Disqus - Latest Comments for Stephen Smoliar

Re: Speaking Appearance at Search Engine 2007

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:27:55 -0000

Lou, I like what you said about Healia. Another way to frame the distinction you are trying to draw is that Healia treats the user as, in database language, an object with attributes (but not, as far as I can tell, with relations to other objects). A lot of artificial intelligence went into this kind of object-oriented approach to "taking the history of the patient;" but its value in diagnosis was never more than limited (and you could never get those guys to talk about "heath maintenance"). From a grammatical point of view, by introducing the concept of "role," you elevate the user from object to SUBJECT, which is extremely important from a point of view of technology effectiveness but also carries the risk of falling down a rabbit-hole where you have to sort out all sorts of subtleties around concepts like "self" and "identity." My personal feeling is that we cannot avoid that rabbit-hole; but we should be able to equip ourselves with "tools" like ropes, pitons, and high-intensity lamps to avoid getting hurt and/or lost!

Re: Speaking Appearance at Search Engine 2007

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:59:22 -0000

Lou, I find the tool belt metaphor a good point of departure for the search-as-service perspective that grew out of the

confused of calcutta discussion. For the most part the tool belt belongs in the hands of a capable service provider. Every now and then a client may learn enough from a service engagement to use a tool properly; and this can be good if it means not having to ask for help every time a particular problem arises. However, knowledge of the tool belt is acquired through some kind of apprenticeship relationship, whether the apprentice is a service-provider-in-training or a knowledgeable client.

Re: Web 2.0 video explanation…

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:30:50 -0000

I have already seen this video; but this might be the right place for me to put in my two-cents worth. There is no doubting that the media have been used cleverly to make a point; but the point leaves me cold, because I think something is missing. I have struggled to put my finger on just what is missing; and I have decided that it comes back to that question of identity and the way in which the discussion at

confused of calcutta broke down when the subtleties of the social side of the issue began to surface.

Like Erving Goffman I believe that much (if not all) of life in the "real world" is a matter of "the presentation of self;" and I further believe that, while the Web 2.0 world makes all sorts of claims to scaling that presentation of self from "face-to-face" to "virtual-face-to-virtual-face," the realization of those claims is highly impoverished, at least by Goffman's standards. While evangelists choose to address this by asking "will things get better," the philosopher in me prefers to ask if things can get better. My argument is that, at the end of the day, Web 2.0 is really just about a new generation of (pretty damned impressive) interfaces to what is little more than the same old databases; and, by their very nature, those databases can only live in a world of nouns and noun phrases. On the other hand presentation of self is a matter of performance, familiar enough to anyone in the performing arts but thoroughly alien to the world of databases, because the nature of performance resides in the world of verbs and verb phrases. Furthermore, that verb-based foundation is not one of state change but embraces the full scope of subtlety of tense, person, mood, and who-knows-what-else. (It also lies at the heart of the concept of "role," which is so fundamental to your current thinking, Lou!)

On my own blog I just wrote that I have finally been won over by Ségolène Royal (even if I cannot vote for her) after reading that she had said, "I'm today holding out my hand ... to all those who think that human values must always prevail over financial and market values." Web 2.0 may be pitching "human values;" but I do not think it is delivering them in any meaningful way. I fear that ultimately it will just maintain the status quo of the world the Internet has made, meaning that the warts in that world will just get more conspicuous, more inhuman, and more problematic!

Re: Web 2.0 video explanation…

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 13:08:24 -0000

ZeMMs, it used to be said (before the media conglomerate bullies invaded the playground) that the job of the journalist was "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I am not sure anyone has been "afflicted" by Web 2.0 yet; but there does seem to be an awful lot of smug comfort whenever one of these Expos convenes! Yes, if you think too much, you end up like the centipede that tries to figure out which leg to move next, never takes another step, and dies of hunger. On the other hand even the world of Web 2.0 is a world of consequences. (Ask Kathy Sierra.) I would hate to see us succumb to a level of comfort that dismisses any thought about those consequences! (I suppose that is why my own blog now now amassed 67 posts with the "consequences" tag!)

Re: Web 2.0 video explanation…

Stephen Smoliar — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:03:36 -0000

Lou, last week at the San Francisco ad:tech, I saw my first "Web 3.0" on a slide introducing the (rather gratuitous) "Content is King" panel; I am sure this was not the first declaration of Web 3.0 to a large public audience, even if no semantics were attached to the term!

Speaking of locutions such as "X #.#," I suspect that this whole fixation on maintaining state has at least some of its origins in the "culture of software releases," since each release is essentially the state of an executable file. In this case the transitions between the states are software development processes, which seem to run the entire gamut from black arts to mismanaged ineptitude. If one studies engineering to learn how to build artifacts that work, be they bridges, airplanes, or television sets, then "software engineering" may well be the greatest misnomer of the twentieth century!

