Category: Uncategorized

7:08:36 PM    

Who knows where the phrase came from, but it’s interesting that we think it’s Islamic; or maybe Christian. Actually, the protocol is built into all species. If you meet someone who’s not of your clan, kill him or run from him seems to be the rule. Many tribes have a term that translates as “human” and another word that means the opposite. It turns out the first term refers to tribe members and the second to non-tribe members.

Howard Bloom, in The Lucifer Principle, describes how cuddly a nest of rats is. They snuggle and preen each other like a litter of kittens. But drop a rat from another nest in there, and they tear the newcomer from limb to limb.

The harsh but interesting experiment is to take one of the nest mates out, clean off the scent, and roll him around in another nest’s materials until he smells like one of the others. You guessed it: drop him in with his loving kin and they tear him from limb to limb. Death to the strange-smelling-carrier-of-my-genes.

Bloom uses the story to demonstrate the beginnings of the meme as a support system for the selfish gene. It’s a reasonable enough marker to make the hostilities manageable, except for the occasional meddling researcher.

The Inclusion Revolution

I’ve suggested before that we, the inclusionists, are the interlopers here. We’re inclusionists because we’re computer/Internet/blogging people with real problems to solve and we need real help from each other. If you need to get your server back up, you’ll take help from anyone. If you disagree with someone’s sound bite, her blog may let you in on the quality of her thinking, and you’ll begin to see your similarities hidden among your differences.

When you’re troubleshooting, the enemy of your problem is your friend.

Troubleshooting doesn’t have much of a history. It’s not clear that prehistoric humans even possessed consciousness, if you buy Julian Jayne’s point of view. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, He argues convincingly that, until about 22,000 years ago, the halves of the brain didn’t communicate so well, so their world was not causal but inspirational. When Homer describes the gods speaking to the Greek warriors, Jaynes takes it literally: the voice came from outside the brain the warriors normally used. If you’ve ever tried to manage a rigorous data or IT project through an organization, you know that most of the forces acting on its design are about turf, image, wishful thinking and ego as they are about listening to the technology.

Now that most of us have to deal with computers and complicated systems, we’re developing new skills. The adoption seems glacial, but it’s happening.

In his current InfoWorld article, XML for the rest of us, the ever insightful Jon Udell describes the enabling technology for developing useful XML schemas to map Office 11 docs to company needs:

…you can bind one or more XSLT stylesheets to the [Word] document, each of which can generate WordML styles and formatting.

The XML expertise needed to create schemas and XSLT transformations is scarce today. Once Office 11 hits the streets, its mainstream applications could arguably commoditize those XML skills more quickly and broadly than have Web services technologies.

Naturally, my ears prick up at the mention of carbon-based solutions, since that’s the world Xpertweb wants to support.

Shared Problems, Shared views

The nearly atrophied visionary within me has a sliver of hope. What if a public utility, Find-The-Expert, were developed, available to all and decentralized enough to be as scalable as the BIND DNS protocol. What if the mere availability of the right expert at the right moment unearthed a mountain of expertise to contain the reservoir of confusion that technology never promised but delivered anyway?

What if Udell’s recruits for building WordML XSLT transformations and WiMedia’s need for circuit designs and HP’s need for printer drivers and our useful web logs could be found and indexed and groomed and rewarded and partnered with to master these technologies that have made us so efficient we don’t have weekends any more?

If enough of us emigrate to a virtual workspace on the Internet, solving common problems to realize common dreams, we might learn that people are not believers or infidels, but rather children who become parents.

4:24:13 PM    

It looks like a religious war. Muslims of all stripes, secular and fundamentalist, railing against the United States hegemony (and its Israeli partner), willing to do desperate, suicidal acts to force everyone to read the Q’uran and to stone Debby the next time she does Dallas.

But it’s not. It’s a war over mental protocols that’s as old as life on earth. In Global Brain, My (unwitting) mentor Howard Bloom describes two kinds of personalities: Conformity Enforcers and Diversity Enhancers:

Conformity Enforcers are the key to any successful life form: bacteria, slime mold, rodents, and humans. They’re also the key to successful superorganisms – bacteria colonies, rat nests, human families, tribes, nations, Republicans and Democrats. Without 99.9% conformity, nothing would be stable enough to work – physiology, language, economics, traffic, software, TCP/IP, HTML.

