For all the talk of disruptive technology in the publishing and media worlds, it isn’t easy to be an optimist these days. But it’s hard not to notice that Clay Shirky, one of the digital age’s most original, engaged thinkers, is remarkably sanguine about the prospects of new media-especially for a man so immersed in discussing its problems.

Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

For Shirky, the gin craze of 18^th-century London is an example of what happens when societies undergo abrupt changes, such as the shift from rural agriculture to urban factories. Life becomes a bewildering struggle, and so we self-medicate the struggle away. But Shirky isn’t a historian, and this isn’t a history book. Instead, he’s trying to grapple with our future. As he notes, the second half of the 20th century has been defined by a similarly difficult social transition, as we move into a post-industrialized world characterized by the incessant flow of information.

So what has been our gin? Shirky’s answer is simple, perhaps too simple. He argues that the television sitcom-those comic soap operas that saturated the airwaves for decades-was the alcohol of post-war societies, “absorbing the lion’s share of the free time available to the developed world.”

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration - and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower - will change the way society works.

Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

They’re online, prowling the world wide web. Shirky describes this shift in media consumption as a net “cognitive surplus,” since our brain is no longer mesmerized by the boob tube. Needless to say, he describes this surplus as a wonderful opportunity, a chance to get back some of the productive social interactions that were lost when we all decided to watch TV alone. And when this new pool of free time is combined with the internet-a tool that enables strangers all across the world to connect with each other-the end result is a potentially vast new source of productivity. “The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource,” Shirky writes. Furthermore, the web allows people to “design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.”

In 2000, following “an intuition that the internet was turning social“, Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking - an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to become the web’s primary purpose for billions of people all over the world.

Internet enthusiasts come in two flavors: utopians and populists. The rhetoric of both camps is revolutionary, but the revolutions are different.

Utopians believe that the Internet provides promising new solutions to our most intractable problems. With enough tweets, all global bugs-war, poverty, illiteracy, fascism-can be quashed.

Populists promise no such lofty goals. They see the profound social confusion sown by the Internet as a historic opportunity to snatch power from elites and their institutions and redistribute it more evenly among netizens, the ordinary citizens who have been empowered by the Internet. Like the participatory democrats of earlier eras, the populists want a more direct democracy, and they think that most social institutions, from the traditional media to political organizations, are unnecessary ballast.

Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals’ new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned - and so it came to pass.

* NB: Lets watching PC-TV, the New era From TV to PC

Virtualization technology is most popular in the server world, virtualization technology is also being used in data storage such as Storage Area Networks. Virtualization allows users to consolidate physical resources, simplify deployment and administration, and reduce power and cooling requirements.

In the virtualization or clouds era, people should Forget the desktop. The future of computing is in your browser. Now, the convergence of the next set of things are going to impact the Web, which the cloud and mobile are changing the structure of the Web and therefore the vantage point–the browser–as your gateway. But the architecture of a mobile client coupled with a big back end in the cloud applied to the desktop is changing everything as well. Because browsers I think generally are becoming thinner and lighter at the core with the extensibility that we talked about before around the Mozilla.

Now it’s the browser on whatever device it might be. It might be your mobile handset. It might be your PC. It might be your Apple, your Mac. But in all cases you have a lot of flexibility now to connect to a gigantic computing resource. So if you think about what the desktop was and is still to some extent today as a foundation of what the browser–the use case–what the browser will displace. So on a typical, let’s say, a PC platform that the largest volume application probably is Microsoft Office. So what do you have in there? You have an e-mail client. You have a word processing package. You have a way to make presentations or documents. You have a contact manager, calendaring device.

If you think about what a browser is in the new world that might in the browser case be a tabbed browser where you can click on one click like you would click on Microsoft Office to open it. With one click now under a group tab you can open up a spreadsheet, like, you know, Google’s  spreadsheet or Google Docs. Or, you know, word processing or a calendar. All those things now come with one click on a Web interface that used to be a multi-hundred dollar, thousand dollar software package per unit from Microsoft. So it’s going to be a different world.

Cloud Computing Grows Up

In 2009, the cloud went from a vague concept to a must-have technology. It’s always fun to watch the emergence of new IT trends and how quickly concepts and products evolve in the early stages. Never was this truer than with cloud computing and what the industry witnessed around its evolution. Over the past year, cloud computing has captured significant attention of CEOs, CIOs and IT personnel alike, as businesses began to investigate the value of moving certain workloads to a cloud model. Facing mounting pressures to provide better services quickly, while reducing costs, many IT decision makers found the economics and capabilities of cloud compelling. Here are a few significant highlights:

1. Private clouds get a seat at the table.

Over the past year, companies from markets ranging from financial services to retail executed proofs of concepts and pilots of both public and private clouds. This wide-spread experimentation has matured the usage of private clouds, and in many cases, has become the primary focus for most enterprises. In fact, based on IBM research, we know that a private cloud is more likely to be seen as appealing to clients than public clouds (64% vs. 30%.) Private clouds take the concepts and technologies leveraged by large cloud-based service providers, and applies them to internal data centers. This entails pooling of resources, leveraging virtualization and delivering IT services via dynamic provisioning and a self-service portal.

