Gavin’s Digital Diner

It’s a long, uphill slog from the BART station on Market Street to San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral at the tip-top of Nob Hill. I was winded and red-faced when I reached the top and slipped into the nave looking for a seat. The place was packed, but I managed to plop into an empty space, on the far left, two pews back from the crossing, a fantastic seat. (There are always single slots in a world that travels in couples.) This particular evening, even the transepts — the left and right arms of a cruciform cathedral — were filled to the brim. People were spilling out into the aisles, only to be swept back every few minutes by fire-marshal fearing staff.

I’ll tell you now, I was mighty glad to see cushions on the pews. My ecumenical sorties into various churches and cathedrals don’t include memories of cushions. I admit it, when I walked up the aisle, I briefly succumbed to a moment of irrational fear; a fear of ass-numbing angst combined with childhood memories of church-induced narcolepsy. More so, I’m usually not one for choral groups, nor cathedrals for that matter – unless, of course, they have flying buttresses (the cathedrals, not the choral groups.)

I am quite fond of flying buttresses. I think I just like saying the words “flying buttress” — it has such a nice ring to it. Unfortunately, they’re not something that comes up often in casual conversation. It’s a shame. Someday, I’ll get to work it into a conversation. “Nice flying buttress you’ve got there,” I’ll say. “I dig the arches, man.”

Nevertheless, given the lack of flying buttresses, it was a surprise to find myself, in a cathedral, waiting for a choral performance. Little did I know I was in for a pleasant surprise, as good — perhaps even better — than a flying buttress.

As chance would have it, you see, I was at loose ends that particular evening in San Francisco. Chance is that way sometimes. So, when a friend offered a ticket I jumped. I’m a firm believer that opportunities not taken are opportunities lost. I despise lost opportunities. Moreover, it was this or cool my heels in that god-forsaken suburban wasteland known as Santa Clara. After a few trips to Santa Clara, my (somewhat) irrational fear of ending my years in a trailer park has been supplanted with an irrational fear of ending up as cubical monkey in Santa Clara or, worse yet, Palo Alto (shudder). The weather is nice though.

So it was chance — and the offer of dinner and a ticket — that brought me to hear the vocal sounds of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares – once known as “The Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir.” (Obviously, they have wisely replaced their Soviet PR firm, Merrill, Lynch, Sacco, Vanzetti, and Brezhnev.)

Truly, there is magic in the human voice, a magic I like. Those who know me know I love the sultry sounds of jazz and blues, singers like Madeline Peyroux, Melody Gardot, Corinne Bailey Rae, Nellie McKay; and Diana Krall. I even like Celtic Woman. There I fault genetic memory. I figure it stirs my Celtic genes or something. It makes me want to put on a kilt, drink mead, marry a red-headed woman, and swing a Claymore, not necessarily in that order. It makes me actually like the sound of bagpipes — a true sign of genetic insanity at its most fundamental.

I always figured the attraction was that, as a human, I am biased towards the sounds of other humans. (Despite what you may have heard, and despite liking the sounds of bagpipes, I am human. I have the papers to prove it.) But, even with that bias, choral music is a stretch. I learned otherwise.

There is another magic that happens when the human voice twists and turns, wafting in and out of phase with other voices, waves and frequencies ebbing, flowing and colliding, dancing with the harmonic resonance of stone and steel. There is a magic in sounds produced by these twenty-four Bulgarian women; women who sing in amazing dissonance and harmony, crossing phase, droning and even chirping.

As the choir — 24 eclectically sized, shaped and aged women — sang, I heard woodwinds, and strings, and even the harmonic drone of a bag pipes. I heard the basso profundo of the bassoon, and the weedy trill of the clarinet. I heard the drag of a bow across the cellos midriff. I heard the wind, I heard the sounds of a village market, the sounds of love lost and found, and the sounds of a people tossed and turned on the juxtaposition of Europe and Asia. Yet, there were no instruments, no woodwinds, no strings; only the sound of the human voice; the voice as instrument.

In their voices, I heard a rich quilt of sounds and images, harmonic and dissonant, at once alien and yet with a familiarity I could taste. One could almost see the waves of sound cascade off the gothic fanned arches of the cathedral’s ceiling and ricochet off the pillars to vibrate the stain glass windows. I’d swear – when the currents of dissonance and harmony collided, I could feel it in my teeth as well as my soul.

In their voices, was the sound of the wind as it swept out of the Carpathians; in their voices was the call of the Muezzin wafting out of the Middle East, across Turkey, into the heart of Bulgaria. In their voices were the gentle chirped murmurs of a village market; in their voices was the call of the power and universal anguish of love and courtship, echoing across time. There was even a dissonance in the translated titles of the songs: these were top-forty Bulgarian hits that spoke volumes in name alone; songs with names like “The Old Lady is Growing Onion,” “I Feel Sleepy, I Want to Go to Bed,” and “Pigeons are Cooing.” Their simple song, in complex voice, was a beauty beyond; a sum greater than the individual parts. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the chords cascade; bouncing and echoing across time and space – the harmonic resonance of grace against stone and steel.

The failure statistic is often cited, usually with a moan and a wail. It goes like this: 30, 40, or 50 percent of all IT projects go bad. The rest — the ones that actually succeed — well, they go “slightly bad too.” At least some of them do. In the end, nobody’s happy. Jobs are lost, heads roll, teeth gnash. The statistics are real enough, by the way, although they are often cited incorrectly. I fault leadership and the incessant mixing up of means and ends.

Here are the facts. The original source of those numbers is a 1994 report by the Standish Group called the CHAOS REPORT. The report said this about IT projects (and I’m paraphrasing not plagiarizing):

• 31% of [IT] projects are cancelled before completion,
  
• 88% are over deadline or over budget or both,
  
• The costs of such overruns are usually (at least) double original estimates
  

If you think those numbers are sort of long in the tooth, how about these from 2004.

• 18 percent of all IT project out and out fail,
  
• 53 percent are “challenged” (in other words went awry in some way),
  
• Only 29 percent actually “succeed.”
  

These were updated in 2004. Unfortunately, the damn researchers rearranged the categories, so it’s actually impossible to compare the numbers.

Pie Charts are Fun

Taken another way, 70 percent or all projects go at least slightly pear-shaped. That’s abysmal. It’s no wonder nonprofits are technologically gun-shy. Seventy percent of the time they feel royally screwed. I’d be gun-shy too. The fact is, looking at those numbers, a good E.D. should look upon all IT projects with some degree of skepticism. Imagine if 70 percent of your dates never showed up, or if 70 percent of your email went unnoticed or unanswered, or if 70 percent of the time you ordered dinner in a restaurant you didn’t get what you ordered. It would be enough to give a guy a complex.

“Hey, who ordered the Kansas City rib-eye,” says the waiter. “I did,” you reply. “Sorry,” says the waiter,” we don’t have steak. Here’s some fried city pigeon.” “But, I wanted steak…,” you mumble. “It’s almost the same thing, just as good,” says the waiter. “Besides, it’s local,” he adds, a marketer’s grin plastered ear-to-ear. “You know, it’s slow food, at least this one was slow. That’ll be ten bucks more.”

Why do good projects go bad, and what does that mean?

Usually, the answer is simple — lack of clarity about the goals. People mix up the ends with the means. They garble their goals. They lose sight of the purpose, the raison d’être. They mistake the means for the ends, or they really didn’t have any clear goals in the first place. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  Let me give you an example, mixing up the means and the ends is deadly.

Recently, a friend of mine recounted a story over dinner. He had been at a meeting of international grant makers, funders, and other philanthropic types. Good people all, I am sure. Nevertheless, at this meeting, these folks were busy patting themselves on the back about their successes with Darfur. The successes, it seems, were many — increased public awareness, social networking sites, widgets and mashups, letters to Congress, web site visitors, etc, etc. All their outcomes were terrific; all the measures spelled success, with a capital “S.”

I looked at my friend and said “But…” “Exactly,” he said. “There is still a war. People are still dying. This is not success.”