Diversity Enhancers are the key to progress (sometimes called evolution – ssshhhh) – why we no longer walk on all fours, how the individual cells of slime mold learned to come together to be slime mold, but only when necessary. How so many Americans learned to loath racism and why Islam fundamentalists can read better than their ancestors could before Muhammad told them the Qu’ran was important.

It’s a weak argument if you’re a fundamentalist because you don’t believe in evolution, so why take an interest in a distinction based on it? We can address their objections later. The rest of us seem to need some intellectual footing in this quandary over whether to colonize Iraq. Like quantum states, both viewpoints are valid and both must be present for our culture or any superorganism to thrive.

Like any blog, this writer and my one remaining reader have agreed to conform to rigid protocols. Twenty-six specifically shaped symbols are arranged according to ancient rules and interspersed with modern symbols (“<b><i>symbols</i></b>”) and then moved across glass and wires according to rules so strict that only computers can enforce and carry out the requirements.

If you tire of all this rigid discipline and escape to a virgin wilderness, you’ll find yourself conforming to rules even more rigid, imposed by elements and predators so exacting that a single misstep can be deadly. So the next time we congratulate ourselves on our radical non-conformism, we might remember that the most edgy behavior is played out on the thinnest margins of our collective habits. Mike Moore has more in common with George Bush II than he has differences.

Conversely, the self-satisfied suburbanites, businessmen and politicians who insist on their narrow vision are blind to the radical inventions that make their existence possible. Most of us, if transported to 1776, would side with the British, as did most of the successful people of that time. Like heirs to industrial age fortunes, the beneficiaries of past innovation resist most innovations.

All of that is biological, enforced by our ROM-based DNA and reinforced by our RAM-based upbringing. The only thing interesting about those distinctions is that so few of us are willing to acknowledge our need for conformity and diversity. Until we collectively get behind both needs, there will be no constructive engagement.

On Wednesday, John Robb pointed to a terrific video of Bill Clinton addressing a group at Berkeley. After the predictable love-in stage of the award ceremony, Clinton spoke of the greatest current threat to the world – the insistence, by people who know they have all the answers, to the right to change everybody else, or subjugate them. Because of the zip codes I’ve known, I’ve met a lot more Christians like that than Muslims. Such fundamentalism is their threat, not their ideologies, which are just details.

Clinton suggested that we need to emphasize what we have in common rather than our differences. Jay Leno would probably point out that he may mean that no politician should be outraged at lies from another politician, but the point is valid. Civilized people understand that they don’t have all the answers and it pisses off their own people. He cites the fact that Gandhi was killed by a Hindu and Anwar Sadat by an Egyptian. Much abuse is domestic, raging at the diversity enhancers.

The only problem is that such appeals don’t work and never have, since we’re wired to discover and attack differences.

However, where jawboning is useless, economics has a chance. Sellers are willing to ignore their differences with buyers and buyers are grateful to those who solve their problems. Those are functional relationships, so we should concentrate on them, rather than their opposite which are, I suppose, dysfunctional relationships.

Perhaps that distinction lies at the heart of the rage that patriarchs, fundamentalists and conservatives feel toward people who question their rigidity in the bright light of the Agora, as Socrates did. Out there, you can’t yell, “Because I said so!,” which works so well with family members who don’t go to school to think for themselves. That’s the real problem fundamentalists have with scientific education, television and the devil’s own work, the Internet. The catalyst is satellite TV, not religious beliefs. Get a bunch of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists together and they’d have the rules written and the world carved up as speedily as did Hitler and Mussolini.

So naturally, I see an Internet-based peer-to-peer economy as a candidate to get the patriarchal fundamentalists’ followers to admit that they were just mouthing the words so they could get the attention of the influential patriarchs. Once the hierarchies are marginalized by open source transaction web forms, people will do directly what they thought they needed the patriarchs for – reach better markets for their energy and engage their genes for usefulness.

 

11:05:38 PM    

Dean Kamen’s Stirling Engine

Dean Kamen gets a lot of press. He’s one of those off-scale smart guys, which causes many of the rest of us to celebrate when it looks like he’s going to stumble. His Segway “scooter” got attention for being a paradigm-shifter – maybe because it can turn on a pair of dimes?

