F2C: Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton, from EFF.

Involved with EFF and Bit Torrent Corporation, but not speaking officially on behalf of that.

Most people here strongly in favour of open networks. P2P is what the internet is, end to end is where it’s at.

Real invention of the internet was not packet switching or email. Not a technological invention. It was the pricing model, which is that i pay for my line to the middle, and you pay for yours, and we don’t worry about the bits in between.

There were other networks, but the internet was the one that worked. It enabled a bunch of applications because it stopped requiring that every application be financially justified. The early networks were in the hands of corporations’ bean counters, which would stifle innovation.

If there had been packet bills for pictures of fish tanks, as per early internet uses, and there’d be no way to justify that. We’d have had a network of timid users; people have a psychological cost to paying money as well as a financial. Even if the amounts are small. But great stuff came from en environment where pricing model not damaging.

Monster in the closet. Everybody oversells their internet capacity, offering unlimited internet or a pipe that’s bigger than they can supply. The expect you not to use your allowance.

Got into a debate of ‘whose pipe is it’? Dissonance between what the customers think they are buying and what vendors think they are selling. DSL, upstream component often unused. That got exploited by P2P, finding a network resource that was unused was a valuable thing in some cases. But getting battles over that.

P2P is clearly the best tech for publishing a file cheaply, so not surprising that copyright violators use it, although that’s not inherent in the technology.

Something new will always be a bandwidth hog, there’s always going to be things that use more bandwidth than others. Worried that the backlash against P2P is that you end up beating down the winner, the most effective tool. If you got rid of P2P, something else would come along.

Law to protect network neutrality is hard to write effectively. All telecom regulation principles have caused more harm than good. They started with good intention in many cases, but before long they did something bad.

One thing they do bad is that as soon as you have a regulation in place, no matter how wonderful it is, simply having paperwork generates a barrier. E.g. export restrictions on encryption methods. Having to do the paperwork make companies take the encryption out of their products. So worried about that.

Like putting out a fire with corn-based ethanol – costs more in energy to make than you get out of it. But because of clever regulation people are going down this route and it’s all a lie.

Universal service, long ago, maybe helped. Today rural wireless can be delivered for less than urban landlines.

Once put a telephone box in the middle of Burning Man. Easy to do now, can bring telephony now to rural areas.

E911 is a case in point, if you want help in an emergency then you have to pay $1 per month per user. This regulation strangles innovation in telephony.

CALEA, regulation that allows the gov’t to wiretap. Companies don’t know if they have to comply. Has cost $500m, but no idea if it’s caught anyone at all. Companies who put this capability into equipment then sell it on to other countries, so giving them built-in surveillance.

2006; 13 digital wiretaps, 1714 of all types, convictions about 1.8x. Very expensive, hardly caught anyone.

Spectrum Allocation, started as a good idea, now is very stupid. Most spectrum not used effectively. Fights over whitespace. Firms bit $50 billion for monopolies. What did we learn from 802.11?

Replace FCC with three words: Don’t be selfish.

One regulation that’s so far been successful is the one EFF are suing AT&T with. Wiretaps – phone companies allowed NSA to put in taps on all traffic without warrants, so one good law told them not to do it, but they ignored it when the White House asked. President tried to get the law nullified, but the Senate said no.

Where is the answer?
– be careful what policies you have
– review all policies after a few years
– default is that they expire
– more bandwidth and competition
– it’s the monopoly, stupid

In many cases, we’ve created these monopolies. 100 years ago perhaps they made sense as a monopoly, but now they don’t. Some say that cable companies are not monopolies, you can move company just by moving your house.

If we can get in the dark fibre, get in the competition. Fibre is going to deliver what we need. Need to let people build from the bottom up. People say the internet can’t scale for video, but that’s wrong. There’s enough bandwidth out there. But P2P really does scale up, especially now there are things being done, part of the Comcast agreement with Bit Torrent, will cause more local peer detection, and it’s the creation of local caches of data from a ground-up tech which is very exciting.