The results of a private cloud model are astonishing. For workloads such as pre-production test systems, clients of IBM have seen eight-month return on investments and have cut overall IT expenses by up to 60%. Much of these savings comes from improved utilization of resources brought about by virtualization and resource pooling. But the real advantage of cloud comes in labor savings. A well-defined private cloud can deliver certain IT services for 20% or less of the labor required in traditional IT delivery models.

2. The “opening” of the cloud.

Most cloud service providers had proprietary interfaces for requesting resources and/or running on their cloud infrastructure. This has changed over the course of the year, especially with the concepts of open standards and open source emerging as vitally important to the success and stability of cloud computing.

A key event in the opening of the cloud was the publishing of the Open Cloud Manifesto in March 2009. The purpose of the manifesto was to spell out the key elements of an open system and to push for these elements to be present in the emerging world of cloud computing.

The Open Cloud Manifesto stresses the following:

–Cloud vendors should work together to define open solutions to address cloud challenges like security, integration and interoperability.

–Cloud providers should not use their market position to create vendor lock-in.

–Cloud vendors should embrace existing standards where they apply, and work together to create new standards where required.

–Cloud community efforts should always be customer-driven.

–Cloud standards groups need to stay coordinated to ensure there are not competing open standards in this emerging area.

Since the introduction of the manifesto and its associated Web site, there are now close to 300 supporters of the initiative.

This is only the beginning. There are now numerous efforts underway to standardize on key elements of the cloud computing model–APIs, data formats and protocols, for example. The Web site reveals an impressive list of efforts currently underway.

3. Public clouds are ready for the enterprise.

The evolution of cloud computing is somewhat reminiscent of the dawning of the Internet age back in the ’90s. Remember when we all said we would never put our credit card numbers on the Internet? Well, those days are long gone; most of us have several Web vendors with whom we entrust our personal information, because online security has matured.

Cloud computing is following a similar path. Although few are ready to move mission-critical or sensitive applications to the cloud, enterprises are starting to embrace public cloud service providers as part of their overall IT strategy. Public clouds offer the opportunity to offload certain workloads from the enterprise data center ,creating flexibility in space utilization, people utilization and capital utilization.

Today, the workloads moving to the public cloud include pre-production systems, collaboration software, batch analytics and virtual desktop images. As the security and reliability guarantees of public cloud service providers improve, more workloads will be ready for this type of outsourcing. IBM, for example, is focused on providing the same level of SLA assurances that enterprises hold themselves to. It won’t be long before we start seeing production and other mission-critical workloads out on the public cloud.

This year was a key year for cloud computing. At the beginning of 2009, most of the discussion around cloud was definitional in nature: What is cloud and how can it help me? By year end, much has changed; most of the discussion is around economics and how best to leverage cloud computing technologies.

Virtualization Versus the Cloud

A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before. It used to be that something virtual wasn’t real. And that clouds were just that–those puffy things in the sky. Today we have the tech industry terms “virtual computing” and “cloud computing,” which often get mixed up. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell them apart, and it involves hearkening back to the age-old distinction between hardware and software. When you’re talking about virtual computing, you’re invariably talking about hardware; specifically, making PC-style hardware available to users in a new way. A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before.

Cloud computing, by contrast, usually refers to the sorts of software that run once a computer gets turned on. The “cloud” indicates that the software is hosted in a data center, not sitting on your desktop. If you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office for your word processing or spreadsheets, that’s cloud computing. You can mix and match these two approaches, undertaking cloud computing on a nonvirtual, traditional PC. And the opposite: You can use traditional, Office-style programs on a virtual PC.

Not Everything Will Move To The Cloud

Some applications will be better off running on internal networks. So what better place to look at how data management is changing? Forbes caught up with John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer, to talk about the evolution and where things are likely to go in the future.

We started with Linux servers. Windows came later for us. Today what’s different is that we do it for much larger customers and we manage a much broader set of applications. For all of them we manage up to just under the application, including data center network servers, operating systems, databases and application servers.

Customers bring all kinds of applications to us, but what’s underneath those applications is common among our customers. It’s the same flavors of Windows or Linux or the same hardware platforms and storage platforms. We work with the customers to support those applications, so it’s an extension of their IT operation. There is obviously some gray area in between. We’ll work with the customers to make it work and will bring in whoever it takes and sort out the problem.

Paying by the hour for CPUs or by the gigabyte for storage are necessary financial models. Companies are trying to take advantage of that. Sometimes it’s hard because the applications aren’t written that way, but more and more they are being architected like that.

Our customers traditionally have looked at infrastructure-as-a-service, so they’ve had administrative access to the applications. What’s next is moving up the stack to offer platform-as-a-service. It’s between the infrastructure and the application. A business could take a platform and build their tools right on that instead of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This is targeted more at a developer instead of a systems administrator.

