Automating location-based mobile tasks

This article on HeyCosmo got me thinking. From the article:

To capitalize on the growing mobile market, a company called HeyCosmo is launching two new location-based service designed for use on both the web and the phone. The first service, HeyCosmo Concierge, wants to help you save time on everyday tasks like making dinner reservations or finding an affordable contractor. The second, HeyCosmo Blaster, is a social event planning tool.

HeyCosmo's software goes about these tasks the wrong way, in my opinion, by essentially pushing people into phone trees:

The easiest example of this would be making dinner reservations. Instead of you calling restaurants one-by-one in order to find an 8:00 PM seating for a party of five, you could use HeyCosmo Concierge to do the dialing for you. With an automated, but customizable, message, its robo-dialer immediately contacts all the restaurants in your area (and this can be narrowed down by cuisine, too) and asks the recipient of the call to press (1) for yes, we can accommodate you, (2) no, we cannot accommodate you, etc. in response to the initial recorded greeting and question. The particular questions and how they are phrased can be specified by you. You can also record your own voice if desired. At the end of the messages, an ad will play, which is how the service makes money.

This is of course the wrong way to solve the problem. People hate phone trees and automated calls. Putting these two together is a terrible idea. It's the opposite of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. It's the Reese's from Hell. I predict that concierges will become adept at hanging up on such calls.

However, something like this could work quite well if HelloCosmo Concierge talked with an automated service on the restaurant's end. Push it from the restaurant's side, peg the pricing structure to the number of connections, and find a way to incentivize customers' use. Unfortunately, restaurants won't have an incentive to help customers comparison-shop.

Thinking about how HelloCosmo tries to automate location-based mobile tasks leads me to thinking about the problem more generally. Currently, the web-based task management system Remember the Milk allows you to associate tasks with locations. For instance, if you want to "remember the milk," you might put "get milk" as a task and associate it with a grocery store location. However, you still have to supply the trigger: you have to check the location to see what tasks are available. That's because your computing device is not currently location-aware.

It will not always be so. More mobile phones have GPS, and are being used increasingly as primary computing devices. Remember the Milk has an iPhone-based application, for instance. The next logical step is for the application to proactively sample your location and push tasks that you could perform at the location. You won't be able to forget the milk if your phone reminds you every time you get within 50 yards of the grocery store, for instance. Or to take another example, you might associate a task with another person ("get that loaned book back from Lauren") and your phone will remind you next time Lauren is in your office.

We're starting to see the beginnings of this sort of leverage going on with the iPhone, although it's slowed by Apple's walled garden approach. I predict an explosion of such capabilities with Android, although I worry that Android will not be fully baked at the time it ships. Either way, I imagine that a year from now, this post will seem quaint.

Copyediting

Here's a fascinating example of how a New York Times article on the Olympics was translated and, er, copyedited for the Beijing Evening News.

Twitter for the Enterprise

Yammer, which launched today at TC50, is being billed as "Twitter for companies."

Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?”

I expect to see a lot more like this.

Twitter dispatching "at" the RNC

Nancy Scola, who wrote yesterday about mobile media coordination of protests at RNC2008, has a follow-up interview with one fellow who acted as a dispatcher. The RNC took place in Minneapolis-St.Paul; the "dispatcher" worked from Tempe and had never been to the Twin Cities. Among the things he did: "appending the hash tag #RNC08 to untagged protest-related tweets so that they would pop-up on the C-SPAN RNC ’08 Convention Hub."

ATTW 2009 call for papers is out

And it looks really interesting.

ATTW 2009 : : Beyond Work? Technical Communication in Professional,
Community, & Social Networks

12th Annual ATTW Conference
March 11th, 2009
San Francisco, CA

Traditionally, teachers and researchers of technical writing have concentrated on writing in workplace settings. And rightly so. But the spread of information technology into all areas of social life means that, increasingly, technical communication practices and genres arise and collide in social spheres other than the workplace. Combine this trend with an increasingly mobile work environment in which people are working from home or from the neighborhood coffee shop rather than an office or shop floor, and an increasingly global workforce that spans multiple time zones, and you have the basis for dramatic shifts in the contexts, practices, genres, and purposes of technical writing. Some may see a threat to our identity, while others may see opportunities for work to have broader cultural and economic relevance.

More at the link.

Mobile technologies enable networked protests at RNC convention

Some notes from the field, courtesy Nancy Scola of TechPresident. Many more possibilities have opened for spontaneous organization since the Seattle WTF protests in 1997 were coordinated by mobile phones.

More Android apps

There's a list of Android apps floating around that reminds me of those thousands of open source projects on SourceForge: niche apps that appeal to geeks, with unpredictable overlaps and mediocre logos and bad names. But then there's this great list of "10 Android Apps We Will Actually Use." They look outstanding, and should really change the way people see phones.

Frolicking on the Internet

Omar Gallaga, a technology writer for the Austin American-Statesman's Austin360.com and avid Twitter user, prints a letter he received from a reader. The letter excoriates him and others for using social networking sites instead of working, lauds Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, and suggests that time spent online is time spent away from volunteering and making the country better.

Gallaga welcomes readers to post their comments online, and promises to "print out the responses and mail them back to her." Want to mount a counterargument?

More on Enkin, the Android killer app

AndroidGuys blogged yesterday about Enkin, an Android application that overlays data on Google Maps and Street View. Today, Wikinomics has a demo. They explain it pretty well:

Using the camera and screen, with labels injected, the Android powered mobile device becomes something of a magical lense [sic] that can be used to provide us with digital information about the world, overlayed on the world itself, as intermediated by the device. So far the Enkin guys have set this up to work with locations that have been tagged in their map view, but imagine the possibilities if it could integrate with all of the Geodata that’s tagged in Google Earth. You could also integrate this with social mobility services, and set your name to public, then strangers on the street could take a look at you through their phone and see your name floating above your head like in a videogame. Businesses could also geotag deals that they are running, and you’d set your Enkin-enabled device in “deal hunter live mode” where you’d see overlays on businesses including distance and deal. The list goes on and the possibilities are great.

No kidding, the possibilities are great. Enkin has the promise of fundamentally changing location-based services. The "magic lens" metaphor is a good one, since theoretically you could select one or more frames to overlay on the world. For instance,

• if you're visiting a city as a tourist, you might select a frame that has pretagged tourist attractions
• if you're there strictly for a conference, you might instead select (or create) a custom frame with only the conference buildings
• if you're more interested in a historical tour, you could load that frame
• if you're working on infrastructure, you could see metadata on streets and bridges, or normally invisible features such as underground cables. Imagine being able to tap into a database of traffic accidents to instantly spot dangerous intersections, or being able to detect cables so that you don't snap them with your backhoe when starting a construction project.

But forget these sideshows, because the real killer app will be when you cross Enkin with a location-based social networking system like, well, Google's Jaiku.

• if you're at a conference, and you want to see where your acquaintances are, you can scan the building and look for concentrations of friends
• if you're coworking, you can find out which coffee shop has your collaborators
• if you're on campus trying to find a colleague's office, you can look through your "magic lens"

Jaiku is currently being migrated to Google App Engine and should relaunch soon. Coincidentally, the first Android phone will probably be presold from T-Mobile in September and delivered in mid-October. I expect the Jaiku relaunch will include the ability to pull data from your Android phone's GPS chip.

Mozilla Ubiquity

Although it's only at release 0.1, Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity promises to be a game-changer, and ensures that Firefox will continue to be my desktop browser for some time. One part Yubnub, one part Quicksilver, Ubiquity allows you to hit a key combination to bring up a command window where you can type abbreviated commands and get instant feedback. Some examples:

• map university of texas at austin (Brings up a Google map)
• youtube cookie monster (Displays video stills search-as-you-type, defaults to Youtube search results)
• g spinuzzi (Brings up Google search results for Spinuzzi)
• word-count (Counts number of words in your selection in the main Firefox window, or counts words that you type after the command on the command line)

The command list is fairly long, but it's also extensible, like Yubnub.