[Note: I have a hideous cold, which is making concentrating very difficult. I know I’ve missed bits out – apologies.]

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Freedom to Connect: David Isenberg

So I’m here in Washington DC at David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference. It’s a very different crowd to the one I usually run in, so it should be really interesting.

David Isenberg
Over the next two days we’re going to expand the discussion. Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life; not just about rising tides and flooding, but the carbon in the atmosphere could extinguish life on earth. So I believe that we can use the internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. And we can use the internet for global participation that transcends tribalism to end war.

This is a remarkable group from all around the world. We are innovators and activists, academics, investors, lawyers regulators, builders of networks, and somewhere in here there’s also a man of the cloth. Among us is or will soon be a son who brought his father, and a mother who brought her daughter. This is how it should be, because saving the internet should be a family affair.

Some of us are here because they don’t believe that the internet needs saving, or if it does, it needs saving from people like me. I welcome those who would be the minority view in the room, because too often we only talk to our friends. I’m under no illusions that minds will be changed, but hopefully a mutual understanding can be reached.

The story we’ll tell in the next two days is one of companies under the disruptive power of the internet, it’s a story we all wrote in one way or another, in blog or C or in cheque books or in wrinkles on our hands and faces. It’s a story we won’t find in the mainstream media because that would be the story of the media’s own impending destruction.

It’s the story of one telephone company that i worked for and loved and hated and tried to save, called AT&T. That AT&T doesn’t exist anymore. AT&T shaped me and made me who I am today, I’m half Bell-head and half net-head. AT&T had other Davids too, people who invented photovoltaics, the transistor, C, UNIX, DSL and the cable modem. It’s also a story of managers who didn’t understand technology so they sent consultants to Bell Labs rather than go themselves and display their own ignorance.

The corporate culture was so deeply rooted that their culture was unquestionable. Managers had to rise through 18 levels of management in 20 years. It’s the story of an executive who drove AT&T”s computer business to failure and kept getting promoted. It’s the story of failed businesses and partnerships and a cell-phone division that would have failed if the mothership hadn’t been so big.

It’s the story of competitors created by a President’s pen stroke, that were destroyed a few years later by the courts. It’s the story that competition would replace regulation, and that competition destroyed.

It’s the story of people struggling to be free. When every record label rejects DRM, or a third of all iPhones are unlocked this is a victory. Neo-econs say these are responses to market forces, but they are not, they are victories, our victories. The struggle to keep the net free is like the struggle to work a 40 hour week, or to end wars. If we want a free internet we need to take it and build it.

The story we’ll tell is the future of the internet. We are writing it, but we do not know how it will end.

[Holds up a bit of fibre cable.]

Three fibres can carry the entire US conventional telephony and have room left over. If every one of the 6.5 billion people had a telephone, and at the same moment they were all making a call, and all that traffic could be routed through this cable, a hundred fibres would still be dark. If this cable was coming down your street, if your house could have ten of these fibres coming into your house…

The problem we’ve been discussing, that Comcast, and net neutrality folks have been having has been completely miscast. We’ve been talking about how we manage scarcity, but we should be talking about how we create abundance.

But all this takes energy. Computing takes the same power as the entire airline industry, so we need to reduce the energy we use. We can do better, we can use the Internet to reduce travel, and manage energy, and we’ll talk about that on Tuesday.

how will the internet story end? Will a few of the smartest telephone companies, like BT or Verizon, who have the wisdom, foresight, courage and money to sponsor Freedom to Connect evolve to be the connectors of tomorrow? Or will the telcos create the internet in the image of Clear Channel, locking it down, ghettoising it? Or will they make it so invasive that no one creative of innovative goes there anymore. Or maybe new forms of organisation, Benkler-style, arise to build and operate a new infrastructure we must have.

Or will other countries show the way? Assuming that the US is capable of seeing what they put in front of us?

In any case, welcome to Freedom to Connect.