Writ large, this is also one of my overarching philanthropic fears. I fear the tyranny of false outcomes. I fear an overemphasis on “outcome measurement,” an emphasis that forces the philanthropic world to think and act solely in terms of all things measurable, thus missing the forest for the trees and mistaking the measures or the outcome for the true goals.

I fear this will, in fact, drive us to a place where success is only something that is measurable, that is quantifiable. I fear that it will drive us to tiny measures, to secondary goals, easily measured, and easily met, and that will drive us to tunnel vision, all the while ignoring the true goals, the real ends — declaring the success of a fund-raising campaign and forgetting why we were raising the money in the first place.

If you mix up the means — things like memberships, activists, letters to Congress, and the like — with the ends — people die and freedoms are lost while we count page hits.

In IT, the demons entrance the audience with the shiny and new — we’re distracted, fascinated by the glitter and gleam, and lose sight of the goals. In my mind, any project that begins with a list of gadgets, software, hardware, or more trained monkeys, is the problem.

I blame lack of leadership. Moreover, I blame the IT directors and CIO’s, the project managers, and IT consultants, and, since I’m blaming people, the ED’s too. If a project goes bad, the odds are someone has mixed up goals, and scrambled the ends. I dare say somebody probably over-sold the whole thing too. Beware the marketer; else you’re likely to be eating pigeon.

In a nutshell, this is the reason a lot of nonprofit IT directors or CIOs or the like feel misunderstood, underappreciated, or downright alienated. They talk about the shiny, the new, the means, and forget about the goal, the purpose, the end. Do that and you’ll end up in that 70 percent.

I fault two specific things: dashed expectations and lack of vision. Setting goals, and setting expectations about those goals, is the key to a long life, whiter teeth, and a better love life. Ah, well, maybe I’m exaggerating. But understanding goals and setting expectations is the key to happy — successful — IT projects. White teeth are just a bonus.

It’s pathological, you techies: you over-promise and under-deliver. For many a geek, technology is an end, gadget as goal. If you lose the goal, lose clarity of purpose, your good projects will go bad.

It starts with a project divorced from vision — the vision of the organization — tacked instead to some secondary, usually measurable but secondary, outcome. It ends with what I call the “expectations gap” — the difference between what is promised, what is really possible, and the eventual, actual results.

• The “promised” — this is what the market usually over promises, whiter teeth, bigger naughty bits of all variety, better, faster, and, of course, you’ll have more friends. Usually it’s absolute hogwash.
• The “possible” — this is what could occur, if absolutely everything goes swimmingly, and all the stars align just right. This is what should be your goal.
• The “actual” — this is what gets delivered.

The trick here is to know the goal, keep the vision clear, and to simply not over promise. Success here is to make the “actual” equal the “possible.” But, if you promised too much, you’ve already failed. Be clear — even painfully honest — about what’s possible, and communicate so often that it hurts. Set expectations wisely. Mind the gap.

Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.

It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.

Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity.

I used to blame it all on the two seemingly contradictory effects of the Internet: the forces of disintermediation and the forces of aggregation. Simply put:

• The Net is a powerful disintermediating force, smashing the Taylor pyramid, revolutionizing “participation” and communications, and generally destroying the value of “brokers” and traditional intermediaries of all variety from travel agents to stock brokers to librarians. It’s all about removing the distance between markets, customers, politics, and people.

Simultaneously (and somewhat contradictorily)

• The Net is a powerful, anti-entropic force, aggregating the disaggregate, creating new “markets” – social, financial, and political – where previously they were too small or too distributed to matter — making collecting PEZ dispensers into a global marketplace, and increasing the value of so-called “infomediaries.”

But there’s another force at work here, a third force. It’s a force I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a while now, since I was part of the research team for the book Megatrends, about the ten trends that would shape the future. Then this third force was something I called the “Eleventh Megatrend.” It didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t that it wasn’t “mega” enough, or “trendy” enough; I think I just wasn’t able to articulate it well enough. Whatever the reason, author John Naisbitt said we only had room for ten anyway.

[I did once ask him once: "Why only ten?" He replied, "It was good enough for Moses." I was young and had no snappy come-back. I should have said something about the Code of Hammurabi. There were over 280 of those!]

Undaunted, I’ve always held this one in the back of my mind. Deep down, it seemed important. Now it’s here. In the last few years, it has started to shape and mold this bumpy world.

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.” It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles.

The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Day by day, step-by-step, we are closer and closer to having our grubby little metaphorical fingers on the pulse of the world, a live wire tapped straight into a global, wired, world nervous system —pulling out the real-time flow of public opinion, or market penetration, or product usage, or the number of parking spaces left in a parking garage.

This sort of stuff, this sort of information – and the underlying tools that let us manipulate it – makes possible real-time feedback about markets, or electricity consumption, or seats on an airplane. It also makes possible real-time plebiscites, voting on this or that idea or candidate, participatory democracy at its finest—or, at a slightly less noble end of the spectrum, “American Idol.”

So, what’s does this have to do with social networking?

People hear the wrong thing when they hear “social networking.” They hear the first word, and miss the second. They hear “social” and stop listening. Then they start thinking MySpace, or Friendster, or something weird like Twitter. That’s bad branding at work. It belies its power, masks its pervasiveness and importance, and makes it seem all together kind of silly. It’s not silly, but it’s also not that social.

We all know what happens once you start ambling down the mental road towards MySpace, you start thinking of pictures of people barfing at keg parties. I know I do. Now, don’t get me wrong, truly such photos are a gift to the world. But let’s not be fooled by this red herring. It’s not about the barf — herring or otherwise —it’s the “network.” Don’t mistake the application for the revolution. It’s also about the network.

Sure, part of social networking is about people being social, working together, and connecting for common purposes, sharing, barfing, mixing, and mashing and mapping. But, the true revolution is about network, and the true revolution is about the machines. It’s the machines that are social – and they are apparently real party animals, constant keggers.

Through their diligence, they’re delivering an increasingly real-time flow of data about the tiniest aspects of our world. They are the essence of the third force, my eleventh megatrend, the move from “sampling to monitoring.” These talkative, social machines are collapsing time, eliminating the distance between data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Moreover, the network is being potentiated this mystical thing called the “mashup” — machine-to-machine structured (and open) data exchange. It’s stuff like voting information from Catalist seamlessly “mashed” and mixed with DemocracyInAction’s magic advocacy engine – one system sharing with another, where the sum, and the power, if done right, is greater than the collective parts, heralding either the spring of hope or, perhaps, the winter of our despair.

It’s Google Maps and apparently just about everything in the universe. It’s my own true love, sweet Jane the GPS lady, loaded and locked with the locations of every Starbucks in the galactic federation. The revolution is all about the real-time flow of information about our world. We’re diving into that flow like we’ve never dived before. Hopefully it’s headfirst into the season of light.

Here’s a mundane, yet telling example: right now, like it or not, traffic congestion is being measured by monitoring your cell-phone. You’re just a little node, my friend, a simple single data point on the net. Unknown to you, your fancy-pants iPhone or your sleek Blackberry, is secretly working for Traffic.com. It, and thousands like it, they’re part of an active social network, busily creating their own “user generated content,” day in and day out, in the form of tiny data points that measure the traffic “flow” through our transportation veins.

Taken in aggregate, all that content, mixed and mashed with some mathematical magic and a map or two, becomes a real-time picture of vehicular time, speed, and distance. There is no wisdom to this crowd; it’s simply the ebb and flow that adds value. The wisdom of this crowd is the crowd itself.

What’s the end result of all this social networking? Well, the result is my Blackberry moans (kind of like a cow on Prozac). Up pops an email message telling me that my particular highway home is jammed — all before I’ve left the office. As a result, I sigh and work late once again. Heisenberg is now happy, as observation has once again changed reality. Meanwhile, “Captain Jack and SkyTeam Traffic Copter” — the old sampling system that had to wait politely for its broadcast time on the six o’clock news — is a relic of the past.

