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Clay on NYCClay on NYCClay on NYC 04/09/2004 04:12 PM This is a fantastic interview with Clay about NYC. Funny, brilliant, twisty in its insights.... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Clay on NYCGrok Headline matches for Clay on NYCJonas on Clay on all of UsJonas on Clay on all of Us 05/05/2004 04:12 AM Here's Jonas' reaction to Clay's latest piece - on 'Situated Software'. I had a completely different reaction. I see situated software - as teh same as what I call "activity based computing." Inspired by Don Norman's work - I really think activity based computing happens when digital lifestyle aggregation is a norm. Here's Jonas' post..... Clay Shirky just published an essay on “Situated Software”, software tailored towards a specific situation.
Part of the future I believe I’m seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I’m calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I’ll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues. Shirky touches on the very foundation the whole “Social Software” craze is all about – communication. He acknowledges, correctly, the basic foundation of it – communication. Communication is cool. Everyone communicates, and sends verbal and non-verbal factoids at almost every waking second. The amazing part about mankind, and one of those things that not only set us apart from “lower” mammals and other life-forms, is our need and will to communicate, no matter what. Deprived of our primary means of communication, that is the verbal way, we invent and use secondary and tertiary means. Hearing and speech impaired use sign language, we use body language and simple pictorials to communicate, and if that all is taken away from us, we still seek and find a way. Which by the way, also explains the withdrawal symptoms and “addictions” to email, Everquest, or IRC. We communicate. If taken away, we lose a form of communication, which is – as everyone who lost hearing or speech or vision will attest to – is something rather uncomfortable and painful. Losing this channel of communication equates to a loss of senses, sensory deprivation, and comes with all the psychological side-effects, such an event has to the affected. In a way, communication is like lightning. It will always find the easiest way, no matter how. Deprived of simple ways to strike, the next easier path is taken, and so on. Successful “social software” is a lightning rod for such communication. It provides an easier way to convey factoids to other individuals. Take the whole “social network” misnomer, for an example. Friendships were expressed on online communities long before Friendster or Orkut. The WELL, heading into its 21st year of existence, is full of verbal and non-verbal displays or friendship and acquaintanceship. Or animosities, outright hate, curiosity. Name it, and it was there. The problem is, telling it that way won’t get one quoted in eWeek. It’s one thing to call oneself an “expert” in Social Networking or a Visionary, or a Pioneer. Passersby stand in awe, the industry rejoices and jumps at the possibility of raking in VC money, and because it sounds academic, few questions are asked. Simply sounds better than “someone who knows, that people talk”, doesn’t it? Take the “backchannel” discussion for a second. There are proponents and opponents of … communication. The basic understanding is simple – someone, somewhere, uses computerized means, such as IRC or AIM, or a WiKi, to comment in realtime on something. That something are mostly talks and presentations in conferences. Before IRC or IM was discovered, whispers were used, body language, such as yawning, applauding, rolling of eyes, or demonstrative snoring. With wireless networks starting to fill conference venues, the lightning strike of communication sought and found an easier, less prone to misscommunication, way in IRC and IM. Skinned of the multiple layers of new words and stripped of the means, backchannel opponents and proponents are back to the basics – communication is good or bad, depending what’s it all about and who it is all about. Proponents point out the less disruptive and more constructive nature of IRC communications, opponents focus mostly on its exclusionary nature, both neglecting to acknowledge that before IRC and IM, other means were employed, which were equally exclusionary and similarly constructive – those things commonly called the “hallway track”. Yes, speaking in new words, or calling ordinary things by academic sounding names has its advantages. Most importantly, it introduces a new lawyer of discussion. “I don’t really like it, when people talk about me behind my back” simply sounds less mature than “I think backchannels are useless”. Communication is old. Providing better means to communicate and convey accurate factoids makes for a potential way to channel conversations into a system. It’s that simple, and I have no idea why we need to make it more complicated than that. [a preponderance of evidence - What Willis Wuz' Talkin' 'Bout]Clay-rifficClay-riffic 07/08/2004 01:58 PM "Untitled Inspirational Memoir" by American [White] Idol '03 Clay Aiken hits #9 on the Amazon bestseller chart. It will be published (presumably with a title) in November. Order yours today. Or, run home and mail off your Great American Novel -- or at least your own dashed-off U.I.M. -- to Random House, publisher to the stars. why i like clay shirkywhy i like clay shirky 04/11/2004 07:43 PM his gothamist interview is my love of new york with logic substituting for romance Clay Cements the SemanticClay Cements the Semantic 11/10/2003 11:16 PM Clay takes apart the Semantic Web, starting small and heading towards the big and beautiful. He ends by pointing out that metadata is politics and that there is a virtue to messiness. It's a brilliant piece and I'd be much happier about it if the ending points weren't ones I've been trying to write about for a few months. Damn that Shirky!... Antigravity has feet of clayAntigravity has feet of clay 02/05/2005 09:26 PM Thanks to Gnomie Paul Wright for this item. Space agency report is a downer for gravity-control researchers. “Could astronauts take a leaf out of H. G. Wells’s book The First Men in the Moon, and use spacecraft propelled by antigravity devices? Some see the idea as science fiction, but major space agencies take it seriously. In 2001, the