The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA is in part an indicator of the maturation of social networking and also the profound demographic shifts occurring in western societies. Obama successfully used tools like Facebook and SMS text to energize his Generation Y supporters. He carried the 18-29 youth vote by 34% over McCain. Obama’s web MyBO is the most Internet savvy site ever mounted by a politician.
Born August 4 , 1961, Barack belongs to Generation X (see Comments about Generation Jones). Social networking aside, his election is also a passing of the torch from the Boomer generation to its progeny. Most boomers don’t instinctively understand Web 2.0 and its social networking. If they have any understanding, it is likely as late adopters or lurkers. Incidentally, Barack delivered his first weekly radio address via YouTube, and is appointing a technology tsar to his team as he prepares to be President 2.0.
Having some understanding of the different values driving these three generations is key to adopting social networking in any organization.
The most flagrant indicator of the maturation of social networking is Microsoft’s extremely late entry into the field as a mimic with a planned Windows Live update in the coming weeks to compete with MySpace and Facebook. The update will integrate notification of Twitter messages, Flickr photo uploads, Yelp reviews and WordPress blog entries.
Most organizations expect social networking to creep in through the back door because they don’t understand how to plan it. With some justification: planned societies always fail. It’s like trying to set objectives for knowledge capture without understanding that knowledge is contextual and has a shelf life. The sell-by date comes quickly.
Every application and process in an organization has a social aspect. At its simplest, it’s how we get things done. Sociologist Robert Putnam argues that voluntary association with other people is integral to a fulfilled and productive existence—it makes us "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy."
At a different level there may be some visible benefit. The value graph for a book-keeping program is very different from that of a community of practice. The social activities around book-keeping are more about how do we get things done. For example, “Does anyone know how I can get reimbursed for these expenses?”. Having a prior chatty relationship with someone can pay dividends.
In a community of practice the social activity is more structured but still semi-structured. There are conditions of admittance and higher expectations of contribution to the social group. The benefits are more widely visible.
One of the difficulties is that social groups tend to be age groups. Boomer males are not welcome in the group of twenty-something females. Mixed sex and mixed generation groups do not have an easy dynamic. If you’re a boomer you can check this out by joining Facebook and looking for a group to join.
The differences are profound. In earlier times, people tended to follow in the footsteps of their parents. But two brutal world wars sowed the seeds for massive demographic and attitudinal change.
In 1996 David K. Foot published Boom, Bust & Echo describing the demographic shifts occurring in society and the consequences. The Echo generation is also the Net generation. Generally, boomers are defined as born in 1943-1960. GenX is 1960-1980. GenY, the echo, is 1981-1996. Don Tapscott in Wikinomics defines the Net generation slightly differently as 1977-1996 (6.5 million in Canada).
Worldwide there are more than one billion people in the Net generation. These are people who have grown up with the Internet not as something new but as something that is part of the fabric of their lives. Today (2008), they are 12-31 years old, so the leading edge of this cohort is already entrenched in government and business. These are the people who are aggressively socialising using Web 2.0. Their experiences with collaboration on a wide scale do not fit well with rigid hierarchical top-down modes of organization. A mixture of hierarchical and peer-to-peer is advisable.
Slightly earlier in 1964 Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media foresaw that “….the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.” Web 2.0 is about participating on a shared canvas rather than passively receiving information. It is the New Gutenberg that Telidon and Web 1.0 failed to deliver.
Another difficulty is that much of what passes for socializing on this canvas is drivel. “I’m at home with a sick kid.” “I’m sooo mad!” “Should I buy the blue one or the red one?” You start to think that GenY is very lonely. Then you catch yourself sending a friend a text about your walk by the river, maybe with a phonecam picture attached.
Yeah, we all want to feel a connection with someone.
© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com
Friday, November 14, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
The Rise of Cloud Computing
Web 2.0, the collaborative and social web, is based on a mixture of technologies like AJAX, XML, RSS and on and on. As most people experience it, it is also based on applications like Facebook and Gmail that use cloud computing. The Blogger engine used in this blog is another example.
What is cloud computing, and why should you care?
Somewhere in 2005-2008 storage online got cheaper and more secure (in some contexts) than storing locally or on your own server. This was the birth of cloud computing.
Cloud computing has many definitions and some of those definitions have variants, so it can be quite confusing. Think of it as a further move into the Internet. You could also think of it as a move back toward centralization and away from decentralized applications on desktops. Or, as an evolution in, and form of, outsourcing through hosted or managed services.
