GOOGLE WAVE IS RELEASED THIS WEEK. Here are some videos:

TWAIN LIFE

I’ve been a wee bit busy these last few weeks:

(1.) Putting a trademark application together.

(2.) Sanity checking some guidelines on entrepreneurialism for some friends.

(3.) Sourcing furnishings for a friend’s new apartment.

(4.) Meeting search and advertising people.

(5.) Contributing to the shaping of the BBC’s documentary production on the 20-year history of the Web.

Let’s just say that since my involvement on the BBC project, the production team have clearly put the need to include a wider and deeper demographic of contributors onto their “to interview and source from” list. I’ve been championing these:

* women who are contributing not only to tech companies like Marissa Mayer of Google, but who also have a history of genius and revolutionary code work like Adele Goldberg who along with Alan Kay did amazing innovations with smalltalk => Squeak;

* teenagers who — contrary to absurd neuroscientists’ unnecessary patronization about how the Web is destroying their brains and concentration — are flourishing with these new technologies and some are even US$ million tech entrepreneurs;

* silver surfers who contribute a tremendous amount with their wisdoms and their wit to help us youngsters understand more about Life, open us up new resources (like musicians, authors and sports stars of yore) we should educate ourselves about because it’s fun and good-to-know, and who kindly temper our exuberance when we’re being a wee bit silly; and

* non-Anglo-Saxon contributors, e.g. from South Korea, since the Web is supposed to be a global village online and it’s important to benefit from the insights of others; the WWW is as much the property of Asians, Africans, South Americans, Slavics, etc. as it is of the US of A.

During various conversations I also managed to point these facts out:

(1.) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergei Brin, Larry Ellison etc have been surfing for DECADES and we haven’t seen any evidence that it affects their concentration or brains in a negative way, have we?

(2.) Chris Anderson’s theory of free is flawed and so is Rupert Murdoch’s one with its paywalls.

Without going into all the economic arguments I presented — I quoted a paper I wrote when I was 20 that included analysis from Alfred Marshall, JK Galbraith and CW Mills about the inclusion of advertising as a cost premium — to essentially decimate any Mickey Mouse economic theories about Moore’s Law pushing down the cost of circuit boards and transistors, essentially resulting in a zero cost scenario.

The “Free Web” is unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s also not capitalism at its optimal but rather communism at its worst because it implies people will contribute their content for free indefinitely and don’t have household bills or their children’s education to pay for.

The “Pay to Play” model is also unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s extreme capitalism because it creates a chasm of digitally entitled and digitally deprived (or as JK Galbraith coined it “the haves and have-nots”) which only serves to exacerbate societal inequalities rather than resolve them.

(3.) The definition of “digital native” as being someone born after about 1990 who hasn’t known a world without technology and ‘digital migrants” as being someone born before 1990 is…….inaccurate since the PC was commercialized around 1974, so there’s an entire generation of people in their 50s and 60s who are digital natives! People like the fathers of the Internet (Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Larry Brilliant, Tim O’Reily et al).

Moreover, by the USC’s definitions, Mark Zuckerberg would also be classified as a “digital migrant” since he was born in 1984 which is a full SIX years before 1990. See? So that’s an example of classifications having plenty of room for error, so we can imagine how it might propagate even with semantic stacks!

TWAIN’S WEB ECONOMY

In my model of how the Web should work, there would be legal requirements as a condition of platform providers being allowed to operate:

(1.) Allocate a % of their online gross revenues towards charitable causes and every company has to commit to a program of sending their employees to work for at least 4 weeks in an NGO/socially deprived area/public service.

(2.) Incentivize and reward content contributors via monthly micropayments — whether it’s a review / recommendation / any comment requiring skill they’ve made which is considered by other users to be of value;

(3.) Innovate new ways to include their communities in the design of products+services which result in companies having smarter inventory systems rather than over-producing and causing climate change issues, then doing hard sell/excessive advertising which doesn’t even result in bottom line sales at the end!

Now those measures, if implemented, would be TRULY DEMOCRATIZING AND WOULD ENGENDER GOOD CAPITALISM wherein each of the participants is conscious of their larger role in the ecosystem of the Web and of society as a whole.

THE WEB NURTURES OUR BRAINS + CONSCIOUSNESS

Personally (and I’m saying this from the experience of someone who’s used technology since pre-teen), I haven’t experienced any reduction in my ability to read, concentrate, contextualize or quote reams of reference sources to substantiate my position simply because I’ve been using the Web for more years than Google’s been around!

This is what I noted in one discussion on the issue of concentration:

“Wrt your comment: “This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity,” I have to respectfully disagree. Leveraging tools like Facebook, Twitter, email and IM can facilitate all of those things. It’s a matter of the HOW, not the what.