There is an amusing edge of irony in the timing of your speculation about Second Life. Yesterday Daniel Terdiman posted an interesting

News blog item at CNET News.com concerning an open letter reflecting a growing wave of discontent in the Second Life community. One of the sources of discontent was "inventory loss," losing stuff and not being able to recover it when Second Life "upgrades" its software. Yes, Lou (and Virginia), Second Life developers seem to have a problem with maintaining state!

Personally, I like Giddens' phrase about the "uninterrupted flow of action." We do not have any problem with this in the physical world: All action ceases only with death (and, from a ecological point of view, it does not even cease then). However, when it comes to IT, we seem to refuse to have anything to do with that which cannot be interrupted and held in a frozen state. We have no problem understanding (or at least dealing with) things that pass us by in the physical world. Why do we deny them in the digital world? Why, in the case of identity, can I not be "what I am at the moment," without worrying about whether I am that way 24 hours (or less) from now?

Re: Web Services for Everyone Will Prove Challenging | correlate

Stephen Smoliar — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:53:02 -0000

There is an old joke from the Fifties about Skinnerian operant conditioning. One psychologist says to his colleague: "I am really impressed with Skinner's results. Using operant conditioning I have now trained my son to do anything I want? Now, what is it I want him to do?" For me this sums up "the value proposition of providing web services to the average individual so that they can build personal applications!"

The whole philosophy behind service is that we want someone else to do things for us. The operative part of that sentence is the human agent, and it is the one most frequently ignored. The highest-ranking executives still have human assistants, ostensibly because they have better things to do with their time. The rest of us get software; and, unfortunately, most of us have more important things to do with our time than configure Web services (or, for that matter, open source code modules)!

The joke about operant conditions gets to the heart of why this is such a problem. More often than not, we really do not know what we want, not, at least, in terms of a formal specification, which, whatever the interface, is the only "language" that Web services technology understands. If I am a high-ranking executive, I make it a point to have an administrative assistant who knows my behavior well enough to understand and/or anticipate what I want without my having to express it explicitly. In a position like that, if I had to be explicit about everything I wanted, I would be up a creek without a paddle! Not being able to say what you want is part of being human, but these days it seems to be a luxury for the rich and powerful!

Re: Web Services for Everyone Will Prove Challenging | correlate

Stephen Smoliar — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:31:07 -0000

Lou, I can give you a single data point on Franklin Covey tools, the one person I know who adopted them. He was a pretty awesome development geek, and I would not be surprised if he dreamed in Eclipse! I knew him for about a year and a half. He was an early adopter of the tablet PC and used Franklin Covey on his machine for all the time I knew him, but I stopped seeing him regularly at the end of 2005!

Re: How many webs are there?

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 05 May 2007 14:07:53 -0000

Many years ago Drew McDermott wrote a wonderful little essay entitled "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity." His basic argument was that most of the misunderstandings of what had been done in the name of "artificial intelligence" or "expert systems" could be attributed to the deceptive nature of those two sobriquets. Notwithstanding McDermott's cautionary lessons, the entire IT culture has been infected with this practice of deceptive naming (not to mention what McDermott called "wishful mnemonics"); and, as far as I am concerned, "Semantic Web" is the latest move in what I like to call "cheating at the language game."

Much as it pains me to praise Google, I think that one of the better reality checks on Semantic Web thinking came about a year ago in an exchange between Tim Berners-Lee (he who made the language game move) and Peter Norvig (Google Director of Search). This was reported at the time on CNET News.com. I wrote up my own comments in my

Yahoo 360° blog. Those comments are still there (hence the hyperlink). I just checked the link I installed there to the CNET site; and it is still "alive." Regarding Lou's "thumbnail" description, I prefer to think of the Semantic Web as a vision for getting more mileage out of XML (which could then impact the effectiveness of RSS); and my blog post illustrates this with the "standard diagram" of the underlying architecture for the Semantic Web.

My "bottom line" on this matter is that, as Habermas has observed, we all live in three "worlds," an objective world, a subjective world, and a social world. Norvig basically took Berners-Lee to task for living only in the objective world and assuming that everyone on the World Wide Web does the same, and I continue to support Norvig on this. However, in McDermott's spirit of coming up with more "honest names," I would say that the Semantic Web is just the latest attempt to succeed at the "ontological engineering" that was attempted (with limited success) by the Cyc project. This can keep you very busy but will not take you very far, simply because, once you get into the subjective world, you cannot have an ontology unless it is supported by a phenomenology! (I also believe that the social world has a phenomenology, but that is another debate.)

This probably all amounts to using a sledgehammer to drive home Lou's main point. It is not that the Web is "tangled" but that we keep finding ourselves victimized by deceptive nomenclature. What we need is more plain speaking. Unfortunately, plain speaking does not get academic papers published; nor does it make for particularly effective marketing strategies!

Re: Split-Screen Computer Use?

Stephen Smoliar — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:43:04 -0000

I hope there is a critical mass of readers who remember Terry Gilliam's future-technology vision in Brazil, based on really small monitors with really large magnifying glasses; I could not shake that image while reading the above report!