Use dollar coins

The US Mint is piloting a program in Austin to promote using the $1 coin. Great, I like dollar coins. But maybe they should start a campaign to get rid of pennies too?

Mobile phones monitor elections

Smart Mobs points to a CNN report that African observers are using mobile phones to monitor elections at the district level.

Some Android speculation: What if the killer app already exists?

AndroidGuys has some sharp speculation about how Google could leverage its considerable resources and exclusivity to help its mobile platform leapfrog Apple. Yes, it involves StreetView and more, and it threatens to obliterate the standalone GPS industry.

Jaiku upgrades?

Jaiku appears to be upgrading to Google App Engine, doubtless in preparation for the upcoming rollout. They have about seven weeks to be up and rolling by the time the first Android phone gets to consumers.

Good idea, poor execution

Obama's idea to text supporters his VP pick was a good idea, but in execution, it got scooped by the MSM.

Breathless Android coverage; phone is simply a feature

Rumors are "confirmed" that the HTC Dream, running Google's Android OS, will be sold by T-Mobile starting on my birthday (Oct 13). That's some clever niche marketing, T-Mobile. Anyway, here's what really struck me about this post: the feature list. Check out the order.

What does my 200 bucks get me?
- Touch Screen
- Full Qwerty keyboard
- 3G/ WiFi
- Full HTML internet capabilities
- Easy access to all Google applications (Gmail, Gtalk, search)
- Maps
- Street view
- You Tube
- Phone
- IM/Text
- Email
- Camera 3.0mp
- Video (playback only, no recording)
- Music player & 1GB memory card pre-loaded
- Applications, all available in Google marketplace (icon on the homescreen)

Yes, the function phone is stuck somewhere in the middle of the list. Just another feature, not nearly as important or exciting as the others. And yes, that does indicate where mobile devices are heading.

The nexus-state

David Ronfeldt and Danielle Varda write in the summer 2008 issue of RAND Review that they expect a new sort of state to emerge:

From this, we predict the emergence of the “nexus-state” — something quite different from the traditional nation-state or recent notions of an approaching market-state or network-state. The nexus-state will integrate multiple modes of governance. It will be stronger than the nation-state but also more embedded and circumscribed. It will revolve around a new kind of administration in which officials remain concerned about what is happening in their offices but become increasingly oriented by the new sensory and sectoral networks into which they are plugged.

This notion fascinates me. It's different from the network state discussed by Castells. To me, in fact, it sounds familiar:

Government and business will benefit from [pervasive information and surveillance] technology, for good and ill. Less noticed, but we think equally likely and significant, is that these tools will help spur the rise of a new social sector — distinct from the established public and private sectors — by providing networked nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations with tools not only for checking on the behavior of governments and corporations, but also for collaborating with them. We can already find evidence of these transformations in health care, integrated social services, and environmental and consumer protection.

Sure, but we are also seeing this work happening to some extent with Google, which has become very active in public policy, energy, and telecommunications. Google is a corporation, of course, but it is also functioning to some extent as an NGO and is subsidizing nonprofit projects such as Android with its earnings from its core business (and yes, those nonprofit projects are strategically key to its core business).

Check out this short and interesting article, and the rest of the issue while you're at it.

Coworking and business

NotAnMBA has a roundup of businesses and business models built around coworking.

Reading :: Discourse, Technology and Change

Discourse, Technology and Change
By Brenton Faber

I've been meaning to read this book ever since it came out, but UT's library doesn't have it. So I finally bit the bullet and ordered it via interlibrary loan. I'm glad I did. Brent is a great guy and a sharp researcher, and in this book he brings rhetorical and discourse analysis together with Latourean and Foucauldian theory to provide a strong account of technological change. The book is really quite well researched, and every chapter provides a model of how to conduct and theorize research (with one exception, about which more in a minute).

The book revolves around a case of technological change, described in Chapter 2: a small college campus, dealing with a faltering IT department, decides to outsource IT. The energetic new (corporate) director of IT recommends a unified email system, so after a search, the university partners with "a multinational computer firm" to implement a new software system pseudonomously called "WorkWare." The system includes web-based email but also a calendar and other components. But the IT director quickly realizes that he has no real leverage as he attempts to get people to migrate to WorkWare. Meanwhile, WorkWare turns out to be a beta product with some bugs that discourage migration.

Brent examines this case in a variety of ways. He examines the different emails sent out by the IT director, "Martin," and Martin's assistants. He interviews Martin after the project ends in disaster. And he looks at other documents to contextualize the case. He does all this by drawing heavily on theories involving technological change, particularly Latour's notion of assemblages and Foucault's archaeology of knowledge.

The discourse analysis in particular is interesting, since Brent ties a close reading of the email -- examining given-new structure, clausal dynamics, sentence-clause ratios -- into a sophisticated rhetorical analysis. In doing so, Brent shows us how the sorts of things discourse analysts do -- what many rhetoricians regard simple word-counting -- can result in deep insights that complement rhetorical analysis.

Those insights lead Brent to an interesting and valuable conclusion about change studies. He argues that "with the postmodern fragmentation of narratives, traditions and foundational beliefs, we do not have a systematic way of examining, critiquing, or resisting non-narrative forms/events of change" (p.154). The loss of narratives, he says, results in the loss of the classical understanding of change (p.158). Indeed, "in technocratic networks, change is not a temporal space or a moment of opportunity within the continuity of narrative and it is not tied to notions of continuity, fortune, or nature. Instead, change has become a technology and a tool, a means for achieving human agency" (p.158). Brent concludes that studies of change must examine how agency is achieved (p.159).

So this book is full of interesting insights in terms of change as well as research methodology. My only problem with it is in Chapter 5, in which Brent attempts to draw a connection between Martin's evangelical beliefs and his attempt to get people to "convert" to the new system. Brent seems to be fascinated by the fact that Martin is a real live evangelical who prays and reads the Left Behind series, and he zeroes in on the term "convert," arguing that Martin subconsciously understands his project in the same terms as Christian evangelism. He substantiates this account by pointing to similarities that Brent perceives between the two domains. However, he does not confirm this connection through triangulation:

• He doesn't perform a member check (floating the interpretation and getting Martin's feedback)
• He doesn't turn up any artifactual evidence (e.g., showing a document trail in which the project and evangelism are explicitly compared)
• He doesn't turn up evidence of this relationship in his interviews with Martin. In fact, Martin gives a crisp and perfectly sensible explanation of why he used "convert" in the emails, and that explanation does not point to evangelism; rather, it seems to be more or less how the IT industry uses the term.

Instead of triangulation, Brent relies entirely on internal consistencies that he perceives between the Christian evangelical literature and Martin's emails, not external confirmation of their tie-in. Brent even argues that Martin may not be aware of such consistencies -- such "references do not need to be intentional or even conscious" (p.121), so perhaps he didn't think it would be worthwhile to perform member checks. But that's not a good move, because without triangulation, it's easy to overdetermine the data. In other words, we are left asking: is the connection between the email project and evangelism in Martin's mind -- or Brent's?

