ClueTrain Manifesto - 10 years after ...

As I promised almost a year ago, I read the new edition of „The ClueTrain Manifesto” issued as 10 years anniversary edition in 2009 with the introduction written by the authors of original Manifesto. This very introduction is exactly what makes this edition so interesting.

Let me however, start with short summary about the original book. When it was first published in 1999 it was like a storm for corporate marketing strategies. Long before Web 2.0, and starting with 95 thesis it predicted the revolution brought about by blogs, forums and all open communication platforms that started to appear.

We were reading it and holding our breaths — it had such a powerful impact. We were almost certain that the ominous slogan: „The end of business as usual” will come true in the next 2-3 years ...

So ... what has happened after these 10 years... Certainly we do not yet see the end of business as usual ... and as one of the authors asked: „Did the original edition of CLUETRAIN commit the Fallacy of Hyperbolic Subtitle?”

As it usually happens, the answer is not straightforward and simple. From one point of view we do have Web 2.0 and socionomics, on the other hand „Huge corporations still stalk the earth. We still report to hierarchical structures that cut us paychecks in exchange for obedience” (DW)

The events of last 10 years show that the path to the new way of doing business is paved with obstacles — and the delicate interplay of successful prophecies with false once is the essential content of the reflections upon the decade after Cluetrain...

If I was to summarize, what are the authors feelings, I would probably say:

David Weinberger — is positive and full of hope and optimism. However his matured optimism knows that we must fight to defend optimism. It is certainly not automatic...

Doc Searls — is positive, but with a grain of salt. He admits the value of growing number of relationships, he sees the potential of his VRM vs. old CRM — yet he admits that „attention economy” still grows in power — only with changed medium: „Transaction we already have. Conversation we are only beginning too develop. (...) Relationship is the wild frontier. Closed "social" environments like MySpace and Facebook are good places to experiment with some of what we'll need, but as of today they're still silos. Think of them as AOL 2.0”

Chris Locke — seems to be less optimistic. „Between the Bubble and the Towers, business cooled considerably in its fanatical whoring after e-commerce billions”. He mocks of certain events of the decade (like Oprah Winfrey and some of her almost occult programs) . He ends his sarcastic essey by a quote from Bob Dylan song: „Don't follow leaders. Watch your parking meters” :-)

Rick Levine — is perhaps also a bit moderate. „How does it taste”? He asks — because he knows we can't ask such questions easily other the net. While he notices the positives (access, data scale, usability and participation) but as he expresses it: „The details we neglected (in Cluetrain prophecy — note by MS) to address were manifest”. It seems Rick rediscovered the power of physical relations between people — and knows well that this is unattainable in the Web...

So — 100 years later — and we have quite mixed impressions...

And we must fight for optimism...

BTW, the 10 years edition finally explained the name of the original book:

„Doc was reminded of a Silicon Valley company about which a friend had said, „The clue train stopped there four times a day, and they never took delivery” :-)

The inspiration - 10 years of ClueTrain Manifesto

When I first read this book (in fact listened to) it was like a bolt out the blue. It was like revelation of truths that we felt in our veins and bones. It was like all my history of business in the new, communism-free Poland, like our "we web it for you" slogan - suddenly gained justification and explanation.

End of business as usual. People of earth - this is our earth. When we converse, dialog, talk, quarrel, without barriers - we create something.

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" became the motto of my managment style for so many years.

And even the "Demonic Paradox" that has been haunting us for so many years in this part of Europe:

"Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. "

was the part of the message of the book.

Today (via David Weinberger - the co-author of ClueTrain) we welcome the 10-th anniversary edition. There is an event at Berkman Center. While we still must wait till we can buy it at Amazon, there is an interesting discussion going there: what is the difference? How we see ClueTrain after this 10 years....

I will come back to it as soon as I get the "10 anniversary edition" with new chapters and new reflections...

Two applications of Wikipedia - one of Meaning, second of Printing

Wikipedia has two fantastic offspring ideas.

In the first we can see what size it would have if printed on paper. See http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/ (via David Weinberger). Have fun :-)

In the second, which I get into closer at last ESWC conference, called dbPedia, we have huge extraction of structured data or, structured data. I specifically like the term "Meaning Minining" coined by David Weinberger. Sings in my ears nigh to my "Web full of Meaning" as I call Semantic Web...

Wolfram Alpha - success or misfire ?

Wolfram Research has just launched its long awaited project: Wolfram Alfa.

My impression of it is however that of mixed feelings.I found some simple queries working well, but some other totally wrong - with no indication why.

I tried some chemistry on it (having PhD in theoretical chemistry I could:-) ).
Simple molecules expressed via simple query like C2H5OH are superb, including nice 3D models (try), but when you take something more complicated but perfectly well known (like La2(CO3)3) it shows something that has almost nothing of any knowledge of value.

Moreover, when I typed an absurd formula H9O – the answer was unnoticeably similar to some other perfectly sound molecules !!!