“About 15% of CIOs are working in highly effective enterprises,” says Richard Hunter, a Gartner fellow and vice president. “In 1975 if you were the head of data processing and you had an online transaction processing application, you were doing fine. In 1985 if you had good information management and data warehousing, you were doing fine. In 1995 if you had a global enterprise resource management operation up and running, you were doing fine. In 2005 you needed to be connected to every other enterprise on the planet in a meaningful way. The problem space just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

CIO Priority: Virtual Collaboration

The video conferencing market grew 30% last year as businesses continued to cut travel budgets for meetings. Gartner predicts that by 2012, video conferencing will replace 2.1 million airline seats per year.

Indeed CIOs are actively pursuing strategies to enable virtual collaboration.
Filippo Passerini, uses virtual reality to simulate product launches in supermarkets. Previously the product launches entailed physical mock-ups, and even incremental changes significantly increased costs. Virtual reality streamlines P&G’s product launch process, adding efficiency and velocity.

As I look at the tide washing over global business culture, I am delighted to see the success that virtual collaboration technologies are having at the moment. A full-blown telepresence suite costs $300,000, not something an SME or SOHO business can afford. I see a golden opportunity for those who can bring high-quality interactive rich media collaboration technologies to the SME and SOHO desktops.

CIO Priorities: Accenture

The ‘CIO Priorities’ series attempts to gain insights into one of the most serious, interesting, and challenging questions facing the technology industry, which, as you might have rightly guessed, is “What are the priorities of enterprise CIOs today?” I decided to start with technology-focused consulting companies, because it is through these companies that we can obtain insights into both the priorities of their internal IT as well as the priorities of their clients through each company’s consulting lens. In this article, I talk with Frank Modruson, the CIO of Accenture.

Frank categorizes his priorities into two camps: effectiveness and efficiency. Companies usually try to strive for efficiency at the start, and then get to effectiveness because the efficiency quest focuses directly on cost, and hence its impact on the bottom line is seen more quickly. The main priority that Frank named was collaboration and telepresence, which fed into both the effectiveness and the efficiency camps, given its game-changing nature and its direct contribution to bottom line savings through reduced travel costs. Accenture rolled out ‘Accenture Collaboration 2.0,’ its internal collaboration platform, last year. In addition to building telepresence capacity internally, Accenture is also federating its telepresence capacity. Federation refers to the concept of extending collaboration networks beyond the organization. Accenture now has now federated 31 companies and has close to 600 federated telepresence rooms, touching close to 2 million executives worldwide.

Other priorities on the effectiveness side have been ECDM (Engagement, Contract and Delivery Management Applications), and applications that help build strong pricing and forecasting capabilities. On the efficiency side, other priorities have been re-doing the entire communications network and focusing on the cloud. Focusing on the network, while contributing to “efficiency,” has also played on the “effectiveness” side by helping to build a robust network infrastructure to support the requirements of telepresence. On the cloud front, Frank believes that the focus on the cloud and SaaS applications is here to stay, because it is an efficiency play, enabling organizations and individuals to maintain a smaller infrastructure and fewer applications.

After discussing the nature of Accenture’s recent priorities, I asked Frank if these priorities were a result of a change in strategy due to the tough economy. That explains the focus on collaboration, ECDM, and other similar projects.Finally, I asked Frank what he felt was the next big technology wave.

Technology’s Language Barrier

A simple cultural and linguistic misunderstanding caused the confusion; in China, women don’t normally change their names when they get married.

Moreover, global popular culture is dominated by English-language television, music, film, print and social media.

English-speaking nations are much closer to the saturation point when it comes to Internet use, so non-English-speaking nations represent the bulk of future growth.

E-commerce hinges on language, too. To be sure, passing information through systems designed by people speaking different languages and using different writing systems can increase the level of vulnerability to translation errors.

Complicating matters further for Anglocentric systems, most characters in China and Japan have multiple pronunciations.

KFC’s slogan “finger-lickin’ good” was mistranslated into Chinese characters that meant “eat your fingers off.” But China was opening up to foreign companies, and The brand name Coca-Cola  in China was first translated as a phrase pronounced Ke-kou-ke-la.

Organizations need to create a seamless cross-language flow of information for gathering and managing crucial identifying data. To meet these challenges, information technologies must be smarter, beginning at the design of data intake processes and throughout record storage and linkage.

From the standpoint of the Asian users who will enter information, data entry must be clear and unambiguous, designed according to local understandings of names. At the same time, to compensate for the inevitable errors, retrieving the many possible variants of a single name requires sophisticated, culturally sensitive search and match techniques.

The modification of names is nothing new. As Asia flexes its growing economic muscle, smart companies must be prepared to handle the ensuing tsunami of cross-language data.

Everything You should know about Auto Cars

An automobile, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. There are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide roughly one car per eleven people.

Most automobiles in use today are propelled by gasoline (also known as petrol) or diesel internal combustion engines, which are known to cause air pollution and are also blamed for contributing to climate change and global warming. Increasing costs of oil-based fuels, tightening environmental laws and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions are propelling work on alternative power systems for automobiles. Efforts to improve or replace existing technologies include the development of hybrid vehicles, and electric and hydrogen vehicles which do not release pollution into the air.