Brent seems to sense that his analysis is vulnerable on this point, and he hedges a bit (p.123), but essentially decides that it's too good a story not to use ("much of Martin's rhetorical project at Northeastern can be better understood when articulated through this evangelical framework," p.124), so he drops the hedge later and simply asserts the connection as fact ("Martin used intertextual references to ideological discourses (evangelical Christianity)," p.125; see also p.126). I don't really understand how Brent moves from his initial hedge to his later certainty; I have a hard time believing that Martin thinks of evangelism every time he buys converted rice, gets his catalytic converter serviced, converts Fahrenheit to Centigrade, buys an AC-to-DC converter, or sees a conversion kit for a Honda, any more than Brent thinks of Foucault whenever his power goes out.

In any case, this is a weak spot in an otherwise strong book. Brent is producing some of the best work to come out of professional communication. If you get a chance, check it out.

Android SDK is out; Android phone gets FCC approval; is all forgiven?

Google has gone through a rough patch with Android. Developers have been angry that the SDK has not been updated in a while. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal and others have speculated that Android phones will not come out in the fourth quarter as promised.

Now we hear two big pieces of news on consecutive days. First, we hear that the FCC has approved HTC's new Android device, code named "Dream." Then Google announces the latest SDK is available to all.

Will developers, who were excited about the platform but discouraged by the SDK delays and the threat of late hardware, forgive everything? And is the Dream still going to be launched on my birthday?

Qualitative data analysis on the cheap

SAGE Publications is advertising a new book called Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer: A Practical Guide by Chris Hahn. The idea behind it is that you can do qualitative data analysis on the cheap, using familiar tools such as Microsoft Office:

Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer is a practical, hands-on guide to using commonly available everyday technology, including Microsoft software, to manage and streamline research projects.

The author discusses using Word, Excel, Access, and so forth to perform these analyses. This is a great idea. Cheryl Geisler did something similar in Analyzing Streams of Language, although that one was more narrowly focused on text analysis.

Me, I'm currently using HyperResearch, but I managed my data for Network entirely in a MySQL database with an open source front end. Honestly, I'm not sure whether HyperResearch adds significant value for me. I do know that it's entirely possible to conduct solid qualitative data analysis with commonly accessible tools, though. Will have to check this book out soon.

We were cyborgs before we were human

That's the implication of this article, which claims that the invention of cooking stimulated a big leap in human cognition. From the original article:

For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.

The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.

The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.

The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

To put it another way, our ancestors found a way to pre-digest food outside the body. Biologically, we only have one stomach; prosthetically, we have two. And the authors tentatively suggest that this shift is what allowed us to develop more complex cognition:

Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal's caloric intake.

Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, "with very severe health problems."

The raw food movement and other health food movements tend to focus on "natural" foods and diets. But if we were cyborgs before we were human, does the idea of a "natural" diet even make sense? Second question: is there anything more natural to human beings than a good cookbook?

Riding the Torch

"Riding the Torch" is a novella by Norman Spinrad. The premise is that humanity has destroyed the Earth via nuclear war, and centuries later, humanity's remnants are still traveling in a convoy in search of another world to inhabit. Eventually, the realization sinks in that Earth was unique; there are no other worlds that can reasonably support life, there is no other life in the universe except humanity.

I think of that novella from time to time, particularly today, when I read that according to computer models, solar systems like ours are rare:

The researchers ran more than a hundred simulations, and the results show that the average planetary system's origin was full of violence and drama but that the formation of something like our solar system required conditions to be "just right."
...

The simulations suggest that an average planetary system's origin is extremely dramatic. The gas disk that gives birth to the planets also pushes them mercilessly toward the central star, where they crowd together or are engulfed. Among the growing planets, there is cut-throat competition for gas, a chaotic process that produces a rich variety of planet masses.

Also, as the planets approach each other, they frequently lock into dynamical resonances that drive the orbits of all participants to be increasingly elongated. Such a gravitational embrace often results in a slingshot encounter that flings the planets elsewhere in the system; occasionally, one is ejected into deep space. Despite its best efforts to kill its offspring, the gas disk eventually is consumed and dissipates, and a young planetary system emerges.

Now don't you feel special?

Reading :: Mobile Communication and Society

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective
By Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Araba Sey

Mobile communication -- specifically mobile phones and pagers -- is impacting work, leisure, and public participation globally. But the implementations are so different in different countries -- due to differences in culture, society, regulatory and legal environments, economic conditions, technologies, infrastructures, and other factors -- that it's hard to summarize the impact of mobile communication or make predictions about new arguments. To better get their arms around these changes, the authors survey mobile communications globally. This book is framed as a strictly analytical account of the current state of mobile communication across the globe: "What we intend to do in this book is to construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts -- an argument whose analytical value should stand by itself" (p.4, italics in original).

It's a huge project, but a timely one. As the authors note, "Wireless communication networks are diffusing around the world faster than any other communication technology to date" (p.1). And as they diffuse, they change possibilities across multiple activities. How can these be generalized? The authors approach the task systematically, by analyzing extant empirical studies, but with the caveat that this sector is changing so rapidly that any conclusions are transitional.

First, the authors study the diffusion of wireless communication, looking at factors such as subscriber growth and penetration rate. They note, as others have, than in many ways we in the US are a mobile communications backwater: The US has encountered relatively slow mobile growth, partially because universal service obligations slowed AT&T's efforts in mobile (p.14). In contrast, the Philippines have very high penetration rates, partially because of low prepaid mobile prices (70-90% of phones are prepaid). "The Philippines is reportedly the world's highest texting nation, with the average user sending over 2,000 messages a year" (p.25), while "Japan, on its own, has consistently had wireless-phone Internet access levels exceeding those of North America and all of Europe" (p.25). The US, on the other hand, leads in wifi deployment (p.27) and has the highest penetration of laptop computers (p.28), suggesting that wifi deployment and laptop adoption have retarded adoption of the wireless web here. Surprisingly, two-way pagers were also going strong in the US as late as 2002 (p.60). Elsewhere, such as East Africa, prepaid mobile cards have begun to be used as currency (p.62) -- the gold standard has been replaced by the minute standard.

Interestingly, mobile technologies have increased quotidian, mutual surveillance. One example is caller ID, which was once a security feature but is now used to identify undesirable calls (p.120). Other examples include parents' surveillance of their children by calling them and demanding their whereabouts or by tracking them with GPS (p.120). In Hong Kong, caller ID helps sex workers to separate business and personal lives (p.122), while in South China mobile phones help sex workers to evade police and maintain customers (p.122).

In terms of family, the authors assert that

communication technologies materially allow the post-patriarchal family to survive as a network of bonded individuals, in need of both autonomy and support at the same time. As people rebuild and extend their lives along their networks, they bring with them into these networks, and into their networking devices, their values, perceptions, and fears. (p.126)

The authors are specifically interested in youth culture: their hypothesis is that

there is a youth culture that finds in mobile communication an adequate form of expression and reinforcement. Technologies, all technologies, diffuse only to the extent that they resonate with pre-existing social structures and cultural values. However, once a powerful technology is adopted by a given culture because it fits into its pattern, the technology grows and embraces an ever-greater proportion of its group of reference, in this case young people. (p.127)

Tentatively, the authors assert that a mobile youth culture is emerging with the following characteristics:

• The management of autonomy vis a vis security. The older population needs the emotional support of the young, while keeping them economically dependent. Youth feel autonomous early (partially because of mobile technologies), but need economic security until relatively late in their development (the parents pay for those mobile technologies). (p.143)
• The construction of a peer group through networked sociability. These break "the organizational and spatial boundaries of relationships" and are instead "based on choice and affinity" (p.144)
• The emergence of collective identity. Youth cultures develop codes of social recognition. (p.144)
  
• The strengthening of individual identity. Youth culture prizes personalization. (p.144)
  
• Consumerism is an important dimension of the culture. Consumption is one avenue of personalization, but patterns of consumption and valuation are "modeled in patterns of signs that constitute a fashion" (p.145)

The authors also note that, as with computer technologies, we are in a transitional phase in which the youth teach their elders about these technologies, something that erodes the patriarchal model and impacts education (p.151).

