Somewhere, possibly in Cinnamon Streets, Bruno Schulz writes of the silvery imprint of the footsteps of angels. A couple of nights ago, I was sitting at home after a long dinner and nice wine, watching the lights on my wireless router flickering as people sent me things. The impersonality of the transport of stuff online still frustrates me as strongly as it did years ago. Indications of passage, but absence of presence. Of course there is now a much wider range of social media applications — Instant Messaging, the blogosphere — than when I was first writing about this, but with the precepts of In Your Face systems in mind, it still seems a shame that all transactions unless specifically anonymised don’t leave at least some silvery footsteps in their wake — an IP address in your weblog isn’t the same as knowing who was at the keyboard browsing. Lost networks of chance interconnections.

In many businesses, particularly creative businesses, where everyone is focussed on client services, attention is the most difficult resource to manage. Successful knowledge management requires tricks like consensual surveillance to gather and maintain valuable information in the moment. Getting valuable information in front of people when they need it is equally challenging. From our experience, I propose that just as What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) has become the dominant paradigm for document production, the interface requirement for systems which support social networks and communities of practice should be In Your Face (IYF).

IYF systems always loop back into the social network within which information, tacit or explicit, has value as knowledge, rather than simply presenting ‘dry facts’ stored in a monolithic web-based system requiring time and effort to update or access, with further effort required to put that information to a use in the real world of social interaction.

IYF systems are layered, making a clear distinction between presentation-neutral backends — SQL databases, XML repositories — and diverse delivery mechanisms which people already perceive as having a social function — such as Instant Messaging and email. There is no point having valuable knowledge tucked away in a database if the only way into it involves many mouse-clicks and a shift of modalities away from where people’s attention is already focussed. Build access into systems which are always in front of users, and which facilitate communication — in creative businesses, value comes from injecting knowledge tactically into social interactions: get that knowledge out to people in a form where it can be quickly shared and enable extant communities of practice, be they project teams or other workgroups, quickly and easily.

Examples?

• Encourage rather than restrict the use of Instant Messaging. Build agents which monitor traffic on your messaging system and which can interject with useful content from backend databases of skills or client case studies, or can suggest other staff it would be useful to involve in the project, based on their experience.
• Exploit RSS aggregation — replace your newsletters with weblogs, and give everyone a news ticker, always running at the top of their screens. Show them how to manage their subscriptions so that they have instant access to requests or news from around your network. Have a weblog specifically for new business requests — click on a request in the ticker to initiate an email or Instant Messaging session with the person needing information.

The essence of IYF is that information is introduced through tactical intervention in the moment when it is relevant, in a way that it can be immediately exploited to facilitate conversation and social networking. The interface is in your face.

Recently, I bought a couple of Buffalo AirStation Wireless Ethernet Converters so I could move my ancient laser printer and server out of sight. These converters let you ‘air up’ devices which don’t have a slot for an onboard wireless card. It seems I’m not alone in finding the poorly translated manual which comes with the devices no help at all in getting them configured and running, and in finding the Buffalo helpdesk slow and unresponsive. However, after three weeks of haranguing emails and the threat of sending the devices back, I finally received instructions that work, which I’m posting here for anyone else having configuration problems:

Connect one of the Ethernet Converters to a pc with an Ethernet card. Set the IP address on the Ethernet card to 1.1.1.2 and re-initialise the Ethernet Converter, this will bring the Ethernet convert back to factory default of 1.1.1.1. Open a web browser and type in 1.1.1.1 for the address. This will give you the Ethernet Converter configuration page.

There’s also a firmware update which doesn’t seem to have made it to their website. You can find an archived copy here.

From Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, on the subject of Borough Market (from the wonderful VictorianLondon.org):

…still the costermongers are only a portion of the street-folk. Besides these, there are, as we have seen, many other large classes obtaining their livelihood in the streets. The street musicians, for instance, are said to number 1,000, and the old clothesmen the same. There are supposed to be at the least 500 sellers of water- cresses; 200 coffee-stalls; 300 cats-meat men; 250 balladsingers; 200 play-bill sellers; from 800 to 1,000 bone-grubbers and mud-larks; 1,000 crossing-sweepers; another thousand chimneysweeps, and the same number of turncocks and lamp-lighters; all of whom, together with the street-performers and showmen, tinkers, chair, umbrella, and clock-menders, sellers of bonnet-boxes, toys, stationery, songs, last dying-speeches, tubs, pails, mats, crockery, blacking, lucifers, corn-salves, clothes-pegs, brooms, sweetmeats, razors, dog-collars, dogs, birds, coals, sand, -scavengers, dustmen, and others, make up, it may be fairly assumed, full thirty thousand adults, so that, reckoning men, women, and children, we may truly say that there are upwards of fifty thousand individuals, or about a fortieth-part of the entire population of the metropolis getting their living in the streets.