Classic auto car

It could be a classic auto car that could be restored to its original condition. If you’re interested in finding out if it is a classic, do some research on the internet. There you will find many different classes of classic auto cars right now. We have classic muscle cars which are for those who love speed. Another type of classic model are classics that were never mass produced but where only shown at past car shows. There are antique classic cars which are the really old cars, from the early nineteenth century like Fords.

Don’t worry a classic car collector already knows the value of your classic car, so don’t think you can put one over on him. The old classic auto cars have a personality all their own. If you can help someone restore one of these cars by selling it to them at a good price.

Best way to buy a car

When choosing a car there are many variables that you must consider including make, model, style, color, options, tires, etc. It is after you have chosen the car that you must contend with the thing that stands between you wanting it and you owning it - the price. The best way to buy a car is with cash in hand or your car loan already in order. This is the only way to ensure that you will not be oversold or out-negotiated on the auto sales floor. Most times, people go looking for a vehicle before they look for the loan and they get their financing through the dealership. As common as this is, it is actually the opposite of what you should be doing in order to get the best deal.

The best way to buy a car is to have your financing approved ahead of time. Car salespeople have a lot of tricks they use to build fees and commissions into the price of your car. If you tell them where you want your monthly payment to be, they may try to tack on a few extra dollars each month by adding to your principal amount. The money that is added to your principal is all dealership commissions. That few extra dollars you are paying each month could amount to thousands of dollars in commissions. The problem is, as soon as you drive off of the lot, your car is worth thousands less than your loan amount.

Auto car dealer

At this time auto car dealers are having a credit crunch too, after a few years of booming car sales, the financial market is hurting them badly.

At the moment it is the same as in the property market, it is a buyer’s market and auto car dealers are very aware of it, as a buyer you don’t have to wait for the end of the month to get the best deals, any time will do.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to buy your new or used car from an auto car dealer, you will find yourself spoilt for choice and if you stay strong in the bartering bit you can surprise even yourself with the savings, extras, you can achieve.

But for auto car dealers therein lies the problem, not nearly enough of us are in the market for a new or used car, manufactures have created a problem for themselves, thank goodness I might add, it is this: Cars made over the last 10 years or so are very, very reliable, so in buyer’s terms, if it ain’t broke, why change it?

Like many industries at this credit crunch time, auto car dealers are right in the thick of it, jobs might be lost or saved in the ‘city’, but jobs will only be lost in this area, car makers have already laid workers off, down numbered the number of shifts, slowed, even stalled production on some vehicles, it is a worrying time for far too many families.

Auto car insurance

If you own any type of vehicle, then car insurance is something you really should be investing in. For many car owners, it isn’t as choice as car insurance coverage in mandatory in many states and in europe. There are two types of car/auto insurance coverage - full coverage and liability. Full coverage auto insurance means that the vehicle is covered regardless of who is at fault when there is an incident. Liability auto/car insurance only covers the cost of the other vehicles involved when you are liable for the accident. While full coverage auto insurance costs a some times a lot more, it does offer you the best protection all round. and is the most populer

I addition to helping cover the cost of getting your vehicle repaired or replaced, many auto/car insurance policies assist with the cost of medical bills associated with the vehicle accident. This is very important coverage to have, especially if you don’t happen to have health insurance coverage. The cost of auto/car insurance depends on a variety infact lots of factors.

Auto auction

Another way to have a car is from auction. Have a look at the government auto auctions information about which you can find information online. Either most of these cars are returned back to the owner or the owner himself comes up and gets the car released after parting with a penalty. In some cases, however the car remains in the possession of the local authorities who have confiscated the car. After waiting for a stipulated period and after trying to get in touch with the owner of the vehicle if the government finds that the owner does not want to reclaim the vehicle, the car is put up for sale through the government auto auctions.

You will get some of the best deals in these government auto auctions. You may find the car of your choice and all these cars are generally certified to be clear of all legal hassle so that the new owner does not have to go through all the legal formalities once again. In addition, the previous owner cannot put a claim on the car because by law he would not be entitled to the car once again. These auto auctions are the best place to look for some of the best ownership options if you want to get an almost brand new car at a throwaway price. These dream cars are equipped with all the gadgetry and accessories that match the interiors of the vehicle and are optional attachments.

Used cars

Of course, in the end, you may buy a “certified” used car anyway. These days it seems there are fewer and fewer used cars that aren’t “certified.” Just make sure to get an independent inspection and an independent used car extended warranty. “Certified” or not, it’s still a used car.

Worst of all, certified used cars come with an expensive risk. They tempt you to let your guard down. Ford even issued a press release headlined “Pre-Owned Vehicle Program Reduces Customer Buyer Beware.” As if that were a good thing.

The frigid Brooklyn night disappears as Josh Clark takes me down into the warm, wooden bowels of a former warehouse, a warren of studios and lofts on the edge of Park Slope, where he and his colleague, Charles Burst, have built the Seaside Lounge. The recording studio, patronized by musicians such as Obits, The New Pornographers, Neko Case and Ted Leo, is also a portal to the sound of the past–in the form of a 3M 16-track analogue tape recorder that once belonged to rock god Eddie Van Halen.

