comments. This gives a live critique to content and sometimes people who are too gullible have a chance to save themselves. For me, the old way of sitting down in front of the TV and watching a news personality that is malevolent with its own biases and choices for news now appears so pagan, ignorant, shameful and old worldly that I have a hard time living with the fact how I subverted myself to it all these years. And even believed a lot of it when I shouldn’t have. Despite my apparent distaste for institutional programming, I do get most of my TV news content from these programmers. But using a portal like YouTube allows be to explore a lot of lesser known institutions, international view points and take a look at what the audience really thinks of the content. I love it.
An equally powerful aspect of open distribution and open acquisition is that it allows the smaller player to reach a large audience who otherwise would have been blocked. With equipment and broadcasting capabilities becoming inexpensive and accessible these talented individuals have already started to show promise. Just take a look at the top viewed content on YouTube whether its creative or substantial. I myself have always enjoyed writing. Readership is gratification for any writer. In the past I have sent a variety of material to various publications only to be shunned because it probably wasn’t anything a few hundred thousand people would want to read. But I don’t need 100,000. I may want it. I have the 1,000 or so that I need. Now, all this does not mean that large institutions are gamed out. A lot of them are very good and run by talented individuals. But they will have to respond. And the smarter ones are already doing that. Hewlett-Packard has already inculcating a culture that spews innovation and invention with a bottom up model. In one of their such tactics they set up web sites where researchers can pitch product ideas. Then ‘players’ who may be other employees of the company view all the ideas and put their wagers on which ones will succeed. While ideas are being developed by the researchers, the players trade their wagers. Eventually, the idea with the most buy-in wins. This may be a small part of the institutional framework today but it can only expand.
I think that a lot of the I have put together here things look pretty inevitable because they make such powerful sense. Its not news to a lot of us. It is the reason why I blog.
Following is a speech by Paul Graham from the 2005 Open Source Convention. Paul is an internet entrepreneur and guru and this is a highly relevant and one of the most refreshing speeches I have heard in a long time. The speech was pivotal for me to pursue certain avenues. Check it out…….
Paul Graham OSCON 2005 at IT Conversations
All ages would have had their versions of advancement and what passes as captivating and interesting. For our age, Computers and the Internet have got to go down in history alongside Electricity, Telephone, Cars and Planes as a turning point that compelled and propelled us into fundamental change. I feel remarkably fortunate and fantastically gleeful to be part of the age that saw the initiation of the Internet, the blogosphere, the rapid shaping of its young, nascent life and its mighty thrust into our day-to-day lives. I am not one for a broad status quo. I like to see things change and mold. New requirements to compel us. And new ideas, innovation and invention to meet them. Even the invention of a new requirement: things and ways we did not know to be needs for us unless someone showed us a great idea and soon it became a need: much like the internet. I believe that change and innovation is in our nature. And if we don’t receive the compulsion for change then we usually end up inventing it. Nothing is quite as fascinating as engineering an invention or change that fuels a completely new culture or market. One that had not existed before. If necessity is the mother of invention, then desire is its guardian angel. Even the most exciting of alternative car energy may not be in the same class of invention as the motor car itself. Blogging, however, I beg to disagree. Blogging holds inside it a tremendous shift in our world. Its beginnings appear basic enough. Using the internet as a broadcast tools just about anyone with a computer and an internet connection (a figure that I would imagine to be around one billion today) could broadcast their thoughts, journals, essays, articles and what else took to their fancy. A few may have realized at the time that this stood to shake the very foundations of broadcast media itself. Those few would be well rewarded today.