Here’s another: a social network that gets to the essence of this age of wisdom, and proves, in reality, that it ain’t really all that “social.” Like all social networks, this one is built around a common goal — the simple goal of not getting lost in Yonkers. In this case, TomTom has done it by turning their customers into thousands of tiny (or not so tiny) data collection robots.

I, Robot; I work for TomTom – more accurately — I volunteer for them. (Either that or my paychecks have gone missing in the mail.) I’m part of their distributed robotic army of sensors and monitors. Through my minute and irregular contributions, I maintain and update their database of roads and bridges and Starbuck locations. When I find a road closed, or a bridge under repair, Jane (the GPS lady) and I flag it, and the world is wiser.

Automagically, that data speeds its way (via Bluetooth) across my own tiny personal area network, into my cell phone. From there, it hops and jumps and snuggles its way through the ‘Net, eventually wending its way into the Borg-like shared collective machine consciousness. My contribution feeds the giant GPS Wiki, and benefits the collective.

I am but a social node on the network, helping monitor the ebb and flow of the reality called road repair (also called “summer” in Michigan). If they added pictures of people mooning me along my route, I might even contribute more often – social networking comes full circle. Well, maybe not.

With TomTom, once again, it’s not so much crowd-based wisdom as it is simply recognizing, enabling, and capitalizing on commonly held needs, and having the wisdom to know that your customers or constituents are your greatest asset. They’re the networkers feeding the machines that provide real-time data collection, real-time analysis and reporting, and innovative mashups between previously disconnected things, like pictures and maps, or voting records and campaign donations, or your membership, national or state voter files, census data, and, who knows, perhaps their petroleum purchasing habits. Together, we’re collapsing time.

This third force is all about collapsing the time between action and effect, between impact and reporting. Once collapsed, it’s about being able to mash that data up to show you new things, in new ways, or just so it lets you keep track of it a wee bit easier. It’s about turning data into information, and information into wisdom or foolishness, lightness or dark.

This third force is about our radical move from sampling our world in little bits and pieces to monitoring our lives in near-real-time, gulping it down in great big chunks, as it happens. And, it’s also about the distribution and representation of this new world of information – these great chunks of stuff – in ways that that change lives, change markets, or simply change the length of your workday. It’s about the network. We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Whichever way we’re going, the traffic is moving briskly, or so says Jane the GPS lady.

I think I was eight when I read my first “real” book — of course, that’s not counting comics, Willy Waddle, or books designed to be chewed. The book was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a proper book; a marvelous story for a boy who spent his days poking at squiggly-wiggly things in the tide pools of Cadboro Bay. I’m sure I still have it somewhere.

I love books — the look and feel, even the smell. They’re almost perfect: relatively portable, random-access, and — treated properly — they’ll last a hell of a long time. If you get tired of them, you can give them away, sell them on eBay, take them to a used-book store, or burn them for kindling, al la Fahrenheit 451… They look grand on bookshelves. They’re almost perfect. The do have a few draw backs:

• Books (and paper) are heavy — especially those damn 4-inch thick computer books.
• Books are not very portable — small quantities are fine, but if you try to take ten or so on vacation with you, it’s a literal drag. Despite their catchy name, Few “Pocket Books” will actually fit in a pocket — or if they do, you look kind of stupid.
• Paper takes up a lot of space — especially those damn user guides, administrator guides, and installation manuals I print and bind in 3-ring notebooks.
• Printed materials tend to “expire” — Today’s newspaper is worth about a dollar, yesterday’s is suitable for wrapping fish. (Of course, tomorrow’s newspaper, if you had it today, would be worth a fortune.)
• Repurposing is difficult — Transmutation costs are outrageous, either lead to gold, or paper to digital. Screw OCR, it’s not good enough, ever.
• Paper is expensive — There a “tree-cost” and an environmental cost. The manufacture and bleaching of paper is horrendous. Stand downwind of a pulp mill and breath deep. You’ll know what I mean.
• The print publishing process is arcane — the economies discourage risk and tend to favor existing authors and large publishers, to the determent of the small publisher or aspiring writers.

In late 2007, Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle. I’m not sure he’ll be remembered in the same breath as Herr Hoffmann Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (whew). At least his name is shorter. The Kindle is, nevertheless, revolutionary.

Life’s Little Ironies

I got mine in late January of 2008. I feel I’m standing at the edge of history. Despite the book’s drawbacks, it was with some concern for my eternal soul — and some trepidation about the future — that I ordered a Kindle. A classic conundrum, I was caught in a lovers triangle, torn between my love of books and my love of shiny new gadgets. I couldn’t resist. I did not get it simply because I had an extra 400 simoleons burning a hole in my pocket though. I had a real purpose in mind, really. But I do like gadgets.

Just so we’re straight: let me assure you, I am not anxious to herald the end of the 600-year reign of the book. More so, after watching what the iPod and digital music has done to the music industry; I fear for the future. Newspapers are already suffering — perhaps on their last legs — put out to pasture by something as innocent as Craig’s List. Information may want to be free, but writers (and journalists) also want to eat. I think they should. Nevertheless, I bought a Kindle – hoping to fill it with user manuals, installation guides, and 4-inch-thick computer books (and a little pulp SciFi for long airplane rides).

Ironically, my Kindle arrived just after I had spent untold hours building, drilling, cutting, measuring, cutting again, cursing, painting, staining, sanding, and trimming some 30-odd-feet of book shelves for some of my thousand-odd books. There was barely time to admire my work before it was time to ponder the future of books. Had it all been a waste of time? They’re awful purty, if I do say so myself.

The Difference Engine

The Kindle is different; it changes the rules of the game. First, it’s wired, in a wireless sort of way. It comes bundled with a lifetime, free wireless connection to the ‘net — an EVDO connection, no less, via Sprint.

That’s right, you heard me —free. Once you shell out the 400 clamasaurs, you can browse the web, surf to your heart’s content for not another plug nickel. You see, the connectivity is bundled as a cost of sales, book sales. Amazon is betting on making up that cost with the sale of content; figuratively giving away the razors and hoping to sell you a razorblade in the form of a $9.77 Kindle-ized copy of Sweeny Todd (the book, not the movie).

They’ve made the process so painless it’s scary. Gratification is instantaneous. Click a button on the beast, and the book arrives, wirelessly, painlessly, ruthlessly efficient. I worry it’s too painless. Now, when I finish the first book in a three-part trilogy, the next book in the series is just a click away. This could cause a clamasaur problem.

I admit, at first glance, the Kindle looks funny. I was disheartened by its design, seeing the initial press coverage. In the pictures it looked like it was designed for the DHARMA Initiative (right here in Ann Arbor), circa 1968. Up close, though it’s not that bad — kind of retro, kind of not.

It’s here that I think the wonky gadget geeks missed their marks, and missed them badly.

The pundits, previously spoiled by the elegant beauty of all-things iPod, almost universally panned the Kindle, complaining about pretty much everything. But they especially complained that it was impossible to hold and “funny looking” (a technical term meaning not an iPhone). Once I had mine in my hands, I knew where those grumpy geeks had gone wrong. They had been using the Kindle naked. I mean the Kindle was naked, not the gadget geeks. (Don’t go there.)

In the half-dozen reviews I saw or read, every Kindle was demoed without its leather case. It was a logical mistake on their part. They’re used to looking at iPhones, and iPods, and other iThings — we can blame bad iPoddy training. The iPod “case,” for example, is a worthless throwaway specifically designed to make you spend another couple of hundred dollars on iPod accessories.

Back to the point, the Kindle, sans the (included) cover, is awkward to hold. However, properly attired, dressed up in nice leather, it all flows, it all makes sense. This cover is integral. You need it.

A Properly Dressed Kindle

Easy to Hold | Easy to Read

Without its cover, there is no easy place to put your fingers, no logical place to grab it at all. In fact, everything you touch seems to toggle the pages, either forward or back.

Slip it in its cover, however, and suddenly all the weird angles make sense. The left edge sort of slips into two leather brackets, and the weird angles on the right side now provide purchase for your thumb on the cover— they’re cutbacks that let you easily hold the thing without mashing the (now handy) “Next Page” bar. There’s a little plastic tab that snaps into the rubberized underside of the beast that holds it all in place. (Pundits, apparently, don’t read manuals.)

