I was pointed to an article on Stowe Boyd’s blog today regarding “Andrew Keen: The New Naysayers” regarding the naysayers of Web 2.0.  The articles (both Stowe’s and Andrew Keen’s)
and
the comments on them got me thinking, and I posted my thoughts on the
site.  The comments is still pending moderation at this time,
though I just posted it.  I have posted the comments here as well
because I feel that I might want to expand on them shortly as my mind
more fully digests the topic.

The complete contents of my comments regarding Andrew’s article: The Dark Side of the �Citizen Media� Revolution.  For the complete context, please read the article and the comments posted by others before me.
—

Amanda,

I fail to see how a blend of traditional media and the Web 2.0 media
system create a paradox as you claim.  Many people go to trusted
sources of information not because they are the only source, but
because they are a generally trusted source.  Their performance
has dictated in the past that they produce (or simply funnel) quality
information that a certain demographic is interested in
consuming.  I fail to see how introducing new potentially trusted
sources into the system inherently excludes a trusted source from
charging for, or otherwise benefiting from subscriptions to it’s
continuing feed of trusted information.  While it is true that the
distributed sources of information make it more likely that intelligent
people that otherwise don’t have access to the mainstream media system
can be heard, that doesn’t mean that mainstream media can’t also be a
source of intelligent information that people value and thus pay for.

Secondly, your arguments regarding open source vs. proprietary, flat
vs. hierarchy and copyright vs. free don’t make any sense because each
of these situations have nothing to do with either side “winning” or
“losing”.  We, as a society, are finding in most of those
arguments that the best balance each of those divides lies somewhere in
the middle.  In other words, the best solution in many cases is
EXACTLY a “blend” of either extreme.  One of the best books I have
started to read recently is named “Management of the Absurd” by Richard
Farson.  While it does seem to be fairly absurd, it almost
immediately raises the points that many seemingly paradoxical
situations are not really paradoxical, but complimentary in
nature.  For instance, when you scratch an itch, you are
simultaneously feeling both pleasure and pain, not just one or the
other.

The need for trusted sources of information will never go away, and
the willingness to subscribe to these sources of information will also
never go away.  The desire to be spoon-fed information without
question or source of information, however, is one of the many reasons
our society is not currently happy with the mainstream media is it
currently is.  That was what the “middle ages” was all about, only
it was decided by government instead of a few select organizations that
happened to be in control of the media stream.  Currently, it is
WAY too difficult to read what is really going on behind any given
story.  However, if, for example, a given article is opened up for
discussion and further research that is made easily accessible, people
are going to be much more willing to trust the source of the
information in the long term.  The current mainstream media system
does not do an adequate job of this simply because it does not have the
time or economic capacity to do so in the current ecosystem.

Also, please stop insinuating that because somebody wants to make
something better that they are suggesting that it is inherently poor to
begin with.  That is essentially saying that we as human beings
should stop learning and growing because we are good.  Or that we
should continue to learn and grown because we are currently bad. 
Society learns and grows because it wants to better itself.  It
wants to improve upon it’s past experience and make things better for
it’s future.

Andrew,

“I don�t want a �diverse media ecosystem�. It sounds painfully
democratic and democratically painful.”…  Wow… if having a
democratic system is painful, what would the alternative be?  The
answer is bleak in my opinion.  Free speech has been the best
thing to come around in a VERY long time.  The current reason for
the current Web 2.0 movement is because society as a whole feels that
many of their sources of information, those purportedly practicing free
speech, wield too much control in their use of that speech.

Regards,
Ben Madsen
—

The following articles woke me up to the way certain vendors treat
users who fully take advantage of the very services they promote:
PC Magazine – Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs
Comcast Broadband Dispute Blog

I
could chalk that up to poor customers service, but then another article
caught my attention and my mind somehow linked the two situations:
The Internet is Falling!