Some 70 years ago, the channeling of Television took its place along side print media in our hearts and minds. Despite what some pundits may be proclaiming at the time, TV never looked to replace print media which is alive and well today. The arrival of TV must have had the generation livid and buoyant at the technological-marvel that could receive transparent signals and convert them into living, breathing images. The vastly superior enhancement over sound signals was fascinating enough and purchase of the wonder box was inevitable for everyone. Soon there after if you didn’t have one then you were just strange and weird. As with print media, TV sought to report, inform, entertain and titillate. But in TV character would not just subscribe to prowess in articulation and style but also appearance, movement and delivery. Given the magical quality of video image few people at the time may have stopped to think over the similarities and disadvantages it carried to print media. Like Paul Graham, the Internet guru, says ‘You don’t realize how bad something is until you have something else to compare it to’. And that my friends, is the kind of invention I am talking about: the Blogosphere. The greatest similarity that TV and print share is their institutionalization. And the characteristic that decision formulation in terms of what programming or articles the subscribers get to choose from will flow mostly top down. Even if this did not happen and let’s say a popular news anchor or writer could sway what stories he or she wanted to cover then instead of the institution we are placed at that person’s disposal who themselves could never exercise with complete detachment from the institution. In either case, the end subscriber has no say in the content that is delivered. Nor can they challenge it in any form or investigate it. This may be the greatest single benefit that internet and blogging bring to the merit and process of the business of media. News has taken up another dimension. Already in motion and soon to dominate: the business of News will continue to be crafted by its makers but not delivered. It will be acquired. News makers will be delivering their contents on to internet portals where the public will choose with a variety of criteria what they wish to receive and view. Not only that, they will rate it on quality, veracity, bi-partisanship and whatever else the community decides upon. Commercial institutions, despite the fact that they perform in a competitive environments do hold some inherent disadvantages. They are run by powerful men and women and while some have benefited from good judgment others have been ruined by a lack there of. Most of these power beings hold terrible egos which inevitable end up clashing with one another at some point to the detriment of all. Large institutions not only have their weight of internal politics but also sway to the political will of influential government figures. All of which are factors that can fly right into the face of efficiency and purity. When such impurities occur they funnel all the way down and right into our living rooms. Print, in fact, may be the purer of the two mediums in the sense that at least it avoids a level of brevity. With a magazine or a newspaper, I can browse and choose which story I would like to read and when I can read it. I can skim over various headlines and headers. Choose the depth to which I want to read a particular story. Options that TV never permitted. Even before TV content was available over the internet I felt the annoying notion that I was stuck with whatever programming was on offer and would miss the shows I really wanted to watch. This must be an arch reason for the success of the TEVO device that allows scores of hours of recorded TV transmission that you can watch at your leisure. The internet promises a whole lot more. In a matter of a few years, the Internet will become the default medium and channel for the distribution and acquisition of Radio programming, music and television programming and even movies (of course theatre will live on unharmed). Google’s $1.65b acquisition of YouTube, which will appear cheap in retrospect, marks the beginning of this awesome future. While Google forges ahead with a portal where aggregators and programmers can deliver material for acquisition, Microsoft with its Vista operating system and Apple with its iTV are laying the ground work for the platform in our homes. There are 2 great prospects here: one is that you see and hear what you want to, when you want to which can be geared to your specific interests. Secondly, we will not be limited to the large institutions and their domination of the airwaves. The brave new world is about to step it up a few notches for the cause of meritocracy and talent promotion. Institutions have done well to search and promote talent but they have carried grave inefficiencies and sins in the process. A large institution that does an overall better than average or better-than-its-competitors job of talent search and promotion can afford for a lot to slip through the cracks. For one thing, layers of middle managers are a problem. An individual writer or journalist may be high on talent and low on form. Such an individual could easily earn the dislike of the recruiting chain. Or sometimes an institution that is largely favored may get bottle necked with a large tide of applicants to join its ranks. Sometimes it will resort to a seemingly cruel process of computers searching through resumes looking for key words and criteria while real talent get shunned down the algorithm circuitry. Unable to absorb the volumes adequately talent easily spills over the wayside. In the new world, the chances of this happening would be far less as individuals have a direct access to the audience. Talented individuals can publish writing, reporting, movie scripts and even video on their own. And their content is fully exposed to anyone who cares to view it. They can generate their audience on their own and get a favorable recruitment response which otherwise may not have occurred.