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Kits and Mortar

It’s been a few years since I last started a new blog and the old itch has returned in the form Kits and Mortar, our new eco- and cat-friendly self-build blog. I’ve wanted to build a house for as long as I can remember and it’s a dream that Kevin shares too. Now that we’re married, it’s time to think about what that would really entail and, if I’m going to research something, I might as well blog it! Kev’s going to join me, and we’re going to write about every aspect of self-building, from thinking about materials to figuring out what sort of design we want to coming up with ideas for making the house cat-friendly.

This is a bit of a departure in some ways. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any “commercial” blogging, but this one will have ads and will be a bit of an experiment to see what can happen if you have passion and ads in one place. We’ve already had an amazingly positive response from lots of the people we’ve mentioned it to, which is a very positive sign.

Either way, though, I’m going to enjoy having a new writing project to focus on!

Going Solo

Being a freelance consultant isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s not necessarily the consulting itself that’s difficult, it’s all the stuff that goes along with it – finding leads, closing deals, deciding prices, dealing with recalcitrant clients.

I’ve been a freelance of one stripe or another for ten years now. I started off as a freelance music journalist writing for the Melody Maker, a career move that lasted not even two years. I was rubbish at getting work, had no real confidence in my own abilities, and was intimidated by many of the editors and PR types I had to butter up to get a commission. (Oddly, I was rarely, if ever, intimidated by the bands I worked with. They were mostly lovely.)

Equally, I struggled awfully as a web designer, lucking out with a good contract just nine months before the dot.com crash, and then spending the next nine months searching for a new contract, along with every other out-of-work web person around at the time.

It’s only since I moved into blog consulting – a scary four years ago – that I really found my peer group and learnt how to do all those things that need to be done to make any consultancy a success. And it’s been my peers that have helped keep me sane, provided me with a way to sanity check my ideas, and give me really vital feedback on whether or not I was barking up the wrong tree.

There are books out there to help with this sort of thing, but most of them are rubbish, and those that aren’t can only ever give you a fraction of what you need, because most of what you need is moral support from another human being who’s going through or been through the same thing that you are. But if you’re working for yourself, you tend to focus all your energies on your massive to do list, you stop going out because you’re both busy and broke, and you end up isolated and maybe just a little bit mad.

Luckily, there’s help. My friend and colleague Stephanie Booth is organising a conference for freelances called Going Solo. I’m both helping advise and speaking at the event, and I would highly recommend that anyone interested in being a freelance attend, along with anyone who actually is now their own boss, no matter how well established you are.

Going Solo is going to be held in Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on 16th May 2008, The early bird tickets are available until the end of March at 400 CHF (Swiss Francs, which is about £196 at today’s exchange rates), going up to 600 CHF (~£294) in April.

So far, speakers include:

And topics include:

  • skills a freelancer needs (doing the work, marketing and networking, contracts and cash flow)
  • fixing prices, closing deals, negotiating contracts (the hardcore businessy stuff)
  • what kind of work freelancers in the 2.0 world do (some jobs are more suitable for soloists than others)
  • marketing and taking care of one’s social capital (blogging… and being a good online citizen)
  • tools of the trade (what software/tools/methods can assist you as a freelancer?)
  • co-working and staying in touch with “colleagues” (compensating for “working alone” – we remain social animals)
  • challenges in making a passion into a job, dealing with the blurring of the life/work distinction
  • international clients, travel, different laws and tax rules, accounting
  • soloist or small business?
  • adapting to different kinds of clients (in particular, how do you deal with big corporations that you approach or who have approached you)
  • is there a market for what I’m doing?

I wish that there had been something like this around ten years ago. I really could have done with not just the information, but also just the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one grappling with this stuff. I still have things to learn – a good consultant never stops learning – and I know I’m going to get a huge amount out of going.

Please bear with us

We’ve had intermittent problems with Movable Type here at Strange Attractor for months now. Every time we think it has been fixed, something else goes awry. Right now, we’re battling with a problem with rebuilds which means that every time we post an entry, or someone posts a comment, the site fails to rebuild properly and spits out naught but a blank page. This is really annoying, and we are sorry if you’re inconvenienced by it.