Now,
to speak of the first issue, I am a Comcast customer, and I use it for
remotely accessing my workplace at times.  I am an IT Manager for
my company (among other roles).  So I download new OSes now and
then, and I join webinars and I also play around with
video-conferencing and VoIP.  So I guess I would consider myself a
fairly heavy-side-of-average user when it comes to my bandwidth
usage.  I don’t, however, put an undue strain on the neighborhood
by constantly downloading ISO images (CD or DVD digital copies) or by
videoconferencing for most of the day, so I doubt that they would
consider me a high-risk user.

In my thinking, justified by some
research of the issue, this kind of situation cannot be nearly so
isolated that Comcast would be the only ones dealing with the issue,
however.  In fact, Verizon and Earthlink have both mentioned that
their policies generally don’t cut off users, but throttle them
back.  Imagine that, using technology that is fairly easy to
implement to continue offering your service to people that use it to
it’s full extent without allowing them to saturate your network with
their traffic.  I’m willing to bet that the bad press and the
0.05% of users you ticked off would not be nearly so bad if you simply
said: “we’re going to throttle you guys back during peak usage times
because you are using an abnormal amount of bandwidth in comparison to
the average user.”  It would be especially beneficial if they
provided the profile by which they made those decisions such that users
understood what it was about their usage that was causing problems.

Speaking
on the second reference to Internet Overload…  My thinking is
inline with the core company representatives that commented.  In
other words: “do people really think that the core Internet companies
are that stupid that they don’t see the trends in bandwidth usage and
account for the potentials of bandwidth consumption rates rising by
abnormally large factors?”  “Do people really think that a bunch
of idiots are running the core Internet backbone?”  Come on…

Then
I saw a comment that inferred that some of the telecommunications
vendors are talking about the inability to adequately pay for the
infrastructure upgrades that will be required to support these boosts
in bandwidth consumption.  Come on, how much do we pay every month
for these services and how often do we hear about new technology that
makes the wires we currently use able to carry many times more
bandwidth than they currently do?  Do people honestly think that
we’re going to “run out” of technological advances anytime soon? 
Granted, the technology does cost money, but it shouldn’t be bled out
of the customers, but instead taken from the ranks of the customer
service and other administrative departments at these companies that
are so poorly rated already.  My bet is that half as many people,
properly trained, could take much better care of more people than do
the current staff.  You could even pay them more, I’d
imagine.  I’ve been on both sides of that equation too.

More
thoughts on the subject postured that if ISPs properly qualified
services (not in a pay-for-level of qualification style, but a standard
protocol-style class and quality-of-service style), they would be able
to head off the majority of the problems that will effectively saturate
their networks.  They would then be able to focus on upgrading
only the parts necessary to continue providing appropriate service
levels for the major popular protocols of the day.

I must admit,
however, that the “devil’s advocate” side of my brain postures that
we’ve been classifying levels of service based on bandwidth allocation
for years.  I mean, that’s what fractional T1’s are all
about.  Or what is a T1 vs. a T3 or OC3?  Now that Intel has
reached a critical mass of CPU speed, they’re focusing on bettering
other aspects of the CPU architecture such as number of cores, speed of
the bus, latency, etc.  Bandwidth has almost gotten to the point
where it is not so much a matter of pure bandwidth as it is of latency
and jitter (two terms heard pounded to death in the VoIP world). 
The truth of the matter is that people will start to pay a different
amount (and probably do already) for the difference between a simple
bandwidth link and a link that has low latency to major parts of the
Internet.  Have I missed something, or is this not what Net
Neutrality is effectively against?

Anyway, I’m probably missing
something in the Net Neutrality scene.  I’ll have to do more
research before I can resolve the debate going on in my little head of
what I think is right.  My gut says that neither side is
completely right, but neither is completely wrong either.  Such is
the life of politics, business and technology.  You can’t just
separate them and work on one level in such a broad ranging topic of
discussion.

So I finally had the opportunity to order and start playing around with
Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.  My first
impression: “Wow”…  I hate to say that, too, because I really
had started to get annoyed by Microsoft’s use of that word in their
marketing campaigns.  I was thinking to myself, “nothing can
really be THAT much better to evoke that kind of response.”  Well,
I was wrong.  But my experience has not all been sweet and rosey
smelling.

