Clunky Flow

I want, I want, I want…

I want Paul Campbell to talk to Nick Kelly

Nick Kelly, formerly of The Fat Lady Sings, won a Clio Award (the advertising equivalent of an Oscar) for his Guinness spot “Tom Crean” in 2003. Nick also wrote the Guinness “Quarrel” advertisement which featured the late Mic Christopher’s posthumous hit “Heyday”.

Nick also made the prizewinning short ‘Why the Irish dance that way’.

So then I want them to contact Dublin Girl, Sophie Merry a.k.a Groovy Dancing Girl (Irish and living in Dublin)

I want them to make a brilliant new ad for Guinness that will reveal the legendary ‘Anticipation’ as little more than a triumph of choppy editing.

And I want them to do it now…

Press play to see why…this made the No. 3 spot of the “Top 10 virals of 2007″

Remixed to Benny Hill theme tune (perfect fit)

Inspiring the kids :)

“Shone like an arclight…” Ah memories…

Guinness Anticipation

I came across the GroovyDancingGirl via StumbleUpon a couple of months ago. I idly thought to myself this could make a great new ad for Guinness. But it wasn’t until today that I learnt that the groovy dancing girl is Irish (via Conn Ó Muíneacháin) And it wasn’t until last night at the first techludd event that I discovered that Paul Campbell knows Nick Kelly. Make it happen guys.

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Born of Fire

When Techludd was first mooted, some hotly demanded it stop before it starts. And protested that the scene is already well enough served. That another event would simply dilute the value of existing events.

All tough statements. Difficult to qualify. That is, unless you have some special way to predict the future.

Nature will find a way

Others countered that the mark of a vibrant scene is to see lots of events launched and lots of events failing, and letting the market pick and choose.

If they need it, they will come

With that, the planning for the event went ahead. A sort of “if they need it they will come” attitude. But it was more than that. It was extended to be more embracing. If they need it. They will tell us what they need. When they come.

When and where

So that’s it. Techludd is on tomorrow night from 7 PM at The Odessa Club • 13 Dame Court • Dublin 2 • 01-6703080. Open to all. If you are coming have a look at who else will be there (78 signups at last count).

Predicting success

Wondering if it will be a success? Enjoying the anticipation? Well, I couldn’t wait myself so I thought I’d join in on the prediction game. Now I can’t disclose whether I got my information from animal sacrifice or from reading the RSS feeds but I can say it is usual for the birth of something great to be preceded by some world-shaking events. Take a look around you and see what’s happening. Now judge for yourself.

All things considered. You are bound to conclude. If you are not there tomorrow. With the other 78 people. You’ll have missed one hell of an event.

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From Paddy’s Valley 2007. This clip below was taken down in San Jose where we went to see Gunther von Hagens’ Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies,. REal human bodies = spell-binding blend of the fascination and horror. If you get a chance…its a must. (Photography was forbidden)

Afterwards we went upstairs into the Tech Museum of Innovation. Lots of fun to be had. You can stand on a platform that simulates earthquakes of different intensities (the ground jumps a HELL of a lot more than you would have thought) and insert jellyfish DNA into bacteria to make them flouresce.

The clip below is of a simple robot arm that picks up blocks to spell out a word of your choice. I like the echoes of Winograd’s SHRDLU natural language program here.
But I especially enjoy the way a small child beside us reads out “Paddy’s Valley”. Its a nice reminder of how technology has so much more to say when it ignites that human connection.

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Louis Gray’s post “Can we talk about twitter for a second” is zooming up techmeme as I write.

Louis concludes that Twitter is

truly a noisy, ineffective tool for typical communication.

He’s fully right. And because of that. He is also fully wrong. In truth, Twitter is also a truly noisy highly effective tool for ATYPICAL communication.

Think of it this way, you go to a conference and the formal talks in the main hall are good enough. But the truth is you could have stayed home and watched them online. Nevertheless, you come back from this conference buzzing because of the informal chats and random contacts you picked up in the side halls.

In this respect, the twittersphere is the sidehall of the blogosphere.

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The move is on…

Robin Blandford has mostly lost interest in Facebook. Pat Phelan has left. And James Corbett closed down his account a long time ago (scroll to comments).

So what you might say? Well, i’ll hand you over to the man himself Clay Shirky from here on in. Here’s an excerpt from his (and I’ll never tire of saying this) absolutely-must-read classic-of-classics “A group is it own worst enemy”

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’d rather be someplace else. I’d rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.” Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave. You make a decision “I don’t like this.” If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.

You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

The question now is how long until there is no life left at the Facebook party but that virtually represented by a bunch killer zombies and blood-sucking vampires.

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Bit of a shaky camera phone job on this one but the sound is not bad.