We are hoping that we’ll be able to move to WordPress soon – that’s our aim, although the actual transition is in the hands of the chaps at Corante so we have no idea when it will happen. In the meantime, sorry if you have visited or tried to comment, only to get a sea of white. Please do email me if you have commented and the site is returning a blank page and I will pop in and do a manual rebuild.

A four-day week

Kevin and I are back from our honeymoon – we had a fabulous time in Barbados – and raring to go once again. I’m looking forward to reclaiming my evenings and weekends, after months and months of focusing on nothing but organising our wedding. I’m pleased that we chose to do so much ourselves, as the big day was just wonderful, but it really did take up time! Kev will attest to how many hours I spent beading fabric and making things!

Now that I’m back, and easing myself into my work again, I’ve made a pretty fundamental decision which will affect – and hopefully improve – the way that I work. I’ve long been an admirer of Ryan Carson and the gang at Carsonified who work a four day week, closing the office on Fridays. I saw Ryan talk about this at EuroFOO in 2006, and promised myself that I would work towards a four day week over the coming months.

For the self-employed, a four day week is both incredibly easy and astonishingly difficult to achieve. As I run my own business, I have total sovereignty over my time, something which is deeply important to me and the reason why I always turn down job offers, no matter how juicy. I’ve been a freelance for ten years, and adjusting to having to ask for holiday or leave early, and having to go to the same place every day would pretty much send me fruit loopy. I like my independence, and I like making my own decisions about how I spend my time, and on what.

The irony of freelancing, though, is that you end up working really, really hard, not taking holidays or finishing early, and working in the same place every day, even if it is just from your couch. I think my first first holiday with Kevin in 2006 was the first proper holiday I’d had since going freelance, or possibly even since leaving university. So whilst it’s easy for the freelance to decide to work a four-day week, it’s a lot harder to actually execute that decision.

In January 2007, I started marking out Fridays as busy in my calendar, blocking the time out as ‘Free Fridays’, with the intention of spending that time doing stuff that was fun or interesting. Sort of like my very own Google 20% Time. As a tactic for getting me to work a four-day week, it was a total failure as I almost immediately had to book a meeting on a Friday, and within a month, Fridays were just like any other day.

Ryan, on the other hand, has the advantage of running a company which employs people, so once company policy is made to shut the office on a Friday, it’s easy to stick to it. Everyone’s paid a full wage and they work 9am – 6pm Mon – Thurs, which is a 32 hour week, and plenty of time to get stuff done. A set-up like that is pretty easy to maintain because it’s embedded in company culture.

So, now’s the time to try again in a more formal, structured way. Rather than designate Fridays as ‘free’, I’m going to designate them as Reading and Research Day. I have a number of books on my bookshelf that are crying out to be read or, in some cases, re-read and there are even more that I want to get hold of. Plus there are various things that I want to research, whether it’s technology, applications, site, or something more academic.

I’m particularly interested in expanding my knowledge of ethnography, psychology, human behaviour, and usability testing methodologies. So much of what I do now is really about people, about understanding how people behave, how they view themselves and their jobs, how they relate to technology, how they use software, how they interact with each other, how they engage politically with their peers, superiors and subordinates.

The more time I spend working with people who are trying to foster social media adoption in their company, the more I see how much of the project’s success is down to the people, rather than the technology. You can make the best technology decision possible, but if you don’t make the right people decisions, your project will founder. This is something that few companies seem to realise, and frequently resist admitting because it complicate things quite significantly. People are, after all, complicated and you do have to take that into account when planning a social media project – you can come up with some lovely, slick ideas about how people “are going to use the software”, but without a solid grounding in reality, you can find that people aren’t doing what you expected them to do.

I am also inspired by ethnographer Grant McCracken, who splits his time between working as an ethnographer, and doing anthropology research. He says:

[E]thnography can be a great day job, the thing you do to earn enough money to do something else. This might be filmmaking, poetry, fine art collecting. In my case, I do it to fund my anthropology.