I can validate a lot of this from my own experiences and of several people that I come into contact with. As the world of blogging and Internet aggregators grew my subscription to Print media and TV news subsided. Most of the time I would be accessing a professional source or news media organization on the internet but I would do it through an aggregator like ‘del.icio.us’ or ‘newsgator’. I can sift through dozens of headlines in minutes and pick only the ones I want. I can then want to go ahead and and check out the blogs on the subject. I can use the news item tags and easily pick out probably 10,000 bloggers on a given subject. Is that a silly thing? NO! That’s good. If there are 10,000 out there some of them are likely to be really good and it don’t take much to find them. For example, I read a number of conflicting reports that conditions in Iraq are either improving or deteriorating. I then have the option of further investigating and looking up blogs of Iraqi villagers in the cross fire or a US soldier in the battlefield. A far more fulfilling and less polluted process than the ghastly and old worldly way of submitting and subverting oneself to the mind and heart of an authority projecting newscaster who really bleeds and bumbles like the rest of us. Ever since the popularity of YouTube and a number of websites following suite I acquire almost all of my news content on the computer while the TV box has taken to a fire-place like back drop item that adds color and sound to the living area. That is less there is a compelling episode of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ on. I even look to entertainment on the net and follow some YouTubers whom I know will pick out the most hilarious clip out of a talk show or comedy. I would say that with entertainment I watch half the content coming from established institutions and the other half from amateurs. And guess what, the two are competing. Another plus for me cause I can really use the save in time. I don’t have to manage myself to the TV schedule. Another brilliant feature of acquiring your content online is that you can communicate with other viewers/readers by leaving comments. This gives a live critique to content and sometimes people who are too gullible have a chance to save themselves. For me, the old way of sitting down in front of the TV and watching a news personality that is malevolent with its own biases and choices for news now appears so pagan, ignorant, shameful and old worldly that I have a hard time living with the fact how I subverted myself to it all these years. And even believed a lot of it when I shouldn’t have. Despite my apparent distaste for institutional programming, I do get most of my TV news content from these programmers. But using a portal like YouTube allows be to explore a lot of lesser known institutions, international view points and take a look at what the audience really thinks of the content. I love it.
An equally powerful aspect of open distribution and open acquisition is that it allows the smaller player to reach a large audience who otherwise would have been blocked. With equipment and broadcasting capabilities becoming inexpensive and accessible these talented individuals have already started to show promise. Just take a look at the top viewed content on YouTube whether its creative or substantial. I myself have always enjoyed writing. Readership is gratification for any writer. In the past I have sent a variety of material to various publications only to be shunned because it probably wasn’t anything a few hundred thousand people would want to read. But I don’t need 100,000. I may want it. I have the 1,000 or so that I need. Now, all this does not mean that large institutions are gamed out. A lot of them are very good and run by talented individuals. But they will have to respond. And the smarter ones are already doing that. Hewlett-Packard has already inculcating a culture that spews innovation and invention with a bottom up model. In one of their such tactics they set up web sites where researchers can pitch product ideas. Then ‘players’ who may be other employees of the company view all the ideas and put their wagers on which ones will succeed. While ideas are being developed by the researchers, the players trade their wagers. Eventually, the idea with the most buy-in wins. This may be a small part of the institutional framework today but it can only expand.
I think that a lot of the I have put together here things look pretty inevitable because they make such powerful sense. Its not news to a lot of us. It is the reason why I blog.
Following is a speech by Paul Graham from the 2005 Open Source Convention. Paul is an internet entrepreneur and guru and this is a highly relevant and one of the most refreshing speeches I have heard in a long time. The speech was pivotal for me to pursue certain avenues. Check it out…….
Paul Graham OSCON 2005 at IT Conversations
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