I tried some concepts form neuroscience – I always got simple: “WolframAlpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

And what bothers me the most: that mysterious source reference: “WolframAlpha curated Data 2009” – with no real explanation what it is, how it was build etc…

As for the only real value I got from WolframAlpha - it did some funny deciphering of my first name: Mirek. Try it – it’s fun and you will understand my "aka" signature below :-)

Well, that was a joke – there are some areas in which it operates well. Almost all math formulas I entered were produced superb, nice plots, formulas etc. So, as Wolfram Mathematica web extension it is perfect. I’m not sure about other fields.

Perhaphs it is as David Winberger wrote: “WA is like roomful of idiot savants”

I hope it will improve. There is something in me, like a small voice, telling me: there is some huge value in Wolfram Alpha, though I still cannot see it clearly...

Mirek (aka 1K^-1)

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Following the post of David's Wienberger on his excellent blog. I read the article written by some Google's scientists carefully. I must admit - it is fascinating.

First, its title "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" is fully intentional, admitted reference to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” by Eugene Wigner. Nice play with titles, but it is a bit misleading. The role of mathematics in natural science is just the opposite to the role of pure data in human knowledge. I could elaborate on it longer, but - what strikes me deeply, is another thing.

It seems that authors dismiss the message of Semantic Web advocates, among them, Tim Berners-Lee, for reasons that are not very clear.

Let me cite: " (...) But even if we have a formal Semantic Web “Company Name” attribute, we can’t expect to have an ontology for every possible value of this attribute. For example, we can’t know for sure what company the string “Joe’s Pizza” refers to because hundreds of businesses have that name and new ones are being added all the time. We also can’t always tell which business is meant by the string HP.(...)”

Well, in all Semantic Web proposals we do not care what "Joe's Pizza" or "HP" means!

We care about one thing - that "Joe's Pizza" is The Company Name.

We do not need ontology for the name itself, we need it for a different potential "Company Name" concept !!!

Not everything in this article is plainly bad, though.

What I liked, was the call "So, follow the data" - in some vague sense they reaffirmed the principle of least action of Tim Berners Lee. I also must admit, that the distinction of “Semantic Web” from “Semantic Interpretation” is very convincing and it is another good part of the article.

Finally, I often think, that Google would be The One who could push Semantic Web forward. And for some reason they don't.

They could simple cry out loudly: "Hi webmasters around the world - use RDF or microformats to mark your contact/author data and we will use it in our search engine!"

Apart from conspiracy theories, there is something in this article, written by Google researches that justifies their unwillingness to start the ball rolling...

This post was first published as comment on David Weinberger and Seb Schmoller blogs.

ClueTrain in a new light ...

I read "ClueTrain Manifesto" couple of times since 1999 when the book was first published. And always when I return to it, after some time, it appears to show some fresh aspects, some fresh views. Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and my favorite, David Weinberger created something worth of return. If you still did not read it - its free: HERE.

If you have no time for the entire book, just read only these: 95 theses ....

My favorite two citations from the book:
"Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. "
"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy."

This book is compulsory reading for all sales people in my company ....

See the citation:

"Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others.
The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. "

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991

Doubt it's still true? Look arround - Think about it ....

When everything is Miscellaneous - what is left ?

This is the third great book of David Weinberger that I was happy to read. Of course, the first, Cluetrain Manifesto (he co-authored it) and the second, Small Pieces Loosly Joined are great books that show the transforming power of Internet and its role in business and in social life.
"Everything is miscellaneous" is a bit different. The book, with some small exceptions, focuses on knowledge and the fundamental transformation that the very concept of konwledge and science undergoes today. The book demonstrates the weakness of the old-style "categorized" and well-ordered knowledge originating in Aristotelian science (to who - of course - the credit of the knowledge creation must be given !!!). It was known since the dawn of civilisation that since and knowledge evolve through discourse of scholars and thinkers. Today everybody can be a scholar and thinker and publisher and mentor. The amazing fact is that, contrary to common sense - this not only degrades the level of discourse, but in fact increases it. See Wikipedia case (which author analyses deeply).

From my perspective, the most interesting parts are those about classification systems, with the stress of "faceted classification" (e.g. colon classification system), that allows to build unlimited trees of knowledge and the notes about semantic web. Without pretending to know the reasons, Weinberger sheds some light on the failure or maybe rather, slow progress of Semantic Web. Surprisingly, the potential reasons are in the very nature of Semantic Web formulation, in RDF like mode, which does not fall far from Aristotelian, non-miscellaneous way of thinking.
For me it is like David Weinberger was to tell us - it is the meaning that matters, not the rigid structure of knowledge.

He tries to find the tools to represent meaning in the concept of "the third order of order": " ... but only if we see past its mess to its meaning, for that is what the third order enables" and “The world won’t ever stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours”

However, in line with the message of the book - it is not easy to explain clearly and without some ambiguity, what are the tools to contain the meaning. Are they in folksonomies? are they in interaction and the way Wikipedia works ? We may fall short if we try to DEFINE them. Or maybe we need to wait until the next book of this great author ...

There are also very interesting thoughts about business today. See the quote: "In a truly miscellaneous world, a successful business owns nothing but what it wants to sell us. The rest is ours."