On a more serious note, back before I was a member of the community, Xerox PARC ran some experiments in what I heard John Seely Brown call "shoulder-to-shoulder software development." This involved two people sharing a single workstation. The screen was not split but could support any number of windows of any size and rectangular shape. This was supposed to be an experiment in collaborative work, but I do not recall any conclusive results coming out of the experiment. There was only one keyboard and mouse, meaning that, while the "driving" could be shared, there was only one "driver" at a time.

I suspect that Brown wanted this to be an experiment to demonstrate the "virtue of the periphery." The hypothesis was that, wherever your attention happened to be focused, you could be very good at detecting cues that something on the periphery might help you with your focal concern. (Beyond the domain of the screen, this involves things like overhearing something from a cubicle within earshot.) I definitely "believe in" this hypothesis, even if it his not yet been resolved through the discipline of scientific method; and I have plenty of personal anecdotes about that "virtue of the periphery." My question about sharing a workstation or a screen is whether that leads to constraining the scope of the periphery, in which case it becomes less "peripheral," so to speak. This strikes me as a case in which people have been asking "What can we do that's really cool?" when they should have been asking "What is the real problem that needs to be solved?"

Re: Still a major pain point…Knowledge Management

Stephen Smoliar — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:19:12 -0000

Over on my own blog I indulge myself by taking samples of text and unpacking them to figure out whether they make any sense and whether the sense they make is the one the author actually intended. Back in January I decided to do this for

CRM, my point being that, as far as the technology products were concerned, all three of the "component nouns";—"customer," "relationship,"; and "management"—had been (in bowdlerized form) fouled up beyond all recognition. By the time I came to the final noun, I had built up enough evidence to argue "that technology providers have no idea what they are managing or why they are managing it." This is as true for knowledge management as it is for CRM. The difference is that, now that knowledge management is on the down-side of the

Gartner hype curve, its failure to address the two questions Lou used to lead his post is now generally recognized!

To some extent is was a product of technology providers getting hung up on the word knowledge when they should have been worrying about talking about it in productive ways. Part (but hardly all) of the blame can be laid on Nonaka and Takeuchi, whose introductory chapter about "knowledge" is so shot through with holes that even a "gentleman's C" college freshman can find some of them! However, a more important problem probably resided with all the different researchers who saw knowledge management as an opportunity to promote a personal agenda, whether it involved better data bases, communities of practice, Socratic dialogue, Marxist emancipation, or Heideggerian phenomenology. At least, in the old joke, the elephant only had three blind men groping at it!

So, if we carve off all of this fat, is there any meat left on the bone?

One important fact that may still need recognition is that, for all of their

promotion, Google and Wikipedia are not "solutions to the knowledge problem" and are as much part of the fat as the more elevated disciplines I cited in the preceding paragraph. I tried to explore this observation back in February in my response to the announcement that the Middlebury College history department would not accept Wikipedia as an acceptable citation. The title of that post

was "Research

is not about the answers!;" and neither is knowledge management.

Let me try to reinforce this claim by going back to Lou's first question: What are people trying to solve? As I see it, every organization, whatever

its size, is a collection of people who know things. If we then take, as a premise, that the "business" of the organization is to satisfy one or more

goals, then the most important problem in managing the organization is to

conduct day-to-day operations in such a way that the people who know things are contributing to satisfying the goals. (I know that sounds simplistic, but that's what happens when you start carving off the fat!) The very phrase "knowledge management" disclosed the problem that this was not happening: The things that people were doing were not always leveraging what they knew; and the organization was paying for it with unsatisfied or poorly satisfied goals. Now I am too much of an anti-positivist to accept this as the whole story; but at least it provides a framework in which the broader story can be told.

One part of that broader story that what is missing is that whole question of "knowledge sharing," which became a focal point of knowledge management

technology and ultimately led many to ask whether or not Google (and/or

Wikipedia) was doing a better job. This is where positivism loses its

punch, because sharing is something that takes place among human agents and therefore belong in the social world, rather than the objective world. Personally, I subscribe to a motto coined by one of my former colleagues who now teaches philosophy at San Jose State: Knowledge cannot be shared, but it can be made sharable. It is not a question of whether or not knowledge is being "poured" into repositories such as databases or even Web pages crawled by search engines. It is a question of the social engagements that take place within the organization and the ways in which those engagement facilitate or impede the "flow" of knowledge. In other words it is all about "talk" (which can take place through digital, as well as physical, channels); and, if we read our Plato better than Nonaka and Takeuchi did, we discover very quickly that much of that talk is ultimately descriptive in nature. It is through such descriptive talk that the scope of who knows what "diffuses" (a favorite word in knowledge management circles) through the

organization; and often that descriptive talk is best reinforced in

contexts of demonstrably effective actions. In other words it's all

about both what you say and what you do!