And, as I have argued here before, it consulting serves in a couple of ways. It pays me well enough to free up chunks of the year for research. But it also gives me data and understandings that work their way into my research.

I have to be careful not to violate my confidentiality agreements and I take these seriously. The moment the corporation believes you are “reselling” its data, that’s the end of your career as a consultant. The corporation is right to be vigilant on this point, but it is smart enough to see that I represent a peculiar bargain. Because I spend half the year doing my own anthropology they actually get two days for the price of one, the day they pay for, and the day I have spend working on my own. That anthropological research is frequently the source of the insight they most prize. Two-for-one, it’s a bargain. And it is a distinctly better deal than hiring a consultant who does not ever engage in intellectual development but instead exhausts his or her resources by taking on too much work.

I think this is a really important point. It’s not enough to just consult all the time. It’s not enough to be abreast of technology. Yes, I learn a lot every time I work with a company – the use of social media is a really new field and every consulting gig is an opportunity to understand more about how it all works – but if one is not careful, one can get caught up in one’s own assumptions of how things should work, rather than observing how they do work. This is why I feel the need to spread my net a little further and explore other people’s work in complementary disciplines.

The downside of this is that it does reduce the amount of time I have to work on client projects, and the number of clients I can take on simultaneously. As a freelance, that’s clearly something I have to take seriously, but I think in the end, it’ll be well worth it. Clients will get better work from me, and I will stay on top of my game.

There’s no time like the present, so this Friday I shall go to the Social Media Cafe Prototype meeting, and thence to the QR Code meeting (conveniently in the same place), and will be taking a book, and a notebook, with me. I shall, of course, report back.

CBDE special guests announced

A little unashamed pimping… 😉

Over the last few months I’ve working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project (hence my quietude here), which is examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property (IP) as a central pillar of their business model.

The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March – a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) – during which we’ll talk about what we’ve discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We’ve managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:

Monday 17 March
Tom Reynolds, blogger, ambulance technician and author of Blood, Sweat and Tea, published under Creative Commons licence and in paper by The Friday Project.
John Buckman, entrepreneur, musician and founder of CC music label Magnatune.

Tuesday 18 March (evening)
– Tom Reynolds graces our presence again.

Wednesday 19 March (evening)
David Bausola, the creative mind behind interactive online comedy Where are the Jonses?

The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry – e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography – and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.

As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend – if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.

If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.

Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!

A tangle with gravity

I wrote this post yesterday afternoon, but technical problems stopped me from being able to post it. Horizon was, by the way, fab.

Whilst Kev and I were at the gym this morning, we caught an interview with Dr Brian Cox on BBC Breakfast, talking to Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams about an episode of Horizon, What on Earth is wrong with gravity. I’m looking forward to seeing the programme tonight, having already seen a number of outtakes on Brian’s partner Gia’s blog. Thankfully, Gia has grabbed the interview and put it up on YouTube:

Now, gravity is tricky. It’s the sort of thing, like mass, that seem pretty obvious. You drop a pencil, as Bill did, and it falls until it hits a surface that stops it falling any further. We all know what gravity does. What’s less clear is what gravity is, how it works, what makes gravity pull things together. It’s actually a pretty difficult subject to tackle in a six minute segment.

Unfortunately, Bill and Sian – and whomever produced and researched the program – didn’t prepare any decent questions. Gravity is one of those subjects where seemingly simple questions have horrendously complex answers, if they have answers at all. Bill and Sian went for the simple questions, but Brian had only a few minutes – if that, given that they showed two clips of the programme – to try to answer.

Now, to my mind, the job of the presenter in these situations is to act as a proxy for the audience and to ask the questions that the audience want answered. The question that I suspect the audience most want answered about an episode of Horizon is: “Why should I watch this programme?” That was a question that Bill and Sian spectacularly failed to address, even indirectly, because they were focused on small but unanswerable questions instead.

Bill concentrated on dropping his pencil and asking querulously, “Why is it so complicated?” and then giggling like a schoolboy, I suspect because he felt a little out of his element. “I thought it was dead simple myself,” he says.