Moving along, the authors argue that in mobile communication, "the space of the interaction is defined entirely within the flows of communication" (p.172); thus "places are individualized and networked along the specific networks of individual practices" (p.174). One characteristic of the networked society, "timeless time," is enhanced by mobile technologies: "The availability of wireless communication makes it possible to saturate time with social practice by inserting communication into all the moments when other practices cannot be conducted, such as the 'in-between' time during transportation, in a waiting line ... or simply during free time" (p.174). (Timeless time -- though not under that name -- should be familiar to anyone who has read David Allen's Getting Things Done.)

The authors go on to examine several incidents in which mobile technologies enable loose, lightly coordinated political action. (No wonder the Russians, when invading Georgia, bombed cell phone towers.)

Finally, the authors conclude by discussing some of the characteristics of the mobile network society. Just a few of their points are:

• Relentless connectivity. Connectivity, not mobile communications per se, is "the key feature in the practice of mobile connectivity" (p.248).
  
• Instant communities of practice. The authors note "the emergence of unplanned, largely spontaneous communities of practice in instant time, by transforming an initiative to do something together into a message that is responded to from multiple sources by convergent wills in order to share the practice" (p.249). This description reminds me of Engestrom's recent discussions of knotworking and mycorrhizae.
• Users are the producers of content and services. If you've read Clay Shirky or others in this vein, you have an idea of what the authors mean.

Overall, a terrific book for anyone who is struggling to understand mobile technologies and their impact on work, leisure, and education. I've only scratched the surface in this review. What impresses me is that the authors deliver on what they promised: They stick to a principled, relatively rigorous analysis based on empirical research. I'm going to return to this book often, I think, as I work through the issues of mobile communications.

Twellow

Twellow is a mashup that makes Twitter more like LinkedIn.

Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.

Obama will announce VP via text message. Smart idea?

Yes, but that's because of the implementation, not just the technology.

Last night, in a cell phone text message that was quickly followed by an e-mail linking back to a new page on his Web site -- my.barackobama.com/vp -- aides to Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) campaign wrote: "Barack will announce his VP candidate choice through txt message between now & the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP to 62262 to be the first to know! Please forward."

As Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, and Sey note in Mobile Communication and Society, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi send 13 million "personal" text messages to cell phones on the eve of regional elections on June 12-13, 2004. In other words, he spammed people's cell phones. The text messages backfired, annoying many people, and "Berlusconi lost the regional elections by a larger margin than anticipated." The authors hasten to add that "although it cannot be proved that the cell-phone incident aggravated the defeat, as many observers claim, we can say at the very least that in this case wireless communication did not help the successful reception of the message sent" (p.211).

Why not? "Berlusconi did not understand that the key to the success of the Spanish messages [grassroots messages sent about the Spanish election a few weeks before] in prompting mobilization was that people received them from someone they knew, from the address book of someone who had their name, not from a central register obtained from some company" (p.211).

Notice the last part of the Obama text message quoted above: "Please forward." The strategy is to send the text message to those who have opted in, and have them send messages to others who they know.

Of course, the moment the text messages are sent to those who have opted in, they will be forwarded to Twitter. That's part of the plan, since those who use Twitter are following friends and acquaintances. Whether you find out by text, Twitter, Facebook status message, FriendFeed, etc., it'll be from someone you know and someone who has established a relationship and social capital with you. Smart.

TOC comes to Google Docs

Lifehacker has the appropriate Javascript.

Reading :: Designing for the Social Web

Designing for the Social Web
By Joshua Porter

Bill Hart-Davidson recommended this book to me a while back. (Porter is his former student.) It's a good, solid, readable overview of the challenges and issues involved in designing web-based social software -- which makes it an extremely timely and useful book. I'm thinking about using it in one of my upcoming classes, in fact, since it does a great job of laying out and simplifying the issues of social software without oversimplifying or overspecifying.

Designing for the Social Web is not a detailed design methodology like, say, Beyer and Holtzblatt's Contextual Design. (The research methods section is one page long, for instance.) But it would work well as a companion piece for such a book, one that reframes a methods book in terms of the particular challenges of social software. I'm particularly encouraged that Porter really examines and dissects the role of online community managers -- a crucial role that has become very important to technical communicators but received relatively little examination -- as well as acknowledging the competing interests that must be served in design. Although Porter gives specific examples of these, he doesn't overspecify, and I think that the book will age gracefully because of it.

All in all, I suggest picking this book up. It's a fast and entertaining read, and does a nice job of translating the proclamations of books such as Shirky's Here Comes Everybody into guidelines that technical communicators and others can use.

Reading :: The Blind Side

The Blind Side
By Michael Lewis

The Blind Side has been selected as this year's First Year Forum book at the University of Texas at Austin: the book that all students enrolled in first year rhetoric and writing classes (RHE 306) will read. Like most FYF books, this is a popular title that (loosely) engages a bundle of controversies: in this case, issues of race, academics, and sports.

In a nutshell, the book has two alternating parts.

One part examines a strategic change in football: the introduction of the quarterback sack -- a defensive move that can only be pulled off by a very swift, strong player who can surprise the quarterback on his "blind side" -- required a strategic, systematic response. The NFL's strategic response was to elevate the position of left tackle as a counterbalance, and to find incredibly rare offensive players who are fast, strong, and massive enough to block a QB sack. This position is now the second most highly paid position on the field.

The other part examines the discovery and grooming of a left tackle: a homeless African-American boy from Memphis who ends up at a Christian private school in the Memphis suburbs, is taken in and adopted by a wealthy Anglo-American family, and helped to reach his potential in academics and athletics. At the end of the book, he is pulling a 3.75 average at the University of Mississippi, the alma mater of his adoptive parents -- and playing left tackle.

It's a well written and interesting story. Although sympathetic to the adoptive parents -- in the Afterword, Lewis mentions that he knew the adoptive father since kindergarten and he stumbled onto the story when visiting the family on a social call -- the book attempts to look at all angles of the story, including one accusation that the NCAA investigated: whether a wealthy white family adopted a black son in order to guide him to their alma mater's football program. Lewis concludes that this was not the case, but allows us to make up our own minds.

The future face of the Web

According to this Adaptive Path video, it will be cluttered and widgety. I like Adaptive Path a lot, but I was hoping the future web would look more like Quicksilver.

Editors' reviews of Network are up...

... and they are awfully kind. Amazon is accepting pre-orders with a 20% discount. Check it out.

I want to believe, but the Mars Phoenix won't let me

Yesterday, Slashdot ran a story claiming that the President had been briefed by NASA scientists about something, and speculated that it had something to do with the Phoenix lander finding organic materials in the Mars soil. This morning, the Mars Phoenix team announced on Twitter that these reports are "untrue and incorrect."

On the shores of Ontario Lacus

According to the Cassini spacecraft, Saturn's moon Titan has a complete hydrological cycle based on ethane rather than water (which cannot exist as a liquid at the moon's average temperature of -300 F). From the story:

The visual and mapping instrument observed a lake, Ontario Lacus, in Titan's south polar region during a close Cassini flyby in December 2007. The lake is roughly 20,000 square kilometers (7,800 square miles) in area, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.

...

The ethane is in a liquid solution with methane, other hydrocarbons and nitrogen. At Titan's surface temperatures, approximately 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, these substances can exist as both liquid and gas. Titan shows overwhelming evidence of evaporation, rain, and fluid-carved channels draining into what, in this case, is a liquid hydrocarbon lake.