In the absence of marketing, information about products and their benefits spreads at the speed of social contact. Imagine a new sector being opened up simultaneously by a group of competing manufacturers (as, say, the alcopops market was, a few years ago here in the UK). Assuming that the objective benefits of the products are all similar, then in the absence of branding and marketing effort, you could expect that for n products in the sector — in a free market, and assuming that all have equal access to distribution etc. — each would end up with around 1/n of the market. However, the world tends to power-law distributions — it doesn’t take long before the unpredictable unevenness of things means that after an initial period of chaos, one of the n would reach a tipping point and become a clear market leader [is this substantiable?] through network effects, after which power law dynamics would tend to keep it in that position. (Incidentally, this thought suggests, as corollory, that market leadership in a sector where all competitors are equally ineffective at engaging the target market may be solely due to network effects, rather than marketing effectiveness — is Red Bull the market leader in its sector due to great advertising, or a singular failure of all brands in the sector to communicate effectively with young club-goers?)

In the real world, of course, marketing seeks to skew matters in favour of a particular product or brand.

I’m wondering whether there’s a way to use social network analysis to quantify the effect of marketing on the diffusion of brand awareness through social networks (and thus serve as a metric of marketing effectiveness). Taking ‘no branding/no marketing’ and ‘100%-effective saturation marketing’ scenarios as limiting cases, it should be possible to apply geometric models to the spread of ‘awareness’ and ‘preference’ (as determined by regional or social demographically-segmented sampling), over time (or geographically) — and those models should look substantially different for the two cases. Growth of awareness through social networks alone would show a characteristic diffusion pattern, radically different from awareness due to effective marketing. I would expect that the real world situation in any instance would be some (possibly linear) combination of both models — the extent to which a real-world case study veers towards either would make a simple measure of the effectiveness of the marketing being conducted on the behalf of that product/brand. The difference in diffusion geometries would also expose highly useful information about the effectiveness (or indeed, in an epidemological view of this, infectiveness) of a given campaign, across space, time and markets. Current sampling techniques seek to identify the percentage of target markets who are aware of — or think favourably about — a brand. This proposal is really about geometric analysis of the higher-order derivatives, over space and time, of such information, and more particularly, to geometric modelling of such metrics.

Such a technique would constitute a more objective basis for measuring both effectiveness (and the nature of effectiveness) than simple examination of temporal correlations between the launch of marketing campaigns and consumer spend on the product, and it would be, I think, relatively immune to external effects (macroeonomic conditions, individual sector characteristics etc). Lots of research needed. I will update this when I’ve talked to people who understand the marketing side of this, and see if I can find anyone to tackle the geometry.

Bernardo Huberman is a busy man. When he’s not working on models of computational economics and agent-based systems (remember them?), he’s researching ways to automate social network discovery through email pattern analysis. I met Bernardo at a conference at HP Labs in Bristol a few years ago. Over dinner, he explained the thought at the core of much of his work — that the Web is an ecology, but with the singular characteristic that, being digital in essence, it is very easy to instrument, and hence a very useful experimental environment.

This idea has historically been underexplored — it is really only with the advent of blogging, with its associated cilia of trackbacks and pingbacks, aggregators and so on, that the exploitation of metadata generated by social media tools has really hit the mainstream.

But the ideas are applicable in many other areas. One of the core thoughts behind HowellHenryLand was the idea of consensual surveillance. Our observation was that an ad agency is an environment where the most valuable knowledge is usually tacit rather than explicit. HHCL has constructed a working environment designed to encourage serendipitious meetings, chance conversations, random interactions that (hopefully) lead to emergent insights. It’s a difficult environment on which to attempt to impose formal structure.

Our thought was that the ideal method for knowledge capture would be to allocate every key person their own personal amanuensis, trailing behind them with a notepad, capturing every important thought as soon as it was spoken — ‘a Boswell for every Johnson’ as we put it. Impractical in the physical world, but possible online (of course, the possibilities are limited by the degree to which people interact using electronic media — in a purely digital world, such as a MOO, every interaction can be monitored by agents such as Cobot. In most business environments you have to make do with what’s available). At HHCL, we set up a number of mailing lists for collaboration on key areas of the business, and made sure all the archives fed into a searchable ‘Soup’ of data. We set up email addresses, again feeding into the Soup — if you are emailing a good idea or an important snippet of research data to someone else, you can just Cc the Soup and your insight is stored away, ready to be found whenever needed. And we built instrumentation into our online chat areas, so that online meetings could be Souped for posterity. Very simple ideas, but ones that work, and still work in other environments — there has been a recent profusion of bots lurking in online chat services, busily keyword searching and informing their masters when there are people online discussing interesting things.

