Dave Jenkins

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: www.planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for www.geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.  Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the dredges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all of, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.

An old college roommate once took a job somewhere in the South, where Dixie was certain to rise again.  He sent us a postcard showing a statue of some confederate general on his steed, sword raised defiantly about to charge into glory.  The only thing my friend wrote on the back was “The War was over long before it began“.

It was one of the most cryptic, and yet compelling messages I’ve had.  It left the whole war– and by extension– his contemporary experiences up for interpretation.

To this day, whenever I meet my friend (once every few months or years now), my first statement is “The war was over long before it began”.  I am not sure he even remembers the postcard at this point, but invariably I am then treated fantastic insight in to the current war (local, state, national, ethical, economic– you name it) or core philosophical challenge that lays before Western Civilization.   Mind you, this isn’t the Wolf Blitzer tripe about what Obama vaguely promises or who McCain’s brother slept with or all that shit (the masses can read People or Time or Teen Beat for that).  No, my friend is much more concerned for the complete and utter lack of advanced discourse,  attainable rhetoric, or salient policy toward anything real.  This time, the war was for the remaining scraps of liberal democracy– and no one seems to really care if it slips out of our fingers.  I am left with the impression that we are working on a millennial scale– my friend mentioned that 600 years of The Enlightenment was at risk.  The war was over long before it began (sure– but which side?).

I promised myself I wouldn’t delve into mindless political opinion on this site– I just liked the phrase, and the internal struggle that it triggers in the heads of all of us– our jobs (or lack of them), the landlord, that fuck-up of a middle manager in your office, the middle east (Gulf War II, Gulf War I, 6-Day War, Suez Crisis, Lawrence and the boys, or the crusades led by St Louis– take your pick), or just the jealousy of those who make a fortune off of writing blogs.

The war was over long before it began.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

Most IT execs try to boil down their decisions to simple dichotomies: build vs. buy, distributed vs. centralized, minimum ante vs technology leadership, good vs. oracle, freedom vs. microsoft. This pattern repeats amongst the developer crewmates: visual studio vs. rational rose, DOM vs. script, cron vs. UP, and the most ancient of wars: vim vs. emacs.

Now that I am on the business side, and not held directly responsible for the tactical stuff, I can see why the business suits always simply stare at IT people in agogged wonder– these tight decision trees have nothing to do with the real world. Developers and engineers live their whole day in an artificial construct of reference hash tables, primary keys, routing diagrammes, and copies of 1s and 0s that need to be shephered from here to there and back safely. The engineer’s job consists of either a) building more of that artificial construct, b) cleaning up someone’s poor interpretation of that same construct, or c) defending their version against someone’s proposed revision.

Business people think in analog– sales are way up, slightly up, break even, almost to goal, a little off, under plan, or ‘in need of budget revision’. Notice the complete lack of any diacritical statements next time you talk to marketing– it’s all shades of orange (the new gray), very little black and white. Notice how the IT guys will pepper endless questions trying to make some logical tree out of statements like “make it cool”.

So what? Well, I don’t know yet. I’ve spent several years trying to come up with the magick formula, the correct set of questions to ask, the right analogy to frame things for the business owners. I hve learned the following points (in no logical order):

• never start with a stark choice– it scares the business types, and makes them inherently defensive
• when picking your analogy, try something close to the listeners’ heart: cars seem to be popular here in the midwest, while history worked well on the east coast. Japanese like to use organic metaphors: seeds, vines, roots (nemawashi), etc. Be careful with chess– your listened either has no clue about the game, or is a grandmaster– either way, they’ll start asking questions about your analogy for which you don’t have answers (you didn’t think that many moves ahead– oh the irony!)
• When laying the groundwork for your eventual “this vs. that” question commital point, make sure you attribute all the incoming data to someone else: bonus points for attibuting the background research/material to the same person you are about to ask for a decision– they feel smarter already.
• multi-variate choices are much better in terms of quick understanding, but they usually require a whiteboard to lay out the different factors involved (i.e. cost and complexity, time and ROI). At this point, the best you’re gonna get is to have your decider play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey somewhere on the whiteboard. This is a false answer– it is still analog-y and relative to their opinion. You still don’t have a hard decision (maybe that’s enough?). Warning: do not attempt multi-variate using only verbal communication. Double Warning: don’t try this with a metaphor, as your listener will forget the question and only answer their opinion about dogs/cars/football teams/naval battles.
• Whenever possible, practice your Fractal Management.

We all get attachments from vendors via email: proposals, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, Ammendments, Contracts, etc.  Some people leave these attached to their email– trusting that the email server won’t go boots up.  Some people download attachments to their desktop, which soon fills up the entire screen (unless you can arrange them in a nice pattern).  The real type-a nutjobs create a separate folder for each set, which we all know we should do, but we’re too busy to spend the 15 seconds.