Earth has a hydrological cycle based on water and Titan has a cycle based on methane. Scientists ruled out the presence of water ice, ammonia, ammonia hydrate and carbon dioxide in Ontario Lacus. The observations also suggest the lake is evaporating. It is ringed by a dark beach, where the black lake merges with the bright shoreline. Cassini also observed a shelf and beach being exposed as the lake evaporates.

Sounds chilly, but beautiful.

Netroots crafting Democratic party platform with collaborative software

We've been hearing about the use of collaborative software for crafting platforms. The Republican Party unveiled a crowdsourcing tool for their platform recently (although it has been overwhelmed by Ron Paul followers agitating for a return to the gold standard). Now the Netroots are using a tool that sounds more finely crafted for this sort of work:

Stern, a former economic development consultant with a masters degree from the London School of Economics, described the project as "very much a synthesis between a wiki and Digg, or between a wiki and Soapblox," the popular community-building software platform. "It's exactly in the middle. It does things that neither allow on their own." Stern is based in Washington DC, and and works with New York City-based partners Vanessa Scanfeld and Dan Scanfeld.

In one of the platform's more intriguing features, when contributors start to edit a plank the software suggests similar prior contributions and suggests that you "Borrow This Sentence." That language is pulled and added to the new version, but the original author's name stays attached to that bit of contributed text, throughout the plank's remixes and permutations. The idea, says Stern, is to "give people credit for their words and ideas." The advantage over a wiki is that no one author's version is dominant -- at least until the project is closed, and only then by community agreement, not by virtue of who edited it last.

The goal? Consensus. And efficient consensus at that. Stern: "Our assumption is that no one person is going to have all the best words and ideas. The idea is to fuse them together, synthesizing ideas into a single, concise text." Each proposed plank is rated from one stars to ten, and the highest rated plank gets to the top. The site now has ten planks categories, from health care to media and communications to electoral reform, and about 75 contributed plank versions.

This sounds like a really interesting tool. I worry, however, that the sort of polarization we tend to see on existing left and right discussion sites will make its way into the platform with this sort of tool. My colleague Trish Roberts-Miller might call this "agonistic expressive discourse," the kind that normally marks a homogeneous enclave. The question, I think, is how well the tool would scale up to include minority-perspective input.

"Learning is not to be found on a printout."

Others have already piled onto the Sunday NYT article about the so-called literacy debate: whether reading online counts as reading. The vignette that starts this debate involves a high school student who spends six hours a day reading online. But does it count?

Peter Merholz sharply eviscerates this quote:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Merholz points out that

Learning is “acquired” (if that’s even the right word… it makes it sound like something you can get at the store) through doing. Through processing. Through acting.

True enough, I think. But I should also point out that McCullough is not spontaneously generating an argument against online reading. This is the same argument that has been leveled against all of the "low genres," i.e., all genres that are not great literature. We in rhet-comp are fairly familiar with this unsupportable argument, which is sometimes trotted out to oppose composition and professional writing programs. It doesn't get much play across campus, though: imagine how this great books argument would be received by engineering, physics, microbiology, or business administration -- let alone the College of Education, where actual empirical research suggests a viewpoint closer to Merholz'.

But I digress. I found it interesting that when McCullough tries to translate this argument into an attack on online texts, he mixes up genres with media. So he ends up making a really muddled argument: learning isn't acquired on a printout, but in the pages of a book. These days, of course, books are essentially printouts. And printed-out websites are themselves frozen, rendered inactive and inert -- booklike.

As people like McCullough try to command the waves, others are interested in how new media and new genres translate into new competencies. One study involved examining how high school students' online reading affected their grades.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”

Jackson doesn't say whether she thinks that students would be better served by reading Jane Eyre in their spare time, but the question seems moot: she indicates that they will read online, and they won't read books. Furthermore, the sort of reading they do online -- active reading, engaged with those low nonliterary genres, those interactive texts, those snippets of information that must be assembled into new arguments -- looks a lot more like the sort of reading and writing they will continue to do in their academic life, their postacademic careers, their leisure time as adults, and arguably their civic engagement.

Android to become a cyborg?

The latest rumor is that Android and Symbian will be combining, and that's why Google has been secretive and slow to release a new SDK. Hmm.

It's a coincidence

I've been thinking a lot about Mars lately, specifically steps to colonize Mars. Just wanted to state for the record that this has nothing to do with the fact that Google wants to make a Mars colony its next major project. Had no idea.

Anyway, I hope they don't approach a Mars colony the way they do their other projects, keeping it in beta indefintely. Probably would be hard to find early adopters that way.

Update: Link went bad, should work now.

Update 2: Did I mention the press release is dated April 1?

Reading :: The Network Society

The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy
Ed. Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso

Policy books are difficult for me to get through since they tend to be narrowly focused and defined and overwhelmingly analytical. Yet this work is necessary and vital work (work that I'm glad interests others). Overall, that's the sort of work that The Network Society does. The collection has a particular focus on Portugal, but discusses trends across the globe as well.

What sorts of trends? That's where Manuel Castells' excellent introduction comes in. As Castells explains it, the organizational form of networks has been with us a long time, but networks have not scaled up beyond a certain size and complexity because they have had difficulty in mastering and coordinating resources. Now, however, "digital networking technologies enable networks to overcome their historical limits. They can, at the same time, be flexible and adaptive thanks to their capacity to decentralize performance along a network of autonomous components, while still being able to coordinate all this decentralized activity on a shared purpose of decision making" (p.4). Castells rejects the litany of underexamined complaints about new technologies, as well as the counterpoint litany of underexamined praises (pp.6-7), to focus on what we actually know about how these technologies are affecting society. He notes an increasing trend toward economic activity performed by networks of networks built around specific business projects (p.9); the erosion of stable and predictable careers (p.9); the ability to work autonomously, also known as self-programmable labor "not necessarily to increase monetary gains but to enjoy greater freedom, flex-time, or more opportunity to create" (p.10); and the hypersociality (not hyposociality) of networked society (p.11).

Castells sees the rise of a new form of state: a network state. Such a state does not replace nation-states, he says, since no one wants a world government, but a global government is a functional need so we are now seeing networks of nation-states (such as the EU) as well as ad hoc groupings of nation-states. "Thus, the actual system of governance in our world is not centered around the nation-state, although nation-states are not disappearing by any means. Governance is operated in a network of political institutions that shares sovereignty in various degrees an[d] reconfigurates itself in a variable geopolitical geometry" (p.15).

Castells' introduction alone is worth the price of admission.

Reading :: Smart Mobs

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
By Howard Rheingold

I've been meaning to read Smart Mobs for a while. The last time I checked it out from the library, I left it at a bus stop. Fortunately, some good samaritan returned it to the library. So now I'm back at it.

Smart Mobs is a well known, widely cited book, and for good reason. Published in 2002, its predictions are generally dead on, making it surprisingly relevant even five years later (an immense time period in terms of mobile technologies).

Rheingold defines smart mobs in this way:

Smart mobs consist of people who act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. (p.xii).

He goes on to describe several possible applications of mobile technologies, applications that have been realized or are being realized at present (xii). But Rheingold is less interested in the specific applications of technologies than he is in how these transform the possibilities of cooperation and communication, in turn spurring shifts in culture, society, and work. For instance, he observed that mobile technologies in Japan were already dictating fashion changes (p.3; as an aside, I predict that a new wave of smartphones and internet devices will prolong the fad of cargo pants) and mobile phones in Norway were allowing users to remain accessible to their peer group while simultaneously participating in other events (p.6). He also observed early trends that predicted the shift of mobile phones away from communication devices and towards a "remote control" for interacting with the world (p.11).