Almost any managed service can be taken into the cloud. For example, managed security firms that provide spam filtering, anti-malware, backup and email encryption functions have taken disk encryption into the cloud.
It’s also a further development in the use of browsers as a desktop environment, as exemplified by Google’s Chrome, and the possible rise of the Internet as an operating system. Like Web 2.0, under the hood cloud computing is not a simple phenomenon.
The basis of cloud computing is in massive data centres. By locating on cheap real estate, close to cheap and abundant sources of electricity, close to cheap and massive bandwidth pipes, and by using new hardware and virtualization technologies, it is possible to provide computing services at a much reduced cost. These cloud-based data centres provide redundancy, scalability to meet peek demand, and a high-level of data security. Think of it as service available on demand.
There are two general configurations: grids for intensive computing like image processing; and utility computing for pooled or multi-tenant environments focused on meeting service levels with the optimal amount of resources. Most web applications use utility computing.
At the corporate level, the market for hosted development platforms or virtual data centres is dominated by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Other big players are Google, Oracle, Yahoo!, and recently IBM. The latest players off the bench are EMC and Microsoft. EMC is offering Atmos utility computing using stored and replicated objects in a managed namespace; while Microsoft has its Windows Azure service described by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie as "Windows for the cloud".
Numerous other lesser-known companies have been established for some time but the battle for market is shaping up between players with deep pockets, i.e., Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Another corporate and also a consumer market is software as a service (SaaS). A corporate example is Salesforce.com while Blogger, Facebook and Gmail were already mentioned as consumer applications. Another variant, albeit an internal cloud, is government’s Shared Services.
Besides social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr, cloud computing also enables online applications like Hotmail, Gmail, Google Apps, Zoho Office and the like. Today you can use word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, image editing, email, and store your family pictures on the Internet, all from your web browser. Desktop proxies like G.ho.st can consolidate all your applications in a desktop GUI, making Windows even less relevant. Generally these are all free services supported by advertising revenue.
Why you should care
The issues in cloud computing have a greater potential impact on consumers using free applications than they do on corporations using commercial cloud services.
The business model for large organizations using the cloud has a firm base in cost reduction. Data centre operations are located where energy, bandwidth and real estate are much cheaper, and the marginal cost of scaling for peak or unexpected demands is low.
But the business model for consumers has less certainty. It’s based on advertising revenue. You get the application and the ‘Net storage for free, as long as advertisers are willing to pay for your eye balls. If advertisers become convinced that this has no (or less) value, because they cannot ascertain (or start to believe) that your ‘clicks’ are not converting into sales revenue, then they will spend less on it.
Recessions and economic events like the meltdown of Wall Street will also cause companies to slash and burn their advertising budgets. These factors will threaten the financial stability of the organization giving you free applications, and storing your data somewhere.
Facebook, for example, has >100 million users but no clear business model independent of advertising revenue.
The pricing model of your Internet Service Provider (ISP), especially for file sharing and downloads vs. uploads, may also impact the business model and affordability of this ‘free’ service.
Financial stability of your cloud service is important for both corporations and consumers. Stability consists of the business model, cash flow, equity and other factors in the organization providing your services. Corporations have available a range of financial reporting services and tools to analyse this risk. Consumers do not. Even large corporations may not be able to understand the extent of this risk in today’s zombie economy. Events favour those service providers who are sitting on a lot of cash.
Converting from your free applications to a subscription-based service may not give you any greater surety. It’s been obvious for several years that large software vendors would like to convert users to an annual subscription model. Recurring revenue maximizes their revenue and reduces some risks. This will tend to drive the smaller providers out of the market, pushing you toward the oligopolies.
The location of your data storage is important for corporations and consumers alike. It should be in a politically secure country with strong data-protection laws. You don’t want to wake up some morning to discover your data is being kept in Shanghai, and the Chinese government is trawling it and your Skype mail. Of course, you won’t do much better in the USA where the department of Homeland Security is amassing every piece of data it can about corporations and consumers, all in the name of freedom. The UK is even worse. Encryption, like cash, is king.
(Unfortunately Canada lacks the national infrastructure needed to be competitive in this market.)
Protection of intellectual property (IP), i.e., your data, is not something most consumers think about. It will be covered absolutely in contracts governing the provision of corporate data centres. But it’s most likely not covered in free cloud services used by consumers. Don’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find your account has been closed (for any one of a number of reasons), and you have lost several years’ worth of family photos. Customer support is unlikely to be very supportive.
