In 1971  Herbert Simon wrote:

This precient observation from the Nobel Prize winning economist sits like a corner-stone underpinning a wealth of brilliant work that has attempted to characterise both the phenomenal collapse of the cost of duplication in the digital economy, fermenting what Umair Haque calls the “Cambrian Explosion in micromedia” (blogs, podcasts, twitter etc)

with the rapacious business-models that: “work by treating consumer attention as the property of the search engine (in the case of paid inclusion) or the publisher (in the case of advertising networks).” [Src Wikipedia]

Kevin Kelly reminds us that: “In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times.” and that: “companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying, [and] …The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.”

However, its all too obvious that the web is far from egalitarian or homogenious. It is stratified into the have-nots and the have-lots… But curiously like the gold-rush era, the perception and the reality of rags-to-riches overnight miracles are legendary.  For every mould-breaking ‘open’ and inclusive new social-media trend that succeeds in capturing our imagination and highly valued attention, there is an army of profiteers scrambling to convert our collective attention be it in the form of ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, (the new trophies of web credibility) …the race is on.

Much of this buoyancy and fecundity in the general web marketplace can be put down to Google’s ingeniously magnanimous and enfranchising paid-inclusion system: Ad-Words which sells the user’s attention-data to Google’s own Ad-Sense system for publishers in a classic two-sided-market.

(Obama’s nominee for antitrust chief, Christine Varney, recently described Google as: “a likely antitrust problem” [and as] “…having acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Joe Nocera from the NYT, puts the phenomenon into a more internet-savvy context by saying: “…the issue isn’t that Google is a monopoly. It’s that Google has become the marketplace. It’s where we all go for information. It’s where advertisers go for us.”

The fact that Google’s business is built directly on freely-given ‘attention’ and ‘interest-data’ is an axiomatic truth that should never be forgotten

In Kevin Kelly’s classic article “Better than Free” he continues with his discussion of: ‘The Internet as a Copy Machine’

“When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?”  “There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied.

You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long).

If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.”

So how important and how fragile is the value of ‘trust’?

One only has to consider the quagmire that the ubiquitous and highly respected serial investor and serial Twitterer Guy Kawasaki has got himself into by his very public admission that he uses two or three ‘Ghost Tweeters’ to augment his prolific ‘tweets’ (writing through his Twitter account on his behalf). When Dave Fleet interviewed Kawasaki on the controversy via email, after promising to identify his ghost tweeters, Kawasaki responded to Fleet’s final question: “How do you feel about the ethical issues raised by ghost writing using social media tools in general?” by saying: “Surely, there are more important things to think about.”

The problem with Guy’s glib response to the big ethical question is that he has patently underestimated what his own brand-promise has come to represent in the eyes of the people who have bought his books and attentitively absorb his presentations. (it didn’t take long to find the following proposition)

The problem can also be seen in Guy’s presentation on ‘Slideshare’ - ‘Twitter as a tool For Social Media’… right there on the first slide Kawasaki states: “Nobodies are the New Somebodies”. i.e. in this new digital landscape that Kawasaki is soooo excited about, the very people he is marketing to; those who Clay Shirky identifies as: “the loosley coordinated groups [which] will have increasingly high leverage over the next 50 years,” are also the ones he is denigrating.

But let me close this off by quoting Guy Kawasaki from his ‘Art of the Start’ presentation: “My final tip is that you ask women - and only women. My theory is that deep in the DNA of men is a “killer” gene. This gene expresses itself by making men want to kill people, animals and plants. Hence…

Because as blogger Michelle Tripp has pointed out in her sensitive almost ‘bleeding-heart’ piece on the issue: “…if it’s not really you [Guy] behind the curtain, your account doesn’t have AUTHENTICITY. And I’ve lost a little trust in you.” [original Twitter post: http://tinyurl.com/cfz8k8]

“…Some recent blog chatter says that online advertising is doomed. The best reasoned case for this is made by Doc Searls (of ClueTrain Manifesto fame), who is touting his radical Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as an alternative.”

Doc responds that: “if VRM is radical, it’s not in an oppositional way. It’s not against advertising, or CRM.” - OK… it might not be against ‘Advertising’, but my understanding has always been that VRM grew out of, and was defined as being antonymous to CRM. If its not “against CRM” what is its agenda? So, there seems to be some back-peddling going on… with Doc wanting to clarify VRM as not really so “Radical”.