This evening on 60 Minutes II, Kamen unveiled the Stirling engine that has been written about since summer. One version is designed for the 3rd world, running on charcoal or wood chips, generating electricity and 10 gallons of UV-purified water per day. Here are some Kamen quotes I got this morning off the blog of Aaron Swartz , another off-scale brain, 16 years old, who named Kamen one of his superheroes. I had a hunch he’d be revealing the Stirling tonight. Here’s what he said about it.

Stirling Engine

It’s no surprise the same people who need electricity need water. So instead of plugging it into your home, you can plug your home into it. Give 4 billion people transportation, communication, electricity and water. One problem: these people have no money. Need a really good invention so we can solve this positively. They need to be a resource, not a consumer. Look what happens when everyone knows exactly what they don’t have and can’t get.

Education

We need to create demand and show kids what’s real and important. Instead, they suffer from obscene distractions: rock star, basketball player. Their only other choice is flipping burgers and selling dope. Most of the country is women and minorities, but their sum makes up less than 11% of all technical jobs.

Average kid doesn’t know a scientist or an engineer. Don’t believe any are women or minorities or have fun. We need to convince these minorities to participate. The rock stars and sports players aren’t going to do it. All you technologists get an A+ for doing great things but a D- for being socially responsible. So we need the Olympic Committee of Smarts. FIRST. Kids doing things with real adults that do things that are important. Kids have the advantage, since it’s not what we don’t know that limits us, it’s what we know that isn’t so. Have to show the kids that it’s every bit as fun as shooting hoops but there are a few more jobs available.

It took off. This year we had 17 cities hold regional events. Big cities. We are creating demand. But we’re missing mentors that understand technology and can show kids that science isn’t middle-aged men in lab coats. We need your support. You’re all busy. If you’re not busy, I don’t want you. But you need to participate.

Your technology isn’t going to do what you think it will. Answering machines were supposed to make sure we can talk to everyone, but now we use them to screen calls. Cell phones were supposed to connect us to everyone, but instead they separate us from the people in the same room. We won’t solve the digital divide with more technology.

The most important thing we can invent is inventors. If we keep having more people with less resources the world is going to be an ugly place.

The Mentor Engine

Kamen’s putting as much energy into his mentor-based Education program – FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Xpertweb is also designed to be a low-energy engine that uses common resources, but to generate mentors, not water. Where Kamen wants to inspire inventors and engineers, we’re more interested in everyday folks doing something, anything, for other people. Kamen rightly believes that, given our current economic structures, we need lots of technologists to bring down the cost of getting useful inventions into third world villages.

But what if some part of the economy routes around our current economic structures? Xpertweb opens that door, but it doesn’t care what people do, as long it’s of real value to others.

I wonder when an Xpertweb user in the US will mentor someone in Bangalore. I wonder how long it will then take for a software engineer in Bangalore to mentor his contractor into Xpertweb.

You could not design the convoluted sequence by which a contractor’s sister in a village outside Bangalore uses the Xpertweb forms and PayPal to sell her exquisite scarves in Des Moines.

10:47:34 PM    

This vet loves his war stories as much as any other. Every time we flew into a place that started with a “K”, I got my ass shot up and they gave me a Distinguished Flying Cross. Maybe it was just to shut me up.

It didn’t work.

A review of Xpertweb-oriented Blog Entries

When I was 25, the important thing was to have a good time and not get killed, in the reverse order. Now it’s more interesting to get Xpertweb online.

Here’s a review of the blogs that relate to the open source/open resource system designed to help a lot of people feel a lot better.

For Hurai and Eric:

A parallel between the settling of the New World and the Xpertweb microeconomy

Plato’s metaphor of the cave: our blindness to the bugs in our economic Operating System

Is contrivance simply how we discriminate among people to determine who gets the goodies?

For every problem I’ve got, there are lots of folks who are as good as Commander Data for that specific problem and who would be happy to help me out, especially if paid, say, $1 per minute

No data base controlled by the seller will tell the truth about the seller

When rules are formalized, it is by the seller or the employer

The Xpertweb seller knows the buyer’s grading history, which is more detailed than eBay’s system

We can’t trust sellers to report everything, so we need customer’s records for the truth

A little microeconomy with a better feature set than the larger one. We’ll see if the nutrients are suitable

Your Xpertweb Value Chain builds itself automatically, extending over the horizon of comprehensibility

What drives the engine of greed, fear, manipulation and capitulation that circumscribes most lives?

