Clay on Situated Software
Grok Headline matches for Clay on Situated Software
Situated Software
Situated Software
04/09/2004 03:54 PM
I teach at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where
the student population is about evenly divided between technologists
who care about aesthetics and artists who aren't afraid of machines,
which makes it a pretty good place to see the future.
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.
I see my students cheerfully ignoring Web School practices and yet
making interesting work, a fact that has given me persistent cognitive
dissonance for a year, so I want to describe the pattern here, even in
its nascent stages, to see if other people are seeing the same thing
elsewhere. - More at
http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
Clay Shirky tried to use some crippled
software to rip a DVD, and it didn't
work.
Clay Shirky tried to use some crippled
software to rip a DVD, and it didn't
work.
03/31/2005 10:58 PM
Clay Shirky tried to use some crippled software to rip a DVD, and it
didn't work. The software was apparently written by legally
paranoid people who are trying to diguise their paranoia by blaming
The Man. The law does not forbid software from copying unencrypted
DVDs (all burned DVDs are unencrypted) -- hence the existence of Nero,
Popcorn, etc. It is a shame that so much voluntarily crippled software
and hardware is out there, but let's not lay all the blame on the law.
Clay on NYC
Clay on NYC
04/09/2004 04:12 PMThis is a fantastic interview with Clay about NYC. Funny, brilliant,
twisty in its insights....
Jonas on Clay on all of Us
Jonas on Clay on all of Us
05/05/2004 04:12 AMHere'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.....
Communicate.
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-riffic
Clay-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 shirky
why i like clay shirky
04/11/2004 07:43 PMhis gothamist interview is my love of new york with logic substituting
for romance
Clay Cements the Semantic
Clay Cements the Semantic
11/10/2003 11:16 PMClay 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 clay
Antigravity has feet of clay
02/05/2005 09:26 PMThanks 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'
INTERNET ROUNDUP: Clay flowers
INTERNET ROUNDUP: Clay flowers
07/25/2004 08:48 PMThe Nation - Thailand Jul 26 2004 0:06AM GMT
[etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags
[etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags
03/17/2005 03:00 AMClay 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...
Rabid Clay Mates handling criticism
Rabid 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.
LMAO. What the hell? (Clay Aiken) -
www.ezboard.com
LMAO. What the hell? (Clay Aiken) -
www.ezboard.com
05/26/2004 01:23 AMClay Aiken bovs'd all over these tees .. photoshop job ..
snort
p071.ezboard.com/fjjboardfrm12.showMessage?topicID=52102.topic
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Clay pigeon shooter goes out with a bang
(Reuters)
Clay pigeon shooter goes out with a bang
(Reuters)
04/27/2004 06:07 AMReuters - Friends of a champion Irish clay pigeon shooter have
fulfilled his dying wish by packing his ashes into
shotgun cartridges and blasting his remains over firing ranges around
the world.
"Clay Shirky?s terrific presentation on
Ontologies"
"Clay Shirky?s terrific presentation on
Ontologies"
04/04/2005 02:12 AM[etech] Day 2 Clay Shirky - Phone as
platform
[etech] Day 2 Clay Shirky - Phone as
platform
03/17/2005 03:00 AMClay begins a segment on tech and education. He says he thinks of his
group at NYU as "The Department of the Recently Possible." A few years
ago they noticed that students were increasingly integrating phones
into their apps. So they started looking into it. One experiment:
PacManhattan that mates the urban grid and the game grid. The runners
are controlled by people in a control room via mobile phones.
DodgeBall was an experiment in mobile social networking. "Mobile
phones are the first things since keys that everyone carries," Clay
says, citing Marko Ahtisaari. DodgeBall alerted him that there was...