Assuming your people use digital communications, and are not adverse to such consensual surveillance, grabbing the data is easy — its much harder getting that data in front of someone who could benefit from it, in the moment, especially if that moment is most likely when they are sitting in front of a stack of notes trying to write a presentation. I wonder if anyone made any progress on developing a Remembrance Agent-style tool that runs inside MS Office watching for keywords, and which pops up something slightly more useful than Mr Clippy when a background search of your Soup turns up a useful snippet. Oh I forgot — wasn’t it called Autonomy? It’s a shame no one in the open source community is tackling this head-on — many knowledge-based businesses are too small to afford something on that scale, but could benefit hugely from this form of knowledge implement — especially if the data sources could be distributed blog-like systems rather than carefully-controlled document stores jealously guarded behind corporate firewalls: there’s a potential model somewhere in there for micropayment-driven knowledge sharing within distributed communities of practice — creating another ecological web which itself can be mined for meaning…

So, Apple is up to something that involves online music sales. And there are rumours that they are also plotting to buy Universal Music from the troubled Vivendi Group. So what are they up to? Whether or not they buy Universal, which is certainly a newsworthy rumour, there’s definitely something going on. And given the untapped market for digital music distribution, I can’t quite believe that Apple will be relying on their 5% market share and doing something which only runs on Macs, although at the moment they are only talking about an iTunes plugin or similar.

I put my money on this being the start of a more concerted push into the consumer market, along the lines of the iPod. Possibly another startup under the Apple brand (anyone remember Claris and Newton?). And being Apple, I hope that they’re going to do something more innovative that click-to-purchase. In fact, I hope they’re going to seize the nettle and release something using collaborative filtering — an Apple-branded Radio-of-Me would work as a proposition, and be way ahead of what anyone else is doing. Have to wait and see.

I love Borough Market. The best fresh food in London, and fantastic atmosphere. Their latest newsletter heralds a new stall:

As the same suggests, the London Bee Company specialises in honey produced in the capital, created in hives situated on various rooftops and in green spaces around the city. Spring sees the arrival of Greenwich Sub-Station honey, a dark, unheated honey with a butterscotch flavour. Once the weather is milder the stall will also house an observation hive containing live bees.

I like the thought of bee-trails over London. Which, laterally, gets me to thinking about David Blair’s lovely film Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees and its hypertext analog, Waxweb. I met David in Tokyo in 1995, and was fortunate enough to get to spend some time with him and his partner, the artist Florence Ormezzano. Wax is worth hunting out, as is any trace of his follow-up project Jews in Space, which seems never to have been ‘properly’ released in its original form, instead having fragmented into various installations and unrealised online works. Given that at the time, David was assembling the film practically frame-by-frame on a Macintosh iici, it’s quite possible he is still working on it. David played us some of Jews as a work-in-progress. Indescribable but wonderful.

Starbucks and T-Mobile are rolling out their wifi hotspots around the UK. For a while, connectivity was free — in Soho people took advantage of the wireless spillover from the Starbucks in Wardour Street to work next door at Freedom, which has a licensed bar, rather than in the coffeeshop itself (reception preceeds perception, remember).

Perhaps they are counting on pent-up demand — or Intel’s pervasive Centrino advertising — to drive sales, but at over ?5/hour, I think they’re pricing themselves out of their core market — wired workers who simply want to log in and check their email, or VPN into their office networks. Admittedly 802.11 is cheaper and faster to use than dialup from a mobile phone, but the likely early adopters are the most likely diss Starbucks for its watery lattes, corporate ethics and cookie-cutter decor: given some competition from better chains and indies, expect prices to fall, and fast. For now, I’ll still be checking my email over a decaf soy latte at Tinderbox in Angel.

From TV Sucks, by Michael Rosenblum:

Television, up until now, has been a group activity. Why? Mostly because it has been so difficult and expensive to make. After all, if Picasso had to pay $1500 a day to hire a paintbrush, and then had to deal with union canvass setters, union paint mixers and union paintbrush dippers — and then had to be an employee of the Sherman Williams company to paint, he probably would have sold life insurance instead. (Not to mention having to focus group Guerinca. “No, put the eyes back in the heads. The audience finds this disturbing!”)

Rosenblum believes the future of TV production will be intimate, lightweight & in the hands of Video Journalists (VJs) — a DV camera and a laptop should suffice. He’s a radical with an influential audience, including the BBC’s Nations and Regions teams. I was pointed towards his writings by Andy Bryant, who heads up the creative side at BBC Broadcast, and who is a bit of a visionary himself. We’ ve been talking on and off about how the broadcast world is shaping up in the face of distributed media creation (amongst other things), and the BBC seem keen to embrace and (benignly) extend the VJ concept into more of their work. Their website is certianly becoming more bloggish by the week — it will be interesting to see how far they get, and how fast, on getting user-generated programming into their schedules…