Alex Barnett blog : memes

The Great Bungee Jump

alexbarnett — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:21:00 GMT

Well, the great Bungee Jump has come. Martin Plaehn, CEO of Bungee Labs has shared the news of the company the letting go of 15 regular employees and contractors. Unfortunately, I am among this set of affected Bungee Labs employees.

A Voyage of Discovery

As Martin explained in today's post, Bungee Labs has been on a voyage of discovery. There are many lessons for me and the company to take away from the whole experience of the last year or so, but the bottom line is that we were overly optimistic about what it takes to achieve the rate and scale of developer adoption - real traction - and therefore the development of killer apps by the developer community that would drive the platform and the business forward at the velocity that makes a VC-backed venture "interesting".

So where does Bungee Labs go from here? Well, I think Martin eluded to the key clue:

"Over the next several months, Bungee Labs will lay out the course for a business object solution framework for user configurable enterprise-class applications that demonstrate these principles"

It'll be very interesting to see how this manifests and the impetus it will provide to the platform's adoption.

No Regrets

No regrets, none at all. When I considered the opportunity of joining Bungee Labs (and by doing so leave a relatively safe harbor in order to do so) I knew of the risks involved. Bungee Labs' mission was - and still is - of the kind that aims to "change the world". To have been a member of the team tasked with realizing the company's hugely ambitious mission has been nothing short of an entirely worthwhile and educational pursuit.

In my mind at least, Bungee Labs has made its mark in the brave new world of cloud computing. It has opened the eyes to many in the industry about what might be and can be. It has made cloudy ideas and visions more concrete and helped to define the concepts a (Platform as a Service, or PaaS) and memes that are contributing to the next generation of cloud computing platforms.

I've learned a great deal in the past 16 months working closely with a very talented, smart and creative set of teammates. And although it is probably unfair to call out individuals - for it implies those not mentioned weren't of similar caliber (which is not the case) - I do want to thank Martin Plaehn, Bungee Labs' CEO in particular for his mentorship during my tenure at Bungee Labs' and from whom I've learned an enormous amount management and leadership. I'll also miss the inane banter with Ted in those podcasts we put together (and the "Shushee" lunches).

What Next?

And so...on to my next adventure. What will that be exactly? Frankly, I have no idea yet...but whatever it is, I need to know I'll be trying to change the world :-)

I'm open to ideas...so if you have some, please get in touch.

I Am a Strange Loop

alexbarnett — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:45:00 GMT

About 10 years ago a friend gave to me a book as gift. We were sitting on the deck of a canal boat on a Friday late afternoon set for a weekend of lazy meandering with friends and family along the Thames, when he handed me his own copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. "You'll love this" he said.

Willem was was right. Godel, Escher, Bach not only tickled my penchant for self-referentialism and recursion ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account"), it also reinforced an odd conviction I've held that "magic" happens where these oddities exist (all around and within us).

Last week, (thanks to Nick Carr), I was alerted to Douglas R. Hofstadter's latest mind-bender, I Am a Strange Loop. The book arrived today, unpacked and on the table when I got back from work this evening...inviting me to another voyage with this great mind:

"Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol is the one you call "I". An "I" is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for."

Chris Anderson: Charlie Rose interview discussing FREE

alexbarnett — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:51:00 GMT

I spent some time this morning watching the Charlie Rose interview with Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, discussing FREE.

The interview covers the economics and ideas driving the Internet's current (and future) state: the Gift Economy; the Attention Economy; and the Reputation Economy. Rose leads the conversation into topics such as covering the Freemium business model and consumer perceptions about the value of privacy (or lack of thereof).

The interview also moves to the topic of the Yahoo! and Microsoft merger. Rose asks: "Why is it that Yahoo! can't recruit the people at Google - through some extraordinary salary offers - that would let Yahoo! replicate what Google has?"

Anderson's answer (paraphrased): "There is a basic philosophical difference between Google and Yahoo! Google is a Machine company. Google believes that data, machines and the Algorithms will drive the company's growth. Yahoo! is a people company - it believes content created by people and the conections made between them with its drive growth."

"And what about Microsoft?", Rose asks. Anderson responds (again, paraphrasing) - "Microsoft is a pre-web software company that philosophically wants to be somewhere in between Google and Yahoo!" An oversimplified analysis, surely (hey, it's a TV interview answer), but I think the Anderson's conclusion is pretty accurate at its heart.

The Efficiency of (the) American English Language

alexbarnett — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:27:00 GMT

As I've come to learn while living in the US, the American English language is more efficient than its British English cousin. The difference between the two languages is more than just ~~fonetic~~ phonetic simplification - the general rule seems to be about using fewer letters and words as a whole. Here are some of the examples I've bumped into:

American English	British English	Diff count	Links to notes
Four hundred twenty	Four hundred and twenty	3	notes
Delimiter	Deliminator	2	notes
Oriented	Orientated	2	notes
I use less words than you	You use fewer words than me	1	notes
anesthetist	anaesthetist	1	notes
color	colour	1	notes
program	programme	2	notes
aluminum	aluminium	1	notes
donut	doughnut	3	notes
yogurt	yoghurt	2	notes
ass	arse	1	notes
Duh!	Of course	4	notes

As we know, most rules have an exception, and the "using fewer letters and words" rule is no exception:

American English	British English	Diff count	Links to notes
Triple 2% grande double mocha vanilla extra hot latte add non-fat whipped cream	Cup of tea	-67	notes

(pic from Color vs. Colour - The Great Spelling Battle)

Thinking with a hyperlinked-content processor

alexbarnett — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:35:00 GMT

Alex Pang's post Thinking with a word processor led me to ask myself...