With the cover on, I find myself holding it just like I would hold a hardback book; palms on the cover and thumbs on each edge. Nothing could be more natural. It “feels” like a book. Moreover, it reads like a book. I’ve even taken to taking it to bed, reading a few pages of a novel before The A Daily Show. Let me say that again: it reads like a book. The transition was painless. My luggage has just shed 10 lbs.

It has a couple of other features, some worth mentioning, some not. There’s a speaker, but it’s lousy. Given that, it will play music and audio books. Through headphones or ear-buds the sound’s great. I gave it the Amy Winehouse test, and it passed. But, I’m not giving up my iPod (which is filled with Audiobooks anyway). Besides, there’s no way I could easily wire it into my car without feeling real foolish. Of note, you can put it “to sleep” — locking the keyboard — and the music or audio books will continue to play. This is important; otherwise the cover clicks the mousy-roller thing, playing havoc.

The Weight of Water

Weight-wise, the Kindle is elegant. It weighs in at exactly one pound, cover included. At first, I thought: “a pound, damn, that’s kind of heavy for a book, ain’t it?” Turns out, it’s not. (And, quite frankly, the Kindle is smaller than it looks in any picture.)

Just for the fun, I decided to run its “comps” — to compare it to a few other books I had laying around on the nightstand.

As you can see in the pictures above, a typical paper-back “trade” book, as represented by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, weighs over a pound and is also slightly larger. A hardback (an embargoed copy of Chuck Lewis’s The Buying of Congress) is almost twice that. A paper-back, unabridged Mark Twain Reader is over 3 lbs. But, then again, Mark Twain is worth his weight in gold. Paperback pulp fiction, the kind I find in airports and carry from country to country, town to town, weighs in at about a pound.

Size-wise digital books on the Kindle average between 500K and 800K. Calculating liberally, that means that my beast, outfitted as it is with a 2GB SD card I found in a drawer, can hold over 2,000 books. With that kind of space, I am going to be well read, but broke.

Here’s the deal: Kindle books typically cost less. By my reckoning, I’ll save the purchase price within two years, on computer books alone. I am, on the other hand, worried about my local Borders, the Kindle’s gain, is their loss. I take solace in the fact that clicking the Kindle is no substitute for my weekly trip to the Border’s redoubt.

Books on the Kindle are cheaper than paper… Here’s a random comparison of titles and prices.

Depending on the book, savings run from nothing, up to about 26 percent of the print edition. Savings over hardback costs are greater still, but that comparison seems unjust, since the difference seems irrelevant.

[Borders, by the way, no doubt fearing the loss of my business, has opened a new concept store in town. It incorporates "digital media and internet features" — a concept they are calling the "media room." I haven't been yet — been too busy building bookcases and playing with my Kindle.]

The Future of Ideas

Finally, with the Kindle, I had two ideas I wanted to pursue — two ideas I used to justify the purchase to myself:

1. I use it as a “geek reference library” — loading it up with PDF copies of manuals, installation guides, administrator references, and all the other desiderata of CIO life (as well as books).
2. There were possible “enterprise” uses — could I, for example, use it for board materials? Would it effectively bridge the gap between things “printed” and things “digital,” serving that in-between no-man’s-land land where we still want paper, but despise it.

The Portable Geek

The first idea turned out to be easy. There are three easy ways to turn other documents, like PDFs, into things that can be read on the Kindle. It’s not perfect, but it works. It works best with text-heavy documents. Graphics can be a problem. They don’t scale well.

At issue here is the ability to scale — fonts and graphics — from “I can read it” to “I can read it across the room.” The text has to be able to “flow” — to adjust to the screen as you up the font size.

Amazon’s native format — a DRM’ed version of the MobiPocket eBook format — does this. Word documents and text documents do this. This makes Kindle conversion easier. PDF’s don’t flow all that well, especially if they’re graphic-heavy. To set the record straight: the Kindle supports Amazon’s DRM format (.AZW), as well as unprotected MobiPocket formats (.PRC and .MOBI) and Text documents. Other formats (like Word and HTML) must be converted

With all of them, Word, PDF, HTML, or Text, the conversion is easy. There are three ways. Two are free, and one costs $0.10 per document. The ten cents is for the wireless delivery.

1. Convert via Email (without wireless delivery) — simply email the file to a special Amazon email address, they’ll convert it for you, and they’ll email it back to you. You then drag it on to your Kindle from your PC.
2. Convert via Email (with wireless delivery) — simply email the file to Amazon to a (slightly) different email address, they’ll convert for you it and email it directly to your Kindle for a cost of ten cents. It arrives on the Kindle via the wireless connection.
3. Convert manually — simply download a (free) copy of the MobiPocket Reader software, and click the button to convert the file to the MobiPocket format. It takes a few seconds and stores it on your hard-drive. Once done, you just drag it into the Documents folder on the Kindle.

That’s it. With a little “conversion” work, I had a complete technical reference library on my Kindle. Moreover, it was searchable. Everything on the Kindle is searchable. That’s what the keyboard is for. Just a few (tiny) keystrokes and you get a KWIC listing of any term you enter. Idea number “One” was a success. I had my geek library, portable, searchable; I’d never suffer insomnia again.

Enterprise and Culture

The other idea, enterprise applications, is slightly problematic. The Kindle, like many of today’s gadgets, does not lend itself well to enterprise. DRM gets in the way, much as it gets in the way of using a Kindle within a library. That’s a problem that needs solving. In my mind, the solution is easy, the answer, simple: like a physical book; a digital book should only be in one place at a time. How this is done, is easy too, but I’ll save that idea for some other time.

DRM aside, there are a few uses where the Kindle has an enterprising chance — a chance to function as a wedge between the analog and the digital world.

Organizationally, for example, we produce and ship an amazing amount of paper, all for an internal audience. Non-profits in general do the same thing. I’m talking about all those board documents; updated policy manuals, bylaws, program plans, pandemic plans, and disaster recovery plans. In organizations today, documents fly through the email-aether. But, in the end, a surprising number end up on paper, in binders, and three-ring notebooks.

The reason is simple. Humans — especially those of longer tooth — don’t especially like to read lengthy documents on LCD. Even short-toothed people don’t like reading long documents on an LCD screen. Enter the Kindle.

My thought is to replace all those “reference-type materials” — Board materials for example — with a Kindle and digital copy. Even at $400 a pop we’d save on in-house publishing costs (not to mention the FedEx bills). Moreover, for the most part, these sorts of documents are not “interactive” they’re reference.

Nevertheless, they’re necessary. And, they’re heavy, awkward, and difficult to transport. They suffer the same liabilities as the “book.” Kindle-izing them would save time, save paper, keep everything centralized and up-to-date, and allow a 10-cent, near instantaneous delivery.

In the end, I am reminded again of Gutenberg. It turns out he only printed about 180 Bibles. He made his money running a press on the side, printing thousands of indulgencies for the Church. It’s an old story, innovation flows to demand. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Perhaps I’m indulging myself, but I suspect Gutenberg would approve.

A few days ago, a reader of this humble blog asked if I knew a way to embed “Skype Presence” in a SharePoint Web Part.

I didn’t. But, I was intrigued. (That’s a bad sign… as it usually means I’m going to stay up until the wee hours.)

It turns out to be pretty easy-breezy, with a few caveats. I’ll explain those below. It’s easy because lots of stuff today is “widgetized.” A few minutes on the Skype site turned up some Skype web-widgets—– basically HTML code one can embed on a blog or web page — that gave me what I needed: HTML that would display Skype “presence” by Skype name (what I call a SkypeID).

Realize, I’m no code slinger, but it looked to me that one could simply modify the HTML, adding in different Skype names, and then stack it up in a CEWP. So that’s what I did.

That’s it. Once again, the Content Editor Web Part (AKA: CEWP) is a wily rascal. It can do the most amazing things. The HTML itself is pretty simple. It consists of a small scriptlet, and some basic HTML. Here it is in a screen shot:

I’ve highlighted the areas you need to change – basically substituting the appropriate SKYPEID in the yellow areas, and/or the appropriate “friendly name” at the bottom. That’s the basics.