Obviously,
there are going to be usability issues in getting used to the new
environment.  There are also going to be some compabitibility
issues in running your favorite software.  There are even going to
be some of your handy “tricks” that just don’t work anymore because of
some new security feature or underlying design principle.  All of
these are good things, in general, if done for the right reasons. 
In my short experience, and in what is coming out of Microsoft these
days in terms of security, their heart seems to be in the right place.

The
one issue I have heard so much about (and I’m sure others have too) is
their User Access Controls mechanism.  Many people seem to really
hate this feature of Windows Vista.  I, being a seasoned
professional and having experience with Linux, Unix and their heavy use
of privilege systems, am not really that annoyed by it.  In fact,
I think it’s a great feature.  I do think it is very
misunderstood, however, and here is why.

One of the most
annoying user practices that I have seen over the years is that people
want to stick files wherever they want on the hard drive.  After
all, it’s their hard drive, is it not?  It’s their computer, their files… Why wouldn’t they be able to stick their files wherever they think they can best organize (or disorganize) them?

What
people don’t seem to understand is that an operating system, such as
Windows Vista, or HP-UX, or even Mac OS X, makes certain areas more
“protected” than others specifically so that it can keep itself
organized, stable and secure.  When we as users, engineers and
administrators don’t follow these guidelines and the best practices
associated with them, we cause our own headaches by going against the
design of the operating system and having to “hack around” it’s default
organizational layout.

You see, each of these operating systems
provides “playgrounds,” so to speak, for users to store their documents
and their settings.  These playgrounds are specifically put in
places that are designed not to interfere with the operating system,
but rather to work “with” the operating system and with other
well-behaving applications that are running on the system.  When
we venture outside of these “playgrounds” when we aren’t really
supposed to, whether by direct choice or by usage of a software package
that doesn’t follow the right procedures, we have to start doing things
to disable the very features that are designed to protect our
experience.

So, while many angry users are out there bashing UAC
and vowing to disable it on every machine they touch, I will be leaving
it on and considering carefully every time that prompt comes up,
whether I’m doing something that is working with the operating system or against it, and what the consequences of what I am about to do are.

In my everyday wanderings of the web, this article from SmallBizResource
caused me to think about the nature of VoIP, who is succeeding and who
is failing and why.  In it the essential message is that Cisco and Microsoft
are both gunning to provide VoIP to the Small and Medium sized Business
sector.  I have many views about why enterprise level companies
are failing so miserably to catch the SMB market, but I wanted to focus
on a particular couple of points that are glanced over in this article.

Preface

First, a note or two about VoIP:

1. VoIP
   is a game-changing technology specifically because it is based on open
   networks and open standards (for the most part, though Skype might be
   even more popular if it opened it’s network with some kind of open
   gateway system).
2. The open-ness of VoIP standards has created a
   wealth of vendors and a wealth of oppurtunities for collaboration, both
   in the product and service development sense, and in the “unified work
   experience” sense.

The Guts

Okay, so here’s where these guys, and a quite a few others (ahem, Nortel, Toshiba, Shoretel and all of those vendors that like to “lock” their hardware into one system…):

1. People like choice.  People like to be able to touch and feel a device,
   and choose between a few different hardware platforms.  You give them
   that choice, and they’ll love you for it.
2. People like flexibility.  People don’t like being locked in.  Oh sure,
   they’ll accept it, but they won’t necessarily like it.  Doesn’t anybody
   notice all the trends of “unlocking” cell phones, “hacking” various
   embedded devices (AppleTV to be the latest), and “porting” of telephone
   numbers when switching carriers?
3. People
   like innovation.  The ability to open your platform to extensions
   and experimentation breeds a whole new level of innovation.  If
   you encourage this from your community, they will more than likely
   respond positively and do things that your internal engineers would
   never have dreamed of.  If they do it well enough, why not buy
   them out and encourage them to continue innovating with your products.

Anyway,
that’s my short little rant on why I think some of the major players in
the industry are really missing the point of all of this
technology.  It’s supposed to be a disruptive technology.  It’s NOT
supposed to look, or feel, exactly like the old stuff.  One of the
biggest problems with the old PSTN network is that it’s stability
crippled it’s innovation. Sure,
they made some recent advances here and there.  But, for the most
part, nobody wanted to add features to upset an already working
system.  So nobody ever innovated any new functionality into it.