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A modern re-working of the children’s classic:

Some years ago, there was a merchant prince who was riding the crest of the kingdom’s latest social networking craze.

The one problem was that his network had grown up to have the same user-privacy issues that plagued his forerunners.

One day he heard from two swindlers who told him that they could make the finest privacy controls the world had ever seen. These controls, they said, would not only be highly granular but also extremely easy to use. And, as if that wasn’t enough, these controls had a special magical quality in that their value was invisible to anyone who was either stupid, careless, lazy or ill-informed.

Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the value of these new controls, our young prince first sent two of his trusted men to make evaluations. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see any meaningful value for the users and so praised them.

The prince and his trusted advisers then announced that these new controls solved the issues of privacy for all except those too stupid to recognize this or too lazy and careless to be beyond help.

The prince and his advisers went on to promote the new controls all over town, never giving into their personal reservations that the new controls were tiresome to use and kinda icky too in the way they expected you to define and distinguish between your friends. In fact they didn’t actually really use them themselves but didn’t say so because they were afraid that the other people would think them stupid.

Of course, many of the prominent townspeople went out of their way to lavish wild praise on the magnificent controls introduced by the prince, while denying the fact that they knew them to be unwieldy and impracticable too, until some people started saying what was on everyone’s mind:

“Facebook doesn’t give a hoot about your privacy!”

This got whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shrugging their shoulders and starting to slip away. The prince noticed this and couldn’t help feeling the game was up, but held his head high and continued with his procession, thinking ‘what else am I to do’.

And that, dear readers, is the story of one of the ways the overwhelming majority of Facebook users, despite individually recognizing the absurdity of the entire scenario continue to engage with a service they themselves feel has had its day.

[Breaking news...And with neat timing, this just in from Pat Phelan on twitter explaining why he has retired from facebook and Robin Blandford too... ]

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You work on something. Really hard. Mostly sweating away in isolation. Then you meet some dude (Elduderino, in fact. How apt!). You tell him a little bit about your idea. And BAM! He says “Oh its like that thing..ehm..The Original Social Network..I’ll send you a link”

Just like that. You get that sinking feeling. You check it out. And its your vision perfectly realised. But by someone else.

The original social network: “The first ever truly social network.”

Ironically, launched while I was hob-nobbing it in Silicon Valley, dreaming big dreams.

Well done guys. 

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J.P. Rangaswami explores the notion of applying ideas from the banking system to the problems of identity and trust in the information economy over at his confusedofcalcutta blog.
Using those thoughts as a starting point, the following is a riff that just got way too long for the comments section:

If the question was: “How do we most efficiently handle the information economy?” The answer may well be found by looking at the banking institutions that evolved to serve the cash economy. And its an excellent idea to look for efficient services for the information economy by taking inspiration from those services that increase liquidity and reduce friction in the cash economy.

This search begins with the fundamental question: So how do banks work? Well, you don’t have to have had an account in Northern Rock or in a US subprime lender to know that banks are all/nothing depending on the presence/absence of trust.

But its also worth stepping outside the normal stomping grounds visited when discussing trust and noting that trust emerges naturally in two distinct ways in human society. 1) Through contract ritual 2) Through friendship/gifting rituals. Every tribe and culture that ever existed engages in both. And both are necessary to satisfy our economic needs. Its worth repeating that and empasising the keywords. Both are needed to satisfy our economic needs. The role of frienship/gifting rituals in meeting our economic needs is often overlooked not because of its lack of importance but because we are hard-wired to have a blind eye to its importance.

Bear with me while I explain what I mean by this point. We don’t intuitively understand the mechanics of friendship/gifting rituals because evolution/Mother Nature/God has hard-wired us to have a blind eye to the mechanics of these rituals. Because Mother Nature doesn’t want us to be too calculating in all our actions. Because she knows that a lot of the beneficial things we could do, we wouldn’t do, if we were to stand back an analyse them coldly. Having kids, for example. Or risking ourselves in even a small way to rescue someone else in trouble. Both these examples parallel friendship/gifting rituals…ie where you are giving of yourself with no explicit contractual expectation of getting a return.

Think of finding yourself in a position of being able to rescue another person. Now, move on and think of yourself in the position of being able to rescue a bank on the verge of collapse.

The banking system is a great example of the contractual ritual formalised and scaled-up so that it operates with great efficiency for the benefit of the market and all its participants. As solid as a banking system might look as a central part of society it is of course highly vulnerable and it could collapse overnight. But the threat of collapse is mitigated by a form of the friendship/gifting ritual rather than the contractual ritual that kicks into the action when the system come under threat. For example, when a major bank collapses it causes a scare and a run on other banks. The governments intervenes on behalf of its citizens and will sink all the financial and political power it can muster to rescue the banking system for wholesale implosion.