It’s like this: those tools are a fishing rod. If we hook an old boot or a minnow instead of sweet, giant salmon it’s not the fault of the fishing rod. It’s the fisherperson’s lack of knowhow and skill. It’s their inability to read the terrain, factor in weather conditions and position themselves in a spot to concentrate and catch the salmon. It’s also their inability to seek the wisdom of others who may have fished before (and in that spot). The fishing rod can’t read their minds. They control it, not vice versa.

Now, I’ve worked directly with CEOs on strategies so let me also share this. Some of the CEOs of the 1950s to 1970s generation are technologically illiterate. They can’t (and so don’t) navigate their ways around email systems; they have their 20-something PAs print materials off for them. They delegate the management of their time and their attentions to those PAs. They read reports long-hand rather than as 140 character tweets. They’re also not on their own corporate networks or IM channels. They have few of the so-called “sources of distraction”.

Yet some of them are incapable of vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity, those sorely needed skills you noted — as is evident in the global financial crisis or any Chapter 11 bankruptcy and corporate failures. They also suffer from information overload from those stockpiles of longhand printed out reports, books and even short 2-page executive summaries.

Likewise, the Anthony Edens, Joseph Stalins, Robert Mugabes and (some would say George W. Bushes) did not have the Web or technology to distract them and look what they achieved. Vision? Planning? Long-term strategizing? Inflation in Zimbabwe surged past 230 MILLION PERCENT by October 2008. Eden triggered the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Stalin is said to be responsible for the deaths of upwards of 10 million, predominantly in Ukraine caused by the famine conditions his policies produced. In China, of course, we have Pu Yi the Last Emperor of China who had no technology distractions; however unlike his illustrious predecessors like Liu Bang (who in 206BC created the Han Dynasty, the first one to embrace Confucianism, strategy and educational and technological innovation), Pu Yi had no vision.

Reaching even further back, Rome and other ancient civilizations fell not because they were distracted by technologies. They fell either because of natural disasters or man-made causes stemming from arrogance, complacency, conceit, narcissism and hubris — the very same hubris that’s said to have infected the banking sector in recent years.

What it all boils down to are not the tools, the education or the experience alone, but the JUDGMENT. Judgment derived from rationale, ego and emotion.

There are technical whizz’s who can have 6 Bloomberg screens flashing constantly at them, a messy desk and they still make a spot-on stock call (every single time). Then there are others who have clean desks, get distracted and lose millions. Meanwhile, there’s another set who can sometimes tune in and out of their attention spans; sometimes tidy up their desks, sometimes call it right, sometimes are grossly wrong.

In a previous thread, I asked the question of whether it’s possible to isolate the Web and its tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as the originating source of distraction or whether the inability to concentrate is also attributable to a priori Web changes in education systems, the proliferation of media (print billboards as much as online spam), the migration to magazines and snappy articles, television and fast-editing and also the advent of mobile technologies. Even the lack of conversation around a family dinner table can affect our abilities to concentrate. Fewer and fewer families sit down for an hour over dinner and simply converse and care.

How is that affecting our abilities to sit still, contemplate and concentrate?

Let’s also make this anecdotal observation and ask the scientists to source and analyze the empirical evidence. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Michael Bloomberg, the Google founders are all long-term technically “plugged in” to this “living in two dimensions,” and must get more emails, IMs and so-called “sources of distraction” than most. Yet they managed to remain focused and to increase the value of their companies and the knowledge repositories of their staff.

In my own case, I don’t treat tech tools as distractions. I take my fishing rod and aim for the sweet, giant Salmon of Wisdom (bradán feasa).

:*).

Hopefully, I’m not going to lose concentration or consciousness any time soon since there’s a lot I’d like to contribute.

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In case anyone’s unfamiliar with the salmon mythology, please refer to ‘The Boyhood Deeds of Finn MacCumhal’:

• http://www.luminarium.org/mythology/ireland/finnboyhood.htm

Friends who read this blog will know that I learnt the story about the Salmon of Wisdom / Knowledge  when cuil launched since that’s the story they regaled the tech sector with. Obviously, I applied it in a completely different way from the cuil team — LOL!

DOCUMENTARY WITH ME: QUOTES

The documentary in which I appear will be shown this coming week on a movie screen. Some of the quotes from the film used to market it are:

Ok, I just heard that my cousins from Germany are flying in later this week. What am I supposed to do with teenage girls?

Hmmn……..Well, all teenage girls love TopShop where Kate Moss has her own design line……..and Portobello Road for kooky treasures…….and eating foods that are banned by parents or unavailable at home (like chocolate, cream scones and fish+chips — separately and not together, of course)………

Hey and their surprise visit is cool. It means I’ll be able to speak Spanish, Italian, French and German all within the next month along with English and Chinese! There was I thinking I may have to watch another movie by Tom Twyker or Der Untergang (Downfall in English, btw) again to remind me of what German sounds like. Incidentally, it’s an Oscar-nominated film, a must-watch and is gripping with exceptional performances:

German and I have a strange relationship; it’s my least favorite of the European languages — lacks poetic lyricism — and yet it’s the language of some of the world’s best philosophers.

