Many years ago I did some freelance writing. Some of it was painfully dull (filler articles for free magazines), some of it bizarre and seedy (your suspicions about readers’ letters in porn mags are well-founded: they are sometimes written by paid writers), but the biggest lesson I got from it was that it’s hard to make a decent living with that as your main gig.

When you need to rely on artistic output to pay the rent, it doesn’t take you long to realise that unless you’re going to get picked up by a large publisher or music label, you’re going to need another job.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this problem and the related crisis in the music and film industries in some detail. At its simplest, the problem is this:

People want to consume entertainment, but they do not wish to pay for it.

Artists do not have the right to be paid whatever they feel they are worth, they must compete in a market and persuade people to hand over cash just like any other industry. Punitive measures such as taxing consumer products in order to force payment of artists is in my opinion pure idiocy. We need to think instead about encouraging people to pay for the entertainment they love. I think that requires a few things:

1. Consumers should not have to fork out more money than they feel comfortable spending
2. More of that money needs to land in the artist’s pockets rather than distributor’s, so that artists on the ‘long tail’ can make a living off a smaller fan base
3. Artists need to find new ways to grow and engage with their fan base

Thankfully, the Internet makes all of these much more practicable than ever before.

One solution to the first problem has recently been played out with mixed results by Radiohead, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had some sort of “tip jar” system in place for all artists? You download something via P2P, like it, and you can make a donation - of whatever size you want - to the creator. Well somebody is working on that but the question is whether it will ever work.

One artist working with a non-digital medium (paintings) has given this a whirl and it seems to be working. Ali Spagnola will - when it’s your turn - paint a picture just for you based on a theme you suggest and then send it you free of charge anywhere in the World. It’s not a con. I know this, because I’m currently staring at this picture painted for me sometime last year. Payment is completely voluntary. I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t got around to throwing some money into the tip jar, but I’ll rectify that mistake this week. The painting has grown on me. I would miss it if I lost it. Ali deserves to be able to eat for giving it to me.

Does Ali make money? Perhaps. Do Radiohead? Definitely. So, it’s a model with potential.

As for the distribution problem, well I think it’s clear now that the current relationship with artists and the distribution chain is going to die within a matter of years. A band or a writer can now distribute directly via their website, and even authors can publish books cost-effectively without the need to get men in suits and lawyers involved. There is an issue of how to manage all this and as Kevin Kelly discovered when researching this, being your own tour manager, promoter, lawyer and roadie can be a gruelling and unprofitable exercise.

And then we get to audience engagement. The Internet has blown that apart as well - artists can now have a direct conversation with their fan base via blogs, social networking websites and video sites. It doesn’t scale (how do you stay personal with fifty million fans in 150 countries?), but that would be as they say “a nice problem to have”. Most artists don’t know how to do this well - they’re musicians, writers and film directors, not PR specialists - which suggests there will exist a niche industry helping bands do this very cost effectively within a few years. The current promotion and PR industries are not a good fit for where the industry is heading, they need to change.

As for growing your fan base, I agree with Robert Rich’s words in his message to Kevin Kelly:

Companies can use demographic models and track people’s search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn’t lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.

There is a problem here with collaborative filtering - it’s locking us into tastes, not broadening them. However, it can also be the most powerful tool an artist can have working for them.

Four months ago I had never heard of The Courteeners and yet last Saturday was in the crowd at their sell-out gig at Manchester Academy having paid several times face value for the tickets off eBay. That only happened because last.fm algorithmically said “you should listen to these guys, because you like James”. So far The Courteeners and their label, promoters and distributors have directly received at least £30 off me they would never have got without that technology helping them. I expect they will get hundreds off me over the next decade providing they keep doing something I like.

However, I’d like to share that music. I’d like to say to my friends “look, listen to this, you’ll like it” and give them a copy. DRM and the law prevents me. It is working against them, because I know for a fact I could recruit at least another half dozen fans for their next tour and album release. They are working against me by insisting I do not put their album up on a website for anybody to download and listen to. I will happily work as their unpaid promoter and recruit whoever I can into giving them money, but that little circled “C” prevents me. They could have licensed it under a creative commons license, but they chose not to.