I fall in the second category– everything goes onto my desktop until I clean it up every Friday afternoon.  The problem I have is that it requires me to open each file and read the first paragraph to know which vendor sent me the doc.  Why?  BECAUSE EVERYONE ALWAYS SENDS ATTACHMENTS WITH REDUNDANT OR NON-DESCRIPTIVE TITLES, DAMMIT.  I work at Brown Shoe.  I know that,  the vendor knows that.  Why, for hell’s sake, does the vendor from Google or Akamai or Accenture or IBM or Pete’s Bait Shop always send me a document titled “brown shoe.doc”?   It doesn’t tell me anything, other than to remind me where I work (Thanks, genius!).  I know why: because on their file system inside Salesforce or whatever, they have organized things nice and tidy, they have a doc for Brown Shoe, for GM, for Budweiser, and for the Department of Corrections (”doc.doc”).  They’re not thinking about me, the customer.  They’re only worried about brownie points for cleanliness inside their own sales department.

Please, please, please: if you’re going to send me something, title it well: “Akamai 2008 Proposal.doc”, “Google NDA.doc”, “PetesBait Price List.xls”.

I won’t even get started on the fact that these should be coming over in an ODF-compliant format…

So, we’ve all disparaged Waterfall software development as overly cumbersome and simply undoable in today’s go-go world.  Agile came along and promised to tighten everything up, but in reality most people just say the words ‘agile’ and they really mean ‘cram waterfall methods into 2 week segments’.  (”Manifesto“? Really? The last guys to use that word didn’t do so well.)
Here is my new proposal for software and project management: The Fractal Method.

The Fractal Method will take 3-5 core principles and apply them at all levels.  Just as a fractal equation takes 3-5 variables in some algorithm and applies them at any scale (kilometer or millimeter level), the Fractal Method for project method will take 3-5 core principals and apply them at large application development as well as small tasks.  This seems stupidly simple, but that’s one of my first suggestions for ‘Core Principles’: keep things stupidly simple.

To implement The Fractal Method, make sure of the following:

1. Get all the business people and developers in a room and tell them that we’re all going to follow the Fractal Method.
2. Explain that the method means that we’re all signing on to 5 core principles, and we’re going to decide them right now.
3. Make sure the Core Principles are short and simple enough to be memorized by EVERYONE
4. Play a game so that everyone begins to memorize them.
5. Go sing some Karaoke together, because everything will be great from now on

Anything beyond this, in my opinion, is hand-waving and/or bullshit project management fluff.  PMs make decent money, and for some reason it’s all too tempting for a PM to schmooze the bosses with fancy methods and drawings and charts to show that they’re worth all that money, when I would much rather pay them to actually get shit done.

With that, here are my Core Principles (if we were to deploy the Fractal Method):

1. Keep things stupidly simple.  Call bullshit on complex proposals and passive-voice responses
2. Write everything down in a common area.  Wikis are nice.  So are white boards in the hallway
3. Divide by 3. Divide each task into 3 subtasks until each item is less than 1 day’s worth of work
4. 20 Minutes. Meetings are never longer than 20 minutes.  If you didn’t decide everything, that’s okay, because you can meet again later, but 20 minutes was enough to give people things to do between now and the next meeting.
5. Results win. Results are worth more than estimations or plans

There ya go.  I think I’ll start writing a book.

Thanks again to my friend Matt, we now have a consistent basis to rank mediawiki sites on www.wikindex.com. The score is essentially a combined log(10) of the daily updates, number of articles, and user count. The philosophy guiding the score is that a successful wiki is really reflective of an active community, and would need a fair population of users, a critical mass of articles for a base reference, and maintenance/currency from daily updates.

If you have a wiki, please consider adding it to the wikindex. We will continue to work on gathering stats from the dekiwiki crowd and hope to add those rankings in as well. We are open to any suggestions for improvement. One that occurs to me: remove the google ads– maybe not worth it?

Some odd things to note from the rankings: World of Warcraft fanboys write a lot, but not as much as the Star Wars geeks (Triumph could have told you that). Both beat Star Trek. Superman and Batman are bigger than Final Fantasy (as it should be) but smaller that Yu-Gi-Oh (Wha-t3h-fu?). Just outside the top 50, however, is a wiki about furries (*blech**shudder* no link on purpose) and it’s bigger than the Conservapedia: a wiki for right-wing nutters.

The Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit that I get antsy if I am in the same town for more than 4 years. As a result, I’ve got bank accounts in 5 cities across three countries. I’ve got IRA accounts from three different vendors from former employers. Yes– consolidation would probably be a good idea, but it’s nice to have that account ready to go in a foreign country when the shit finally hits the fan here in the Twighlight’s Last Gleaming.