I was a little startled to see that Rheingold interviewed, among others, "Jyri Engestrom, a sociology student in his early twenties" (p.17). Engestrom later worked for Nokia before cofounding Jaiku, a service that flourished briefly before being acquired by Google last year. Engestrom is quoted describing a public space in terms of consumption, production, and exchange, in a phrase that could have been taken from one of his father Yjro's articles (p.17).

In any case, the book is easy to read and surprisingly fresh; I would recommend it over more contemporary work such as Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for people who are interested in the impact of mobile technologies.

The only disappointment I found was that in the last chapter, Rheingold turns to Foucault to discuss the "panoptic" possibilities of mobile technologies. Specifically, he worries that too much information about our mobile dealings will result in self-censorship and other ways of conforming due to pervasive surveillance. True, in some contexts and societies this will be the case. But Smart Mobs is stuffed with counterexamples, and I wanted Rheingold to explore further why these counterexamples occur. One reason, I think, is that mobile technologies (at least as they are currently configured) foster peer-to-peer connections that actually encourage violations of conformance by surfacing counterconformance across the network -- or more accurately, surface different centers and activities, exacerbating the tensions and contradictions across established and nascent activities.

I'm just thinking out loud here, but: In Bentham's panopticon, prisoners (theoretically) conformed because they knew they might be observed by the guards, who had the ability to enforce conformance. The uncertainty of whether they were being watched or not resulted in incorporating state-friendly actions into their every movement. In the police state of the Soviet Union we saw something similar, although citizens also developed "double consciousness" in reaction to the contradiction between pervasive surveillance and private activities (see Wertsch). In 1984, the protagonist similarly finds himself called out by the televised exercise leader for not exercising strenuously enough, an event that nicely illustrates the ambiguity of surveillance that results in the weaving of state intent into citizens' unconscious action.

But we move across different groups with different expectations. You might behave quite differently at your bowling alley, your church, and your home, for instance. When peer-to-peer connections are enabled, you might find yourself interacting in multiple networks simultaneously, and state power (at least in a relatively hands-off state such as the US) contends with power in these other intersecting activities. So countervailing knots form, from hobby groups to cryptography clubs to sex clubs. And the power of social opprobrium is loosened in any given knot, since other knots have different criteria and one can live across these knots. So we're seeing much freer discussions and diverse identifications, as well as fracturing of political organizations (e.g., the Reagan coalition is fracturing into libertarian-leaning conservatives, South Park conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, small-government conservatives, and other groups that are beginning to form knots where they can more freely articulate viewpoints diverging from the Republican platform). Like the car, which encouraged the dissolution of stable communities and loosened stakes in neighborhoods, mobile technology is accellerating the shift toward such knots of interrelated activities with different expectations. Rheingold actually gives some examples of these, and I'd be interested in seeing a more fully theorized exploration of them.

Teaching controversies: Using Opposing Views as a simple support site

TechCrunch announces Opposing Views, a site on which certified experts debate established controversies such as peak oil and the supposed connection between thimerosal and autism. It aims to be a go-to site for getting up to speed quickly on a controversy, with links to further resources.

There are problems with the (lower case) opposing-views model, since it tends to bifurcate more complex discussions. But the site might be really useful in particular for rhetoric teachers using the so-called controversy model, as we do in our introductory rhetoric and writing courses at UT. I like that, compared to other sources such as Wikipedia, Opposing Views puts the controversy front and center. On the other hand, setting up two opposing sides tends to lend equal credence to both. OV doesn't debate whether the world is flat, but you can imagine how a "balanced" debate would give credence to the flat-earthers.

The McCain-doesn't-use-the-internet meme

I've seen this meme half a dozen places: John McCain doesn't use the Internet or computers, therefore he's unqualified to be President.

Well, I'm intensely interested in understanding digital technologies and how they are causing enormous shifts in work, education, and leisure -- but I think this argument is pretty thin. It's essentially the flip side of the "experience" argument that we hear trotted out in various ways, often from the McCain camp itself. Candidate X has never served in the military, so how can he be commander-in-chief? Candidate Y has no executive experience, so how can she function as chief executive? Candidate Z has little economic experience, so how can he run the largest economy in the world?

Yet we generally don't narrow the pool of candidates to governors with economics degrees and military backgrounds. Competent leaders hire teams to take care of the issues in which they are not expert. Or to put it another way: the pool of true polymaths who are also outstanding leaders is pretty small. And that's okay.

But perhaps computer use seems more like a basic life skill. Like pumping gas or buying groceries -- two activities that we don't honestly expect our President to do either. I'm much more interested in what the candidate thinks about technology and education, technology and public policy, technology and the economy, than whether s/he can blog. I am not convinced that the experience of using a consumer electronic device will impart significant experiential knowledge that can't be substituted by a good board of advisors. Obama has a 300-person foreign policy advisory board to shore up his perceived weakness, and that seems perfectly reasonable as long as he can coordinate them; surely McCain can similarly draw on an advisory board to shore up his lack of experience in Googling.

(I should make clear here that I'm not in the tank for either McCain or Obama. I just want people to base their decisions on arguments that are reasonable and significant.)

iPhone total cost of ownership

One source ran the numbers, which are pretty remarkable.

Telegraph Media Group moves from MS Office to Google Apps

Jeff Jarvis excerpts the story of how the publisher of the Daily Telegraph migrated to Google Apps. Which is impressive. It also makes a weird sort of sense that the dying newspaper industry is turning to Google to optimize itself.

"If enough people asking the same question creates a viable market place, then we've reached the end-game of a knowledge society."

Jan Chipchase looks at the practice of renting rooms in China during the Olympics.

Google Docs now has templates

They're not fantastic, but they're decent. See what you think.

Sabotage

Confused of Calcutta unearths an OSS field manual on sabotage and discovers some familiar-sounding practices.

Project Lore - Better than This Old House

I could see myself spending a lot of time watching this show about how to level up in World of Warcraft. Maybe I'll fire up the Wii and watch it on the TV through the browser. I mean, I don't play WOW, but I don't design clothes either and I still catch Project Runway sometimes.

The street finds its own uses for things, even Windows Server 2008

Slashdot has an article about converting Windows Server 2008 into "the lean, efficient, reliable 'power user' OS that Windows should be," rather than trying to run Vista.

Community managers for startups

ReadWriteWeb asks: Do startup companies need community managers? Short answer: Yes.

Facilitating and managing communities has already become an important job and I believe it will increase in importance. As far as I know, no field or discipline has specifically targeted this sort of job. Technical communication and rhetoric are well suited to do so, but we'll need to get out of the starting gate quickly.

The free software, anti-DRM case against the iPhone

Gina Trapani, who has an iPhone, argues that you shouldn't get one.

Soon GMail and GCal will have offline access

Google Gears is coming to both.

A few thoughts on Google's strategy

As most frequent readers of this blog know, I'm very interested in what Google is doing. That's partially because Google has a big influence on other players in the sector, partly because I use their products extensively, but mostly because while other players have focused on enterprise or consumer sectors, Google has been exploring ways to tap latent markets of small businesses and federations.

One example is Google Docs. As I've argued elsewhere, comparing GDocs with MS Office misses the point: Although MS Office is usable by broad swathes of the public, it is crafted with large companies and enterprises in mind, and that has influenced its features and positioning. Microsoft knows that enterprises have a lot of value locked inside them, like oil fields, and so Microsoft goes to the most promising oil fields to drill. Microsoft doesn't drill eveywhere; that would not be cost effective. In fact, small businesses, sole proprietorships, and casual groups are a bit of a drag on Microsoft: They tend to pirate software like Office, or skirt agreements in other ways (ex: students graduate but still use their student version of Office).