Building the Symmetrical Data Store, one datum at a time

Their skills can be describable, sellable, reputable and worth more next month than they are today

The theme of Peer-to-Peer transactions: Identify, Specify, Negotiate, Deliver, Evaluate and Pay

Aristocracy and meritocracy look remarkably alike to people who missed the boat

There’s an expert in Bangalore to finish our code and someone nearby to build our deck

Imagine a centralized system set up to do what Xpertweb proposes to do

Once we start designing for both parties, we have the economic equivalent of cold fusion

We may inspire people to move money around as SMTP and POP3 move words around

We currently seek to amass significant assets, Xpertweb delivers myriad inconsequential amounts

Money for the Rest of Us

Data for the Rest of Us. The XWriter tool by Hurai Rody. We’re indebted to him.

Open Data, Open Resources

Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the next RFP

The Mentor Agreement is the core of the Xpertweb experience

10:36:53 PM    

In his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger observes that the web allows people to “try on” different personalities. Examples he cites include eBay sellers and web loggers. He suggests that trial and error lets people find the voice that works best for them

This is an interesting point that deserves more than passing notice. The point of this design study is to discover and code the protocols which best serve our collective, yet personal, economic needs. In the economy we love to hate, one is expected to be well educated, well rounded, well spoken and well placed. Like any superstar, it’s a rare person who has all those traits.

And that’s what should raise our hackles. The “real” economy is based on an unrealistic model of how people learn and grow. Further, it measures workers against an impossibly complete package for the employer – not the talented programmer, project manager or accountant the company needs, but the model employee that managers want to surround themselves with.

Since the Internet invites us to try out different personas – and possibly improving on each one, our economic design should provide that possibility. How does the Xpertweb mentorship model allow such variability?

The mechanism is twofold. Mentors are rewarded only to the extent their support is valued by their students, and each Xpertweb user may have as many mentors as they wish, creating a new Xpertweb persona each time. The only impediment to changing mentors is that, like any Xpertweb provider, each person’s new persona must earn a reputation from scratch. Until respect is earned from experienced purchasers, each persona must undertake an apprenticeship of lower income and volume.

This flexibility would be impossible if Xpertweb were a conventional enterprise. Mentors would be unwilling to allow their students to move on to other mentors and that preference would be formalized as policy – because they could control the payments moving through the system. The virtues of an unmanaged transactions system echoes the virtue of open source software – responsive because there’s no management to be unresponsive.

11:45:34 PM    

Unlike most blogs, this is a series of essays – a word whose root means attempts. My attempt is to describe the web application a tiny group of us is developing called Xpertweb. I’m just too hurried or inarticulate or egotistical to make it a series of short entries. This idea seems to want breathing room and its architecture is just quirky enough to need background. Or so it seems to me.

As a result, this blog is so thorough that it’s pretty unapproachable – maybe that’s just part of our reader deflection program. There are so many people more observant and talented than I, who point to all the links worth linking and who keep you current on what’s going down, that I’m concentrating on this P2P microeconomy design study.

That’s a little disingenuous. The design was laid down some time ago and we’ve been hacking code longer than I care to admit. I hope the specification is even-handed enough that we haven’t missed anything crucial. Certainly, it’s not too late to change the few Xpertweb parameters that are hard-wired. But there’s not much hard-wired. Everything in Xpertweb is voluntary, which makes it the inverse of the current Economy of Compulsion described on Sunday.

There are specific elements that cripple software or web applications:

1. The data structure is set in concrete and the datatypes are frozen.
2. The data interface is unresponsive to user needs.
3. The data is centralized and subject to the economic interests of the developer.
4. Only a few experts are skilled in the use of the layout/data tools that built the application.
5. Only the designers know how the specific application works.

By addressing all those factors, we hope to make the Xpertweb application responsive to its users. The only thread that even slightly directs user behavior is the relationship of experienced Xpertweb users to less experienced users. Each user of the protocols is expected to mentor others in their use. Each mentor will have an understanding with the newbie that there are certain ways to behave in this boutique economy. The mentor will spell out those standards and the new user will agree to convey those standards to other new users when the time comes.