This one act alone has probably cost them a couple of thousand pounds in future lost revenue just through me. Scale it up to the 2,000 people who were at that gig the other night, they’re probably losing millions. Not millions in five years when they try and break America: millions of pounds right now, this week.

So, we need to find more new ways to openly and cheaply distribute art and leverage a fan base so as to be able to make a decent living - perhaps even an indecent living - for artists and fans alike. I have more ideas on how to make that happen, but I will share those with you tomorrow.

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before - and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be - I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own - an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

Let’s imagine you are a toymaker. No, not some carpenter in a little workshop deep in Old Europe - a multinational that commissions studies on “pester-power” and are only slightly embarrassed by the fact some of your toys contain lead paint.

You have a trademark over a game, that quite frankly went out of fashion in the 1980s. Nobody wants to play it any more because it’s seen as dull, boring and just a little bit “fuddy”.

Then, one day, you notice sales are starting to rise. People are buying the game again. You can’t understand why, so you commission another report (hey, that’s your job) to find out where this new interest is coming from. A few months later, you have an answer - somebody has created an electronic copy of your game and made it available as an application in a social networking site. People are so crazy for it as a result, your brand is now gaining value and you’re going to have to think about how to cater for this new generation of players.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Mattel or Hasbro and your games is Scrabble and the online app is Scrabulous on Facebook, you naturally send out cease & desist letters and hack off your new fan base.

The idiocy of this decision is monumental. Yes, you need to protect your trademark. Yes, you need to show that you’ve acted to protect it otherwise you can end up losing it anyway. Do they really think this is the way forward though?

I have to admit I’m a tad biased here. Here’s my Scrabulous stats screen:

As you can see, I’m one of those people who plays daily, and plays a lot. I’d hate to see it go. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

There is something new about the economy that is spreading around us. In the past ideas, trademarks, patents all were treated as if they had some inherent power that should not be discussed. People say they won’t discuss things because they need to be secret, that they fear the legal consequences. People don’t give up ideas until they’re “protected”. People guard words they invented as if they alone are the secret sauce to great riches.

Here’s the thing: that’s all bullshit now.

You want people to talk about your product, your ideas. You want them to talk, talk, talk, talk all day long. You want people to stand up and shout from the rooftops about your products, your patents, your trademarks. You want them to share their ideas of how your products could be made better. When they start doing that, especially when other people are providing them the tools to do it, you should think very carefully about whether you want to tell them to shut up.

This afternoon, I’ve been playing around with Facebook’s ad platform. Partly for Vagueware, partly for other businesses, I’ve been looking at what Facebook says about its user base to advertisers.

The level of targeting is just outright astonishing. It allows for ads not only to be targeted on demographics such as age range and city, but even on interests and relationship status.

For example, I now know there are approximately (all figures given are approximate to the nearest 20 or so), 120 people in Manchester interested in Programming.

Out of the 2,017,440 UK citizens who describe themselves on Facebook as ‘single’, 998,900 are male, 904,960 are female. The numbers don’t add up because some people don’t define a gender which makes the point that if you don’t fill info in, you can’t be targeted via that info.

There are 1,180 females in the UK who declare an interest in ‘Computers’. The figure for males is around 8,540.

580 UK men say they’re really into shoes, with 14,300 British women aspiring to be Imelda Marcos.

There are around 5,680 people working for BT in the UK on Facebook. In the US, there are around 40 people working for O’Reilly Media who mention it in their profile. I could target either with an advert - handy if you have a product or idea you want to pitch.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Advertisers don’t need to know who your friends are (the social graph), to target you this tightly. If a member of GeekUp wanted to put up a singles ad for all single women between the ages of 24 and 32 who are into computers resident in Manchester (approx. 100 of them), they now theoretically could. Lucky ladies.

The question is, is this really a bad thing? Doesn’t it mean we’re not all going to see advertising that really has no relevance to us? Or does this kind of marketing mean that we are the perfect willing victims for advertisers to go deep into our psyche? I knew this day was coming, but I thought it was still some way off.

I’ve spent the last few weeks re-appraising my business plan in advance for 2008. Next year my business will pass its second birthday and I want to change the focus in a few places. I also want to bring other people on-board either as equity partners in specific products/services or as staff, and that all needs planning in detail.