The same thing will happen if the service provider goes out of business. You, as a consumer, will never get your data back.
This is probably the single biggest reason why I do not want my data on the ‘Net.
Performance in throughput, response time and availability are other factors to consider with consumer cloud services. An application running on your desktop computer will always be faster than a browser-based one running on a remote server. Period. And you will never have to worry about the ‘Net being down when you most need it.
Recently both the free and paid versions of Google's Gmail were down for a day. This hurts if you depend on it as a mission-critical application. But to be fair, I've seen similar failures in large enterprises running their own systems. At one company, the single-sign-on servers went down for a day, so no applications were available.
Centralisng your data, or putting it on the ‘Net, is always a security risk. That’s why (some) organizations have disaster-recovery plans. Letting a third-party manage it increases that risk of data and ID loss. The potential pay-back for a hacker or terrorist is that much larger.
For consumers the risk is a breech of privacy, as employers read about your party-hard lifestyle, and exposure to ID theft.
The best solution for consumers who want to use the cloud is an asynchronous application that lets you work offline with the power of your PC and periodically synchronises with the cloud application.
As for me, I will keep my data locally and back it up using a cheap USB hard drive.
© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com
What is cloud computing, and why should you care?
Somewhere in 2005-2008 storage online got cheaper and more secure (in some contexts) than storing locally or on your own server. This was the birth of cloud computing.
Cloud computing has many definitions and some of those definitions have variants, so it can be quite confusing. Think of it as a further move into the Internet. You could also think of it as a move back toward centralization and away from decentralized applications on desktops. Or, as an evolution in, and form of, outsourcing through hosted or managed services.
Almost any managed service can be taken into the cloud. For example, managed security firms that provide spam filtering, anti-malware, backup and email encryption functions have taken disk encryption into the cloud.
It’s also a further development in the use of browsers as a desktop environment, as exemplified by Google’s Chrome, and the possible rise of the Internet as an operating system. Like Web 2.0, under the hood cloud computing is not a simple phenomenon.
The basis of cloud computing is in massive data centres. By locating on cheap real estate, close to cheap and abundant sources of electricity, close to cheap and massive bandwidth pipes, and by using new hardware and virtualization technologies, it is possible to provide computing services at a much reduced cost. These cloud-based data centres provide redundancy, scalability to meet peek demand, and a high-level of data security. Think of it as service available on demand.
There are two general configurations: grids for intensive computing like image processing; and utility computing for pooled or multi-tenant environments focused on meeting service levels with the optimal amount of resources. Most web applications use utility computing.
At the corporate level, the market for hosted development platforms or virtual data centres is dominated by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Other big players are Google, Oracle, Yahoo!, and recently IBM. The latest players off the bench are EMC and Microsoft. EMC is offering Atmos utility computing using stored and replicated objects in a managed namespace; while Microsoft has its Windows Azure service described by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie as "Windows for the cloud".
Numerous other lesser-known companies have been established for some time but the battle for market is shaping up between players with deep pockets, i.e., Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Another corporate and also a consumer market is software as a service (SaaS). A corporate example is Salesforce.com while Blogger, Facebook and Gmail were already mentioned as consumer applications. Another variant, albeit an internal cloud, is government’s Shared Services.
Besides social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr, cloud computing also enables online applications like Hotmail, Gmail, Google Apps, Zoho Office and the like. Today you can use word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, image editing, email, and store your family pictures on the Internet, all from your web browser. Desktop proxies like G.ho.st can consolidate all your applications in a desktop GUI, making Windows even less relevant. Generally these are all free services supported by advertising revenue.
Why you should care
The issues in cloud computing have a greater potential impact on consumers using free applications than they do on corporations using commercial cloud services.
The business model for large organizations using the cloud has a firm base in cost reduction. Data centre operations are located where energy, bandwidth and real estate are much cheaper, and the marginal cost of scaling for peak or unexpected demands is low.
But the business model for consumers has less certainty. It’s based on advertising revenue. You get the application and the ‘Net storage for free, as long as advertisers are willing to pay for your eye balls. If advertisers become convinced that this has no (or less) value, because they cannot ascertain (or start to believe) that your ‘clicks’ are not converting into sales revenue, then they will spend less on it.
Recessions and economic events like the meltdown of Wall Street will also cause companies to slash and burn their advertising budgets. These factors will threaten the financial stability of the organization giving you free applications, and storing your data somewhere.
Facebook, for example, has >100 million users but no clear business model independent of advertising revenue.