Brian has some great stories to illustrate his point. Most surprisingly, he talks about how if we didn’t correct for the way that time passes differently in orbit to on earth, our satnav systems would drift by 11km per day. But he’s forced to talk about spacetime without being able to fully explain what spacetime is and, frankly, anyone would be forgiven for struggling with that.

Sian then says, “I’m still not sure what causes gravity.” Well, you and the rest of the physics world. That’s not a smart question to ask, because there’s no answer, and the lack of an answer is going to flummox people. The point of this six minute segment is not to solve one of the universe’s greatest riddles, but to spark a little curiosity in people’s minds. And I can pretty much guarantee that no one woke up this morning and asked, “What causes gravity?”

Indeed, I did a straw poll of my friend son Twitter and Seesmic, and asked, “If I was an omniscient being, what scientific question would you like answered?”

From Twitter:

jrnoded: @suw why 42?
michaelocc: @Suw Is faster than light travel possible?
adamamyl: @Suw: why, on taking government office do incumbents forget they have principles/spines? Or, why int a resignation, a resignation, thesedays
zeroinfluencer: @Suw: How to make an affordable Holy Grail (Assorted Colours)
londonfilmgeek: @Suw Can i haz an Aperture Science Portal gun, kthanxbai
The_Shed: @Suw Are we even close to knowing the truth about anything?
johnbreslin: @Suw: Is this like “does anything eat wasps?” 🙂 how about, where does all the time go (inspired by the Time Snails in “Captain Bluebear”)?
aidg: @Suw Science q for the omniscient: How the universe was created or the story of creation from primordial soup to multicellular organisms.
meriwilliams: @Suw Why is life?
tara_kelly: @Suw Dear omniscient being: is time really as linear as we like to think it is?

From Seesmic, my question:

An amazing question from DeekDeekster, that I personally would love the answer to:

Jeff Hinz echoes MichaelOOC, but from the opposite angle:

Christian Payne takes the Prince Charles line:

Dave Shannon asks the hardest question:

You’ll notice that no one, not one single person, asked “What is gravity?”.

Then towards the end of the Breakfast interview, they bring up the entirely spurious issue of the asteroid that missed hitting the Earth by 334,000 miles at 8;33am this morning. Cue the stupidest question of the morning: “If gravity is such a big deal, how come that asteroid that Carol told us about didn’t crash into Earth?” That’s like saying, if the sky is blue, how come grass is green?

To add insult to injury, Sian ends up by saying, “See, that’s why he has a PhD and we haven’t, because he can understand these sorts of things and we’re still bamboozled” and Bill finishes up with, “You’d managed a major achievement this morning, which is that you’ve managed to explain something to all of us and made us both feel really thick.”

Poor Brian didn’t stand a chance. How can you manage to extract even a shred of dignity from that? How can you pull back from that and say something that will encourage people to watch your programme?

If the Breakfast team had thought for a moment and actually talked to Brian before the interview about what questions would make for an entertaining and interesting interview, ruling out questions that no physicist alive can answer, and including ones that perhaps the audience actually want to know the answer to, then I suspect things would have gone much better.

But to me, this is indicative of the attitude of the media towards science and technology: “Oh, look at those weirdos over there with their white coats and strange ways of talking. They’re not like us. They’re Boffins.” It’s an attitude based in ignorance and fear, and nurtured by the unnecessarily divisive split between science/tech and the humanities at school and then university.

Yet at times like this, the “I’m too dumb to understand you boffins” attitude is counterproductive. All Bill and Sian have done is put off people who might otherwise have watched Horizon, and pissed off the people who definitely will. Which is foolish, given that they are working for the very same organisation that commissioned Brian’s programme.

The Strange Attractor Wedding of the Year

Well actually, it’s the only Strange Attractor wedding! Kevin and I are getting married in February, and at last we’ve managed to get almost all the invitations out (although a few are still stuck here, with no addresses – for shame!). As we’d expect from our friends, so far we’ve had responses via IM and this one, via Seesmic. Thank you Lloyd!