My German languages teacher was pretty upset I chose chemistry instead of German as an elective. Mostly because in the last German exams I ever took I got 99%, the first time anyone she’d taught had passed the 85% mark. Oh well, at least I opted to stay in her French class and she got to write in my report, “Twain has a natural flair for languages!” Ha ha. If she’d had her way instead of my mother, I’d have studied all the major languages, marched off to the LSE / Sorbonne, studied European Studies and become a UN interpreter or something.

LOL. Of course, if I hadn’t studied chemistry SmithKlineBeecham wouldn’t have let me play with their Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine when I was 17, compound my own paracetamol, glass blow my own test tubes and round-bottom flasks, and then two years later I wouldn’t have been in the development team (at what is now IFF) that created the world’s first alcopops, right? I wouldn’t have spent one summer synthesizing one cola as close to Coke as I could, right? And promptly lost all interest in soft drinks because if you spend 10 hours a day in a lab concocting and testing it, the last thing you want to do at the w/e is drink it!

Most importantly, I wouldn’t know an iota about chemical mechanisms to propose that THIS is a much smarter and more natural way to envisage and realize the Global Brain, when crossing it with linking open data:

See? There’s cause+effect and a natural connective order to each of our lives. I gained insights on this and it created neural paths to enable me to make successive leaps of know-how and cross pollinate it into another sector.

Hmmn, maybe it wouldn’t take much to translate that entire Google knol into Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and to ensure that colloquial Anglo-Saxon phrasing is suitably cross-checked to reduce “lost in translation” issues. Maybe then researchers from all over the world will have one source on the Global Brain which is written in all the major languages. At the moment, no single source exists.

[Note to self: must learn more Russian beyond "perestroika" --- LOL.]

See? All these to-do’s, to move Semantic Web concepts more spot-on along with Project ART commitments to disrupt online business models. Ergo, I’m a wee bit busy to join Facebook’s translation project group, particularly since (even in English) they can’t communicate it in a clear way that makes us understand what their request is!

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/07/15/facebook-im-rotflol/

Also, I know from translating M+A deal documents (French => English, Italian => English, Spanish-Italian => English) that translators cost GBP15-20 an hour. Obviously, I decided to translate those documents myself instead.

Hmmmn……Now, please can anyone explain, “WHY SHOULD ANYONE TRANSLATE FACEBOOK WHICH HAS A VALUATION OF US$10+ BILLION, ACCORDING TO THE LATEST INVESTMENT OFFER BY DIGITAL SKY TECHNOLOGIES, AND CASH IN THE BANK TO PAY FOR TRANSLATION SERVICES AS PART OF GLOBAL ROLLOUT STRATEGY? FOR FREE?”

There too the question about the paid content model, users’ contributions and who owns what copyright arises.

Suppose we help Facebook translate itself. Suppose that some of us even create an algorithm that flags similes and non-translate-ables. Or even a methodology for someone in China to grasp the concept that that there are quantifier conjunctions in English which don’t exist in Chinese. Then suppose one day Facebook decides to charge us to upload our content in the same way that hosting providers charge us for storage space and our ISPs for connection. That means that instead of earning per hour for our translation abilities, we’re giving away our time and efforts for free. It also means that FB owns the algorithm and the methodology. It means the users will have added to the valuation of FB, yet they own no shares in the company, they’re not management or employed staff on a salary — not even temp / agency / consultancy staff — and they haven’t been paid for their contributions.

See? The Internet model which is appearing (and which Chris Anderson argues for) is NOT democratizing at all if the traditional barters of trade (aka MONEY) is not appropriately distributed and has differing equivalence. It is actually……..Communist if the online user bee is expected to build the hive, pollinate it and their reward is only that their content is allowed to exist in the hive — rather than for their content to LIVE, propagate collective sense-making and be nourished by honey (money).

This is why paying users for their content contributions and any special skills they bring to bear on a site should be a consideration that ALL sites which genuinely believe in online democracy need to commit to and implement.

THIS IS WHY MALCOLM GLADWELL WILL PROBABLY PROVE TO BE RIGHT AND CHRIS ANDERSON TO BE WRONG.

Returning specifically to my thoughts on German, what’s the other great reason to be able to speak and read the language apart from improving our technical competence and understanding “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement through technology)?

Answer:

* Wittgenstein

* Nietzsche

* Hegel

* Schopenhauer

* Kant

* von Clauswitz

What do these great minds teach us? I think, therefore I am. The World as Will and Idea. The power and utility of logic. We fight wars to win and there is no such concept as moderation in a war (to me, this is a sad but true insight). And, We are Human, All Too Human.

Sprechen Sie Deutsche? Ja, natürlich.

Why do we learn other languages if not to become informed with the wisdoms of and appreciation in as many cultures as possible?

Das ist Die Wahrheit. No, that doesn’t mean “the height of war”. It means………the truth.

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:

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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.

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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.