So the Mentor Agreement is the core of the Xpertweb experience. Although the agreement is only between the user and her mentor, it specifies the standards under which the user purports to be operating. Its logical concerns are:

• Never break a promise.
• When you do something, do what you know well.
• When you buy something, give the highest grade you can justify.
• Be a good mentor immediately: get your student off to a good start.
• Be a mentor for life: even when your student surpasses you, generous admiration is a gift.
• Buy from your students or their students or people mentored by your mentor.
• Maintain data integrity – yours is one of 4 records of the transactions you track, be a good steward.
• NEVER contact an Xpertweb user to sell something – your reputation is your marketing.
• Pay your mentor fees promptly on your mentor date – You will not receive what you do not give.
• Do at least $100 of buying and/or selling every month.
• Mentor 4 students during your first four months.
• Enter into these commitments with your students.

Word of Action

Xpertweb is a formalized word of mouth describing visible actions. The Mentor Agreement is the only tangible obligation made by an  Xpertweb user. The expectation is that these mutual commitments will be passed along in a natural way, as skills once were passed from parent to child – we all were once millers and bakers and smiths and wrights.

With any luck, it will look a lot like a guild.

11:49:44 PM    

The other day, I suggested that a valid design criteria for an economy would be to base it on bloggers’ values: openness, exposure and candid discussion of our offerings, a compilation of our justifications for and our collective estimation of the quality of our respective offerings.

But what if we turn that around? Instead of imposing blogger values on meatspace, what values from meatspace might we take on, as representative of the collective values of web loggers?

Tonight I caught the end of PBS’ Ken Burns documentary on the life of Thomas Jefferson. It concluded with these words:

Thomas Jefferson essentially said to us:

“We cannot be complacent until two conditions are met.

“Every human being born on this continent has a right to equal, indeed, identical treatment by the machine of the law, irrespective of race, gender, creed or class of origin.

“And secondly, that every human being born on this continent has a right to roughly equal opportunity and modest prosperity. Until those conditions are met, we cannot rest.

“When those conditions are met, we may say as he said he would, nunc dimittis, ‘you may dismiss me.’ My work is done.”

Do we have anything more important on our agenda? Do we have the right to such lofty goals? Do we have the stomach for them? Is web logging the forum to take on Jefferson’s challenge? Oh, what the hell. Why not?

The challenges to the human spirit have always been economic, and the tyranny that scarcity economics invariably leads to. It’s not surprising that my view is that those imperatives can be embedded in a set of values and transactional forms adopted to express those values. The people using those forms can hardly presume to change the “machine of the law,” but it can route around undesired compulsion under the law using the tipware protocols I described yesterday.

Just a thought.

11:23:42 PM    

Reflecting on this Sunday after the Microsoft Absolution, I’m reminded of the distinction between personality types: Pushers vs. the Pullers, Daniel Quinn’s distinction between the Takers and the Leavers; the current line between the Geeks and the Suits. In the middle ages, there were the peasants vs. the “nobles” (John Perry Barlow’s “The divine right of thugs” comes to mind).

Geeks like to do stuff that’s useful and often worry about the pay later. Suits like to control stuff that’s useful and compel others to pay more for it than they pay the geeks. Nice gig.

Howard Bloom has made a strong argument that the dominated become aggressive when they become the dominators, so the distinction may have more to do with roles than personalities, but that may make this an even more worthwhile inquiry.

What might a new microeconomy do to break down these distinctions rather than reinforce them? It’s unlikely that any amount of teaching, preaching or reaching out will work – those have always failed. Government policies and books and morality plays don’t work. Religion seems a Dominator’s dream, so rigidly does it subject its followers to the whims of its leaders. Given all that, are there any protocols in our economy that should be included in or excluded from our little design?

You Can’t Steal a Gift

Let’s look at the protocol called compulsion. Our economy and our rule of law are based on compulsion, as have been all societies. The western world has raised compulsion to a Kafkaesque level, essentially saying:

“Here’s our body of laws, so complex that no one understands or obeys them perfectly.
If you violate one and attract the wrong party’s attention, whether or not you know about the law (even though no one knows them all), and whether or not it hurts someone else’s interest, you will be compelled to undergo a degrading, expensive process that intentionally does you significant harm.

“Of course, if you’re influential enough, or your interests align with influence, the compulsion will be illusory or non-existent.”

(Let’s not feel sorry for ourselves. It’s always been tough for people like you and me who descend from the peasant classes.)