You’ll forgive us (well, me, really, as Kev’s still writing prolifically), if blogging is a little lighter than usual in the run up to the Big Day.

Are social networks in business a white elephant or is Gartner’s report a red herring?

Gartner have recently released a report, Three Potential Pitfalls of Corporate Social Networking by Brian Prentice, with the tagline “Investing in social networking solutions from enterprise vendors is no guarantee that users will embrace the technology.” I’ll probably never get to read it, as it’s a bit on the steep side – $195 for a four page report. Nice work if you can get it. Instead, I’m going to have to rely on Tim Ferguson’s article, Businesses warned: Don’t rush into Web 2.0.

Now, I know that at least one of my social media consultant friends thinks you should ignore Gartner, but I think they’re right… although for the wrong reasons.

Ferguson says:

Businesses are advised to consider certain issues before investing in or developing internal social-networking tools. These include protecting personal intellectual property, and people’s preference for using existing non-professional external networks such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

[…]

But the Gartner report says the hype around social networking doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a mature enough technology to make it a critical business requirement.

There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other web-based communications technology, such as instant messaging and VoIP.

Ultimately, Gartner suggests, the value of social-networking technology comes from content rather than the product itself.

So let’s just break this down a bit. It should be pretty self-evident that businesses should consider what they are doing and how before they install social software. We’ve seen with blogs and wikis that just flinging them up and hoping for the best doesn’t always work very well. Indeed, I get most of my business from companies who have tried social software in some way and have found that it doesn’t “just work”. It takes thought, consideration and the benefit of the experience of those who’ve actually done this sort of work (rather than just theorised about it).

I disagree, however, that personal intellectual property is an issue that companies need to focus on. Most intellectual property created by an employee is what’s called “work for hire” and is owned by the company, not the person. This is generally covered by the employee’s employment contract and has nothing to do at all with what software is installed or used.

The use of external non-professional social networks, such as Facebook, is also a red herring. Staff use Facebook for managing and maintaining professional networks – of both internal and external contacts – because it’s easy and it’s the social network du jour. A good internal social network would allow staff to move some activity off Facebook if they wanted, but it wouldn’t replace it, because if it’s internal then they can’t maintain their external contacts in it. This isn’t an either/or scenario, it’s all about “and”: you need internal and external social network tools.

The maturity of the technology is also irrelevant. If you have any more than 150 people in your company, then your employees are inevitably going to be missing out on some crucial internal professional relationships, because you just can’t maintain meaningful relationships with more than 150 people. That’s Dunbar’s number at work. If you want to be an effective business, you have to find a way for people to find those colleagues they need to work with – that is, in my opinion a critical business requirement.

Too much business time is wasted re-inventing the wheel. Social networking (done well) directly addresses that problem by providing a way for people to find or stumble upon those they need to know. The other half of that problem is cultural, and is about whether people are willing to share and ask questions and take risks by approaching a stranger for help and advice, but the maturity of the technology has nothing to do with that.

Gartner’s right is that there’s a lot of hype around social networks, and particularly Facebook. I hear far too often the refrain “Oh! We must have our own Facebook!” as people make the wild assumption that Facebooks success will translate directly into success for their own social network (internal or external). It won’t. Companies have to be careful not to leap on the Facebook bandwagon without first thinking about what it is that they want their social network to do.

But Gartner’s wrong to think that the sparsity of evidence for how social networking works in business is a problem. Businesses who are experimenting with social networks (and social tools in general) are tending towards keeping their experiences to themselves, but we are right at the beginning of a trend here, and lack of evidence is not a good reason not to investigate the possibilities.

And finally, Gartner states that the value of a social network is the content, and again, they miss the point. The content is very important, but the connections are what distinguish a social network from a broadcast network. Without those connections, there isn’t a network, there’s just lots of people creating content.