The problem is, most business plans are dull to write and dull to read. I always felt that the inherent wordiness of them made them difficult to deal with, and they only made sense if you were looking for investment - you wrote them for people who didn’t know your business. I started thinking about what might be useful to write for people inside the business (i.e. me), and how it could help me make sure I was on track and doing well.

This morning my RSS reader threw up (via a Technorati sub to ‘business innovation’ a post called The Canonball Business Plan over at Seeds of Growth

The idea is quite simple. There really is a Canonball run (raced illegally), in the spirit of the film. The participants are attempting to break the record for a coast-to-coast drive, and produce a Driveplan that highlights key milestones en-route, fuel stops, timings, major risks from weather to what the ‘safe’ limit is to breaking the speed limits without ending up in jail in each jurisdiction.

What if we had something like that for a business plan internally? What if those of us who need to get a bit of focus sat down and thought about key milestones over a period, the risks and hazards, and the eventual goals. What if we updated it with real data as it comes in to see how we are faring against our guesses and predictions? On one screen we immediately see what we need to see.

It’s an interesting idea, and the only reason I can see anybody having to object against it is that it is inspired indirectly from a pretty cheesy film about bootlegging booze. The core idea seems sound enough though.

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source - it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked - he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general - probably more urgent in education than anywhere else - and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion - the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up - he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well - a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

If you need any proof that we’re in a bubble around Web companies, the valuation of Facebook at $15 billion thanks to the $240 million Microsoft just paid for a 1.6% share, must be it. Even the TechCrunch guys seem a little flummoxed by it - the comments are worth a scan.

To put that into perspective, if we assume $150 million in revenues next year is solid we’re talking about 100:1 price-to-earnings ratio there. If you’re the kind of person who normally yawns when hearing about P/E, here’s why it’s important.

There are lots of reasons a company might be valued with a high P/E. The six most common are:

• The market expects earnings to rise rapidly in the near future. This is normally the case with oil or gold companies who have little in the way of earnings right now, but who have secured income in terms of drilling/mining rights
• The company makes piles of cash normally but has had to take a one-time hit on something showing earnings being lower for this year
• The company has a business advantage that guarantees revenue for low risk. Think “monopoly”.
• Investors need to shove a large amount of money into the market to get it out of other vehicles, so the law of supply and demand means prices go up
• High demand for a particular share for some reason, for example a takeover bid
• The company is hyped, and we’re in a bubble

Going through each of these in the case of Facebook:

• Facebook’s revenues are not going to rise dramatically any time soon. They have not suddenly secured a huge pot of advertising revenue they have yet to “mine”, and my P/E is based on next year’s optimistic revenue figures, not past figures.
• They’re not making a lot of cash at all, and they’re not taking any major hits in terms of infrastructure, so that’s not it.
• Whilst everybody is raving about them, they don’t have a monopoly. It would be relatively easy to replicate the Facebook platform in open source (in fact, that’s an idea going onto the site tomorrow - unless you now put it up first and claim credit), so it’s hard to see how this sticks. The value is in the user base, but talk to MySpace if you want to hear about how fleeting they can be.
• Microsoft are in no hurry to diversify risk or in need to get money out of other “vehicles” - they might need to show their shareholders they’re hitting hard with their new advertising-driven model, but that doesn’t justify the expense
• 1.6% is no basis for an immediate takeover bid

That leaves us with…

• We’re in a bubble

It’s not like Microsoft are going to miss $240 million. It’s not that we’re in big trouble if this doesn’t hold up when Facebook floats in a couple of years.

It’s the mindset that bothers me.

People are no longer looking at figures. They’re thinking irrationally. They’re buying shares because they want to hold a chip. I’m not an IFA or your banker, but I suggest you make sure you don’t pay too much for any chip you want to hold on to yourself.

We can all remember the futurology clips from the 1960s suggesting we’d all have hover-cars and silver jump-suits by now, so it surprises me that newspapers still try and predict the future. I definitely expected more from The Independent

What they fail to appreciate is:

• The forecasts have always been wrong in the past. There is no reason to be confident they will be right in the future. Not just immigration figures, but shifts in employment, prosperity, house prices, interest rates (which are managed by the central banks!), share prices, the weather tomorrow…
• They’re not taking into account movement in the opposite direction. Yes, your parents’ house in the South of France or Spain is considered immigration by the French.
• We actually need to get to 75 million in the UK by 2030 to keep the state pension system working as it does today, but they ignore that because it doesn’t fit the political agenda de jour.