"Gothamist Interviews: Clay Shirky,
Internet Technologist"
"Gothamist Interviews: Clay Shirky,
Internet Technologist"
04/12/2004 10:00 PMClay ShirkyThe Semantic Web, Syllogism,
and WorldviewNovember 7, 2003
Clay ShirkyThe Semantic Web, Syllogism,
and WorldviewNovember 7, 2003
11/10/2003 11:36 PMInteresting "Emperor's New Clothes" piece by Clay .. Clay Shirky
smacks sy .. his entire piece ..
more
shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
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Clay Shirky: RIAA Succeeds Where
Cypherpunks Fail
Clay Shirky: RIAA Succeeds Where
Cypherpunks Fail
12/18/2003 11:52 AMscubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption:
'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users
to trade a broad ...
Gothamist Interviews: Clay Shirky,
Internet Technologist
Gothamist Interviews: Clay Shirky,
Internet Technologist
04/10/2004 08:47 AMGothamist has an excellent interview with Clay Shirky today ..
intervju
gothamist.com/interview/archives/2004/04/09/clay_shirky_int
ernet_technologist.php
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Three Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics
of Blogging – Marko's Reply to
Clay
Three Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics
of Blogging – Marko's Reply to
Clay
01/17/2004 10:43 PM
Marko points out three mistakes in the moral mathematics of
blogging that Clay has been writing about and articulates very
clearly some key weaknesses in the arguments.
Marko
The first mistake
– lets call it the “Natural Social Institutions”
view – is the simplistic but widely held view that the patterns
resulting from the operation of freely forming networks are acceptable
because the rules of operation of these networks are in some sense
natural.
[...]
The second mistake – lets call it the
“Links from Nowhere” view – claims that link choices
are made under full information about available options and fully
formed values or preferences over those options. We should also reject
this view. Autonomous linking choices are always informed by
incomplete information and incomplete values and preferences. There
are in fact no links from nowhere.
[...]
The third mistake – lets call it the
“Forced Compensation” view – claims that the only
way to address the unacceptable degree of inequality that results from
the operation of a freely forming network is to “force”
people to change their linking behavior. This is a far too narrow view
of the means available to influence the distributions that
arise.
Marko ends by asking some more questions about
justice.
Marko
What
arrangements of inequality are preferable over others from the point
of view of justice? How do we justify to each other the rules,
architectures and tools we adopt in the blogging world?
In answering these questions we should look back to understand the
present. John Rawls put the task description well: “The task is
to articulate a public conception of justice that all can live with
who regard their person and relation to society in a certain way. And
though doing this may involve settling theoretical difficulties, the
practical social task is primary.”
A public conception of justice for freely forming networks. That
could be our shared goal.
You should
read the entire entry on Marko's blog.
Clay Shirky talks about the RIAA forcing
people to adopt Encryption
Clay Shirky talks about the RIAA forcing
people to adopt Encryption
12/18/2003 02:28 PMI have always been intrigued with encryption and use PGP on select
e-mail from time to time and understand the...
CLAY
CHRISTENSEN ON INNOVATION
CLAY
CHRISTENSEN ON INNOVATION
09/08/2004 12:35 PM
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:
- Sustaining
Innovations
are new, higher-margin, significantly more valuable products and
services brought to an existing market, a known group of customers.
Large corporations, who 'have' most of those customers, have a huge
advantage in introducing such innovations.
- Disruptive Innovations
are new products and services that extend the market to a whole new
class of customers (usually down-market, by introducing a cheaper
version or alternative). As these innovations improve they gradually
start to eat away at the up-market version, sometimes destroying
it.
(His books have many examples of both types, the most famous
disruptive
innovations being the Mini-computer and the PC which largely destroyed
the mainframe computer market.
He then goes on to say, in response to a question about whether
public
companies, being bottom-line (profit) rather than top-line (revenue)
focused, are inherently incapable of innovation and hence doomed to
fail, "The evidence is just
overwhelming that is true."
That's a remarkable statement, and vindication of my claim that the
current price/earnings ratios of most public companies, which
anticipate continuing double-digit annual profit growth for decades to
come, are absolutely preposterous.
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:
- While the best innovative ideas come from talking to
customers and determining their unmet needs, 'customers' should include prospective customers, not just current ones,
and
- There is some danger that a customer who knows you for
product or service X will not want you, or not imagine you being able,
to produce Y as well: Your excellence
in one area can actually detract customers who are aware of that
excellence from helping you innovate in another
area.