(As I said in my comment on Doc’s Blog) The real problem is that VRM is not so much being ‘radical’ as ‘rhetorical’ i.e. “expressed in terms intended to persuade or impress”…

Doc takes a swipe at both Bernard Lunn and Richard de Silva (from Highland Capital) by saying:

“ReadWriteWeb is a micro medium. So is Digg, in which Highland is an investor. They may be big on the Web, but they’re micro next to the giants of mass marketing that have kept Madison Avenue in business… What keeps ReadWriteWeb and Digg in business isn’t Madison Avenue. It’s Highway 101.“

Yes, ReadWriteWeb and Digg are being driven by “Highway 101″ (if by ‘Highway 101′ Doc is referring to a mass of users themselves) however, the major problem for VRM is that it is patently NOT being driven by Highway 101…  It is ideologically concerned with “Highway 101″ without a broad validation by its claimed constituency… Therefore, its weakness is that it comes across as a ‘top-down’ prescription for a ‘bottom-up’ solution.

For Doc to make statements like: “VRM is also about Highway 101. It’s is one more stage in the not-very-seamless transition to whatever succeeds mass marketing.” actually succeeds only as a rhetorical statement, which he is not supporting by any compelling argument.

Further, to say: “Our job is to make the pudding that proves our ideas.” is very much like the statement Doc made last year in his post ‘Clues vs. Trains, cont’d’ (http://tinyurl.com/c2rld3) that: “We need the invention that mothers the necessity” - and as I pointed out that the time:

“We need the invention that mothers the necessity ~ That is an inversion of a parable, the same way that VRM is an inversion of CRM. I get it, and its clever, but… the inverted meaning really kind of messes with the logic of the original parable. The original, points to what drives human invention: ‘need’. To say that we need the invention to mother the necessity (i.e. the need) is to almost admit that ‘need’ has failed to be the driver.”
- June 2, 2008

Where is the mass bottom-up push for VRM from Highway 101? Many of us see the ‘need’ (me included)… but you can’t pronounce the solution into being, and you can’t rely on an “open-source” approach to magically provide the answer.  This is the ‘Achilles heel’ of VRM… and (I still think) The exponents of VRM have to address this ‘elephant in the corner of the room’, before they try and address ‘managing vendors’ on behalf of customers.

[note: I support the overall ideas behind the VRM movement, but have issues with the rhetoric and the process, rather than the desired outcome]

“What’s this?” It sounds like a scam… and unfortunately, (I’m sorry Bill)  but you chose the wrong person to send your automated pitch to.

If you follow Bill, you will find he has all manner of things to say about highly topical and interesting issues… in fact the more topical they are, the more likely Bill will be right onto it.

However, all is not what it seems… because Bill has ‘invented’ the: (wait for it) ‘THE TWITTER TRAFFIC MACHINE”… http://www.twittertrafficmachine.com

Here’s a quote from Bill’s promo-video:

“ I’ve figured out how to get 16,000 targeted followers in 90 days, and make a bunch of money from it… all on auto-pilot”

However, (borrowing a phrase from Umair Haque) to add ‘insult to irony’, Bill (who describes himself as a “Social Media Evangelist”) also has a video on his website called: “Twitter Etiquette (Twetiquette) in Plain English” is which he states:

“… What Twitter is NOT? It is not a place to sell stuff, if you do, you’re gonna turn people off.”

(link to ‘Twetiquette’ video)

What Crosby describes as his: “automated content factory”… is based on pure trickery and its viral ‘get-rich-quick’ multiplier tactics will have the inevitable effect of muddying the waters of twitter with a growing avalanche of ostensibly authentic looking ‘Twitter-Spam’ and will induce ‘tragedy of the commons‘ effects.

I urge everyone to reject this kind of B.S. as it’s DNA is inherently surreptitious and dishonest.

OK, the relevance of that quote may become apparent later…

The best thing I’ve seen this week, came from techcrunch. An article about a guy called  Kutiman, (MySpace page) who has very recently produced a series of musical mash-ups of various YouTube videos, weaving them together, creating credible and quite sublime musical pieces in themselves. The collection is at: www.thru-you.com .

Comments on the original techcrunch article are overwhelmingly positive, although some have questioned whether the ‘thru-you’ clips could in themselves really qualify as ‘music’ or as ‘art’…  - They most definitely are both.