European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned two scientists to evaluate schemes for gravity control. They have concluded that,… Direct and Related Links for 'Antigravity has feet of clay' Clay on Situated SoftwareClay on Situated Software 04/09/2004 04:12 PM Clay's being brilliant again (damn him!), this time on the rise of software that works because it isn't intended to scale. This is not only a trend, it's a clarifying meme.... INTERNET ROUNDUP: Clay flowersINTERNET ROUNDUP: Clay flowers 07/25/2004 08:48 PM The Nation - Thailand Jul 26 2004 0:06AM GMT Rabid Clay Mates handling criticismRabid Clay Mates handling criticism 07/28/2004 08:11 PM Wilmington News Journal features writer Ryan Cormier wrote a review of a Clay Aiken concert today. Word reached "The Clayboard" with a link to Ryan's newspaper-hosted blog which then got slammed with angry comments from Clay Mates. There are other News Blogs from this paper; they even cover scandals and legal transgressions by elected officials. But Ryan? He's done touched a nerve. [etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags[etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags 03/17/2005 03:00 AM Clay talks about how taxonomies always have values built in. Even the periodic table's "noble gases" division reflects an assumption about the "essential" state of elements. He points to the Dewey Decimal System's skewed religion category. [Yikes! I've been doing that, too! I probably heard it from Clay first. I will attribute it from now on. Ack!] Even the Library of Congress puts the Balkan Peninsula and African on equal footing because it's measuring the number of books on the shelves. The categorization reflects not the ideas but the physical storage. He points out, that even though Yahoo has cross... [etech] Day 2 Clay Shirky - Phone as
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 Gartner Group has a wonderful new o nline interview with Clay Christensen, one of the few consultants out there wisely focused on innovation. Here are some of the highlights: For those who haven't read The Innovator's Dilemma or The Innovator's Solution, he recaps the definitions of the two main categories of innovation:
Not only will disruptive innovations eventually kill market leaders, he says, but those that want to survive will have to create new, autonomous organizations or business units to compete in the new 'disrupted' marketplace -- the inertia of the 'old', disrupted organization is deadly, and cannot hope to transition to the new market reality fast enough to survive. IBM was the only survivor of the mainframe PC companies, he says, because they did exactly that when they entered the Mini-computer and PC markets -- they established completely separate, autonomous divisions headquartered in different cities. [An interesting aside for regular readers of this weblog: Christensen, in the process of discussing how disruptive innovations take over a market, suggests something that may be disheartening to entrepreneurs who want to take a low-risk, low-sweat Natural Enterprise approach: The race is to the quick, meaning the entrant who can bring in a lot of new investment quickly to commercialize the innovation will likely dominate the market. Big risk, big return. Entrepreneurs need to recognize their limitations -- trying to bit off more than you can chew is more likely to lead to bankruptcy than the brass ring. There are still lots of opportunities for natural entrepreneurs to make a very comfortable living, without significant risk, by innovating on a scale they can manage and which they can finance organically. There is much to be said for modesty in business.] Christensen goes on to suggest, as a corollary, that going, or staying, private can be a better route to sustainable innovation than being a public company. While an IPO can be a great way to raise cheap money, it then exposes your company to the insatiable and unreasonable expectations of passive shareholders, forcing you to take your eye off both innovation and strategic vision, in pursuit of short-term profitability targets that, in the long run, are often dysfunctional. That creates a great quandary -- because private companies have much less access to cheap capital, they are also less equipped to capitalize on innovation, even though they are better equipped to produce it. Now Christensen gets to the most important point in the interview, though he does so strangely. He starts by saying it is dangerous to listen too much to your customers, because they are, by definition, satisfied with what you do now, and hence won't force you to be innovative. But his real point is that it is by talking to prospective customers (who he calls non-customers) that you discover why they are not buying from you today, that can lead you on the path of innovation (by finding out why). I think that's a bit black-and-white: It suggests you have either 100% 'market share' of a customer or none. In my experience there are lots of opportunities to sell more to existing customers, and since you have strong relationships with those customers they may be able to help you identify opportunities to sell more to them through innovation, than 'non-customers' who don't know your capabilities and with whom you don't have a relationship that can buy you time, trust and candour from them. But there are still three important points here:
He recommends two techniques for honing in on such needs:
The interview includes a wonderful quote from Ted Leavitt in a 1960 HBR article called Marketing Myopia: "People don't buy a quarter-inch drill. They buy a quarter-inch hole. You've got to study the hole, not the drill. The drill is just a solution for it." Rob Paterson recently made this point with similar eloquence, coining the word "coolth" for what people were really buying when they bought an air conditioner. Christensen didn't seem to be prepared for the final question -- where to look for unfilled needs. I guess I need to tell him about my post of last week. Thanks to the always-excellent Innovation Weekly for the link to the Gartner article, and to John Wark at New Dog Old Trick for the link to KJ diagramming. John also has an interesting recent post suggesting one of the main values of a blog is as a place to organize and store our memories. For the explanation of my Innovation Process chart, above, please see this article. |
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