Read a great new book by Chris Anderson titled, “Free – The Past and Future of a Radical Price” .
For those wondering, Chris did put his money where his mouth is.. I downloaded the entire audio book… yes for free, from Audible.com.
Overall the book is a good read/listen. Goes through the history of free, as well as the psychological impact of the whole concept along side capitalism. But certainly one of the more interesting chapters was the one that covered The Attention and Reputation Economy.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. So as information of various forms (news, music, historic reference) becomes virtually free and money no longer rules, what does? As information is free and abundant, it requires our time or “attention” to give it value. The sources of information therefore also fight to build their “reputation” as worthy of our ongoing attention.
But what gauges the economy of Attention and Reputation? Hits on a webpage certainly represent how much attention an internet data source is receiving (similar to TV ratings), and page rank is possibly the ultimate gauge of reputation since its formula takes into consideration the number of links that point to a webpage and therefore recommend it, thereby raising its reputation. It’s then up to the owner of that attention and reputation to translate them into the monetary economy through some means, for example advertising.
There are also other micro social economies of this nature throughout the internet with their own social currency. For example, in Facebook you earn reputation through the number of friends you have, Twitter via followers, etc. I’m actually exploring one of these economies, Blip.fm, in a more detail. Immersing myself to analyze its nature and social dynamics. It’s quite fascinating. More to come in a follow up post.
With the streamlining of our lives by computers and the sacrifice of passive TV watching for the interactive, collaborative, and social internet, we work our way up Mazlow’s heirarchy of needs, and closer to the tip of the pyramid, namely Self Actualization. Thanks to the interactive social internet that allows are creativity to produce, collaborate, and share content, these attributes have never flourished as quickly and been so accessible.
What I wonder however, if the internet is making the various levels of the pyramid more easily accessible (ie. shrinking the pyramid’s height). How will this effect the lower end of the of the hierarchy, in particular employment. In the past, the achievement of self-actualization was based primarily on the person’s contributions through their jobs, and what they achieved throughout their career. With the higher levels now more readily available to all via the internet, does this create a lesser dependency on employment for self-actualization? Is this the reason why kids these days are labeled with a sense of entitlement?
There are many suggestions as to what Web 3.0 will be. Here is one from Google’s Eric Schmidt that describes it in terms of applications structured based on simple Web services in The Cloud:
Sure.. I’ll accept that. But what about Web 4.0? Here are my thoughts…
Web 1.0 helped connect people to information.
Web 2.0 helped connect people to other people through social networks.
Web 3.0 will help connect Web services in The Cloud to form meaningful situational applications
Web 4.0 will help further connect the physical world to the internet
The Web is often compared to the human brain in its workings. Google, the search engine of the web, was designed around cognitive scientific theory, with its creators fluent in artificial intelligence. If the internet is the world’s brain, then in order to create a Smarter Planet, we need to connect the brain to the physical world. I always thought IBM was behind when it came to Web 2.0… in reality they are simply looking ahead with Web 3.0 (SOA) and now Web 4.0 (Smarter Planet).
To accomplish this sensory devices will be required that can translate physical qualities into data, and log the data chronologically through feeds. This is nothing new. Weather stations provided this type of data for many years now. But we’ll see it more and more in our daily physical lives, here for an example is a plant tweeting its soils moisture condition:
…and the data will become more readily available, immediately, through the internet, The Cloud, in the form of feeds, and processed and abstracted intelligently through layers of Web services or pipes:
Yahoo! Pipes
… the same way our brain processes, translates, and abstracts our own sensory data retrieved from our eyes, nose, hands, tongue, ears, etc.
I may expand on this thought more in future posts… till then it will be stuck in my head.
I’ve always liked this diagram and how it relates SOA to Web 2.0.
The plane between SOA and Web 2.0 defines what was or was not determined to be a necessary Human Task. Within the defined Business Process Model (BPM) all human tasks require a user interface, while all non-human tasks are essentially automated IT services (internal services, B2B, etc). Hence why Process sits between Rich User Experience and Services.
There are two methods to achieve SOA: Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Top-down SOA is usually initiated at the business level, and involves the CIO and his crew of analysts to define the process and then put requirements for services against IT.
Bottom-up SOA on the other hand is normally initiated by IT componentizing its existing legacy apps and EIS systems and turning them into reusable services.
Bottom-up gives you quick ROI, however long-term efforts without governance and business level scope is futile. But for some clients that don’t have the resources to start a business level SOA movement, Bottom-up (hopefully with appropriate governance in place) is a good start which would eventually lead to a top-down investment.
Overall, a mix of the two methods to achieving SOA is commonly recommended.
If you happen to visit my last.fm page, you will notice my second most listened to artist happens to be Fisher-Price Little People.
Yes, I have kids, and though the tunes are catchy, and got me through several traffic jams with my sanity in tact, I don’t want them to reflect my musical profile.
How did they end up nearly on top of my Top Artists List? Well Last.fm has a feature to not only scrobble songs listened to through iTunes, but even those listened to on your iPod. Every time you connect your iPod to your computer to sync and charge, the Last.fm app pops up and asks if you wish to scrobble the songs played on the iPod since the last time you connected. It also presents you with the list of the songs that were listened to, and asks if you wish to Scrobble All or Scrobble only the selected tracks. Despite deselecting the Fisher-Price Little People songs… as well as Celine and several other requests granted for my wife (no really), the application ends up scrobbling the full set!
Now I wonder whether my last.fm Recommendations station will reference singing purple dinosaurs.
I’ve since sent the issue to last.fm support and await a response (and hopefully a chance to adjust my list).
With the Canadian dollar at par with the US dollar, will this result in lower prices on goods in Canada? As you guessed, we likely won’t see prices drop too fast up here as a result.
But with online shopping malls like eBay.com and Amazon.com (notice I said .com not .ca), what would stop Canadian shoppers from online shopping across the boarder in order to take advantage of the exchange rate?
So I decided to test it out… Yup, the book Wikinomics is 15% cheaper on Amazon.com than Amazon.ca, taxes and shipping included! However, you would receive it a lot faster by ordering from the Canadian site. Time to invest in FedEx.
Though here is one example of an immediate price drop… Canadian price of a 2008 Porsche Carrera 4S Cab. down 8% from 2007!
What a steal! … My wife unfortunately wasn’t convinced.