My first attempted yielded the result above — a webpart with my Skype status and name. If you click on the “I’m Online” graphic, it launches Skype and tries to make the call (via Skype, of course).

Silly Rabbit, Trix is for Kids

I tried it, but some wiseass at Skype designed it so you can’t call yourself. (Grumble – what fun is that!). Anyway, this all once again shows how truly neat the CEWP is.

Now I decided to get fancy — after all it was still early. I decided to set up a nice format, a table, light border, etc. Just because, I also decided to see how it handled multiple Skype accounts in the same part.

Not a problem, it turns out. I just had to cut-and-paste the code, changing the embedded SkypeID in two places, and inserting a “Friendly Name” so that it looked nice on the screen. It’s all pretty straight HTML. No muss, no fuss, and — no kitchen drudgery.

Here’s the final screen shot:

Schizophrenic Skype Status

The caveats and other bits:

1. You’ve gotta have a Skype account to use this. And, you have to have Skype loaded to use the button to call someone. If you don’t have Skype, you’ve wasted your time reading this anyway.
2. This is just stacking up the standard Skype “Skype Me” widgets. You can find other ones here: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/
3. I’ve not a clue what kind of demand this puts on SharePoint — but since this is all “client-side” code, it shouldn’t be a problem.
4. The trick here is the Content Editor Web Part. Make it your friend.
5. I did this originally in MOSS, and then duplicated it in WSS, just to make sure that it worked in both environments. It does.
6. This Skype status does NOT refresh unless you reload the page. Hence just leaving the page loaded might result in inaccurate “presence” information. [I looked at a few methods to automatically refresh, but nothing seemed elegant, and the easy answer would refresh the entire page.]
7. Use at your own risk.

I’ve appended the final code below, and I put an exported copy of the webpart up here. Feel free to download and abuse. You’ll need to edit the code and insert the desired SkypeIDs and dup the sections for additional IDs.

Finally — and I say this seriously — Caveat Emptor and all that jazz. I offer no guarantees. I distribute this free of all responsibility and liability, use and/or abuse at your own risk. It should give you no problems, but if it does, well… I’ve left town, and I’m living with the dogs on the Dalmatian coast.

Content Editor Web Part – Code for Skype Presence embedded on WSS site.

Note the areas you’ll need to edit and change. You must replace the text “SKYPE_IDn” and “Friendly_Name” with a real Skype IDs and really friendly name.

I woke up when I heard the snap, crackle, pop. A tree had fallen in the woods and I had heard it. Whatever the philosophical implications, the actual effect was that my power went out.

“Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. It was early morning, Sunday, December 23. The winds were howling — gusts to 90 mph, or so the weather channel had predicted the evening before. Trees were snapping and cracking like Rice Krispies. “Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. The earlier the hour, the more limited my vocabulary. “Damn,” I muttered.

I glanced at the clock. Now on battery — having achieved true cosmic Zen harmony with its VCR brethren — it was happily flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. “Damn,” I muttered, switching my gaze to my backup alarm clock. It read 7:30 am.

It’s was a Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve, and I was without electricity. I thought to myself: “now, you couldn’t pick a better day to challenge the fading infrastructure of a once-great industrial state.” I then told myself to shut-up and stop being so pedantic — fading infrastructure, indeed. “Damn.”

Me and disasters, well, we’re on friendly terms. Part of my job is disaster planning, “Disasters R Us.” I get to ponder global pandemics, earthquakes, deep-fat-fried-Twinkies, extensive power outages, staff gone wild, management run amok, nuclear winter, printer jams, and printer jellies. It’s all part of the job. Since ICT is now central to people’s days, lives, and work, it’s my job to figure out what to do when things go pear-shaped.

Consequently, I try to have all the appropriate responses already lined up, ready to go. I was a Boy Scout; I am prepared. In the case of my Christmas Eve scenario I was ready to leap into appropriate action.

In this case, I pulled the covers over my head and tried to adjust the position of my patented personal heating unit (AKA Tanzy the Dog). Moving a sleeping dog is impossible, by the way. Dogs control space, time, and gravity. They can change their weight and size, at will. And, they’re also very fond of tennis balls. It was Sunday, for Pete’s sake, a holiday, during a holiday week, no less. I was going to sleep in whether I wanted to or not. Now that’s an entirely appropriate disaster response.

Experts have lots to say about disaster preparedness (pesky bastards); most of it is either unintelligible or shrouded in $10 words and $100 phrases that don’t mean squat. Personally, I have four simple elements: Avoidance, honest and realistic objectives, maximum flexibility, and clear communications. Let me explain:

1. Avoid the disaster in the first place — this is the most important rule and it’s the one that most people ignore. I prefer avoiding a disaster to living through one. Given a choice, spend your resources on avoidance. I like redundancy (hence the backup alarm clock). In this case, I should have bought that standby generator I lusted after when the world was going to end in 1999.
2. For those cases where avoidance fails you, at least be honest in your planning. Identify the processes and resources that are truly critical, and I mean truly. Having all your phones work is nice, having one that works is critical; having AC in the summer is nice, having heat in the Michigan winter is critical. Moreover, once identified, develop realistic and cost effective recovery objectives. Simply, that means figure out how you might easily resurrect the critical bits, cheaply, quickly, and without much fuss.
3. When you’re planning, admit you can’t know the future and don’t try. The objective is to give your future self maximum flexibility. Remember “Murphy’s Law of Combat” — No plan ever survives first contact intact. Designing a plan that tells you exactly what to do is stupid. Instead, design so you can roll with the punches. Be prepared — plan — to adapt, improvise, and overcome. Have options, have backups, have redundancy, and think on your feet. Worry only about the critical stuff (see item 2, above) and give yourself lots of lots of options.
4. Finally, plan on communicating. Plan to (and have systems that allow you to) talk to folks — your clients, your staff, your mother. Stress clear communications in your planning and in your responses. This is absolutely crucial and this is where most folks screw it up. All the planning in the world won’t do you a lick of good if nobody knows about it, or if nobody knows what to do. Have a backup communications plan, and have a backup of that.

Back to my wee disaster…That morning, Tanzy’s canine gravity control was in top form. She was immovable. I made due, wondering all the while how such a medium-sized dog could be such a huge dog, or is it the other way ’round? Nevertheless, she’s a great heater (dogs have a body temperature between 101°F and 102°F).

We get 4 or 5 major “outages” a year. Obviously, I’m on an alien flight path and the damn di-lithium crystals are playing havoc with the flux capacitors again. Perhaps, you say, I’ve been watching too much of the SciFi Channel? Maybe, it’s my karma. Nevertheless, we’re prepared. Batteries, flashlights, a small battery powered lantern, 10 or 20 gallons of bottled water. Duct Tape. We’re prepared, I like the process. I’m often tempted to put together the survival kit from “Dr. Strangelove”:

Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days’ concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”  (Slim Pickens speaking as Major T.J. “King” Kong from “Dr. Strangelove,” 1964).

Admittedly, my supplies are slightly different. (The Russian phrase book seemed superfluous and I couldn’t decide about the lipstick.) Nevertheless, we’re prepared. We’re prepared because when the power goes out, it’s not just the lights. We lose all niceties like water, phone, toilets, heat, internet, TV, garage door opener, and all my ‘puters. Prepared does not mean pleasant.

At 9:30 am I got up. The power was still off, and I started wishing again that I had succumbed to the siren call of Y2K and bought a standby generator. I made conscious decision to revisit that decision — avoidance is the best defense.

With great trepidation I realized it was time to brave Detroit-Edison’s (DTE) voice-mail-hell — the living example of how not to design your customer / disaster communications systems. So I woke my wife.

DTE’s integrated voice response (IVR) was designed by someone with the communications skills of an illiterate monkey. Perhaps, I’m insulting the monkey. It was designed to obfuscate, not communicate, to placate not to inform. Even that was done badly. During a disaster, you don’t want to trifle with people. You want a clear message, with clear instructions.