I’m a liberal (in the European sense of the word), and I find the “Immigration is always bad” argument morally repugnant, but that’s not what I want to focus on in this article. Rather, I’m interested in how mainstream media goes about handling forward forecasts. They typically:

• Don’t ask questions about whether forecasted figures are accurate, or how they could be accurate
• Don’t ask questions about whether figures are representative of the complete picture, or even what “complete” means
• Don’t ask questions about what the forecast actually means in real terms beyond the gut reaction

In short, they’re terrible at understanding possible future outcomes and analysing them. If they were working in the technology industry they would instead know:

• Forecasting is inaccurate
• We never have full sets of data
• We can’t really know what it means until we get there

That would however make for lousy newspaper copy. “Immigration may or may not be a bad thing, or a good thing, depending on what actually happens” is not as catchy as “Immigration out of control”.

How do we educate politicians, journalists and the public about how best to deal with these figures though? This industry is about as good as it gets with future forecasting (although we struggle to see paradigm shifts and anything > 3 years out), so is there anything we can share that others might learn from?

[UPDATE]: Comments like the one I’ve approved below have started coming in. Hmph.

I know from past experience that whenever you talk about immigration, a bunch of BNP/nationalist nutjobs (who are very clued up as to how to find and comment on blogs that even lightly touch on the subject) tend to pass by and start making silly statements. I’ve let this one through to demonstrate my point - whilst glancing on racism in a way the author probably hoped I wouldn’t notice, it’s not as bad as others - but let me please, please stress: I’m not having a debate about immigration here, I’m discussing how the media handles forecasting in general. Immigration is the story today, but I’m talking about a trend that applies to everything from viral epidemics to what the weather will look like next week.

Please do not add comments of the “but we’re going to run out of space” or “the schools will collapse” vein here - they simply won’t get approved, as they’re not relevant to what I’m really talking about above. Making vague statements about “ethnicity” is likely to just make me think you’re an idiot.

I’m still catching up, but as promised, here are my notes from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Due to the length of my notes, I’m splitting this up into several parts to be posted over the next couple of days.

The Open Schools Alliance have a tricky balancing act to pull off. There appears to be a natural inclination towards giving what is effectively a monopoly to Microsoft in the education market, they have to lobby hard and loud. By doing so, they risk being labelled “religious zealots”, as indeed some have labelled them in the past. This event though was positioned as a way of making educationalists aware of the landscape of open source in schools and aimed to educate and inform rather than proselytise.

Well, that was until some people got stuck in during the afternoon panel session, but we’ll get to that in Part III.

Martin Douglamas, the founder of Moodle - the most developed and widely deployed of the open-source VLEs - was present and gave a run-down on the history and possible future of Moodle and its partners. The open-source business model they’ve adopted is pretty interesting: the code is owned by a trust that is sustained by donations and contract services, but partner organisations can get official recognition as long as they drop 10% of their profit around projects back into the trust. It’s like an open-source, anarchist (in the political sense) multi-national that works. It’s possible this is one future of open source economics.

Martin talked about the scalability of an open source model: 200+ developers which even commercial VLE providers would struggle to match with their exorbitant pricing models, and the relatively flat structure.

What really interested me though was the plans to introduce “community hubs” into Moodle. Teachers in schools in a given geography are likely to be teaching the same curriculum material in a similar style, yet they are all independently creating the same content. How best could you organise it so that once a module was in the system, it could be shared by all teachers teaching that module? The answer will be a hub where courses can be shared (or charged for) amongst a group of people with the ability to connect to that hub. Bottom-up hierarchies: you’ve got to love it.

I’m currently reading Wikinomics and finding it incredibly engaging. I’ll write a fuller review when I get to the end of it sometime later this week, but I’m that enthusiastic I had to give people a bit of a heads-up before the weekend. The full review is likely to be long. This post won’t be.