This question: How does my trawling / tagging / blogging / processing of hyperlinked content affect my thinking?

Answer: Immeasurably, I suspect.

The Lightnet Revisited

alexbarnett — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:35:00 GMT

At the end of 2005 I wrote a post messing around with some ideas on the future of the net.

One of the ideas was the counter concept to the Darknet, using the term 'Lightnet'. I didn't define 'Lightnet', Lucas Gonze did that (and soon after Lucas was good enough to acknowledge me with credit for the invention of the term in the Darknet context).

Over the next few days, Mike Linksvayer, Peter Van Dijck, Kenyatta, Richard MacManus and Jon Udell did their bit of meme-spreading, then J.D. Lasica, author of 'Darknet: Hollywoods War Against the Digitial Generation', picked up on the Lightnet too, where this pic turned up:

A few days later, Lucas and J.D. Lasica were both interviewed by Jason Boog for an article Jason published at Publish, where Clay Shirky was also asked to comment.

But it didn't end there. Prompted by Raymond's post today I was curious to see how the lightnet meme has been doing so I did some searching around.. Here are some samples of the Lightnet citations I found:

December 2005 - Lightnet becomes a del.icio.us tag
December 2005: J. LeRoy connects the Lightnet with Web 2.0
February 2006 - the above lightnet pic and lightnet concept is discussed by Joshua Kinsberg in the context of political free speech
February 2006 - Dave Tool contemplates 'lightnet services'
February 2006 - Chris Ritke confrims Lucas is adament: "one lightnet but many darknets"
March 2006 - Lightnet is discussed at South by Southwest (whether 'lightnet values' can work in a secure private network)
August 2006 - Soundblog considers Lightnet in a future of open media and social networks
October 2006 - the lightnet is the P2P place
December 2006 - lightnet mused in italian
January 2007 - the term Lightnet get its very own entry in Wikipedia (a bit light on content at the moment - I haven't and won't ;-)
February 2007 - Darknet! = Lightnet
February 2007 - DTLQ believes in lightnets. Raymond wrote that today, 15 months after lightnet's birth.

Long live the Lightnet.

The Abundance of Memes

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 04:09:00 GMT

The Long Tail meme took quite a while for it to propagate through memespace. I don't know how long it took for the first spark of the idea to emerge in Chris Anderson's mind, to it being a popular modern economic idea, but it's safe to say it took close to years.

Like others, I suspect Chris Anderson's new meme, 'The Economics of Abundance', will take a lot less time to do the memetic rounds this time around. Not just because of the Long Tail's success - of course the exposure Chris has accrued with his bestseller will bode well for his next literary effort, and not just because the idea itself may have merit, but also because the context within these kinds of memes can spread has evolved significantly, even within the relatively short period of time it has taken for the Long Tail meme to travel from one mind to many minds.

Since the advent of the internet, indeed since humankind's ability to communicate verbally, the environment in which ideas and thoughts can be spread, circulated, discussed and evolve has changed dramatically for the better (from the meme's eye point of view at least) and is changing at an ever accelerating pace.

As we take each new technological step to speed up the rate at which we can communicate ideas, the rate at which the next technological step arrives and is almost universally accessible is itself accelerating. Our first great technological step in this direction was the invention of the Gutenberg press - it provided a massively more efficient way to share ideas. And from there, local newspapers then to international periodicals powered by Morse code, communicating stories and ideas to far reaching nodes of the world; from landline telephones to cellphones to text, then pictures and even video messaging; from letter writing and the postal networks, then fax machines to email and instant messaging; from bookwriting to desktop publishing to websites to blogs; from homevideos shared by foot and post to high resolution videos shared by clicks of buttons; the memetic efficiency of RSS and the great online social networks that are getting built out at a phenomenal rate - each of these technologies, and many others more, have created and are creating an ever more meme-friendly environment for which ideas can thrive. The environment for ideas to traverse from to mind to mind and from minds to networks of minds has never been so friction free, and still, this trend is set to continue at an ever more increasing rate.

Many of the memes that zip along the carriageways and networks of minds are to do with how to improve the environment of the sharing of ideas. This is self-referential magic at work. The exponential curves we experience in the progress of these communications technologies are set to continue. If there is the abundance of anything at all, it is surely the abundance in the numbers of opportunities that these memes have to spread amongst our networks of minds.

We are fast arriving at a critical evolutionary point of the memetic environment, if we have not done so already, where ideas that encourage yet further progress along the open communications paths will succeed speedily, and where those memes that attempt to stifle the propagation of ideas will be rapidly snuffed out. This truth, to me at least on this point, is abundantly clear.