This particular IVR was not only irrelevant and condescending but inconsistent. Seemingly randomly, the option to press the keypad would disappear, and it would only accept a voice response. Moreover, its voice recognition system was lousy, only understanding if you mimicked it, imitating its lilting prosody, forcing my wife to sing “I don’t have one” when asked about a second contact number. After endless (and slightly chilly) minutes of punching buttons and singing into the phone, we heard a hopeful note: “please hold on while I transfer you to a customer service representative.”

If the journey was endless, the letdown was immediate. The system quickly interjected: “Actually, there are no customer service representatives available right now.” “Actually,” I thought? What strange phrasing. “Actually, I’m an idiot for actually getting my hopes up.”

“Please enter or say your telephone number and a customer representative will call you back,” said the IVR. To that, my wife sang a few more bars of “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t have one,” it hung up. I went to gather firewood.

All in all, we must have called at least 20 times between Sunday morning and Monday morning, Christmas Eve. No one ever called back. Finally, on Christmas, we reached a human who told us our worries would be over by 5:30 pm, a repair crew was on its way. At 11:00 pm, still in the dark, I realized we’d been stood up again. I stoked the fire and vowed to get a generator. Two days later, the crew arrived.

I learned something. The DTE systems for both reporting problems and checking on the status of problems just did nothing except to force us to sing into the phone — Voicemail, the quickest way of telling your customers that frankly, you don’t give a damn. The web site (via laptop and blackberry) was designed solely with marketing in mind. It was also unusable via handheld.

Let me tell you, trying to navigate through buttons, icons, pictures, and swirly glossy things with a handheld does not make a good marketing impression. This struck me as another example of poor communications planning. Folks, pay attention, ’cause this is a lesson for me too:

In any sort of a disaster situation, most likely the tool you’ll have at hand is a cell phone. Moreover, the tool your customers, users, staff, or family will have is also a cell phone. Design your information systems, your communications systems, and your response systems with that simple fact in mind. Keep things simple and to the point, and communicate often.

This old dog learned from the experience. Girded by the experience, I decided that my various disaster recovery plans needed some rethinking. I needed some communications redundancy — and I needed to make things work via handheld and cell phone, the telephone is a simple and resilient communications resource, ubiquitous in its reach and adoption.

In the end, I went with a simple out-dial system, something that could be turned on or off at the flip of a switch, something off-site, third-party, and something that I didn’t have to maintain. In this case, a pre-programmable phone-tree service called “Call-em-All.” For next to nothing a year, it provides a turn-key automatic phone tree that can, at the drop of a hat (or crash of a tree limb), automatically call a preset list of folks and deliver a message. They even have nonprofit rates.

Be smart. When you plan for disasters, plan to communicate. Plan to communicate about its duration, impact, and consequences. People want to know what’s up, and they worry if they don’t know. Do that and you’ll weather it. Planning is easy; communications can be tough.

Note: Most of this was written in the dark, on a laptop. The laptop was charged using our hybrid Mercury Mariner (it is one giant battery after all) and the draft was uploaded using a wireless connection via my Blackberry (also charged off the hybrid).

I learned of the game the hard way. Sometimes it’s called “Follow the Lady” — you probably know it as “Three-card Monte.” It depends on the art of misdirection, distraction and illusion, and just a little sleight of hand. And now it seems, it’s played every night on the evening news. Even “The Daily Show” (or for now “A Daily Show”) seems to have been taken in by the artful dealer; fooled by the throw of the cards; fooled into casting the contests one by one, and ignoring the real story.

“What,” You say, “you don’t know the game?” Well, it’s easy… easy to play, easy to win. Step in a little closer…, trust me… Step right up, everyone’s a winner!

I learned the game when I worked a carnival one summer. Nope, I wasn’t “a carnie.” I was just a “greenie,” cheap summer labor. Being a carnie, well, that’s something you’re born too.

I was an innocent — called “a new” — maybe a half-step above the mooks and marks that meandered on the midway. Even now, I can sometimes catch a scent of that past, when the wind blows right. It’s scent that casts me back to those long days and thick summer nights, Kansas in late August.

They were nights where lightening-bugs punctuated the sky, and where every once in a while an elusive breeze would lift the scent of fresh-cut straw over the crowd, spiced with the burnt sugar scent of cotton candy, to fall lightly across my face as I barked the midway.

“Step right up and win a stuffed animal; everyone’s a winner,” I’d cry , as the crowd filled the midway, shuffling through the narrow lane formed by the “Ring Toss,”, “Shooting Gallery” and the rest of the joints that formed the main street of the carnival. I’d cry to the blue-eyed young women with straw colored hair, and to young men bedecked with tattered straw hats; all trailing a scent of the earth, Dove soap, and hard work.

Carnival life is no fun: I was either setting up a joint or tearing one down, or driving through the night, bound for the next small town. I worked my ass off and barely making enough to cover my tab at the concession stand. When I wasn’t working my ass off, my job was to bark on the midway, calling in the marks for a quick round of ring toss or to try their hand at knocking down a milk bottle with a baseball attached to a pendulum. The games aren’t gaffed, they aren’t rigged. Trust me, they’re straight. It’s just physics, sleight of hand, and misdirection. It’s the refined art of distraction that wins in the end.

Back to that great game, Three-Card Monte; it looks so easy. Just follow the lady. A good dealer can rope you in with a few easy wins. The shills entice and distract. I tried to learn the art of the throw and how to deal the cards; to artfully throw down one card while all the while looking like you’ve thrown the other. My hands were never good enough, my fingers never deft enough, my eyes were never shaded enough.

Today’s shills are working the media, on Fox, on NBC, and on CNN. They’re hyping the winners and losers, everyday. The news casts it continuously as a series of losers and winners — the art of misdirection.

In Iowa the surprise was Obama; in New Hampshire, Clinton was supposed to lose and lose big, only to surprise us all and win the stuffed elephant. (Or would that be a donkey?) Strangely, despite “losing,” Obama won more delegates.

But the story we hear: the pollsters are chagrined. It’s all the art of misdirection. Just between you and me, I take great pleasure in lying to the pollsters every chance I get. I advise you to do the same. Take great glee in knowing that they’re usually required to record faithfully everything you say. Imagine the possibilities.

All the while, there’s no game at all. In reality, it’s not the individual primaries that count. In fact, the media is just working the story they want to work. It’s a tie. As of this writing, neither is up, neither is down. It’s all the game of distraction.

They’re tied in a game that’s not played state by state; because it’s only the cumulative score that really matters. In Nevada Clinton added 14 to her score, while Obama added 14 to his. Obama has 38 delegates and Clinton has 36; film at 11:00. But there’s no news in that, is there? The game is called “Follow the Lady.” We’re distracted with the horserace, and we ignore the substance of the race. Step right up. Everyone’s a winner.

[The exciting sequel to "The Cuneiform Code"]

Having established the elements, theories, and principles, what I really wanted was pretty simple. I know what I wanted to keep (element one); I had a place to keep it (element two); and what I thought was a simple way to find it all again (element three).

Element One — Know what you want to keep:

What I wanted to keep were all the bits and pieces of information that are crucial to a sane IT operation. Here’s the dirty secret. There is a vast amount of stuff — facts, figures, incantations, mystical folklore, secret handshakes, twiddles and tweaks — that IT folks have to remember to keep tens or hundreds or thousands of computers happy and healthy. There’s even more to remember if you want to keep a vast army of squeaky users happy and healthy too. To most folks IT stuff is voodoo. I needed a simple system to remember all the voodoo, Papa Legba be dammed. What I wanted was a simple system to track all these assorted permutations, combinations, and incantations.

[My secret goal was to simply avoid the 11^th circle of IT hell — the hell where all bad programmers go, along with whoever invented the concept of "opt-out" email. (It should be "opt-in," you bastard — no fruit baskets for you! Oops that slipped out.)