At this point we can loop back to Lou's wrap up "KM solutions must" sentence, because I would argue that, once you couple people doing things that lead to satisfying goals with a social climate that encourages descriptive talk reinforced by demonstrably effective actions, you have a KM solution! I apologize if this was a long trip; but, to paraphrase the old saw, there

is no "royal road" to knowledge management. Now it is someone else's turn to talk (hopefully descriptively)!

Re: Amazon Web Services…not obvious but “clear” strategic synergies

Stephen Smoliar — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:47:56 -0000

Over on my own

blog I wrote up some comments on a recent BBC NEWS feature based on an interview with Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen has invested most of his cognitive ergs into developing guidelines for preparing readable and useful Web pages. The substance of the interview is that Nielsen fears that his ox is being gored by Web 2.0, whose sites he calls "glossy but useless." The BBC link is in my post. All visitors are welcome, as this aspect of Web 2.0 has not received that much attention.

Re: Amazon Web Services…not obvious but “clear” strategic synergies

Stephen Smoliar — Tue, 15 May 2007 14:07:39 -0000

In fairness to Nielson, none of us will ever know how much of the BBC interview with him actually made it to their Web page (unless he decides to speak up about it). From what I have read of his, my guess is that he elaborated on his points at greater length and pulled out examples from both sides of the coin. So it may have been a BBC decision to frame the article as an attack on Web 2.0.

Re: The Context of Search

Stephen Smoliar — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:21:34 -0000

I have to admit that the most interesting thing about this post was the revelation that Comcast has someone who "manages search." If

Jakob Nielsen is upset by the "glossy but useless" Web sites coming out of Web 2.0, I suspect that just about any set-top box would drive him apoplectic! I have now tried to "search" with my own Comcast box and with a friend's TiVo/DirectTV hookup. On the scale of my life experiences, this one ranked far below debugging assembly code on a PDP-8! My guess is that most Comcast customers do not even know that search is an option. (I do not think my friend knew she had it with her TiVo/DirectTV.)

None of this is meant to discredit Rudolph's recognition of the value of context, which is likely to be the biggest challenge for the future of the living room, so to speak. Several years ago I was told that Amazon's biggest search problem was in their Music "store," because too many search requests would yield either way too much (mostly of the wrong thing) or nothing at all. This is sort of the "24" problem blown up to an even larger scale.

Context is as much social as it is "semantic," however. Graham Button talks about the problems of introducing a new technology in a workplace; and the problem that most concerns him is that any work setting has its own "immutable work practices" (his words) before the new technology is introduced. If the learning curve for the new technology does not take those immutable practices into account, the new technology many lower productivity rather than raise it.

So it is with home entertainment. However poorly it may have been designed, the Comcast box has now been around so long that a whole barrage of immutable practices have formed around it. Those practices would drive Nielsen (and probably most of your readers) crazy; but, like it or not, they are now part of the context of the consumer market. The path to the "Future of Media" will have to take them into account, which means that it will probably have any number of twists and turns that those of us with "technological common sense" cannot possibly anticipate!

Re: Is there such a thing as too much connectivity?

Stephen Smoliar — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:15:27 -0000

Your closing example reminds me of my first laptop. I bought it when we were living in Singapore. It was an Apple PowerBook 170, which I had purchased when I realized that it had enough power and space to run Apple Common Lisp. I took it along on a vacation we spent at a resort on Borneo, and my wife probably still has a photograph of me working on Lisp code at a poolside table! This was a great object of derision for her until, several years later, we were both attending the same conference in Hawaii; and she was preparing her PowerPoint slides on her PowerBook! More recently, she wanted to shop at a particular gourmet-food outlet along the road during another vacation trip. It turned out that the place had a coffee bar with WiFi, so I pulled out my ThinkPad and took care of mail and RSS news while she did her shopping. That kind of connectivity can sometimes make for a happy marriage!

Re: Is there such a thing as too much connectivity?

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:55:44 -0000

I remember hearing Jerry Yang talk at a Cable TV convention. He described going to a restaurant in South Korea. At the next table were about half a dozen guys, all of whom were watching television on their cell phones! It makes you wonder why they bothers to go out to eat together!

Re: Customers Do Not Always Know

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:29:21 -0000

Back when we were discussing knowledge management, I cited a post from my own blog entitled "Research is not about the answers!" and asserted that the same held for knowledge management:

http://correlate.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/still-a-major-pain-pointknowledge-management/

In the frame of this post, the claim can be modified to the assertion that customer engagement is not about questions and answers. It requires richer communication over a longer scale of time that embraces the entire development process and continues after delivery. A key element of the richness involves OBSERVATION, as well as verbal exchanges, which is the cornerstone of workplace anthropology.