To date, the only truly successful wiki has probably been Wikipedia - it’s probably the only one that the mythical ‘man in the street’ can name. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams document an emerging trend and show that it’s not just wiki software that is describing the new spirit of collaborative development, but blogs, UGC sites like YouTube and social networks. It is the interactive element that adds value into the business, not the technical definition of what a wiki actually is.

Where the really interesting things are going to happen though are where collaboration happens between end customer and producer, and the middle men who connect half a dozen businesses to a single customer desire.

Outsourcing has reached a point where an industrial designer and a marketeer can design a product over coffee, firm up designs overnight, have prototype units being developed by a Chinese company within a matter of weeks, and support provided by an Indian company the day the unit goes on sale. The flexibility of this kind of out-sourcing is allowing start-ups to get very big, very quickly.

Some are beginning to realise they can even outsource the product design to the customer. It’s not just small companies either - major companies are seeing the value of a porous membrane between internal R&D and the rest of the World.

Vagueware obviously has a vested interest in this model. I haven’t quite worked out the dynamics, the money side of things and how we go about making developers take notice, but I’m hoping that others who like the idea of open collaborative design in the software industry will help work that out with me. I’m currently toying with ideas on how to reward those outside my business who directly add value to it. If you have ideas on how that can happen, you know what to do

I’m not alone. We’re about to enter an era of real businesses with real products being built this way. The knowledge economy is going to be very flat, with each of us having the ability to act as independent agents working on the ideas that interest us. Economically, this is going to be fascinating.

From what I’ve read so far, Wikinomics is a good introduction to how this new World is starting to unfold, and I think if you’re interested in these new models or if you’re interested in what the next 2-3 years of web application development is going to look like (if you’re a bespoke developer or designer, your future clients are either reading this book already or will do soon), you need to grab yourself a copy.

You can buy it from this link if you’re in the UK or this link if you’re in the US. Enjoy!

Service Level Agreements are a must-have for Enterprise clients and it has surprised me that so few web companies have used them as a route to making money: if you don’t need an SLA, take the app for free. If you do want an SLA (because say your entire email operation is running on our web service, say), then you need to pony up some cash. It’s worked in open source, so I think it’s a no-brainer for an industry that is service-orientated at its core.

Good news then that Amazon S3 has today announced an SLA which means if they drop below 99.9% uptime per month you can have some cash back. You get even more money back if they drop below 99% uptime. They also agree to give you 60 days notice if they want to get rid of you for any reason - but don’t have to give that reason.

It’s a step in the right direction, but they could make even more money by offering even better SLAs if customers are prepared to spend more money to get them. That money would be capital Amazon would be free to invest in infrastructure which not only enhances S3, but Amazon’s core systems and business.

My good friend and ex-colleague from way, way back, Andy Stothard, is currently on holiday in Vancouver. He loves the place and last time he came back he raved about it.

He’s just posted an article that struck me as an interesting take on file sharing. He’s sat down in front of his laptop, found a nearby computer sharing iTunes and decided to have a listen. It may be that “Gareth” didn’t intend for that to happen, or maybe he did.

What fascinates me about this is that there is an added context to the file sharing given by geography. It’s only people on the same immediate network you can see, and if Andy had really wanted to, he could have found Gareth and had a chat about his music collection (and maybe IT security) whilst he was there. What if it was “Gillian” instead of “Gareth” and Andy had really liked her taste in music. And she had found his iTunes collection to be interesting as well. And they’d made an effort to find each other?

File sharing has been criticised because it allows for an anonymous, amorphous mass on opposite sides of the planet to steal copies of music easily. What Andy was engaged in there didn’t take anything away from the publishers (he didn’t have a copy of the music, if he wants a copy he’ll need to buy one himself), added to his sense of the people around him in a foreign city, and potentially could have allowed for interesting conversation to break out between two previously unconnected people.

There is a lot to think about in the future with relation to the economics of creative works and the rise of ubiquitous digital access, but we need to realise that it’s not “File Sharing” that is the problem but “File Copying”.

Brian MCallister argues quite convincingly that “Popularity, in technology, is shit. Seriously.”