It's a hell composed of forever clicking "Next" again and again and again, while simultaneously explaining how to print an envelope with Word. It's a hell where all three heads of Cerberus nip gently at your heels while you un-jam a printer. It's a hell where you are forced, again and again, to diagnose why "X" program doesn't play nice-nice with "Y" program.]

So, I needed a knowledgebase. My knowledgebase will serve as a repository for a host of esoteric knowledge, making it easy find again, right at my proverbial fingertips, so it’s there, when memory fails — a shared repository of the critical yet esoteric. By the way, the sharing aspect is as crucial as the “keeping it simple” part. It does no good if I know it and others don’t. Those “others” must be able to find it too.

Element Two — Have an organized place to keep it:

Abraham Maslow once observed “When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.”

[My variant on Maslow is: "When all you have is a hammer, you're bound to hit your thumb. So swing lightly." My father's variant on this was: "Nothing screws things up faster than a power tool." With a power tool, you're likely not just to hit your thumb, but cut it, and a portion of your arm, clean off. Beware the power tool. ]

It’s only natural I suppose, that when I wanted to build a knowledgebase, I turned to my preferred hammer, SharePoint. I’m sure there are other options. Maslow aside, SharePoint is well suited to the task. It’s perfect — really. It hits all the criteria. In fact, a couple of features in MOSS make this a cakewalk — specifically these new things called “email-enabled document libraries.” This feature, new to MOSS, eliminates a dozen headaches. Moreover, they make it easy to feed the beast. Email-enabled document libraries are also kind of smart. MOSS is a power tool, though, swing lightly.

First, using email-enabled document libraries, a knowledgebase is easy to feed. People already spend their days inside of Outlook; I figured I might as well capitalize on that. Second, MOSS’s document libraries are flexible. They’re flexible enough that they handle just about everything I’ve thrown — or emailed — at them, including multiple attachments, mixed attachments, weird attachments, and Buddhist email (no attachments).

Element Three: Have a Way to Find It Again

Finally, the “easy retrieval” requirement is well met by SharePoint, almost out of the box. Once you twiddle with it a bit, SharePoint’s indexing is terrific. It handles all “Office” documents, including (important for me) Visio drawings. I tend to think in pictures and flow charts drawn on napkins and, subsequently, translated to Visio. Other file types are a piece of cake too, as the search engine is extensible via add-ins called IFilters. There are IFilters available for PDFs, and JPGs, and MP3s, and all sorts of other stuff. Find a list here. There’s a filter for just about everything, from GIF’s, to TIF’s, through ZIP’s.

Creating and Feeding the Beast:

With SharePoint, feeding the beast is easy. You can send it an email message; you can send it attachments via email. SharePoint will magically convert the message to a file and put it in the document library. Along the way, it takes all the information it can from the email system and adds it as metadata, automatically. Everything — metadata, message and attachment(s) — are completely searchable.

Anything mailed to the library gets the following information automatically added as related metadata:

I added one additional field — a calculated field to store the concatenated value of the “Title” field and the “Subject” field. This is just so I have one field that contains either the “Title” or the “Subject,” instead of having to look at two separate fields. As such, if one or the other was blank, it didn’t matter.

Helpdesk Site Showing IS Knowledgebase View

When you email an item, SharePoint automatically detaches any attachments and saves them with the same metadata as the message (From, Subject, etc). As I mentioned, you can also feed the document library directly, dropping files directly into it, uploading, or by saving files to it from any Office application. You can even set it up as a mapped drive, should you want to. True to my needs, it handles just about anything, including images and Visio drawings, as well as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, and the body of an email message.

Knowledgebase — View Showing Items Grouped in Folders by “From” Address

There is one nice option called “Group Attachments in Folder.” This option lets you decide to have MOSS automatically store things in folders based on the “Subject” or “From” field of the email message. I show a view of this above. I chose to group by “From” — neatly organizing the stuff by each contributor to the knowledgebase.

(Note: As you’ll notice in the above screen capture, I’ve once again mucked up the names and such. This is to protect the appropriately paranoid. I’ve left most of my info stand as is — it’s too late for me to be paranoid.)

If you turn on the “From” grouping option, items sent to the Knowledgebase are automatically sorted and filed into folders named for the originator’s email address. It creates the folder automagically. All the stuff I send goes into a folder named for me. Stuff from other people is automatically sorted into their own folders.

I should note that getting the mail-enabled features to work took some effort. I had to tweak it. In the end, I followed a guide from a site called “Combined Knowledge” verbatim. Here’s a link to the PDF.

(I emailed a copy to our Knowledgebase, by the way — illustrating the rule that you must use it to make it worthwhile. See it works!)

Knowledgebase — Standard View Showing Basic and Custom Metadata

In addition to the regular metadata fields, you can “roll your own,” adding as many fields and types and other crap as you might need. (So far we haven’t needed to add any. )The sky (and your imagination) is the limit. Beware, however, if you create the beast, you must feed the beast. Keep it simple.

In the end, I ended up with a simple, inexpensive system for managing information, something that met all my particular, curmudgeonly needs. A system that:

• Accepts any sort of information I can throw at it, including documents, pictures, diagrams, web pages, and just about anything else that can be digitized.
• Accepts that sort of stuff via all imaginable methods, including “drag and drop”, email, scanners, upload, and regular old file/folder access
• Automatically tracks the “who, what and when” in metadata (who put it there or who changed it, when they did it, and what it is).
• Is customizable and flexible (because, well, I’m going to customize it, like it or not);
• Is easy to search — a “Google-like” interface, except none of those annoying ads about linoleum, free cell phones, or timeshares in Essakane.

Nevertheless, the most important lesson in all this is clear: Never , unless, of course, you the and first. Everything else pales in comparison. Oh, and watch your thumbs.

In theory, knowledge management is easy. Then again, in theory, lots of things are easy. In practice, things are never quite as easy as they sound. Nevertheless, lightly armed, I set out to put a few of my theories into practice.

There are three essential theoretical elements to effective knowledge management. I call these “Gavin’s Three Essential Theoretical Elements To Effective Knowledge Management.” Unfortunately, “GTETETEKM” does not lend itself to a memorable mnemonic, so let’s just call these the “KM-3.”

As I said, in theory, Knowledge Management is easy. In practice, organizations usually ignore the first element (especially the garbage part), do a half-assed job on the second, and muck up the third totally.

Moreover, the whole thing gets usually gets derailed when someone brings up the dreaded “T-Word” — Taxonomy. When you hear that word, it’s time to run screaming from the room. It’s a sure sign that you’re going to spend the next year in meetings trying to figure out how to “accurately” classify socks, or rocks, or ethnicity, or nationality, or chumps. The trouble is the world does not fall easily into logical groupings. For example, is Russia part of Europe or Asia? [It's a trick question. The answer is "yes."]

If you must, when in doubt — if you need one — use an existing taxonomy. You’ll save yourself a truckload of heartache. Trust me here — I know trucks and I know heartache. In fact, be daring, live life on the edge and don’t use a taxonomy at all!

Wait. Stop… Before you beat me about the head and ears with a leather-bound copy of the Library of Congress Classification System (or worse, the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities), let me explain:

You see, there’s been a war going on for the last 5,000 years, give or take a Tuesday or two. It probably started with the first scribes in Sumer, as they struggled to do something with their ever-multiplying cuneiform tablets. Some, no doubt, wanted to keep them all stacked on their desks, while others wanted to file them away, sorted and organized, all the stuff in one place, all the stuff in another, and all the other stuff in a third. Never mind that no one had invented file cabinets yet.

Anyway, thus was born the first controlled vocabulary, the first taxonomy. There was no doubt a memo stating, unequivocally, that all clay tablets should be filed either as , , or as, upon pain of death or promotion.

[There was also all the stuff , but, I suppose it's best not to mention that, at least not in polite company.]

Thus began the war between those who file and these who pile — the filers and the pilers. I’ve been on the wrong side, it seems, since the beginning. I’m a filer, tried and true; a card-carrying member of Filer’s Anonymous. I even organize my paperbacks, first by genre and then by author. Nevertheless, my proclivities aside, the pilers have won; hands-down. So, ever pragmatic, I switched sides. No, I’ve not started just piling up my books, but I’ve embraced the “pile it on” approach. “Bring it on,” I say, “I’m no chump; Nuh-uh, not anymore.”