My Advice

Open
up your phones and your servers so that anybody can talk to them, not
just a few select vendors (or even just yourself).  Make the Cisco
IP phones talk SIP so they can talk to any SIP-based server or
service.  Make the Cisco Call Manager systems talk SIP so you can
run your favorite SIP phone against the server.  Stop locking
users into systems they’ll just have to throw out in 3 years
anyway.  If you open both ends of the system up, you can innovate
and synergize on both sides of the solution.

This morning as I was driving to my data center for some emergency maintenance, I was listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
An interesting topic came online that I feel the need to speak about.
There was a guest, author David Shulman, on the show that had written a
book entitled “From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace”
examining lying in the workplace. The host and the guest author then go
on to discuss various instances where lying might be justified.

Let me first state that, while I believe any form of lying is
wrong and should be avoided at all costs, this is not the basis behind
my arguments here. No, my arguments here will focus around the business
justifications (both for the company and for the individual employee)
in these instances NOT to lie or deceive.

Also to note, however, is that I have NOT read the book. I do
wish to read the book as I believe (from the comments on the Amazon.com
site) that is basically wanders through the lives of many business
peoples lives exactly for the purpose of showing some of the amazing
lies that cripple our current businesses, and likely our very economy.

Problem #1 – What’s wrong with a little white lie, anyway?

Two words: slippery slope
Once you justify a small lie, how do you make sure you don’t go on to
bigger and badder lies? How do you draw the line when it comes to which
lie is ok to tell and which lie is too much? What happens if you’re
wrong in your judgment.

Problem #2 – How can you establish trust when you’re lying?

This
one is the most important. Once you lie, especially when you are caught
as that triggers the impressions in others’ minds, you establish the
precedence that you can, and sometimes will, lie to get what you want
or need. How does anybody know, from that point forward, what you say
is really to get what is needed in any given situation, or is just
fabricated to get what you want, but is not necessarily needed or the
best thing to do?

Problem #3 – What process is broken that is forcing you into a position where you are lying?

Lying
or deception is done for one of two reasons. Either 1) the process is
broken and you need to “work around” it, or 2) you are trying to do
something for which you don’t have the proper authority or privilege.
If it’s number 2, shame on you for trying to cheat the system. If it’s
number 1, see problems #1 and #2 and decide if it’s not a better path
to try and fix the process than it is to just lie about it and let the
process remain broken, causing you to lie further in the future to work
around the broken process.

Problem #4 – What impact does your lie have on business if it is not detected?

What
happens when you actually lie about something. Either you are trying to
work around a broken process, in which case the process generally
remains broken and inefficient, or you are trying to convince somebody
of something that is not really the case. Now, I’m not saying that
everybody needs or even should know every little detail regarding
everything that goes on in any situation. For example, I shouldn’t know
how much Bob in Accounting makes in salary, or how much Sally’s
Christmas bonus was last year, unless I am their manager. However, the
more information I have that I can rely on in making any given
decision, the better able I am going to be to make that decision in the
most proper way.

Problem #5 – What impact does your lie have on business if it IS detected?

The breakdown of trust can cause duplication of effort, territorial
struggles between departments, and undue competition for already
limited corporate resources. Where there is trust, there is teamwork.
Where there is teamwork, there is cooperation. Where there is
cooperation, there is efficiency.

Also, the lie might carry specific and dire consequences such as a mark
on your record, a pass on that promotion you were working so hard for,
or even termination in some cases. Do you really want to risk those
actions just to appease or impress somebody?

So my point is, before you tell a little “white lie” to appease
your manager, or your customer, or whomever you are lying to, think
carefully about why it is you’re lying, and whether it is really the
best thing to do. I know as a consumer, I am very skeptical of people’s
claims these days because of the almost epidemic that is prevalent in
the business community in this regard. This is a sad thing when I can’t
trust the word of my vendors and partners at face value because of the
sheer number of stories and experiences that I have heard and myself
had.