The pricing model of your Internet Service Provider (ISP), especially for file sharing and downloads vs. uploads, may also impact the business model and affordability of this ‘free’ service.
Financial stability of your cloud service is important for both corporations and consumers. Stability consists of the business model, cash flow, equity and other factors in the organization providing your services. Corporations have available a range of financial reporting services and tools to analyse this risk. Consumers do not. Even large corporations may not be able to understand the extent of this risk in today’s zombie economy. Events favour those service providers who are sitting on a lot of cash.
Converting from your free applications to a subscription-based service may not give you any greater surety. It’s been obvious for several years that large software vendors would like to convert users to an annual subscription model. Recurring revenue maximizes their revenue and reduces some risks. This will tend to drive the smaller providers out of the market, pushing you toward the oligopolies.
The location of your data storage is important for corporations and consumers alike. It should be in a politically secure country with strong data-protection laws. You don’t want to wake up some morning to discover your data is being kept in Shanghai, and the Chinese government is trawling it and your Skype mail. Of course, you won’t do much better in the USA where the department of Homeland Security is amassing every piece of data it can about corporations and consumers, all in the name of freedom. The UK is even worse. Encryption, like cash, is king.
(Unfortunately Canada lacks the national infrastructure needed to be competitive in this market.)
Protection of intellectual property (IP), i.e., your data, is not something most consumers think about. It will be covered absolutely in contracts governing the provision of corporate data centres. But it’s most likely not covered in free cloud services used by consumers. Don’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find your account has been closed (for any one of a number of reasons), and you have lost several years’ worth of family photos. Customer support is unlikely to be very supportive.
The same thing will happen if the service provider goes out of business. You, as a consumer, will never get your data back.
This is probably the single biggest reason why I do not want my data on the ‘Net.
Performance in throughput, response time and availability are other factors to consider with consumer cloud services. An application running on your desktop computer will always be faster than a browser-based one running on a remote server. Period. And you will never have to worry about the ‘Net being down when you most need it.
Recently both the free and paid versions of Google's Gmail were down for a day. This hurts if you depend on it as a mission-critical application. But to be fair, I've seen similar failures in large enterprises running their own systems. At one company, the single-sign-on servers went down for a day, so no applications were available.
Centralisng your data, or putting it on the ‘Net, is always a security risk. That’s why (some) organizations have disaster-recovery plans. Letting a third-party manage it increases that risk of data and ID loss. The potential pay-back for a hacker or terrorist is that much larger.
For consumers the risk is a breech of privacy, as employers read about your party-hard lifestyle, and exposure to ID theft.
The best solution for consumers who want to use the cloud is an asynchronous application that lets you work offline with the power of your PC and periodically synchronises with the cloud application.
As for me, I will keep my data locally and back it up using a cheap USB hard drive.
© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Introduction
This blog covers a wide range of information- and knowledge-management issues and related technologies loosely covered by the terms Enterprise 2.0, Government 2.0 and their origin in Web 2.0.
My background for many years has been in systems for component content-management (using XML), document management and eLearning.
With each new technology shift, such as Web 2.0, we tend to think that history has ended and that we live in a new paradigm. We seize the new tools, eagerly expecting that they’re the ever elusive silver bullet, only to find that the basic data, information and knowledge issues remain: capture, storage, management, access, retrieval, purposing, transformation, packaging, delivery and archiving.
Web 2.0, the collaborative Internet, is an important shift but at heart it simply means that web tools are catching up to how we work in teams in any kind of organization. There is no inherent magic to replace business processes and their context.
The real shift is in the external world. Huge tectonic plates are shifting and most of us only dimly perceive their impact. (See Shift Happens.) Only by applying information-management technologies to real problems, processes and products can we hope to improve matters.
© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com
My background for many years has been in systems for component content-management (using XML), document management and eLearning.
With each new technology shift, such as Web 2.0, we tend to think that history has ended and that we live in a new paradigm. We seize the new tools, eagerly expecting that they’re the ever elusive silver bullet, only to find that the basic data, information and knowledge issues remain: capture, storage, management, access, retrieval, purposing, transformation, packaging, delivery and archiving.
Web 2.0, the collaborative Internet, is an important shift but at heart it simply means that web tools are catching up to how we work in teams in any kind of organization. There is no inherent magic to replace business processes and their context.
The real shift is in the external world. Huge tectonic plates are shifting and most of us only dimly perceive their impact. (See Shift Happens.) Only by applying information-management technologies to real problems, processes and products can we hope to improve matters.
© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com
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