Clark, who is 32, tall, lean and, like many men in Brooklyn of a certain age, bearded, talks eloquently and lovingly of his 16-track as a marvel of machined technology and about the tinkering he has to do each week, given that it is composed of so many moving parts. But he is not a curator, and this isn’t a museum: the 3M  is the studio’s flagship machine because in the age of digital sound, analogue is rich, detailed, wondrous–and as Clark puts it, “exciting.”

It may be odd to hear a 32-year-old describe himself as a bridge to the age of analogue, a quaint era of gears and levers and screws, and yet many of the musicians who use the Seaside Lounge will have grown up listening only to the tapeless, ethereal sounds of binary code. This gap between kids who grew up with the Internet, says Clark, and those–only marginally older–who grew up with hi-fi is huge. “No one sits down in front of good speakers anymore, no one cares about buying gear for life,” and, sometimes, he thinks, no one born after 1985 is ever going to sit or care as people once did or now do in dwindling minorities. Nevertheless, even those musicians who arrive knowing only the sound of digital are open to being wowed by the possibilities of analogue.

I wanted to see the 16-track because I have been wondering about the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the digital revolution we are so often reminded is taking place, with or without our assent. And I was thinking specifically about sound after cracking open The Chaos Scenario, a recent addition to the library of “what does the Internet mean for media and what to do about it” by NPR’s On the Media cohost and Advertising Age editor-at-large, Bob Garfield. Garfield has a complex thesis, dubbed “listenomics,” which he wanted to use as the book’s title except, except–as he notes in the introduction–he “was preempted by Wikinomics and freakin’ Freakonomics, two fine books that went all ‘-omic’ on the publishing world before I got a chance to.”

Listenomics, according to Garfield, is responsible for the “death of everything,” and everything’s reimagining in a “New World Order,” where the herd of consumers will be heard and in order to influence consumers one must give up influence. Inevitably, such claims offer much to argue with on almost every page of Chaos Scenario, not least with what Garfield calls the “pod people” and what they are doing:

Surely you’ve noticed them, on the subway or at the gym, all those folks milling about with little white buds in their ears. This is not a hygiene problem. This is a prima fascie [sic] evidence of the ongoing revolution. These people may seem placid enough, but as they pump away at the elliptical machine or stare into the middle distance avoiding eye contact with their fellow straphangers, they are actually storming the Bastille. As they privately groove to digital recordings … they are simultaneously dismantling the Old Word Order. Thanks to the iPod, the record business and commercial broadcast radio are in extremis.”

The book is dense with passages like this, well written but sometimes verging on the obtuse through overwriting: who, precisely, are the readers puzzling over the ubiquity of iPods, and how old must they be to have missed the Sony Walkman era? The more important question, of course, is whether the economic woes of big music’s Bastille are terminal or just temporal–accidents of technology that may be reversed through newer technology. As Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, “it is too early to say.”

For what is really startling about the revolution in music is that the “pod people” are not just keeping vinyl alive and sales steady, or going to live concerts and nurturing micromusical climates at a local level. They also have altered one of the basic principles of rock ‘n’ roll in a way that might bode well for the future economics of the music business: They like their parents’ music.

Paul Rachman, director of American Hardcore, a terrific history of the homegrown American punk movement, noticed this when he was doing the promotion for his documentary: The kids didn’t just want to talk about punk, and they didn’t talk at all about contemporary music; they wanted to talk about Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top and AC/DC. He then noticed that his friends’ teenage kids were playing old classic rock, and that videogames such as Guitar Hero were composed of classic rock songs, marketing them, in effect, to a generation bereft of the kind of supergroups created by the massive advertising budgets of the past. Confirmation that he wasn’t simply imagining this trend came from Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who told him that for the first time in history of rock, parents and teenagers were not in rebellion about their music; they were in agreement.

What does the craving for classic rock supergroups mean for “listenomics?” It means a certain kind of music is valuable. For Rachman, who is working on a documentary series with the working title of “lost rockers”–those who almost made it huge–it means that we’re in a transitional period, where the business models to exploit this value are being rebuilt. What it doesn’t mean is that kids will never pay for music.

The point is this: Much of what is theorized about the behavior of consumers in a digital age takes place in a temporal fug, where contingent practices–don’t pay, won’t pay–take on the adamantine quality of laws handed down by God; but just because something starts one way doesn’t mean that it is bound to continue on the same course, immutable and unyielding to change.

We may have traded the convenience of musical portability for a staggering loss in audio quality, a leap backwards that might be compared with taking away Raphael’s paints and giving him an Etch-a-Sketch. But at the same time, revolutions create people like Clark and spaces like the Seaside Lounge: people and places that mediate between technologies and eras, and in doing so draw attention to what might be lost and what should be preserved. They all have the power to alter the seemingly linear path of revolution.