Is compulsion the source of customer dissatisfaction? Sure it is, especially with intangible services. Phones and cable TV and subscriptions and travel and lodging are all based on making bandwidth or physical space available to you, on the assumption that the availability has intrinsic value. Individual vendors may have generous refund policies, but that’s at their disgression. The fine print says that if you sign up, you’re compelled to pay until some period after your written cancellation. That’s how it’s always been.

But now there are alternate models – the work of waitpersons and street musicians and bloggers is valuable but unstealable. Open source software and closed source shareware and most Internet browsers are unstealable. Gene Lees wrote a fine book about Jazz called You Can’t Steal a Gift.

Naturally, most laws are broken due to economics – and the temptation to steal what’s stealable. Could our little P2P microeconomy make some of this stealing impossible, perhaps reducing the power of compulsion?

The solution for theft and compulsory economics should be based on code designed around the shareware model. Lawrence Lessig’s doctrine is that code can have a power comparable to law. Under the shareware model, all work would be delivered in advance with no compulsion to pay, as in Xpertweb. (Unlike shareware, Xpertweb requires the receiver of the work to declare its value – anything above a failing grade requires a payment between 50-100% of the asking price.)

Xpertweb users will live in two economic operating systems, the large one we love to hate and their P2P forms-based shareware model. For the Xpertweb portion of their lives, they’ll deal with people ranked as experts by their previous customers. They’ll find their expert by looking in an RSS index for people who’ve done similar projects before and who know more about their problem than they do. This is the embodiment of Bill Joy’s axiom that there are always more smart people outside your company than within.

Both the buyer and the seller know the expert’s work is shareware. By knowing each other’s reputation, thay share some assumptions. They assume that this gig is not a big hassle for the expert, who may be customizing previous solutions, so he’s not risking a lot on this task. The buyer knows the seller is motivated first by the grade and secondarily by the fee. The presumption is that this is indeed an enjoyable and responsive economic OS for both parties.

The peer-to-peer transaction model favors the geek over the suit (who’s nowhere to be found in the deal). This transaction is as unstealable for the suit as it is for the buyer – an expression of a gift economy with contingent price tags.

Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the next RFP.

6:58:31 PM    

Phil Windley, CIO of the state of Utah, gives us a wealth of insights we usually don’t hear from people managing “big iron” systems. I hope he won’t mind me reprinting this report from last Monday:

I did a little reading at lunch in The Transparent Society by David Brin. Brin sets forth the following and calls it an “accountability matrix:”

1. Tools that help me see what others are up to.	2. Tools that prevent others from seeing what I am up to.
3. Tools that help others see what I am up to.	4. Tools that prevent me from seeing what others are up to.

His contention is that people see boxes (1) and (2) as good and boxes (3) and (4) as bad.  What society needs is boxes (1) and (3) since that creates accountability.  Further, society should eschew boxes (2) and (4) since that pits citizens against each other in “an arms race of masks, secrets, and indignation.” 

This point speaks directly to the data issues we’ve been looking at in this design study. Let’s imagine an economy entirely made up of bloggers. Do bloggers worry about there privacy? Not really. In addition to the blogger’s URL and email address, any industrious reader can dig a little and know where a blogger lives, her phone number, etc. Bloggers willingly give up their anonymity in the interests of the truth they wish to share.

“After 9-11, we have a right to privacy but not anonymity.”
                          – (source spaced out, not withheld)

In the blogger economy, Brin’s boxes (1) & (3) would be part of the transaction software, and boxes (2) & (4) would not. Further, the likely features of the software would be:

1. Transaction records under the control of each blogger, like their blogs
2. No central transaction database, like blogs
3. Expose the quality of participation in every transaction, like the links to individual blog posts
4. Beyond some standardization, variability in the information types, like each blogger’s navigation links
5. A means to aggregate quality ratings and expose them for comparison participation skills, probably using RSS, like blogs
6. A means to streamline the introduction of new bloggers into the Bloggers’ Economy, As bloggers help newbies like me.
7. A global web of links among the participating bloggers, as is already the case.
8. Blogger appreciation is currently linkage & blogrolling; In the Bloggers’ Economy, it’s likely to be money

It’s hard to beat the blogger ethic as a guideline for our design study.

It will be easy for individuals to adopt such protocols but very hard for corporations, which think their value lies in what the hide from others. They’re only now beginning to guess that their value is in what they expose to others.

11:46:01 PM