My point is that asking the customer what the pain point is will probably be no more fruitful than asking what the customer wants. Because they have different work-situations, it is inevitable that customer and provider have different world-views; and those differences are likely to confound even the simplest verbal exchanges. More progress is likely to come if the provider embeds in the customers operations long enough to start hypothesizing about pain points. Those hypotheses can initiate a more informative conversation between provider and customer with greater promise of a satisfied customer. The reason this strategy is not very popular is that it is usually difficult to estimate how long it will take to arrive at those hypotheses that enable this particular development methodology. However, with appropriate prototyping tools, one may be able to take an incremental approach, giving the customer the opportunity to critique "samples" that basically embody "candidate hypotheses."

Note that none of these ideas are new. You can find them in the old book about decision support systems by Keen and Scott Morton. The book also provides several case studies, which, while old, remain quite informative.

Re: The “Echo Chamber” Reverb

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 26 May 2007 13:28:18 -0000

Forget about Twitter! Does the average person care about the Web? (If he's your uncle, Lou, he probably is not "average!") Last March I put up a post about the National Technology Scan:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/03/rest-of-country.html

Reuters ran their report under the headline: "Many Americans see little point to Web: survey." My post includes a link to the Reuters story; and it is still there (I just checked). Even in a world that changes at "Internet speed," I suspect that most of the observations I reported have not yet gone obsolete!

Re: The “Echo Chamber” Reverb

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:54:15 -0000

Lou, I was glad to see you broaden the conversation to that more general question of the fulfilled life, because you reminded me of one of my other favorite themes. Let me pose the proposition that the echo is nothing more than a cheap (and thoroughly ineffective) imitation of self-reflection, that process by which life becomes worth living through our capacity for examining it (twisting around the words the Plato put into Socrates' mouth). (In this respect I am fascinated by that Greek culture that could spin a myth around the fates of Echo and Narcissus and the sad result of their encounter.) I first tried to explore this in a blog post that I titled "A World Without Reflection:"

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-without-reflection.html

You have reminded me that what is actually happening is that we have rejected the "mirror of the mind" in favor of the "mirror of the image."

Re: There’s Contextual, And There’s Exact

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 13:31:32 -0000

Lou, if that immediacy of placement of the AHS is supposed to be a value-added service, I have to say that it is a pretty dumb one! After all, it seems to have been cued by your writing a "fan" letter for the company; so you are the last person in cyberspace that needs to be told about them! The ad should have appeared along with the message your BROTHER RECEIVED, but do you know how your brother reads his mail? (Mine only uses his Gmail account when he cannot get to his Comcast account.) From my point of view, your experience is right up there with the Amazon.com recommendations I get for books I already own (some of which I have written about in very derogatory language)!

I've given similar thought to how Google handles ad placement on my blog:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-logic-of-system.html

At the end of the day, however, I do not think it does me much good to worry about it. When privacy is necessary, I either get behind a firewall (for my business life) or refrain from writing (for my personal life).

I generally agree with Peter that, when it comes to who sets the priorities, the shareholders tend to trump all other factors. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see that, in Google's case, China may have trumped at least one faction of shareholders:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/05/things-are-still-black-and-white-at.html

As users we have to look out for ourselves and, as you put it, "beware!"

Re: Knowledge is the important word in KM

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:02:55 -0000

Lou, as you know from the last time we went down this road, I am very skeptical, if not downright jaundiced, about the way we use the word "knowledge."

http://correlate.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/still-a-major-pain-pointknowledge-management/#comments

My opinion has not changed much since your last post; but, in the interest of my positive thinking, I would like to offer a "modest proposal" for an alternative strategy. The basic idea is this: Since the proper domain of management is concerned with what people DO, we should pay more attention to the ACTIONS that take place in any work situation and then direct our inquiry towards how those actions come to occur. To a great extent our actions ARE informed by what we know; but because, like the fox, we know a great many things, we cannot fall back on a vague concept like "knowledge" to satisfy our inquiry. Rather, in the tradition of Max Weber, we need to take a more analytic approach to the actions themselves and then, in a parallel tradition of Kenneth Burke, we need to take an equally analytic approach to the MOTIVES that drive those actions.

I fear that the concept of knowledge management is predicated on the myth that organizations will function more effectively (and, hopefully, more efficiently in the bargain) if they have better access to better knowledge. I believe this myth needs to be blasted away by the proposition that organizations can only function more effectively when they have more effective managers (and anyone who has given a serious reading to the Nonaka-Takeuichi KNOWLEDGE-CREATING COMPANY book knows full well that the authors support this, particularly in the case they make for the value of middle management). From this point of view, we need managers who are better at "reading" the actions that take place "on their watch" and making tactical (and sometimes strategic) decisions based on those "readings."

Re: Knowledge is the important word in KM

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:32:37 -0000

Lou, I suspect our major disagreement is over comfort with using the word "knowledge" at all! Having learned from Socrates (via Plato) what an elusive concept it is, I try to avoid it when there is a risk of confusing rather than enlightening. Nevertheless, I am quite fond of a motto coined by my former colleague (and friend) Noam Cook to the effect that "knowledge cannot be shared but can be made sharable." So another take on my point is that an effective manager knows how to institute those structures and processes through which knowledge "can be made sharable." This is not necessarily a matter of intuition; but, taking a page from Isaiah Berlin's analysis of political judgment, it probably requires a cognitive skill that is as good at "reading situations" as it is at reading texts!