- If you're going to try to innovate in a new area, set up a separate, autonomous business unit
to do so, so interference from, and to, the existing business
is minimized.
He goes on to talk about the folly of the traditional product
line/demographic market segmentation, trying to find patterns in
product category needs by customer age, income level, profession or
sex
-- leading even sophisticated market-driven companies like P&G to
fail with 85% of their new product launches. He re-affirms what I've
always believed: Every individual is a market segment of one. The
answer, he says, is to segment the
market by types of need instead of by demographics.
To do this, he says, you need to understand yourself as a customer and
consumer, and appreciate that your needs are diverse, dynamic, and
ever-changing. The best innovations fill an unmet need, and starting
with demographic segments actually obfuscates the identification of
needs that transcend demographic boundaries.
He recommends two techniques for honing in on such needs:
- At brainstorming sessions, get people to identify and
then individually rank why people buy each type of product or service
(KJ
diagramming), and then aggregate the top-ranked reasons to create
a profile of the need.
- Conduct a series of interviews of
customers who recently
used the product or service, asking each to tell a story about (a) the
specific situation that caused them to decide to use the product or
service, and (b) the last time they were in a similar situation but
used a different product or service, and why; and then aggregate these
into a profile of the motivations.
The combination of these two profiles gives you an appreciation for
the
needs that exist, and the customers' buying behaviours when faced with
that need -- excellent grist for the innovation mill.
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.
|
A Response to Clay Shirky's "The
Semantic Web, Syllogism, and
Worldview"
A Response to Clay Shirky's "The
Semantic Web, Syllogism, and
Worldview"
11/12/2003 01:17 PMI'm farming out my deep thinking to Paul Ford .. semweb smackdown!
paul ford responds .. the SemWeb thing .. his essay
here
ftrain.com/ContraShirky.html
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Broadlook--#1 CRM Software
Solution--Empowers your CRM Software and
fill your CRM Software with contact
management relationships.
Broadlook--#1 CRM Software
Solution--Empowers your CRM Software and
fill your CRM Software with contact
management relationships.
06/18/2004 03:03 AMWhichever CRM software your company uses, you need to look at the
Broadlook Suite of Software which should seamlessly integrate with
whichever CRM software you are using. BroadLook is an integrated set
of applications designed to harness the Internet as a powerful
real-time data source--the data from which can be exported into your
CRM software. [PRWEB Jun 18, 2004]
Adobe to buy Macromedia in $3.4 billion
stock deal - Computer Software -
Internet Software - Software - Internet
- Company Announcements - Earnings - M&A
Adobe to buy Macromedia in $3.4 billion
stock deal - Computer Software -
Internet Software - Software - Internet
- Company Announcements - Earnings - M&A
04/19/2005 04:29 AMAdobe Systems To Buy Macromedia ..
schluckt
marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B3B04AC26-E1ED-4FA3-8
E72-9C493CADC469%7D&dist=rss&siteid=mktw
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Print Manager Plus Wins W2KNews Top
Award for Best Print Management
Software, Best Price, Best Quality in
the Industry American-British Company
Software Shelf Receives Software Award
Print Manager Plus Wins W2KNews Top
Award for Best Print Management
Software, Best Price, Best Quality in
the Industry American-British Company
Software Shelf Receives Software Award
05/31/2004 02:14 PMSoftware Shelf International, Inc., an American and British software
development and marketing company today announced that its flagship
product, Print Manager Plus(R), has won the coveted Sunbelt W2KNews
Top Award for Print Management Software. The award is presented at
Microsoft's Tech.Ed 2004 for Best print management software, Best
price, and Best quality in the industry. The Award was won as a result
of voting from over 500,000 W2K News subscribers consisting of Windows
NT/2000/2003 Administrators, MIS Managers, MCPs, MCSEs and IT
professionals around the world. Print Manager Plus solves the problem
of the hidden cost of printing in organizations. According to
Datamation document costs consume up to 15% of a company's revenues.
Print Manager Plus reduces these costs. [PRWEB May 26, 2004]