If these people are reacting to the ‘many-authors’ attribute of these works as somehow diminishing Kutiman’s achievement, they are totally missing the point. - Kutiman is a musician of considerable skill, and what he has done, is actually to create a highly evolved crowd-sourced composition that, (IMHO) displays a good deal of humility on his part, because he is moving beyond the common ’self-referring’ style of most songwriters and musicians, toward a kind of ‘crowd-referring’ meme. Interestingly, one cannot consider Kutiman’s work without also considering the wider issues of copyright and the (retarded and almost misanthropic) music industry and particularly the RIAA.

(I say: ‘misanthropic’, because they are suing teenagers for using file-sharing applications, instead of realizing that the speeding freight train has already left the station… EMI and the RIAA are like the large Ice Factories that went out of business following the invention of the refrigerator)

Kutiman’s offering, coming so soon after EMI launched legal action against a Mr. Ryan Sit, the developer behind a number of popular mashups, for his application Favtape, makes an interesting juxtaposition…  EMI’s action is apparently because Favtape uses the Seeqpod API, and The RIAA and the record companies are not too fond of seeqpod.  What has alarmed many industry watchers is the way EMI has gone after an independent developer of an API… as this has the potential to supress what has been one of the key drivers of innovation on the web. (for a perspective openly critical of the RIAA see ‘boycott-riaa.com‘) …but, speaking of innovation:

Back to Kutiman… (as I said in my comments on techcrunch) - far from not being ‘real art’ or ‘real music’, www.thru-you.com displays the work of an artist who can not only see, but fashion the beauty and value in the scattered leaves of myriad YouTube videos, and weave them into multiple works of art, in the same way that avante guard artists from the 1960’s and 70’s juxtaposed ‘found-objects’ on boards or canvases.

His works, to coin a new term, could be called a musical ‘Folkshomily’… celebrating the mundane and the disconnected… and making stars of ordinary people… like the enigmatic woman on track #3 who soulfully repeats “I am Blue, I am Blue…” and the equally engaging young woman on track #5, who sits with a baby on her lap while playing a keyboard, singing: “…Someday I will find my soul… I, gotta have one too”… (Incidently, the definition of a ‘homily’ pertains to “spiritual edification rather than doctrinal instruction” …so that somehow works for me…)

Featuring these aspirational people and their precious human fragments is a gift to all of us… and; if the ‘form’ of this art is hard for all to comprehend, then it is yet further indication of its uniqueness and cutting-edge status.

[consider Robbie's quote now]

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. - Tim Berners-Lee

This statement projects the typical view of the ‘semantic web’ that somehow the chaotic and loosely defined nature of the web can be tamed by applying syllogistic deductive logic. However, syllogisms often lead to the inadvertent application of generalizations that, while seeking to prove truth, end up only proving that there are always exceptions to any rule. As a pertinent example, (and to maintain a theme):

All people, are unique individual humans
All Facebook users are people
Therefore, all Facebook users are unique individual humans

(incorrect!)

So, one could obviously factor in the undeterminable probability of ‘Facebook-Trolls’, but to put in place a system that corrects the contextual mistakes of syllogisms would be a gargantuan task. As Clay Shirky stated back in November 2003, (discussing the semantic web) - “Any requirement that a given statement be cross-checked against a library of context-giving statements, which would have still further context, would doom the system to death by scale.” (http://tinyurl.com/uakb)

In the end, it could be said that it’s the ‘top-down’ nature of the push for the ‘semantic web’ that makes it so obviously not a ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon.

The new breed of P2P search projects that are contending for the ‘next big thing in search’ holy-grail, like Faroo (www.faroo.com) and Minerva (www.minerva-project.org) have taken the semantic overlay networks (SON) approach to organize peer-nodes and data objects into clusters in accordance with the inherent semantics of the content in these networks.

These projects look at the semantics of an existing resource and attempt to use semantic rules and processes to facilitate the search and retrieval of data or files from that resource. The trouble is that this is a little like the semantic web approach, where semantic rules are formulated to attempt to make some order with regard to an open-ended amount of heterogeneous web data.