Re: Knowledge is the important word in KM

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 13:22:32 -0000

Lou, you are beginning to home in on a point that Richard Daft and Karl Weick tried to make in their 1984 ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT REVIEW paper entitle, "Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems." Unfortunately, their characterization of interpretation was (for my money at least) too heavy on the positivist side (which is to say too eager to abstract away the human aspects of the people who constitute an organization). For several years I have been preaching that effective management now requires a strong appreciation for the insights of hermeneutics, which, over the last two centuries, had progressed quite a ways from the deciphering of obscure Biblical texts. Indeed, Paul Ricoeur even made a good case for the fact that hermeneutic analysis could be applied to actions (including, of course, communicative actions), as well as texts. Since this approach tends to reflect back on the conception of the Semantic Web (and how realistic that conception is), you might want to take a look at a post from my older Yahoo! 360 blog at:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Mff23hgidqmHGqbcv.lfskakEtS6qLVHUEMFUG4-?cq=1&p=7

Re: Demise of Books? Not for a while.

Stephen Smoliar — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:21:19 -0000

Lou, I have to side with Cliff on this one, but for a reason that neither of you have raised. My fear about quality being jeopardized has less to do with diversity being endangered and more to do with the likely deterioration of the quality of editing, if not the very practice of editing. I am happy to see that mine is not the only voice in the blogosphere addressing this topic, but that does not prevent my using my own stuff as a point of departure!

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/05/on-practice-of-editing.html

The fact is that behind every great author (fiction or non-fiction) is (at least) one great editor, who is just as passionate about the text as the author is. I do not see these guys being covered by that "'long tail' dynamic."

Also, I think you have to be very careful with your bricks-and-mortar statistics. I am less interested in the macrostructure of bookstore population and demography and more interested in the "microstructure of products" the flow in (from distributors) and out (to customers or back to distributors) of those shops. Of the examples you cited, Borders is that only one that seems to get beyond "same old stuff" in what they put on their shelves; and, even then, they seldom have stuff I want to read. Also, if you want to look at the shops rather than the books, you also need to look at the population and demography of the INDEPENDENT booksellers. It used to be that just about any walk I took in San Francisco would take me past an independent bookstore where I could linger and browse for a bit. These days, the main thing I see is signs advertising awesome discounts for everything-must-go sales!

Re: Demise of Books? Not for a while.

Stephen Smoliar — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:03:05 -0000

Lou, the question of the quality of editing probably has to do with the extent to which the task of editing is defined by an institutional context. Fifteen years ago I had cultivated a rather broad skill set for reviewing book reviews submitted for publication in the professional journal ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I do not think that skill set would serve me very well at Harper-Collins, not to mention THE WALL STREET JOURNAL! (The argument behind that proposition can be found, at least in part, in the hyperlink I provided with my last comment!) Of course I could always set myself up as the editor of my own institution (i.e. publishing house); but even that requires having some kind of context (possible of your own making). Ferlinghetti did this with City Lights Press; but, of course, he had the context of the whole Beat Generation!

As to your second point, I was just responding to your making a case for the state of the book industry on the basis of what I called the macrostructure of bookstores! You seem to be arguing that the paradigm for the production of short films can also apply to books. That may be; but, if I make something on a shoestring (or even a maxed-out credit card), and then post it for sale on Amazon.com (which a friend of mine did for a book he wrote and I assume can also be done for audio and video podcasts), does this constitute a paradigm shift for the book/video industry or a rejection of it in favor of a new approach to commerce? This may be a verbose way of saying that any debate about the "end of the book" should begin not with the question "What book?" but with the question "What end?"!

Re: Knowledge is the important word in KM

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 13:49:13 -0000

[flame alert]

I dare say that the skepticism I voiced in Comment 1 just keeps getting reinforced as the Comments accumulate! I remember back in 1995 when my Wells Fargo bank teller (I am almost certain that his position had some other label) wanted to talk about "relationships." It became almost immediately apparent that he could not get beyond utter claptrap (not that different from those who now read from the CRM-based scripts). He did not last very long; and, for that matter, it did not take much for me to be persuaded to take my business to another bank! We really are not going to get very far if we persist in playing games with nouns that we do not understand very well, since those nouns only distract us from getting on with our business. We certainly are not going to solve problems of ineffective management by throwing philosophical nouns at them!

Unfortunately, the IT concept of data has engendered a fixation with the static that has debilitated our capacities for both thinking and acting. We only seem to be able to deal with "specific states" that we can hold before us an examine. Even the "business process" is an impoverished abstraction that tries to reduce the complexities of work practices to "specific states." (Needless to say, the idea that knowledge had anything to do with specific states was shot full of holes back when Plato documented how Socrates would needle his students; and the holes are still there, probably bigger than ever!)