On the other hand, Google has crafted GDocs in a way that does not necessarily work that well in enterprise settings, but that works wonderfully for small businesses, sole proprietorships, and casual groups. And especially in emergent federations of contractors and subcontractors, in coworking, and in similarly dispersed, loose affiliations of workers. That's a latent market, one that Microsoft can't tap and hasn't been eager to recognize up to this point. Metaphorically speaking, whereas Microsoft is looking for oil fields, Google is deploying solar panels to recover low amounts of energy everywhere. And this works mainly because Google has the infrastructure to do that deploying.

All right. Keep that in mind as we turn to Android, the Google-initiated and backed OS for mobile devices. I know I've been talking about Android a lot, and partially that's because since it hasn't been released yet, I'm free to project my hopes and wishes onto it. But there's enough information that we can also do some speculating about strategy.

Analysts have been speculating lately about what market Android is trying to crack. Is it going after the corporate market, competing with RIM and MS Windows Mobile? Or is it going after the consumer market, including Apple's iPhone?

I suggest that, just as with Google Docs, the niche is neither. Google is going to use Android to facilitate latent connections among emergent organizations and organizational forms, such as federations and coworking. It's not focusing on a tightly controlled consumer experience, like the iPhone, or a tightly controlled corporate infrastructure, like the Blackberry or WinMobile devices. It's going to focus on the many small businesses that have to do B2B collaboration, the professionals who have to be increasingly mobile while facilitating face-to-face meetings, the loose collaboration that is increasingly characterizing knowledge work.

A linchpin in this strategy, I think, is going to be Jaiku. For those of you who may not remember, Jaiku is a Finnish startup that emerged as a Twitter competitor before Google bought in fall 2007. Since then it's been closed to new registrations as Google works to scale it. Jaiku is mobile phone centric and includes short messages (like Twitter), feed aggregation (like FriendFeed), and location awareness (like BrightKite). It's being moved onto Google Apps Engine. And we keep hearing about how that move will "soon" be complete. I strongly suspect that the move includes integrating Jaiku and GMail's address list (continuing Google's de facto social network of contacts), Jaiku and OpenSocial, Jaiku and SocialStream, Jaiku and Google Maps.

Like Twitter, FriendFeed, and BrightKite, Jaiku would be good at serving the latent market for loose recombinant organizations, but it will do this in a much more coherent and focused way. And it might or might not launch in October, but it almost certainly will be hyped to coincide with the first release of Android phones from T-Mobile in October. Look for a Jaiku icon on every Android desktop out of the box.

Reading :: Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
By Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody has been discussed widely on tech-oriented sites such as BoingBoing, and for good reason. To be honest, if you read BoingBoing, BuzzMachine, and similar sites, you won't find much new here. But Shirky manages to clearly and elegantly summarize the sorts of shifts that are currently occurring in mass organization and organization as social software and hardware bring down the transaction costs of communication.

The book makes a good summary for those who have already been reading these issues; a good reference for those who want to illustrate it; a manifesto of sorts for those who are thinking through these changes; and a tract for those who want to communicate these changes in organization to others. Shirky discusses networked organizational structures, power law, the fail-faster approach, and similar concepts clearly and simply; he reviews tools and projects such as Twitter, Dodgeball, MeetUp, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia as illustrations of his points, not just as neat services; and he levels precise, common-sense criticisms towards successful-on-paper, failures-in-reality efforts such as MoveOn campaigns to email Congresspeople. I'd recommend this book if you're trying to understand social media yourself or if you want to explain it to someone else.

"People [are] starting to put the dreaded @ signs from Twitter in emails!"

That's a reader's report to Gawker:

Has anyone else noticed this trend (or is it a one-person trend piece?) From a reader: "People [are] starting to put the dreaded @ signs from Twitter in emails! Such as @Tricia, how did making that Excel spreadsheet go? and other horrible things of that nature." Has this infected your office as well?

It hasn't yet, but I think it's a brilliant convention to export for the same reason that it makes sense on Twitter: it allows you to set up automated scripts to identify direct addressees within the body of text. It also makes it easier for humans to scan text for direct address.

iPhone is the new PC

ReadWriteWeb discovers that a sufficiently powerful and app-friendly phone has potential to be a true personal computer. Yes, that is why Microsoft, Google, and Apple are flooding the space. Expect iPhone 3.0 to link up to Apple's Bluetooth keyboards and perhaps displays.

Discouraging signs for Brightkite

Brightkite is a relatively new service, still in private beta, that combines Twitter-like microblogging with location-awareness. Up to this point, it's taken that location via user input: you type your address into Brightkite or alternately have it search for the location based on a business name. This is a clunky way to indicate location, which is why I rarely use it. Obviously, getting coordinates directly from a GPS-enabled phone would make the service much more useful.

Unfortunately, Brightkite's iPhone 3G app does not take GPS input. This is a big issue, and I am not sure how Brightkite will recover unless it can pair a GPS-enabled client with another major launch such as the upcoming Android or RIM touchscreen launches.

Reading :: Groundswell

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Just a short review tonight. Groundswell is another social media book focused on how corporations, particularly marketers, can stop worrying and love social media. It's not a bad book, and I particularly liked the fact that much of it was based on research performed by the authors and their employer, Forrester, Inc. I also appreciated that the book tried to make sense of social media by deducing and presenting a strategic approach to using it within one's own business.

On the other hand, the book does not have a lot of new insights to offer. If you've read The Cluetrain Manifesto or Wikinomics, or for that matter Scoble's or Jarvis' blogs, there's not a lot of news here beyond some finer-grained work on strategy. And that grain is not that much finer: the book still speaks in very general terms. The book also relies heavily on stories and anecdotes, many of which have the shelf life of lettuce.

If you're interested in what this whole social technologies thing is about, Groundswell is not a bad place to start. But you may get more from reading a broad cross-section of tech blogs.

Are the British really worried about Google Street View?

It's condemned as a "gross invasion of privacy." This is from the country with more surveillance cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Strategy in the Obama Campaign

Although the end of this analysis piece is negative (it's written by Karl Rove, after all), most of it is highly interesting. A master political strategist looks at the Obama campaign's ground game and sees several parallels to the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

Avatars teleport from SecondLife to OpenSim

IBM and Linden Labs have for the first time managed to teleport SL avatars to another virtual world, OpenSim. The thing that interested me was that both worlds appear identical -- they both look like Santa Barbara, CA. Why not make OpenSim look like someplace more interesting, like Mars or Austin?

Want to reproduce Twitter? Here's a crazy idea.

Just blue-skying here. Here's a crazy idea for replacing Twitter:

Use Google Calendar. Make your calendar public. "Tweet" by adding an event; if you simply text it to GCal, it's put in the calendar at the point you sent it in.

Have your friends do the same thing and share their GCals with you. Show all their calendars in your default view. You'll see your "tweets" and theirs in an ordered time stream. They'll also be auto color-coded, although you'll soon run out of colors.

Advantages:

• Massive, distributed infrastructure.
• SMS integration (upstream).
• Many clients exist for desktop and mobile.
• Can export to other services and perhaps import from other services.

Disadvantages:

• Calendars (streams) will not be easy to scale.
• No practical SMS integration downstream at present.
• This is really, really not what GCal is designed to be used for.
  

Information overload!!!

There's yet another article on information overload, this time in the WSJ online. This one starts out with this sober warning:

Warning: On average, knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they're distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost. So if you're trying to read this column at the office or within range of your mobile device, what should be a few minutes can take much longer. Consider the rest of this article an 800-word test of your ability to maintain attention.

Okay, I'm having trouble parsing this. The casual reader might think that this means that once you get distracted, it takes 30 minutes to focus again. But if you're changing activities every three minutes, that means that in that 30-minute span you're cycling through ten activities. Right? So what is this business about "the task"? How are tasks defined? Does this string of ten activities represent several steps in a larger activity (like the Communication Event Models that Bill Hart-Davidson creates from studying knowledge workers)? Does it represent touching several different genres in a genre ecology, which collectively coordinate and mediate a larger work activity? Unfortunately we don't get any answers in the loose string of personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this article.

