@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Today an article in the Times covers the nascent disagreement between two well-known Internet and business theory intellectuals (Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson) over whether content will be free:

· http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2009/06/malcolm-gladwell-vs-chris-anderson-a-very-intellectual-bust-up.html

Now, the difference between what theorists propound and what practitioners DO should always be noted. Obviously, the optimal form is to be possessed of the genius of Steve Jobs — which is seamlessly conceptual and pragmatic AND pays off. Unfortunately, few of us are lucky enough to be thus talented.

So whilst Anderson makes a stand for a future of free, reports indicate that Simon Cowell is in negotiations to earn US$144 million PER YEAR to continue with American Idol, which arguably has the biggest viewing audience (and advertisers’ dream) in the US.

· http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/30/simon-cowells-idol-salary_n_222906.html

In other words, established media channels are witnessing increasingly competitive payment for talent and their content contribution — whether this is Cowell, a film star like Tom Hanks, a director like Steven Spielberg, a singer like Mariah Carey, etc. — whilst Internet stars are supposed to be drones working for nothing except to please the Queen (owners of the platform) if Anderson’s theory becomes orthodoxy.

Hmmmn………..

Well, we already know that Newscorp has been examining models to start charging for online content:

· http://www.nypost.com/seven/05062009/business/news_corp__studies_web_content_platforms_167809.htm

Not forgetting attempts by YouTube, various IPTV platforms and socnets like Facebook to try and monetize their content properties.

We should also remember the famous quote attributed to the supermodel, Linda Evangelista, who said:

“I don’t get out of bed for less than $10000 a day.”

And how billionaires become billionaires and it’s not because they’re born in the free era.

This is personally pertinent and odd serendipity/synchronicity because recently a business contact valued my strategic abilities — business modeling, content and code work — at GBP1,000 per hour (no joke and no delusions), and then I read this just now in my star signs:

**********************

TUESDAY JUN 30, 2009

A stricter separation between your career and volunteer work is called for. You’ve given away one too many freebies, and it’s starting to affect your bank account. Generosity is not about sacrifices, Libra. If you drain your own resources, you won’t have a drop of charitable energy left to give the world. The same holds true when it comes to your creativity. While it’s fine (and advisable) for you to pursue your passions without reserve, you don’t do the starving artist routine very well. Having money in the bank keeps you balanced, which, in turn, gives you the right foundation to keep dreaming up all those brilliant works.

**********************

Now, I tend to take horoscopes with a healthy dose of skepticism of the type:

· So one in twelve people is going to be in the same situation as me; and

· It’s all just generalization and open to your own interpretation.

Still it did make me think — particularly after the experience of that SemWeb play where I gave a lot of goodwill, content, consideration and time. Plus the horoscope is right to say my sign doesn’t “do the starving artist routine very well”. My thinking’s now further compounded by reading about the Gladwell versus Anderson stand-off.

The more I think about free content online the less I think it’s democratizing and the more I believe it’s exploitative towards user-generator-content-collaborators and…………..Communist rather than capitalist. Capitalism may be flawed but, at least, market forces can determine the value of our content rather than fool us that all content is equal and all contributions are free.

It’s not, as I’ve discovered.

Moving forward, CEOs like that SemWeb play’s will need to pay me GBP1,000 per hour UPFRONT before I as much as write a single apostrophe on their site. Henceforth, there will also be no such practice as a “free lunch” or as a “favor to a friend”. Despite his insistence that we were friends, that CEO categorically is NOT my friend.

No friend of mine would waste my time or disrespect users’ content.

That’s the problem with free content. It’s treated as if it and its originators are of no real value. It makes any owners who are unscrupulous think that they can disrespect their users and abuse their content.

I’m glad I now have 100% ownership over my content so I can monetize it, especially now I see that Newscorp, Gladwell and Simon Cowell believe in paid content / talent models — LOL.

I just spotted something interesting on the Huffington Post blog site and am wondering whether anyone’s mentioned it to Arianna Huffington. Here’s how Bing is being promoted across the site:

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/business/

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entertainment/

You can see via the second link that although Bing is being banner advertised, the custom Google search feature is still very noticeably being used by HuffPost itself. We can ask what commercial agreement is in place between the various parties about non-compete issues……………

So as some readers are aware a SemWeb play, which is such a disappointment I won’t even namecheck them and give them free PR, deleted vital content of mine on some baseless — and frankly stupid — issues of theirs. This brought to the fore all the typical online concerns relating to:

* stewardship of users’ content and IP;

* trust between the online provider and the content generator;

* how people can misinterpret and misunderstand each other’s meanings and intent (semantic differences of perception), so how can we expect machines to understand humans; and

* whether various parties can overcome their egos and psychological constructs to genuinely collaborate towards the Global Brain.

Clearly, the CEO of the SemWeb play and I do not have the same vision for or insights on the Global Brain, rewarding content contributors or fostering constructive and democratic relationships. It’s just as well that my content is no longer subject to his team’s control, oppressive deletion or influence since he’s the person who spun a whole heap of garble about Semantic technology, Google not having any semantic capabilities in its search algorithms and customer care which have proven to be completely off-the-bullseye. After all, he and his team willfully closed their public feedback channels not once but at least THREE times despite my advice to the contrary.

Anyway, today I’m reminded of how justifiably annoyed I am at his deletions of my content.