Effective managers know better than to try to freeze the world into a state they can examine. (Isaiah Berlin made this point very nicely when he wrote about Bismarck.) It may be that IT has ultimately sapped managers of the skills they once had for dealing with the flow of activities of business WHILE THEY ARE FLOWING; and we can now witness the consequences of this "addiction to the static" just about every day. Unfortunately, our perceptions have become so warped that we barely recognize these consequences, let alone summon the will to do anything about them!

[flame off]

Re: Natural Language Search & Powerset

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:00:48 -0000

Lou, I think you are right to address the question of switching costs, which are related to what the workplace anthropologists call "immutable work practices." Remember the days of the jokes about expert systems being solutions in search of problems? There is no question that there are problems that can only be solved by "deep reading." My guess is that you could rattle off a few of those problems from your own experiences. I might also guess that, for at least some of those problems, you could tell stories about the work practices that emerged for dealing with them and how effective those practices turned out to be. So the real question will not have to do with finding answers but with whether the linguistic technology behind Powerset is (significantly?) more effective than practices that are already in place.

Re: Knowledge is the important word in KM

Stephen Smoliar — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:04:02 -0000

From the perspective of finance, I once proposed to a friend of mine at Accenture that the sort of snapshots you describe are analogous to what is called "taking the history of the patient" in medicine. I then proposed that I could prepare a talk for him on the value of using the practice of health maintenance (disregarding the contamination of that process by business interests) as a better metaphor for business operations than curing disease. The former is actually more consistent with artifacts such as those quarterly reports; but my friend warned that such an analogy might be too "radical" for his colleagues!

My point is that, in health maintenance, we take snapshots as a way to think about the TRANSITIONS between the states. More specifically, we want to know if the "flow of body processes" is "running smoothly" or if there are indications of "malfunctioning behavior." My guess is that, in your work in finance, you do (did?) this without thinking consciously about it; but I fear that the real danger of "IT thinking" is that we end up abstracting away some of the most important parts of what we do unconsciously in the interests of system implementation. This is the basis for my Cassandra-like passions; and I seem to be reminded of the dangers I fear just about every day in at least one of my business interactions!

Re: iPhone leads to RSS homogeneity recognition

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:08:20 -0000

Lou, for all the RSS chatter about the iPhone, what has interested me the most is how little has been written about how good a TELEPHONE it is! Presumably, by now you have seen some account of Meredith Vieira failing to receive a call from Matt Lauer with the iPhone given to her for demonstration purposes on the TODAY show:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/06/friendly-to-which-users.html

There has also been no mention of the whole legacy of touch-sensitive interfaces whose displays (and, therefore, functionalities) keep changing. This has been researched all the way back to the days when Bell Labs was a research powerhouse, and they were looking for ways to make telephone operators (remember them?) more productive. Think about it, though: How often do you "fly" your hand-held device by touch, without giving it very much focal visual attention. I suspect that all of us are now very good at feeling our way around standard telephone keypads; and I bet there is a whole culture that can do the same with Blackberry-style "mini-typewriters." Now imagine what it would be like if your sense of touch were take away from you. My guess is that you would not be a very happy camper!

Re: Virtually Within “Column Inches” of the Social Network

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:00:11 -0000

I have to pick a linguistic nit here. "Horsepower" is far from a "quaint term." Rather, it became a STANDARD OF MEASUREMENT (just like "foot"); and it is still a rather popular standard for consumers purchasing engines (for cars, lawn mowers, boats, etc.). If it has lost any of that popularity, it is through an increased attention to fuel efficiency in place of power.

Nevertheless, having acquired most of my writing chops through print journalism, I was as surprised as you were embarrassed over your unfamiliarity with the concept of the column inch. In fairness, though, this has never been a standard, since there has never been a standard column width. (I think it is still the case that THE WALL STREET JOURNAL uses different column widths for different content.)

Before I forget, on the subject of print-based metrics, do you know the term "above the fold?"

Simon's REAL question, however, was: How much attention is the JOURNAL paying to Second Life? This is not the question of how many stories (news and features) have been written but of how much of all that text actually made it to the printed page. Now that the printed page no longer constrains what appears on a newspaper's Web site, the column inch is a far more obsolete metric than horsepower. The problem is that we do not yet have an alternative metric, which would involve not only which Web pages get "hit" but also how much they are "read" once they have been hit. There are a variety of ways to collect this kind of behavioral data, but I am not sure that INTERPRETING the data has progressed beyond groping hypotheses. It is definitely an area that deserves research; but I have my doubts that the "new" Dow Jones will be particularly interested in that kind of research!

Re: Virtually Within “Column Inches” of the Social Network

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:58:31 -0000

Lou, having established contact, let's put the terminology aside. Your encounter with Simon raised two fundamental questions that we remain ill-equipped to answer:

1. For all the techniques we have for gathering data about "eyes on the Internet" (to invoke the language of the Online Publishers' Association), can we gather data about where those eyes are directing their attention; and, if so, how?