This application of ‘semantics’ is in contrast to the way the term ‘semantics’ is being used in the fields of ‘Emergent-Semantics’ and ‘Semiotic-Dynamics’ which are more concerned with neologisms (newly coined words or expressions) and evolving language systems, and specifically, ‘tagging’ and ‘folksonomies’ as evidence of these phenomena. (see the work of Ciro Cattuto http://tinyurl.com/b5z3g7 and ref: www.tagora-project.eu )

‘Emergent-Semantics’ and ‘Semiotic-Dynamics’ are relatively new fields of study that have gained some interest due in part to the general interest in ‘Semantic-Web’ research but specifically the recognized properties of folksonomies that display power-law and small-world characteristics. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Law)

These fields, “study how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools from complex systems and computer science.” [quote from: www.tagora-project.eu]

The stated aims of the ‘Sematic Web’: “a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” [Berners-Lee 2001] seem somewhat quixotic by comparison to the immediacy and relevance of the study of the ‘emergent semantics’ of the web and the plainly obvious evolving language systems characterised by the tagging phenomenon, which are unmistakably ‘bottom-up’ in nature.

So, what are the practical applications of ‘bottom-up’ emergent-semantic systems? I’ll have to leave that for another post.

I have a friend, who up until recently, was quite a good friend, but then something strange happened. His dark, mischievous sense of humor, which had always been one of the qualities that made him unique and often terribly funny, suddenly discovered a vehicle that offered him something akin to supernatural powers. Like the power to transform himself into anyone he wished, or to be multiple people at the same time. The power to gain the confidence and trust of strangers by morphing into the identity of their trusted friends.

On top of this, he had the power to anonymously wreak social havoc, distress and disorder, only to then be able to disappear like a thief in the night.

How did he obtain these supernatural powers? He signed up with Facebook, and slowly but surely became a Facebook “Troll”. Unfortunately, he is not alone. There are many individuals that exploit the unintended gaps within the fabric of sites like Facebook to impersonate and humiliate people that they don’t know.

One alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that these people are able to conduct this activity only by making quasi-partners of legitimate web-sites and services like Facebook and GMail, which is often used to generate fake email addresses to qualify for additional user accounts on social networking sites.

So, with human nature being what it is, one thing that we can depend on is that the trend will continue and there is very little that can be done about it. This then leads to the conclusion that in many ways the web has reached a point akin to what is known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’… meaning that the common area that became popular has now become too popular. So popular that in fact many of the benefits have been spoiled.

Its clear that many people will regret profoundly, releasing their private pictures and personal details innocently on the web, because once released, often they may never be able to be completely retrieved.

Which brings me to the idea of ‘open’ vs ‘closed’… Is it just me, or does the idea of a closed personal network to exchange information with friends seem so much more appealing than an open one?

I think there is a huge area of opportunity here, to appeal to ‘non-consumers’ of open-networks. These would be networks that people used to conduct genuine conversations with real friends from the real world. They would not necessarily be exclusive of strangers, but rather protective of relationships. New acquaintances could be invited in based on genuine qualification, again, in the real world.

My guess is that this period in the first decade of the 21st Century will be characterized by recollections of how so many people got burned by being ‘too open’.

Post Script note: (Nov. 2009) Investigations into how to create secure private networks using peer-to-peer technology, to solve some of the negative externalities that plague open social networks, has been one of the research projects of Virtusoft Pty. Ltd. a company owned by the producers of this blog. - Virtusoft is self-funded and has been in R&D mode for some time. Virtusoft is not developing a Twitter clone, (although we have experimented with Twitter’s API, to look for possible synergies related to a general signup and registration process). One of the fundamental aspects that underpin the company’s projects is the notion of giving as much power to users as possible. This strategic pathway requires that all the projects Virtusoft is developing would be ‘free’ for end-users. 

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addendum:

Mr. David Thorne chose to submit a comment to this article on the 20th of February 2009, at the previous Blogger URL for edgepolitics, but we decided not to publish his comment, at the time, due to its apparent self-incriminatory nature. However, we now publish a screen shot of that stored comment notification, taken today, Sunday 29th November 2009.

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

Note: an email with photos, from D.T. entitled: “real life trolling and the black eye consequences” is not included.

This has been a Post Script to the ‘Friends, Your new Enemies’ article.

We will now return to normal programming.

“…99% of web-users don’t click on ads… and only a tiny % of those actually purchase!”

But wait… it gets worse!

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks. ~ Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

That’s actually pretty revealing data, especially the rough demographic profile of the clickers themselves. This may go some way to explaining the proliferation of those really annoying gambling pop-up ads and flashing, vibrating banners proclaiming to (what would surely be) a seemingly implausibly gullible web-user who by some incredible stroke of luck, has just won a really neat prize! ~ Regrettably, market forces don’t lie… it seems these ads are apparently targeted at the only people who dependably click.