Garfield’s Chaos Scenario is, perhaps, best interpreted as a scientific metaphor for nonlinearity, where the multiple inputs of an open-source crowd tempt us with determinable outcomes but, in fact, yield odd and fascinating unpredictability. One possibility in that unpredictability is that we could eventually return to the past, where we paid for entertainment and preferred the sound produced by tape traveling through an elaborately mechanical box.

Indeed, the complex dynamics of the digital era may give even more power to top-down influence than ever before; after all, the ghost of marketing budgets past is still alive and kicking–and clearly able to deliver what the kids want: epic music. Who could have predicted that this digital era would bring about concord between musical generations, uniting rather than dividing parents and teenagers–at least until a new generation of supergroups and epically marketed rock sunders them again?

In a bid to shake up the wireless industry, Google announced Tuesday a new phone based on its mobile platform, Android, and the opening of a Google-hosted Web store to sell it. The move will enable the Web giant to deliver its mobile software to consumers more quickly and–eventually–at a lower cost than current operators do, said Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of mobile platforms.

As the first phone to ship with the latest version of Android (2.1, also known as éclair), the Nexus One also boasts some flashy software. The phone’s photo gallery and “application launcher” boast three-dimensional graphics, making the latter resemble a scrolling wheel. Much of the phone is voice-enabled, meaning users can speak to the phone and have their words translated into text, in the form of a command or a message, such as an e-mail. Google’s 3D mapping program, Google Earth, is also being adapted for use on Nexus One, complete with its popular “bird’s eye view” viewing angle.

Google says the device is intended to serve as an exemplar of Android’s potential. It is calling the Nexus One a “super phone” to distinguish it from other smart phones.

Though it will likely be dwarfed by Nexus One’s glitz, the real import of Google’s announcement is its new approach to buying and selling phones. With the launch of its online phone store, Google is becoming a retailer, of sorts. Consumers will be able to purchase certain Android phones and sign up for cellular service plans directly from the site. In the U.S., consumers can select from a subsidized phone from T-Mobile, an unsubsidized phone on AT&T, or a subsidized phone on Verizon Wireless later this spring. European shoppers can get an unlocked phone or, if they’re willing to wait a few months, a cheaper device on a Vodafone plan.

By offering a simple and ubiquitous–who doesn’t have access to Google?–alternative to carrier stores, Google is upending the way people have long purchased cellphones.

Google says it simply wants to increase options for consumers and drive more eyeballs to its Web site and related services. “We see [the store] as another channel [for buying phones],” said Rubin during the company’s Tuesday press conference. “It’s not intended to replace other channels … our primary business is advertising.”

Nevertheless, it’s clear Google intends to keep pounding on the wireless industry.

The company says it will commission more Android devices to sell in its online store. It’s not clear whether these phones would also be available through other channels, such as carriers and third-party retailers. Google also recently revealed it is still working with the Federal Communications Commission to turn wireless spectrum known as “white spaces” into a low-cost way for consumers to access wireless broadband. Since opening up that spectrum would allow people to jump online with phones, computers or other Web-enabled devices without signing up–or paying for–data plans, white spaces have been interpreted as another end-run around carriers.

On Wednesday Microsoft did that, showing some attractive changes to its Bing search engine, all designed for longer and deeper engagements with search than what people are used to. For the most part, the changes have to do with anticipating what someone is really after when they search and offering them steps to get there within their search experience.

If someone puts the term “Atlanta” in the search query box, for example, the results page offers the usual series of Internet links. But above all those is an “entity card” with a likely array of choices,­ among other things, a slideshow of the city, local weather reports, and, since Atlanta has the world’s busiest airport, flight information. Clicking on any of these brings up that information on a “task page,” which is still inside Bing.

In other words, one could work productively for several minutes inside the search engine. Compare that with the few seconds people typically spend on Google ­long enough to get their links, see some Google ads and move on to where they hope to navigate on the Internet.

“The central data and insight is that 50% of tasks are spent on long queries­ greater than 30 minutes,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services division. “Sixty percent of sessions include four queries or more … people are trying to do more with search.”

Naturally, Microsoft hopes the approach will resonate with customers, and presented some statistics (9.9% market share, up 1.9 percentage points in six months, and a young demographic) to show it is on the right track. More intriguing, though, is the way the focus on longer, sustained interactions, with the possibility of commerce inside the search engine, affects its strategic battle with Google.

Nadella showed almost no ads on the task pages at Wednesday’s demo, a matter he said would be rectified. In fact, he allowed, ads in the task pages could be worth more than regular search ads, as the customer’s intention is better known and she is likely nearer to a point of decision.

Microsoft could also offer vendors incentives to be on these pages instead of Google, much the way it is discussing exclusive content distribution deals with News Corp.

Microsoft also showed efforts to extend the length of engagement with maps, offering more choices (such as nearby restaurants and parking, or blog posts and Twitter updates) with identified destinations. It has also introduced stunning graphics, from seamless street views to three-dimensional photo-realistic models you can manipulate, which makes it more fun to spend time with the map. The maps run on Silverlight, Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash, and the hope here may be to increase downloads of what has been a lagging product.

The Internet has changed the way we produce and consume, how we socialize, even how we organize ourselves. I suppose I should have been ready for the idea that it could change war too.