As I mentioned last week I met a Google engineer who’s using MapReduce to populate large volume data onto a map. Now, I know for a fact that what we all need is an early detection system for build-ups of economic bubbles and I believe that something like MapReduce could potentially be an element of this system. Therefore, I was going to send her an 80+ page PDF of some economic statistics some clever guys had generated back in Sept/Oct 2008. Unfortunately, they’ve presented their findings in a static format and it would be really helpful if their data was actually in a timeline or MapReduce form.

So that’s my good intention: share this economic analysis with Ms. Google MapReduce and do my itsy-weensy bit to accelerate us reducing our risks of repeating the recent global economic crisis.

However, here’s where the chink in the sense chain appears: the SemWeb platform. I entrusted the link to and contextualization of that PDF to the SemWeb platform. I no longer have access to that content. This means that the sum effect is:

* the SemWeb platform wasted my time; instead of putting the link and contextualizing it with fellow contributors on their site I’d have been safer putting it into my Gmail or my own blog; and

* the SemWeb platform is (yet again) responsible for a delay in human progress and collaboration.

* the SemWeb platform and its team has increased ignorance, discontent, annoyance and the system’s stupidity rather than advanced Enlightenment.

Yes and I do hope that the upcoming Google Wave “blows them out of the water” because that’s what their inconsiderate actions and disrespect towards users have resulted in: disappointment and disloyalty.

Meanwhile I have to go rooting for this PDF again. This time I’m bookmarking it direct into my browser.

……..for month.

As a final taster of what I’m giving up for 31 days, I went to a cool South-East Asian restaurant called ‘Bambou’:

· Hanoi-style pork ribs in red wine vinegar

· Sichuan-spiced duck breast with tamarind and chilli

· Banana fritters with pistachio ice cream

Today for my last meat day for the month I’m going to make spicy chicken wings.

I’ve decided to go temporarily veggie because I discovered that during the summer our bodies need a lot more fluids whilst meat can make us feel “heavy” and retain water to process it, so I’m making July my month of meat-free detox as a health trial.

My mother says I won’t be able to do it and will probably only last two days before I give up, but I’m determined to complete my objectives. She says I won’t mostly because my family are such BIG meat eaters — especially seafood. Apart from the puffer fish (also known as “Fugu” in Japanese sushi and the second most poisonous vertebrate in the world, btw) and endangered species, we’ve eaten most types of seafood: cod, salmon, herring, haddock, eel, tilapia, pomfret, John Dory, plaice, sole, red snapper, catfish, monkfish, sardines, trout, shark’s fin, tuna, mullet, bream, brill, parrotfish, butterfish, halibut, scallops, crabs (lots of types), clams (lots of types), mussels, lobster, langoustines, sea urchins etc. On the meat side as well as conventional chicken, beef and pork we’ve tried venison, crocodile — my brother on vacation, ostrich, pheasant, rabbit and wild boar.

So this is the lifetime to-date of taste bud conditioning I’m trying to overcome for a month. It’s going to be…….tough.

My parents did use to make our own tofu; on Sunday mornings our kitchen was swamped by boxes my father had crafted from oak / beechwood / ash to set the tofu and my mother was whizzing away on the food processor to extract the milk from sacks of soya bean we’d bought. However, as much as we love tofu our kitchen was more likely to burst with flavors from home-made dishes like these [if you click on the images, you'll be directed to good recipe sites]:

MY FATHER’S SPECIALITIES

· beef and pineapple stir-fry (here’s my first attempt of this dish below)

· Pei Pa duck

· braised pork belly

· pan-fried tilapia with ginger and spring onions

· beef brisket ho fun soup

MY MOTHER’S SPECIALITIES

· spring rolls (the BEST IN THE WORLD! She makes batches of 200+ each time.)

· seafood noodle soup

· steamed sea bass in soy sauce and ginger

· Dai Bao

· char sui pork

This is only a tiny fraction of their repertoire and, natural bias aside, they are (was in my father’s case since he’s passed away) really good cooks. They made classic Cantonese dishes as well as added creative and experimental twists — like putting chestnuts to the spring rolls. We also had a sizeable garden where my father grew our own tomatoes, strawberries and raspberries in the greenhouse with potatoes, spring onions, lettuce, carrots, beans and radishes outside in the ground. That was where we were first introduced to…….slugs — YUCK!

This early experience is how I know it’s a lot more cost-effective to grow your own food and be able to cook it than to buy convenience foods. A bland, ready-made microwave oven mean can cost between GBP3 to GBP5 and for that (if you don’t have your own vegetable patch) you could go to a market at the weekend and pick up all the fresh ingredients you need to cook tasty meals for 3 days. All it takes is about 15 minutes to cook and the preparation time is therapeutic.

Cooking can also teach us great discipline — timing, combination of elements and distinctive appeal — which actually has applicability in creating businesses and brands too.

Anyway, I’m lucky my parents have passed on some culinary abilities to me. I’m going to use some of the flavors and spicing techniques they taught me to help make the vegetarian dishes more interesting and palatable. Yes and it’s fairly amazing that despite all this good meaty home cooking we kids haven’t turned out to be clinically obese! This is because there’s no such thing as butter, cheese or other saturated fats in our family cooking. Plus we don’t make many cakes or pastries and when we do we add only a 1/4 of the amount of eggs and sugar the recipe says.

Mostly we stayed a healthy shape, of course, because we were encouraged to be active and take part in extra-curricular sports and join teams (athletics, badminton, squash, tennis, basketball, swimming, netball, volleyball and cycling).

Yes and in an alternate universe if I wasn’t so into business, technology, films and “brain work” I’d like to have been a travel + food writer so I could indulge in my love for food and adventuring! LOL.