As is often the case, the blog’s commentariate kick in with some worthwhile observations:

CHRISTOPHER:

There is another aspect to the question of “who is clicking on these ads” that I don’t believe has been raised. That is, if the ads are taken as indicative of “level of interest in the population at large”, then the people who are clicking on those ads are the ones who are driving marketing decisions for the world at large.

and KEVIN:

…Its the marketer that gets hurt - HE/She advertised to the wrong person. The clicker did not buy anything- (do we know if they convert?) It means that ads in the web world are worth even less than we thought. It means that Google’s revenue and business model is a huge scam?”

[my note: even Google’s Adwords average only around a 2% CTR, and Google consultant Professor Hal Varian has stated that less than 2% of ads might get clicks and less than 2% of clicks might convert to sales, meaning that 0.04% of clicks might result in sales... ~ A $40B web-ad market might sound impressive, but according to Sir Martin Sorrell, of WPP, the wider Advertising market is a Trillion $ market; so with such dubious current ROI, that $40B might really currently be largely driven by hype, and the pressure to be 'a player']

But my favorite comment comes from CASEY:

I actually work for a company that does a lot of online advertising campaigns, so I think I can shed some light this. The honest-to-god truth is that the people in charge of these campaigns have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. They describe their target audiences with phrases like, “Interested Non-Users,” or by using terms they’ve made up, such as the gag-worthy “prosumer.” [SUBSTANTIAL EDIT] …Of course, the punchline to all of this is the fact that most click-throughs don’t translate to actual sales. If an ad campaign is relying on accidental click-throughs, or on attracting the attention of a niche market who can’t afford what they’re selling, then the joke is on the person footing the bill. The model is clearly broken, and most people in the industry know that, but the people signing the checks aren’t in on the joke.

This all indicates a kind of grand-illusion based on volume metrics: i.e. If total number of clicks is counted in millions, even a tiny percentage will bring some users sales. However, It’s the same logic as Spam and ‘Cold-Calling’ i.e. If you call 100 people and only get one buyer, it’s a sale, but you really annoy the other 99.

A post on: mini-news.com, entitled “Bye Bye Ads” quotes Usability expert Jakob Nielsen: “The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.”

These are Clayton Christensen’s ‘Non-Consumers’… ‘Non-Consumers’ of web advertising.

A more objective Value-Axis of the Internet?

From where I stand there is a clear ‘value-axis’ existing on the Internet, and a rather peculiar ‘Cargo-Cult’ type adherence to a dominant cultural meme called “The Web” which as a term is used too often interchangeably with the term “Internet”. This simple semantic muddle must end, as it is the source of a lot of confused reasoning.

There are three primary components in a value-axis of the Internet, Connectivity, Communications and Transactions. Of these three, Connectivity is the most fundamental, with the next most fundamental factor being Communications and then Transactions with all other general applications, (information, entertainment, blogs, websites, web2.0 etc) sitting above these three. This simple taxonomy ranks factors in terms of which is more primary in its ability to ‘enable’ the others.

Websites, Portals (Facebook, MySpace, Saleforce, etc) are at the upper end of this scale of importance. (ie least fundamental) This does not mean to imply that consumer or business websites and ASP-based web-services are not important, but rather that as a rule these sites function atop a foundation of established connectivity, communications and transaction protocols, and are not in themselves ‘fundamental’ in the sense that they exclusively enable higher applications.

The Web itself sits on layer 2, ‘Communications’. After all, the Web, for all the hype associated with it, really just resembles a massive Amusement Park accessed by obtaining a ‘Browser’ ticket. In other words the Browser is your ticket, and you ride this communication platform which is actually built on the more fundamental Connectivity layer. Its no secret where the value truly resides in this mega-market duality. Browsers are free, Connectivity you pay for, and the ‘Attention Economy’ (acknowledgement to Umair Haque) sits like an ecosystem above all that, with Google currently at the top of the food-chain.

In his illuminating article ‘Content is Not King’ written in 2001, Andrew Odlyzko nailed it with prescient clarity, even though he, like so many, has used the term Internet, when he could well have been referring to the Web.