Android comes to Sprint

Sort of -- enthusiasts have gotten it working on the Touch.

Voicemail is dead?

That's what Michael Arrington says. He suggests that if you want to contact him, you should email him instead. Of course, elsewhere he has talked about periodically declaring "email bankruptcy," deleting all unopened emails in his inbox, so maybe that's not a great strategy either. Maybe if you want to contact Arrington you should just visit his house.

For me, voicemail is just fine. No, I will not give you my number.

identi.ca

identi.ca is the latest Twitter-like service. It's open source and uses OpenID. It's also slow right now -- but if you like it, you can download and install the underlying software on your own server. Not sure at this point whether doing that will wall you off from other installs on different servers, but if it does, it seems to be going in the wrong direction. More as it stabilizes.

The iPhone wants me to buy it after all

Corporate iPhones are rumored to be getting a slide-out keyboard. Golf clap for Apple.

Point of No Return

The world (of Warcraft) is flat.

Network book cover is up

A total surprise for me. Cambridge still hasn't updated the book title on the page, but the proper book title is on the cover. I'm just delighted to see it coming out, and incidentally I like that the typeface and bars make it look a little similar to my other book's cover.

Here they are together, my two books, just hanging out.

Microsoft to buy Powerset, or Yahoo Search, or something

People are all excited about the rumor that Microsoft will buy Powerset to beef up MS Live Search. Of course, this succeeds the rumor that MS is back in talks with Yahoo to buy it or its search business. My sense is that the Powerset deal is a possibility, but MS is floating it now to keep Yahoo's stock from rising on speculation.

I remember this pulp cover for 1984

Cory Doctorow just reposted an excited blog post about a pulp fiction-style cover for George Orwell's 1984.(Click through to see the lurid cover.) The blog's author enthuses: "Significant is the artwork and over-the-top copy on the back, which is quite different from almost every other edition of this novel that I've seen."

The funny thing is that this is the version of 1984 we had when I was growing up. I think I read this thing when I was ten, and I remember feeling a little let down that the material was less exciting than the cover.

Big glossy love letter to Android in Wired

Google\'s Open Source Android Phone Will Free the Wireless Web

Reading :: Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management: How to Succeed in the Face of Changing Project Requirements
By Gary Chin

I've reviewed several project management books lately, and so far this is the best-of-breed in terms of defining agile project management, describing its need, and setting out a list of concepts for understanding it. The book isn't a set of heuristics and principles, nor is it a methodology, but it provides a solid basis for those other sorts of books.

Starting in the Preface, Chin argues that highly innovative businesses, especially those that push the limits of current technology, face challenges in discovery and planning that have not been encountered before. Such projects have inherent uncertainty, and face multiple paths, decision points, and iterations. Classic project management, he argues, is simply not set up for that sort of problem (p.vii). He ties this issue to the advent of the knowledge-based economy and acknowledges that although project management could be a key advantage for smaller businesses in this economy, classic PM is not well suited for helping them (p.ix).

It's not that classic PM is broken, he argues in Chapter 1, but it's been overextended. Agile project management is seen not as yet another extension, but a new foundational element (pp.2-3). The focus of agile PM moves from planning to execution -- a necessary move because

Agile PM Environment = [Uncertainty + Unique Expertise] + Speed (p.3)

or, in other words, the agile PM environment involves specialized problem solving that has not been done before, at the edge of experience, with rapid development. It's for startups in particular. Think in terms of software development, but also other lightweight tech-heavy development such as search engine optimization, social networking, and social media marketing. Organizations functioning in this space have "gurus" rather than interchangeable resources, working on problems that change from day to day, opportunistically incorporating new technologies to accommodate a rapidly shifting environment with both internal and external uncertainties. In contrast, classic project management assumes familiar problems, interchangeable expertise, unchanging objectives, and minimized internal and external uncertainty -- all signs of more mature industries such as construction.

I've discussed emergent organizational structures such as networks, federations and coworking on this blog. Chin doesn't quite get there -- he is still envisioning single organizations, multiple organizations, and single companies within multiple organizations (pp.17-20). Yet he edges closer to a federation understanding in Chapter 3, when he argues that in smaller companies, projects are the business (p.22) -- that is, a single project might be the central activity of the startup. In such an environment, classic PM, with its emphasis on project boxes that cut across silos, is not wholly applicable (p.25). Naturally, a project-driven organization is better suited to agile project environments (p.33).

In agile spaces, Chin argues, teams need to be boundary-crossers in order to solve new, multidimensional problems (p.43). Agile decision-making must be decentralized as well, pushed down to the level of the local team when possible (p.46); it is rarely handled through formal authority, most frequently through personal credibility established during the project (p.69). "The agile project operates in an atmosphere of high interactivity, boundary crossing, and multiple simultaneous pathways," he adds (p.79), which is to say (in my terms) that agile PM is a result of splicing dissimilar activities. It's not surprising (to me) that he points to telecommuters as good candidates for agile projects (p.94).

Chin goes on to offer some heuristics and practical approaches to implementing agile PM. But the real value in this book is Chin's sharp eye for the connections between classic and agile PM, grounded in the differences among organizations, industries, uncertainty, speed, and expertise. It's a great book for getting an overview of agile PM rationale.

Reading :: Managing Agile Projects

Managing Agile Projects
By Sanjiv Augustine

In my ongoing quest to read about project management and its permutations, I picked up Augustine's Managing Agile Projects. This book is focused on software development projects, as much of the agile literature is, but provides principles that could be more broadly abstracted. Like other books along these lines, this one takes pains to separate its brand of project management from more traditional, PMBOK-based project management.

The author draws heavily from agile programming and its variants (eXtreme Programming, Scrum, FD). But he also draws from a broad set of other concepts and frameworks, and the result is sometimes a grab bag of theories and concepts: complexity theory, memes (as cultural DNA), game theory, mental models, and communities of practice all make a showing without much to tie them together. But this book really isn't a theory book -- it's more about a set of organizing principles put forth as a compact or a constitution for governing team interactions. Augustine introduces this notion from the beginning with a clarifying "fable" based on an actual shift from traditional to agile project management (Ch.1).

Essentially, agile project management as it is described here consists of the following principles:

• foster alignment and cooperation
• encourage emergence and self-organization
• institute learning and adaptation (p.25).

Complementing these are the following practices:

• organic teams (small, flexible, composed of generalizing specialists)
• guiding vision (keeping the team aligned with the same "mental model" or "commander's intent")
• simple rules (generative process rules that can result in emergent organized behavior)
• open information (vs. information kept in silos)
• light touch (fostering emergent control rather than heavy-handed rules)
• adaptive leadership (continuously monitoring, learning, and adapting) (pp.26-29)

The author lists certain core values for agile project managers:

• trust
• collaboration
• learning
• courage (pp.38-39)

The rest of the book elaborates these principles, practices, and values and supplies heuristics for implementing them. Overall, these are well done, with clear guidelines and relationships. But, I hasten to add, the approach really does assume strong management backing to push through this compact, even though the end result is to get everyone else on board. Also, the approach is meant for larger organizations working on large software projects, and may not be appropriate for other industries -- too variable for longer-term manufacturing projects, too heavy-handed for smaller, lighter organizations with short engagements.

Plurk has third-party updating available via HelloTxt

... along with several other services. Have not tried it yet, but this was one big obstacle to using Plurk. Perhaps I will set up an account and double-update for a bit.

HelloTxt - Help SMS Gateway