Mint.com was made for this. It has a pretty easy interface and some cool juju on the backend to assure security. It downloads the current transaction records from your bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolios, and savings all into one online screen. Moreover, it provides the fun Charts-n-Graphs on your spending habits that made Quicken so entertaining. This is no less secure than when Quicken accesses your accounts. In fact, it’s much more secure: the transactional records are only going one way, and between mint.com and your bank. With Quicken, those transactions are going from the bank to your half-assed ISP, to your wifi antenna in your basement, and to your windows-pc, where you’ve likely got a virus, a root-kit, and a keylogger installed by the Russian mob– not to mention the teenage neighbor who sniffed your WEP key last year and uses your network to share bit-torrents of Nelly videos.

Mint.com: thumbs up!

Okay, I’ve started to sell out, starting with my Technorati Profile, my linkedin profile, wikipedia, and facebook. There’s a myspace page somewhere, and I am getting a lot of invites from sexy college girls who suddenly want to sell me ringtones (to pay for tuition, i guess). I have yet to sign up for kaboodle, twitter, amvona, or style, but don’t worry, I’ll slut out this website there soon enough.

The obvious drive here is for attention, for the narcissistic joy of ego-googling your own name into that top position (over my rivals Dave Jenkins the photographer, the construction company owner, and the guitarist for Pablo Cruise, not to mention the mayor of Salt Lake City back in the 40s and my cousin Dave Jenkins in London). But is there a place for the meta-meta-blog? Would a site that gathers all of these together for someone and allow common updates work? here’s what I see as the base requirements:

1. The code must be neutral and open, allowing all these other meta-blog sites to adjust into the API
2. The site would need to provide a one-click-heres-all-your-links functionality
3. People would want an interface where they could ‘go dark’ with a simple click– erase all their profiles

This last one is the most powerful. Already way too many of us have shared way too much information out there. How nice would it be to be able to comprehensively kill all those profiles out there? The problem is that– with Google Cache, the wayback machine, and others– data never really disappears. So, this meta-meta-blog-eraser would need to go in and jam all these profiles with random information, in the hopes that as the spiders come through again, the newly randomized junk would show up instead. But we all know that won’t work either.

Well, the bubble has popped. For the record, this is the third real estate bubble I’ve seen– Tokyo in 1988, Seoul in 2004, and now all of the USA in 2007. Funny thing about bubbles, they’re so apparently obvious in hindsight, or even in the middle of them, but The Fever takes over, and no one wants to hear anything bad. For me, a big sign was the show “Flip This House”, which essentially showed idiots in SoCal who would buy cheesebox shitholes, redo the kitchen, and make $200K in 6 weeks. I say ‘idiots’ because most of them really were that– preoccupied with paint and tile selections rather than improving the structural integrity or usable space of these homes.

Dilettantes. Middle-class schnooks with some disposable money chasing the big payoff but not enough patience nor smarts to really pull it off. They’re not the suckers down at the Cash-n-Go, and they’re not the rational thinkers at Morgan Stanley, they’re in-between. They know someone really rich, and think that they are just as smart (but they’re not). They work, and they probably save, but not enough. They invest, but regret those investments because they didn’t buy Google.

The Dilettantes come in waves. They were multi-level marketers in the 80s, day-traders in the late 90s, and web developers soon after. The Dilettante Economy revolves around, provides the toolsets for, and celebrates the rare winners (just like a Casino billboard on the freeway that promises you Freedom) within this demographic. Shows like “Flip This House” and “Property Ladder” fed on this, just as Countrywide Loans and all those other loose finance companies made real dollars enabling all this poor behaviour. Before this wave, eTrade, Charles Schwab, and Ameritrade made their mark with fees from the day-traders, and NuSkin, Avon, and Amway before then. Hell, I could trace this economy all the way back to Levi Strauss: the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a lot of dilettantes, but it was ole’ Levi who got rich by selling them blue jeans sewn from the surplus sailing canvas torn from the ships rotting in San Fransisco Bay.

The New York Times picked this up (and actually did some interviews, unlike my cheap rants here):

“That is an income Randy Haddadin would have welcomed. Mr. Haddadin, 38, moved to Miami Beach in December 2003 from Washington, after leaving a job in information technology. He promptly got his real estate license.
[…]
Mr. Haddadin is now weighing his options. He might seek a job in information technology again, or perhaps help a friend open an Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, while selling real estate on the side.”

In other words, this guy jumped on the IT thing when that was hip, burned out when his skillz weren’t enough, then hawked property. I hope his pesto sauce actually has some punch behind it, because he sure sounds like a Dilettante to me.

So, now that the Dilettantes can no longer feed on each other and the suckers below them, now that the interest-only floating-rate NINJA loans are gone, what is the next big thing?

My guess: debt collection and repo men. I am working on my ‘How to Succeed at Finance Recovery’ kit right now. It goes on sale next month for $499.