“The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true “killer app.”
- Andrew Odlyzko, First Monday: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/

Email (by the way) has the same status as the Web, it is a communication platform on layer two. Andrew Odlyzko does not distinguish between Communications and Connectivity. In his article referred to above, they are to all intents and purposes the same, yet his message is clear. Its the connectivity between people that is more fundamental (and valued) than the content exchanged.

The Web and the Internet are not interchangeable concepts

So we need to appreciate that the internet and the World Wide Web are quite different things. The internet is a network that is in fact a loose array of interconnected networks. The Web has been superimposed on this global network, and is the dominant overlay-system, but it is not the only possible system that can utilize that network. The web has allowed many hundreds of millions of people to download information from ‘servers’ via protocols like DNS, (domain name system) and communicate between each other via email by use of DNS and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). However these protocols, serve to lock users into the ‘client’ paradigm where ‘clients’ have to accept the terms of the businesses that control the web servers. This system also helps to make the Web and email systems vulnerable to a wide array of security problems. Albert Benschop pulls back the curtains in this slightly ominous description.

“The exponential growth and far-reaching commercialization of the web have lead to an ever-stronger manifestation of the power structures of society in the virtual world. At present specialized computers channel the data traffic on the Internet and portals and search machines such as AOL, Google and Yahoo! dominate and exploit the market of the internet-dollars. Strongly concentrated hubs have arisen that play a crucial role in the Internet traffic. They are monster-servers, diverting their information to millions of regular web-users.”
- Albert Benschop, Peculiarities of CyberSpace- University of Amsterdam

The client/server paradigm of the World Wide Web, overlaid on the internet in the late 1980‘s, with its multiple layers of servers sitting on their underlying enabling protocols (DNS, SMTP, FTP etc) represented, at the time, a ground-breaking innovation and has gone on to become a global phenomenon. However, as the Web has grown, its hierarchical structure, identity and addressing protocols have also facilitated many of its almost intractable negative externalities.

For all the web’s vulnerabilities to attack and corruption, there is considerable ‘lock-in’ to WWW legacy systems, with the marketplace in general having built up a history of blind-acceptance trust and familiarity with it’s processes. This is a large part of the conundrum typified in the usual search for solutions to the web’s problems.

Projects like APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language), BCCF (the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum) and Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) are all well intentioned projects by switched-on people who want to do something about the inherent inequities and privacy problems of the web, and are arguably contained within this larger P2P pluralism. But… with the greatest respect, they all miss the point. Doing it actually ‘on the Web’, is self-defeating because its not a level playing field. There’s an orthodoxy present on the Web as dominant as the Catholic Church during the middle ages.

This is where an understanding of the pure definition of P2P, as it has developed on the Internet, may provide an instructive counter-weight, and clues to dealing with the over-hyped and over-rated orthodoxies of the web.

Communication applications like email and ‘Instant Messaging’ (IM) are sometimes referred to as P2P or being closely related, because they are ‘user-to-user’ services. To make matters more confusing, the Banking and Finance industries use the term P2P to indicate ‘person-to-person’ financial transactions like those made through ‘Western Union’, and more recently, the internet payment service PayPal has been designated by the Banks as falling into this category. So when mainstream media or file-sharers and ‘geeks’ refer to P2P, they are talking about ‘network and device functionality’, but when Banks talk about ‘P2P’ they are talking about ‘people transferring money to each other, outside of the Banking system’.

All of the definitions indicate an increasing orientation toward a kind of ‘one-to-one’ connectivity rather than the one-to-many model of traditional media, ‘broadcast-television’ or the client/server paradigm of the WWW. The P2P meme also has a societal meaning in that it implies a cooperative approach to social-networking and commercial activity demonstrated in new forms of group-association and collective publishing on the internet. The ‘Wiki’ and the ‘Open-Source-Software’ movement being good examples of this broad trend. Michel Bauwens, in his work, ‘P2P and Human Evolution’ defines P2P as: “a form of human network-based organisation which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners” This, could be called the ‘many-to-many’ movement, because it is one-to-one, on a mass scale.

The social phenomenon of P2P usage that is gaining strength on the internet, is a kind of pluralistic global super-community with a theoretically unlimited number of widely dispersed users. To join this community is to subscribe to a system of shared resources and distributed ownership, where all users contribute their own capital resource, their computer and processing power, to the open community. For internet users, being part of this new phenomenon is an innately communal and social process.