2. Assuming we can gather the data, how to we interpret it?

I assume you remember the Davenport-Beck ATTENTION ECONOMY book. You may even remember that it was physically designed to tweak the usual habits of an "attentive reader." Unfortunately, while it certainly made for an interesting reading experience, I have not found it the best source for "lessons learned." Also, it has that subtitle: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW CURRENCY OF BUSINESS. This implies that attention is some sort of medium of exchange, following in the footsteps of Herb Simon's adage that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention," meaning that it all comes down to the exchange of a scarce resource. This makes attention too much like an artifact; and I think we are better off thinking of it as a process (but probably not what Csikszentmihalyi calls a "flow experience"). This means that both gathering and interpreting data have to do with dynamic, rather than static, properties (just as human life and behavior are all about dynamic properties). This is particularly difficult to grok for business school graduates trained in counting beans (I really do not know your educational background, honest!); and my own humble opinion is that those educated in both history and literature have better understanding of such dynamics than those with more technical specializations.

What does this mean for the future of reporting the news? Well, according to Neustadt and May, two first-rate historians who have studied presidential decision-making in times of crisis, there are two are key questions you ask about the dynamic properties surrounding any situation (particularly a bad one):

1. How did we get into this mess?

2. If we respond by taking action A, what will the consequences be?

There is a lot of good journalistic talent out there for dealing with the first question (for reasons I shall not detail here). However, the second question belongs on the turf of the policy makers. Still, if you want public support for a policy, informing the public of how the context of the present emerged from events of the past increases public awareness of both the need for action and the paths to consequences. This is the sort of "public trust" that newspapers once held; and perhaps that trust can be recovered as more and more journalistic activity takes place in the digital domain.

Re: Meritocracy of Ideas OR the Persona Quotient?

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:02:42 -0000

Lou, I certainly believe in the Meritocracy of Ideas; but I have no idea if I am a representative sample! There are two predominant ways I discover blog posts:

- Through a Google search, which is usually highly specific. If the post turns out to be interesting as well as useful for my search, I then consider subscribing to it. (I think this is how my own blog was "discovered" by the Communications Department for the San Francisco Symphony, by the way; and that was enough to get me free tickets when they instituted a "Bloggers' Night" earlier in the summer!)
- Through a pointer from another blog to which I have subscribed, usually because it provides a position that either supports or opposed a point the blogger is making.

Note that neither of these has anything to do with a Persona Quotient. If I use the PQ at all, it is almost always negatively! Thus, to give an example close to your home, I tend to be skeptical about the musings of "Silicon Valley heros," so to speak, probably because I have already been (overly?) saturated with those musings by listening to them in panel discussions! The people I most WANT to read on the basis of personal reputation (on just about any topic) are writers I discovered through THE NEW YORK REVIEW; and they don't blog!

Re: couple of things (that you already know)

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:39:48 -0000

Lou, have you tried running the Google Reader search through its paces yet? At first I was very glad to see that I could restrict the search to a single subscription (like "Comments for correlate"). Then I noticed that only a few of my subscriptions were on the pull-down menu! What I found most curious was that "Reuters: International" was on the menu but "Reuters: National" was not! It looks like they peeled off the first nine (interesting number) items on my subscription list and ignored the rest! Hopefully, an "Advanced Search" button will come along soon, since I really do not want to deal with an enormous pull-down menu!

Re: couple of things (that you already know)

Stephen Smoliar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:33:16 -0000

Lou, after reading about your Mac experience, I decided to try Google Reader on IE. (Firefox is my browser of choice.) Sure enough, I get a full (scrolled) drop-down menu! On the other hand I can search by folder on Firefox, which is generally what I shall want to do anyway!

Re: Mozilla Firefox Goes 'Organic'

Stephen Smoliar — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:29:14 -0000

Firefox is definitely my browser of choice, but I am extremely frustrated with how it does printing. In the spirit of the name of this blog, if "green" means doing everything possible to discourage you from wasting paper, then the adjective is being properly applied! However, when I need to print, I have discovered that the best way to avoid wasting paper is to go over to IE! Make of this data point what you will!

Re: The New American Hysteria

Stephen Smoliar — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:55:42 -0000

I found myself going back to some of the writings of Hans Magnus Enzenberger after reading Tomasky's piece. There is this whole issue of a "consciousness industry," concerned more with the ability to manipulate public opinion rather than any specific opinions being induced. This has been part of our culture since the rise of television advertising (now being examined in MAD MEN) and rapidly moved into the domain of both politics and the practice of governance itself. It seems as if general rage has become the stock-in-trade of this consciousness industry, regardless of where the rage is directed. Presumably this is what "big business and the ultra-rich" (as cited by jamesls) want, since they are the ones who control the practices of this consciousness industry. What they will do with it remains to be seen. I have been trying to document my own thoughts at <http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2009/10/...>.