So, if Gartner can get it this wrong, why am I agreeing with them? Well, I think that businesses really do need to think about what they are doing before they invest in social networks. They need to understand how social networks work in an internal business environment, because it’s rather different to how they work on the web.

On the web, we find old friends, we send them phatic messages like a “poke” in Facebook, we gather connections, we maintain light-touch relationships with people that we might otherwise not bother staying in contact with, and we find new people with whom we have something in common. Successful social networks have a social object at the heart of their network: in Flickr the social object is the photo; in Last.fm it is music; in LinkedIn it is the curriculum vitae. What is it in business?

Anyone who’s been involved with centralised directories in business will tell you that people rarely keep their biographies up to date, they depend on someone else to update things like telephone numbers, and they provide little or no useful information on what skills someone has or what their area or interests are. Generally speaking, a profile page is not a compelling social object within business, and updating one is seen as a chore than can be indefinitely put off.

The sorts of activities in which people engage in business are also very different to those displayed in Facebook. I doubt many people would want to “poke” their boss, for example, or post photos of their big night out.

In my opinion, a business social network has to be very low-maintenance. It’d like to see something pulling in all my content and contributions, such as blog posts, wiki pages I’ve created, comments I’ve made, and websites and documents I’ve bookmarked. I’d like it to pull in any other feeds, authenticated or not, so I could add my external blog feed and anything else that I find interesting. I’d like the profile page to be the only one I need to maintain, so it would be automatically pulled into all other applications that have an “about me” page. And it’d like it to be taggable, not just by me but by my colleagues, so that they can decide how best to describe me. People never describe themselves as fully and accurately as a group of their friends and colleagues can. Clearly it would need search – keywords and tags – to let me find the people that I need to find. But the tags would also create ad hoc, fluid communities of interest, so I can serendipitously stumble upon others.

So my content becomes the social object and maintenance overhead is negligible. That’s the sort of network that might fly in a business setting where everyone is strapped for time and you don’t have the luxury of waiting a couple of years for the network effect to kick in. Instead you get immediate value because you’re pulling in information that I’m generating in the course of my daily work and there’s a lot of usefulness in pulling that together and making it (and therefore me) taggable and searchable.

One thing I’m wary of in a business setting is the idea of friends lists. I’d need to do a lot more thinking and research before I settle that issue to my satisfaction. There are two types of business hierarchy – explicit and hidden. Explicit hierarchies are ORG charts, staff lists, departments, teams. These are based on position as granted by the company, and are for some people important indicators of their own status and success. The are artificial, often semi-arbitrary, and frequently misleading.

The hidden hierarchies are really not hierarchies at all, but networks. This is who you know, who you bump into at the water cooler, who you met at the Christmas party, who your friends introduce you to, and, of course, who you work with. The hidden network is the one that helps you get your job done despite the official hierarchy getting in the way. It’s how you do an end run around that annoying boss who prefers to be obstructive rather than help. It’s how you get your computer fixed by that nice chap in IT in time to get that important presentation done, rather than raise a ticket and wait for an hour for someone to get back to you.

My worry is that exposing these hidden networks to the harsh light of the explicit hierarchy could kill them, or vital parts of them. In old-style command-and-control companies, the very fact that you know someone rather senior in another department may rankle with your boss in such a way that they start to work against you, and that would undermine the very fabric of the company. After all, a company isn’t a single entity at all, it is a group of people who have social relationships and who need some of those relationships to remain hidden.

With RSS readers, blogs, wiki ‘recent changes’ feeds and watchlists, many of the functions of a buddy list are covered – it would be easy enough to keep up with what everyone’s doing. And as people in business tend to steer well clear of obviously phatic communication, much of what Facebook enables becomes irrelevant. (This is not to say that there’s not a lot of phatic communication going on in business – there is, it’s just not as obvious.)

So yes, businesses do need to take a lot of care when considering how to implement social networks, and all other social tools. But they need to listen to people who’ve actually got experience working with social tools in business, whether those people are their own staff, from other companies, or consultants. Social media is so experiential that analysing it from an external perspective misses the point more often than it hits the nail on the head.