The thing that is often overlooked is that some of the biggest successes on the web, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook for instance, are facilitating aspects of the many-to-many/peer-to-peer movement, but doing so within the constraints of the client-server system of the web. This produces a weird kind of asymmetry. The users are creating the content, and the web vendors are trying to keep the genie in the bottle. Its all about control… When users are finally given the keys to the toy cupboard, I don’t think they will want to give them back.

Firstly, some definitions. In referring to ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) I include Application Service Providers (ASP’s) because, although the ASP model is seen as inferior in service to the more recent SaaS model, they both essentially do the same thing… they process data outside the client’s PC as a service. This idea has steadily gained momentum and along the way has become associated with ‘Web2.0-Think’. Tim O’Reilly et all, talk of ‘Web as a Platform’ and ‘Software above the Level of a Single Device’ and consequently, ideas like this have been jumped on by companies like Microsoft who have tried to co-opt the movement by coining new cool sounding terms like CloudOS which is really just another Microsoft euphemism for continued world domination… Visualize Steve Ballmer chanting:“developers, developers developers, developers!”

The anomaly that I see, is that the broad SaaS trend is fundamentally at odds with the massive investment consumers and businesses have made and continue to make in computer processing power, and Web2.0’s ‘Architecture of Participation’ is built on that processing power. The extent to which the Web2.0 movement have actually embraced the SaaS model as serving some undeniable user benefit is unclear and therefore to assume so, could potentially be misreading the situation. However, the reason I am drawing the parallels here is that it is an issue that needs to be cleared up. ‘Software as a Service’ inherently serves the interests of vendors as much as, if not more than end-users by attempting to make users dependent on licensing technology and services rather than owning them and maintaining those competencies in-house. Chris Anderson and Tim O’Reily et al talk of the ‘Long Tail’… Steve Ballmer talks of “selling to the Long Tail”.

In my view, this goes all the way back to Hotmail. In the early days people used a hotmail account only when traveling or for non important or ‘anonymous’ email. Of course many students and ordinary folk used hotmail as their primary email account and that fed its stunning growth. However, it was also a curse, as I noted in an earlier post (Putting P2P in Perspective - April 22 2006) even Bill Gates freely admitted that:

“…over half of what goes through (the hotmail servers) is actually mail that’s spam that people are not interested in receiving.” - Bill Gates

The trouble is now, as I found out the other day when helping a friend with her new Mac, that webmail is the only kind of email that some people know about. My friend simply had no idea that there was any other kind of email! She has never used a proper email program, has never had a proper email address and had no idea what I was talking about when I said:

“With a real email program, you download your email and it stays on your computer, including the files you receive, like pictures, PDFs etc. So, you don’t have to go online to review all the emails you have received”

She had no idea… To her, when you check email, you have to go online and log onto Hotmail and that is the only way to get email or to review old emails. She is clearly not an early adopter, obviously. She in fact is what marketers call “a lagard”, but if you look at the product adoption curves for market growth on the web you will know that she is far from alone. This is where the disparity becomes evident. She is able to afford the latest iMac, (easily) but the little ‘Mail’ icon in the tool bar is a foreign area for her. She’s got an abundance of processing power and storage space, she only ever checks email from that PC, but the market has trained her to depend on a third party for a service as basic as email… I think she has been disadvantaged.

Now, consider Salesforce.com and such sites. They want everyone to throw away their in-house software and migrate on mass to the quasi ‘thin-client’ approach and use their software instead of yours. This trend is pushed heavily by web2.0 entrepreneurs and the venture capital industry because its a business model that keeps ‘control’ with the vendor and keeps the client having to come back time and time again to that vendor for a service that in earlier models may have meant sporadic or once-only purchases. It also provides the ‘multiplier’ to shore-up the business model. So, where does the benefit really lie, and who’s really driving this model, consumers or vendors?

The ‘Software as Service’ doctrine is that it is a: “low-cost way for businesses to obtain the same benefits of commercially licensed, internally operated software without the associated complexity and high initial cost.” (wikipedia) However, in many ways its a model that is also at odds with the service enabled by P2P applications like Skype, where users individually and collectively power the software that underwrites the service. This undeniable trend (eDonkey, Limewire, Bittorent) is pointing in the opposite direction, as it utilizes each consumer’s capital outlay in PC processing power and bandwidth. So… What is so ‘web2.0′ about Software as Service? This is web2.0 vendors in service of themselves, arguably.