Technology [written language, clay tablets cuneiform, that kind of stuff] started the war, and now technology [fast full-text machine indexing, smart digital filing systems, and natural language query] has ended it. With today’s tools, you can just dump things into a nice digital pile o’stuff and let the machines sort it out. Our tools have ended the conflict, by ending the need for the conflict. As such, they’ve also eliminated much of the need for a formal, controlled vocabulary (the T-word). Instead, a simple one will do, if you need one at all.

How to Build a Simple Knowledgebase

Let me show you how I built a simple “knowledgebase” — using simple tools and a simplistic approach — what I call simple minded knowledge management (or is that knowledge management for the simple minded …).

It’s an approach that lets me just put things in piles. Moreover, there is no taxonomy — ok maybe a small one — but all the filing is done by the machine. It works; it’s easy to feed, stuff is easy to find, everybody’s happy. And, it’s out of sight, neatly self-organized, so it doesn’t irritate me at my core.

So, welcome to the machine — welcome to SharePoint’s “mail-enabled” document libraries — a world where the machine does all the heavy lifting, from submission, to organizing, to search and retrieval. It’s a piler’s dream, and a filer’s delight. One caveat: knowledge creation and synthesis still takes work. That’s an essential human process, one of creativity and editorial heavy lifting. Machines don’t do that.

First some rules. Remember “GTETETEKM”… err… the “KM-Three.” Remember those and you should ahead of the game; forget them and you’ll likely discover that “knowledge management” is an oxymoron. Moreover, you’ll probably end up either in management or looking for a new job, or [shudder] both. Rules in hand, let’s add a dash of required simplicity:

• Keep things simple. I like simple things, simple tools, and simple approaches. Tools that aren’t simple won’t be used. Simplicity wins, period. Complicated systems fail — usually because they’re too complicated. Complicated approaches fail for the same reasons. It must be easy to use and easy to find stuff again; easy, and I mean “Eee-Zee” with a capital EASY, else it’s a wasted exercise.
• Beware, you must feed the beast. Any knowledgebase must be fed. They live on a diet of — you guessed it — knowledge. If you create a beast, you must feed it. So, while you’re at it, don’t make the beast so impossibly complicated that you won’t, don’t or can’t feed it. It needs high quality chow, lest it bite your hand.

In summary: an effective knowledge management system starts with knowing what you want to keep, and knowing what you don’t want to keep. After that, it’s all about the tools, and your tools must: A) be simple in design, B) be some-what self-organizing, C) meet your security needs, D) be easy to feed, and F) easy to search.

[Don't miss the exciting sequel: "Cracking the Cuneiform Code — The KM Supremacy" – coming soon to a blog near you.]

It was many years later that I was to remember that day in Seattle. How I had ended up where I was, standing next to who I was, was beyond me. But, there I was — I was at the “top of the WAC” – the Washington Athletic Club — staring out the windows at what seemed to me at the time to be a giant abstract tableau. It was the end of November 1999 and I was looking at Seattle, laid out like a giant game of “Go.” The WTO was about to go into full swing — in what was to be known as the “battle for Seattle.”

From those windows high atop the WAC, I could see the various pieces on the board, see the planned movements and strategies as the police set up barricades and as people in the streets ebbed and flowed in response. It was easy to imagine reaching down and flipping a white stone to black, and thus changing the game. The game of “Go” is that way — the placement of single piece — a single move — can change the outcome of the game.

Seattle holds many fond memories for me, but that day bordered on the surreal. That day, beside me were some of the major pieces in the game, including James Wolfensohn. All in all, in the room were more than a dozen representatives of Globalization, with a capital Gee. I felt like Zelig. I kept thinking to myself that, properly, I should be down in the streets, relishing the scent of teargas in the morning. We were talking about the synergies of philanthropy, technology, and collaboration; I was imagining teargas.

These are the thoughts that swirled about my head as I watched five rather amazing musicians take a stage last week in San Francisco. I was at a concert. In fact it was a week bookended by music. Tonight was Tinariwen. Yo-Yo Ma was next Saturday. In between, philanthropy, technology and collaboration; some themes don’t change it seems.

These five fellows, in flowing Boubou robes, covered head to foot, with turbans wrapped about their heads, were playing Fender electric guitars (now there’s a truly global export) singing a rap song with a distinct West African beat, in a mix of French and Arabic. As the klieg lights shone down on these troubadours, only their eyes showing, guitars flashing, I was struck by the true amazing fact that it was globalization that had put them there; it was globalization that put me there, as well.

And, there in the row in front of me — globalized — were five young quintessentially Californian women dancing and ululating like they had spent their formative years in the High Atlas rather than Marin County. I was struck by the contrasts, by the sense of living on an interconnected planet. I was struck by the facts of globalization; and once again, things are neither black nor white.

The five fellows were Tinariwen, an almost indescribable musical group of Touareg from the southern Sahara. The Tinariwen story sounds like fiction. Guns and guitars, Ghadaffi’s poet-soldiers, Stratocasters in one hand, and a Kalashnikov in the other; supposedly, together, they count 17 bullet wounds among them. These were the Touareg, the nomadic desert warriors, the blue men of the desert. Their songs are the soundtrack of the ishumar (from chômeur, French for “unemployed”). They are the Sahara’s Generation X; once Malian rebels, now full-time musicians. (They are not a Volkswagen, despite what you may have heard.)

On stage they’re an example of globalization beyond imagination, one of its consequences and one of its effects. It seems in music and the arts, where monolithic American culture has not run roughshod; we are experiencing a new renaissance. All hail rock and roll. All hail the magic mix of music that has me rocking to the Touareg one day, and gently enjoying Yo-Yo Ma the next. [This contrast and intersection is all the more poignant given Yo-Yo Ma's involvement with the "Silk Road" project.]

All around me that evening were the signs, the positive and negative effects of globalization. I rode to the concert in a Japanese hybrid and parked next to a fleet of others; I dined on a meal of sweet potato fries, California greens, topped with seared Ahi tuna, dressed with sesame seed oil and Japanese rice wine vinegar. I had a glass of French Viognier. I was wearing French shoes, a pair of jeans “engineered” in Germany (whatever that means) and made in Romania, and a Canadian shirt. And, I listened to the sounds of the desert, the raw tale of the Touareg, played on electric guitars made famous first by 1950’s rock and roll. Sub-Saharan nomads ripped from their lands, made unemployed and made famous by globalization.

I listened to the sounds of the desert, the sounds of a nomadic people displaced by the 21^st century, and the sounds of a people who suffer the fate of nomadic peoples all over the world.

From the Tinariwen web site (just that statement is amazing, when you think of it):

“…Forget the myths, forget the ‘guns-and-guitars’ fantasies and tales of blue-men on their camels. The humanity, the wonder and the epic sweep of the real Tinariwen story doesn’t need any photoshopping or romantic embellishments. It is the raw tale of an everyman, who was cut off from history and embraced the modern world, who lost his home and found solace in the guitar, who through pain and exile invented a new style of music that could express who he is and where he’s going. Nothing mythical or exotic about that. You can find the same story the world over…”

At the risk of showing my naiveté, clearly the effects of globalization are not all bad. Some are, in fact, grand. But others are frightening, and I often fear what we will lose, for lose we will, I fear. More so, I fear what the world will lose.

Moreover, I am, in fact, truly embarrassed by our current list of mainstream “cultural” exports. It is in music, culture, and entertainment where the west and the north are the great winners. We get better than we give. We trade the “O’Reilly Factor,” in return we get a richness and depth unplumbed. It’s striking and sad that we add so little of value to the trade, yet nevertheless seem to monopolize the market. Take Geraldo. I’ll gladly trade you Disco, the entire 1980’s, and Geraldo, for the richness of Mbaqanga, the pure energy of Tinariwen, and the sultriness of just about any French piano bar.

In this new world, where content is king, where cr