He has a point. When we aim to make something popular we are doing so for reasons of ego, and therefore attempt to compromise what it is we’re trying to achieve. We can’t do complex and useful to niché audience if we’re worried about being popular.

One version of this internal corruption of objectives is sometimes known as the “What would your mother think?” test in development. Would your (presumably technically illiterate, possibly senile) mother make of the gizmo you’ve just made? If the answer is “she wouldn’t understand it” then the trend is to simplify and to make things better.

But your Mum probably doesn’t care about your widget. What’s more useful is whether the people who are going to use it can. And that’s why, so the argument goes, that commons-based peer collaboration might be a better design practice than what we currently do.

It’s also why I think the future of innovation in software is going to be governed by companies making money whilst putting the source code out into the open. They quietly execute, iterating out improvements, making things better with each step, and then eventually the larger market catches on. The market catches on quicker if the source code is out there, resulting in better revenue streams.

Alas, we’re still in an age where the “intellectual property” myth still permeates our society, and trying to produce popular software seems more important than producing useful software. Sometimes it’s like the last decade was a dream…

You can’t learn expertise from an expert - you can only get clues as to what to do next with what you’ve already learned.

This is contrary to pretty much everything you might have understood about learning over the years: you study, you gain knowledge, you become an expert on something. However, that’s just information inside your head, not expertise. Expertise is being able to apply that knowledge and the experience of knowing how and when. Unfortunately, the only way to gain that insight is by going out and doing things - i.e. by gaining experience.

Last week Andy Oram wrote an article on O’Reilly Radar asking “What comes after the Information Age?” and it’s had me thinking for a couple of days now.

In one of my previous jobs, I worked as the IT bod-in-chief on a project that hoped to address how best to get expertise into the hands of SMEs in the digital media sector. The project was pretty much a disaster for a whole host of reasons, but the lessons I learned then have stuck with me. One of them was that you can’t learn expertise, only build it with experience.

You’ve probably seen this in a textbook somewhere if you’ve ever studied Computer Science:

Information = Data + Structure

That is to say, structure without data is merely a schema. Data without structure is noise. The two together combine to provide us with Information. Therefore, we spend most of our lives today thinking about how best to bring structure to data and how to design structures that provide the most information possible from data. This is in essence the core of “The Information Age”. Oram asks:

“But the Information Age was surprisingly short. In an age of Wikipedia, powerful search engines, and forums loaded with insights from volunteers, information is truly becoming free (economically), and thus worth even less than agriculture or manufacturing. So what has replaced information as the source of value?

The answer is expertise. Because most activities offering a good return on investment require some rule-breaking - some challenge to assumptions, some paradigm shift - everyone looks for experts who can manipulate current practice nimbly and see beyond current practice. We are all seeking guides and mentors.”

He’s almost right. I don’t agree we’re out of the Information age (we’re still obsessed with trying to work out semantics of data), but I think what he’s trying to say is:

Expertise = Information + Application (or ‘Exerpience’)

Where I think Andy has got it wrong is he thinks that expertise can be transferred given the correct pedagogical framework, and if only we had the right tools we could suddenly harness all this information and produce experts by teaching people how to be experts.

The history of teaching shows this just isn’t feasible. The reason why students are asked to produce dissertations and projects on which they will be marked is not to keep them busy for a couple of months, but to give them the experience of applying the knowledge and information they’ve gained about the domain in which they’re being taught. I can’t make you a historian by teaching you a bunch of key dates or how to assess primary sources, but I can teach you those things and then ask you to go and find some key dates and assess some sources yourself and then constructively discuss with you the way you applied technique. By doing so, you gain experience, and hence expertise.

This is why the first chapter of every book on programming starts with a statement along the lines of “Whilst I give examples, it’s important you try them out as we go along as that’s the best way to learn…” - it’s not learning syntax that is important in programming (although that is of course critical information), it’s the experience of applying that knowledge. The first 6 months a developer works in a new language will produce crude code but as experience builds, the code becomes much more professional thanks to the developer acquiring expertise through application.

As such, most of Andy’s argument about what might come next falls down for me. I’m not sure I know what comes next, but I think most people are moving into post-Industrial jobs where creativity and expertise *do* matter. I’m just not convinced we have the tools to teach those skills - people need to go out and experience it for yourself.