“Business as warfare” is a false and reckless metaphor, but it would be equally foolish to ignore the trends Smith sees affecting his trade. One of the great changes to the battlefield, he writes, is the way conflicts end–not with the capture of a city, but in the creation of conditions so that a desired social outcome might take place. The example he cites is how violence against Serbia made possible the Dayton peace accords. Another might be our recent war in Iraq, a conflict many thought was finished with the capture of Baghdad, but which had more durable strategic outcomes with the so-called “Anbar Awakening,” a social change with military consequences.

As Smith puts it, “establishing a condition may be deemed a hallmark of a new paradigm of war.” Or, as Drucker might have it, the goal is to affect perceptions of what a workable ecology might be, and give people a way to envision themselves in it.

Another hallmark of modern war, to Smith, is the way in which it is fought within the media. Military leaders must continually assume their moves are being broadcast, and the “story” of why they are fighting must cohere within an overall narrative of the country’s politics, history and aims. There has always been room in a campaign for propaganda, or public relations, of course–the difference now is how picked-apart one’s story is by all sorts of players and media outlets, and how little control an organization can assume.

As with force itself, the goal is to create conditions that will enable others to create something like your desired outcome. For leaders, this means a continual (perhaps even dangerously avid) awareness of what your audience is seeing and feeling about a topic. For strong players, a consistency of purpose is required (what publicists might call “staying true to your story”) so you are not re-explaining your reasons for action. For powerful players, restraint of action becomes as important as force itself; the violence is often less effective than a visible presence, surveillance or propaganda efforts.

Weaker players aim for sensational images that will travel over the media faster than an F-14, or vigorous disruptions in the existing social ecology–hence, suicide bombings. Often these players cannot posit a workable system of governance, but they can negate dominant perceptions as a strategy.

Smith is not saying that state-owned militaries are going away. Like Drucker, however, he is saying that something fundamental shifted around 1945, and its full implications are only starting to be understood. For him, this means the rise of non-state actors in positions of power that can equal those of a state. For Drucker, it amounted to a new type of society, likewise enabled by cheap technology, in which organizations would take new forms. For all of us, it implies a need for openness to remake our ideas about how the world works.

The Web has changed business and society–why not the concept of victory?

Concerns around Enterprise 2.0 fall into two broad categories: fears that people won’t use the newly available ESSPs [emergent social software platforms], and fears that they will. The latter, which stem from the lack of upfront control common to ESSPs, tend to crop up first. When first exposed to these technologies, business decision makers voice concerns about what happens when direct control is surrendered and many people can freely contribute to information platforms. The scenario of broad participation in these platforms behind the firewall gives rise to a consistent set of worrying questions:

Won’t people be tempted to use forums to talk about current events, review movies, ask for advice about camcorder purchases and have other non-work-related conversations?

What if blogs are used to denigrate the company itself, air dirty laundry or talk about how misguided its leadership and strategy are?

Don’t these technologies make it easier to leak secrets, deliberately or inadvertently, to the outside world?

If we give up tight control over our intranet’s content, how can we possibly avoid running afoul of all potentially relevant regulations and laws on information sharing in all the places we do business?

The first and largest category of risk is inappropriate behavior and content, either deliberate or inadvertent. Four factors, however, combine to make this scenario unlikely.

First is the fact that while anonymity is the default on the Internet, on the intranet, attribution is the norm. When attribution is the norm, people are much more likely to be cautious and circumspect and much less likely to “flame” their colleagues. And if workers do misbehave on an ESSP, they can be easily identified, counseled, educated and disciplined, if necessary.

The second factor limiting inappropriate behavior is self-policing. Participants in an ESSP usually come to feel a sense of community and are therefore quick to react when they feel that a member is violating community norms. The communities formed on top of ESSPs often have informal leaders who exert a great deal of influence and can shape the behavior of other members.

In addition to informal leaders, the formal leaders of an organization are a third counterbalance to inappropriate behavior and content. Managers can intervene when one of their direct reports is being counterproductive in an ESSP, and often the simple awareness that “the boss” is observing behavior and watching contributions leads to changed behavior.

The fourth, and most fundamental, factor limiting inappropriate behavior and content is simply that most people know how to behave appropriately in ESSPs and are inclined to do so. There are exceptions, of course, and in a few instances people have been fired because of ill-advised posts to their external blogs; but my experience indicates that most people know how to act professionally in job-related environments, including digital ones.

If a company believes that these four factors do not provide enough protection against inappropriate content, it can set up a review or moderation process in which contributions must be vetted before they appear on a content platform. Finally, inappropriate content on company-owned ESSPs, either internal-only or externally visible, can always be removed if necessary.

Whatever the advantages of Enterprise 2.0, though, it is true that ESSPs typically do increase the amount of discoverable information within an organization. In other words, they add to the inventory of material that can be requested and reviewed as part of a legal action, just as e-mails and memos can.

Many organizations understandably want to limit the amount of discoverable information they produce, but they also want to gain access to the advantages and capabilities of Enterprise 2.0. Because I have yet to hear of a case in which ESSPs and their content gravely hurt a company during a legal proceeding, I continue to believe that the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 outweigh the potential disadvantages associated with generating more discoverable content.