As such the entire banking system is underwritten in trust not by a contractual guarantees but confident expectation that a rescue is likely to be there when it is needed, whether or not the banking system is truly deserving or not. Which is just another way of describing a friendship contract.

Thus, although we are generally blind to it, the fact remains that friendship/gifting contract is the foundation for the contractual contracts upon which the banking business is operated. Banking systems could not exist without it. Banking systems would repeatedly collapse without it.

If you wish to explore the hidden mechanics and processes of gifting/frienship economies that underlie our contract-based economies and how they are used to create bonds of trust it is worth taking a look at these analyses in wikipedia as a starting point.

Koha

Moka

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Damien Mulley updates us with “Google kills Jaiku…another dodgeball it seems”.

This set me to thinking again about the marked differences between being acquired by Google and being acquired by Yahoo!

I mean, if Jaiku is to be condemned to the same fate as Dodgeball, it’s a crying shame. If I had been part of either Dodgeball or Jaiku and was acquired by Google I’m sure I’d be extremely pleased. At first. But I can’t help feeling I’d also feel a bit hollowed out as the reality of what I’d achieved got slowly diluted into “…oh yeah..he’s one of the guys who had a social app that was cool for 15 minutes back in the day… what was it called? baiku or bodgeball or something..anyway that was a long time ago…couldn’t really say what he’s been involved with since..”

I mean, I assume most of us are doing what we do because we have a vision and a burning desire to make meaning with that vision. In most cases its probably a vision so compelling it won’t go away. Maybe even a vision that exhausts us if we try to ignore it.
The kind of vision that drives the creation of great services like Dodgeball and Jaiku. The same vision-powered energy that lit up the room whenever Jyri from Jaiku took centre stage. The same vision-powered energy that you can see everyday if you care to look at the Irish startup scene. Its the energy that unites us, what draws us together, its what makes things happen. Its the essence of what we are about. Its the one thing we have in common.

That’s why I say its a crying shame to see that kind of vision smothered and extinguished. What’s that about? I mean if the Dodgeball or the Jaiku guys wanted to be subsumed into a large corporation. A world where they would lose any sense of their own identity, vision, and drive. A world where they could lose their ability to make meaning and contribute to the world in their own unique way.

If they had wanted to lose all that, I am sure they would have aimed at careers as middle-ranking civil servants, corporate lawyers or accountants or some such. I doubt that’s what they wanted. But its what they got. And all they could do is watch as their unique contributions to the world were subsumed, smothered and quietly killed off by their new partners. Personally, watching that process from this remove makes me feel pretty bummed out. I can barely imagine how it must feel for those guys. As I say a crying shame.

Now compare that experience of acquisition by Google with that of acquistion by Yahoo! From what we saw on Paddy’s Valley with Yahoo! they have policy of keeping the original brand alive and maintaining a strong link between the acquired talent and the original brand. During our visit to Yahoo! Brickhouse, Salim Ismail roped in Jumpcut entrepreneur and co-founder Mike Folgner. Mike is still the Jumpcut guy and also leads Yahoo! Video and came over to talk to us all about his continuing involvement with Jumpcut and Yahoo!Video as a whole. Noticeably, Mike was introduced as Jumpcut entrepreneur first and leader of Yahoo!Video second. And noticeably Jumpcut still maintains it own brand and presence with a barely noticeable ” a yahoo! service” discreetly tucked away where you might never see it.

And this wasn’t just special treatment for one guy on the day. This is policy across the business. I know because a couple of days later when we were in Yahoo! Sunnyvale I refered to Dodgeball when asking one of the main acquistions guys about their policy and the likely fate of acquisitions after the jump. He was keen to emphasise that they enter a process to learn as much as possible from the entrepreneur about their vision for the project so that they can work out a mutually satisfying game plan going forward. This fitted with what we witnessed wrt Jumpcut and appears to bear out across many of the companies acquired by Yahoo!

Which all make me think that if Google and Yahoo! got into a bidding war for the wholesale acquisition of something I was doing*. I’d be strongly inclined to favour Yahoo!**

* Of course, it goes without saying, that the services to come out of the RelevantM stable will be built to become great companies in their own right and will never be built with a view to being acquired (cough)

** And of course, the above conclusions have nothing to do with the fact that Salim Ismail of Yahoo! Brickhouse is totally ***king sound and a good man to go on the beer with - Note for foreign readers (says he aspiring to have one): ‘a good man to go on the beer with’ is an Irish colloquilism reserved to connote someone held in especially high esteem. Not be confused with the more common or garden ‘a good man to have a beer with’

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