It was a link to Clay Shirky’s article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and indeed it is an intriguing article where he sets out his initial thesis thus:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

It’s not a new theory, however I’m not entirely sure it’s completely accurate. Urban life is not a new invention: Rome at one point is reckoned to have had 1 million citizens, and Athens had 300,000 citizens before it. Whilst they both had their debauchery, nobody has ever suggested that Rome needed wine and orgies in order to function as a city.

His parallel starts to get more interesting however:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I’m not sure the “wheels would have come off”, but there is no doubt that even people on very poor incomes have more free time than people of similar economic standing would have had for many millenia – if ever.

He goes on to talk about this surplus of time as something useful, interesting and powerful. His first example however directly contradicts my thoughts around The Vision Thing:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Actually, it’s a change, but it’s not one we should embrace unless we say it’s the thin end of the wedge. That eventually something useful and interesting is going to happen and society starts working on interesting things. Clay goes on to talk about how if even one slither of that time of staring at the flashing box in the corner is used to do something productive, it means something interesting is going to happen.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

To an extent I agree. I don’t know what 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year is going to look like, but there is no doubt that something, somewhere is going to happen of interest.

But what are those 10,000 projects? Do we have the creative ability to do 10,000 useful things every year? Do we have the will to do something more interesting than throw sheep at each other or spending our entire time photoshopping memes? Time will tell.

This cartoon from the excellent xkcd strip sums up my problem with comments right now:

The problem I have is this: on any popular system where users are allowed to comment, as the number of users able to comment without fear of genuine peer review increases, the signal-to-noise ratio drops exponentially.

In other words, if I and 5 million other people can comment on a YouTube video without any fear of us being reminded of what we said not just in the future but the very next time we meet a friend, we are more likely to be flippant, irrelevant, and “noisy” than if we knew people whose opinion of ourselves mattered to us were going to be reading that comment and evaluating it.

It’s why social network status updates and posted items are relatively sane and measured and why blog posts are more considered. We care about what the readers think, because what they think will have a direct impact on our future relationship with them.

So, whilst thinking about kagtum a lot recently (background if you’re unaware), I’ve been thinking about this problem. How do you allow for user comments without them descending into noise?

The “mission statement” for kagtum in its current form is something along the lines of “delivering relevant news and event information”, where “relevancy” is the secret sauce that gets quite complicated. How do we make sure every comment you see is relevant in order for it to stay within that mission statement?

I have a possible answer, but I need to keep it close to my chest for now. Normally my ideas are thrown out into the wind as being worthless, however my answer has a direct consequence on execution of a business plan. That said, if you come and meet me at an event and ask me, I’ll tell you what it is if I trust you. ;-)

No matter. The point, the thesis, the element, is quite communicable: we the audience are now in charge. What’s more, Lilley makes a compelling argument that this isn’t a sudden and new development, but something that happened the moment the audience started to appear on screen from quiz shows to our scribbles being sent to Tony Hart.

The power of networked media is considerable, and it’s pretty odd to see a bunch of network TV executives try and grasp the content that they, their ideas, their employers and their money don’t matter much any more. Within 10 years, Lilley hinted that networks like UKTV which mostly show repeats will essentially be pointless with the advent of VoD and PVR systems being widespread. Within 20 years the people being asked to pay the license fee will have no real memory of broadcast media. Within 30 years… who knows?

I was minded of a certain cartoon and then thought about how the BBC Innovation Labs is on again this year. I wonder how daring the BBC and others want us to be. Personally, I think they’re just outright scared.

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!

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this – everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this – “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look – where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.

Collective, localised information gathering is a big step forward, and is what Tim O’Reilly really meant when he first talked about “Web 2.0” all that time ago (OK, for a tired man like me, it seems a long time ago). It’ll take a while to get traction, but once this switch is noticed it will fundamentally change the way we think about map data.

There is however a problem – how do we make a decision of trust on a user-contributed map? Google are marking out community maps in the result so you can make your own mind up, but what would be even better is if once a map is started the community could rate and even – wiki-style – improve a set of map data?

I still think that the OpenStreetMap community has answers to questions Google have yet to ask.

I say that is an amazingly good thing for the Web in general, and UGC sites in particular.

If you go to YouTube today it is full of clips from mainstream media interspersed with attention-seeking idiots and experiments with Mentos and Diet Coke. Right now, mainstream media have nothing to fear from YouTube because it is merely TV cut up and made more convenient for people with ADD. By demanding that MSM-sourced material is removed, they are relinquishing control and demanding that the users compete with them directly.

If we get rid of the mainstream media from UGC video sites, we’ll actually see a proliferation of UGC. Nature abhors a vacuum, and nothing fills it quicker than YouTube users. I think people will quickly get bored of op-ed pieces to camera, and we’ll see a more creative spirit flourish because suddenly the audience will be looking for it, rather than just finding clips of comedy shows and watching them in lieu of doing something more creative instead.

The week of the 23rd April through the 29th is TV Turnoff Week and my own experience shows a proliferation of creative activity when my time is not being stolen by a piece of furniture. Content filtering on UGC sites will have a similar effect – when you can’t watch clips of Family Guy any more, you might try and fill that time with producing something yourself, and if that happens in just 1% of cases, we’ll see a sharp uptick in quality UGC found on the video sites.

People shouldn’t bemoan copyright material filtering on YouTube – they should applaud it, and encourage it as the dawn of a new era in users taking control of the media they consume. Viacom are willing Google to ensure Viacom can’t control their audience any more: that’s to Viacom’s detriment and to our benefit. Viva la revolution! :-)