It’s easy to be impressed by the large, dynamic and vibrant Web 2.0 communities on the Internet and to overlook the fact that they’re actually quite tiny when expressed as a percentage of all Internet users. A key challenge, then, for all Enterprise 2.0 advocates is increasing the percentage of intranet users who contribute to their organizations’ ESSPs.

To do this, it’s critical to understand why the “ambient percentage” of contributors to organizational ESSPs isn’t higher. Are the technologies themselves too primitive, or are they difficult to learn and use? Do some managers in an organization actually act to block Enterprise 2.0, because they don’t want information to flow more freely? Or are the real roadblocks internal, rooted somewhere in the heads of individuals? Accurate answers to these questions are essential prerequisites to designing and executing successful efforts to deploy ESSPs.

Within enterprises, where the incumbent collaboration technology of e-mail is well established, ESSPs are what Harvard Business School marketing professor John Gourville calls “long hauls”–products that represent significant technological leaps forward and are therefore potentially quite valuable, but require major behavioral changes from their target audience.

Long hauls have the potential to become popular and widespread, but their success comes slowly. Champions of longhaul products must be patient and prepared to evangelize, demonstrate, coach, train, and explain for what seems to them a very long time. As Gourville writes, “The simplest strategy for dealing with consumer resistance is to brace for slow adoption . . . to be successful companies must anticipate a long, drawn out adoption process and manage it accordingly.”

Adapted from Andrew McAfee ( a principal research scientist at MIT)

The question is, “Does [offering X] from [vendor Y] qualify as an Enterprise 2.0 product?” Established vendors of collaboration software are modifying their offerings and repositioning them as social software platforms that have all the features and functions necessary to support the new modes of interacting and getting work done. Smaller companies and startups often say that the established vendors “just don’t get it” and that the new features they’ve incorporated–blogs, wikis, discussion forums, tags, etc.–are just window dressing on products that are still essentially geared for Collaboration 1.0.

So who’s right? Whose products at present come closest to enabling Web 2.0-style collaboration and interaction in enterprise environments? It would be a huge amount of work just to learn about all the vendors and their offerings, let alone to evaluate them. And evaluating them “fresh out of the box” wouldn’t be that relevant anyway; collaboration software usually gets highly configured and tailored by companies before it’s turned on, with only some features activated and only some of those highlighted. One company, for example, might want its employees to be able to blog, while another wants no such thing.

According to Andrew McAfee (Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business), there were any three criteria for enterprise 2.0 that are: freeform, frictionless, and emergent.

Freeform means that the technology does not in any meaningful way impose, hardwire or make and enforce assumptions about workflows, roles, privileges, content and decision-right allocations. Instead, people come together as equals within the environment created by technology, and do pretty much whatever they want. Technologies that are not freeform are not bad or shortsighted or somehow deficient.

In addition to this system, though, I’d also certainly want to have one or more completely freeform digital platforms in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them. My experience is that over time people place themselves into roles within these platforms (As USC’s Ann Majchrzak and her colleagues found in a study of corporate wiki users), but the important point is that they’re not assigned into roles up front, or by any external party.

Frictionless means that users perceive it to be easy to participate in the platform, and can do so with very little time or effort. One measure of friction is the total time required between having an idea for a contribution (while sitting in front of the computer, carrying the iPhone, etc.) and the appearance of that contribution on the platform. Sign-ins, navigation through many Web pages and clunky user interfaces are all perceived as hurdles by a platform’s potential users and increase friction.

Tweetdeck makes contribution to Twitter pretty frictionless. It sits on my desktop as a separate client, and I zip over to it whenever I have an idea. It’s quick and painless to send a standard tweet, a reply, a direct message, or a re-tweet, and to shorten and include a URL. With Tweetdeck I can convince myself to take a timeout from my deep academic thinking (cough, cough) more often because each timeout is so short–literally just a matter of seconds.

Emergent is both most intuitive of these three terms and the hardest to pin down. It really does bring to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s famous yet unhelpful definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” My best-effort definition of the phenomenon is the appearance over time within a system of higher-level patterns or structure arising from large numbers of unplanned and undirected low-level interactions.

Without these mechanisms, online content becomes less useful–less easy to navigate, consume and analyze–as it accumulates. With these mechanisms in place, just the opposite happens; the platform exhibits increasing returns to scale, and becomes more valuable as it grows.

The Web as a whole, and especially the Web 2.0 portions of it, is wondrously freeform, frictionless and emergent. It stands as our clearest example of the kinds of energy and benefit that can be unleashed by the new technologies of interaction, and the communities that form on top of them. Some specific sub-segments of the Web like Facebook and especially Twitter are almost perfectly freeform and frictionless, but are less able to foster all forms of emergence. As I wrote here and here, it’s hard for me to use them to separate signal from noise and let the “best” content rise to the top.

Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one. The tendency to build walled gardens is evidently a deep-seated one, and one that should be questioned far more often than is currently the case.