Dave Jenkins

So, the Internet is everywhere.  Times was (back in the day), that we used to surf around to websites just to see the design or some cool functionality, but we are no longer enamored with the technology (well, almost).  Futurists no longer spend their time pontificating about capacity, bandwidth, or the extent of data that could be recorded in their great computers– all of that is assumed to be in place.  Rather, these seers spend their time in two activities:

a) Blowing their own horn on twitter — not worth watching

b) Showing insights on the social interaction of the great online hive that has now come into being — these are what I’ll call  “Network Biologists”, and are worth your time.

The network biologist will spend his/her time researching the strange interactions between people, and the even stranger medium that is created as a result.  They are not sociologists, because it is more than the interactions of the humans; there are robots, scripts, and crude AI influencing the mix.  The environment itself is ever changing– and the actors change as a result– but the center of focus has shifted to the behaviour of the fish, not the mechanical workings of the reef: hence the term ‘biologist’.

The usability managers in ecommerce companies were an early manifestation.  Now, everyone in the online marketing department, merchandising, and even finance is trying to ascertain how the huge mass of people will react to the online environment.  This is different from standard “retail science” or “catalog management” because of the constant arms race in online functionality as well as the multiple-variable equation where customers will influence each other in real time, as well as try to get in on the deal with some sort of affiliate, coupon, or recommendation in exchange for a slice of the profits.

The best results so far have been to segment and clasify online users into their various behavioural patterns.  Oddly enough, people don’t mind surrendering them willingly.  The current spate of “what [blank] are you?” viruses circulating on facebook are a segmentation maker’s dream: people are happy to tell us exactly what drives their brightest fears and darkest hopes. The most successful websites out there have tapped into the hive behaviour that humans portray when given just the right mix of anonymity and self-aggrandizement: Google’s page rankings are a canopy of dominant players and ground-dwellers in their shadow; Amazon’s entire merchandising catalog for millions of products is an expansion of fecundity like salmon spawning; Facebook is basic tribalism that proves Dunbar’s number, De.licio.us is our own pollen-finding wiggle dance; twitter is a sea of iridescent jellyfish desperate for attention; there is a flavour of pr0n out there for every strange perversion you could imagine (and a few you don’t want to).

I would imagine that colleges will soon have some sort of degree in Network Biology: it will be a combination of sociology, crowd biology, and basic network mechanics, to show how it is all wired together.

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.

Google has announced their version of the wikipedia, but with straight out article ownership, and in return, a cut of the revenue for the author. Finally, a place where those military historians can get paid for all their brains! Will it work?

PRO:

• article ownership should connote some sort of expertise
• revenue sharing for the author may entice decent writing

CON

• article ownership will likely discourage collaboration– no one really knows everything, and even then, it’s questionable
• revenue sharing for the author will encourage plagiarism, debasement (for traffic), and squabbling

Boil this down, and essentially Google is telling everyone they can be their own Professor. That’s the problem though– “smart” and “learned” is really a peer-review thing. You get your PhD from other PhD smarties, not from popularity contests. Even then, the people who really know something are already publishing their knowledge out there and trying to get paid for it (they’re called “textbooks”). For those who don’t want to go to physical books, there’s this thing called ‘t3h Internet’. Meh. I really cannot see this past Google trying to coopt more data for their database, and handing out a sliver of the cash.

UPDATE: I am looking at that picture of The Professor, and– is that a whiskey still?!?

UPDATE2: Huh.  I think this was just a commercial cover attempt for something that Google was building for the Pickle Factory and their Maryland Cousins.

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.

Mediawiki (3,174) | TikiWiki (56) | DekiWiki (9,649)

Yeap– Matt has done a phenomenal job on the spider for wikindex.com, and we now have over 9,600 wikis in the dekiwiki format, as well as expanded out the Mediawiki listings to over 3,000! Overall, traffic is increasing, especially after a big push from the stumbleupon.com link. I continue to be amazed at the number of wikis out there centered on pop-culture. I have recently found a wiki portal that is specifically aimed at (and sponsored by, I suspect) the drivel being spewed by the babysitter.

I want to introduce a new side project that I have been pursuing together with my friend Matt Libo-on: Wikindex.com is an index of wiki sites. We spider through the statistics of sites running mediawiki software, and gather the daily usage, size, and number of users. These statistics should show a searcher which wikis are active, and which ones are dormant. For example, if you search for “linux”, you’ll see three or four entries, with one (Gentoo Linux Wiki) showing a huge number of articles and users. This is the active one, and probably the best source for information.

On a lighter note– who knew that the wiki for Star Trek is bigger than the wikipedia in over half of the European languages? Those trekkers are nothing if not well-versed.

*sigh*
Project Redstripe seems to be a sorry attempt at getting in on what the kids are calling Web2.0 these days. The Economist, a magazine I read religiously every week, and have held in high regard (although this may be slipping on this move) seems to want to get in on the whole participatory content community thing. So they took six staff, holed them up somewhere in London, and told them to come up with inventive interactive ideas. The one idea the interns came up with? start a blog and ask for ideas. Genius!

I can tell the editors at what is probably the smartest weekly available are getting antsy about this. Their recent feature article focuses on the 800-pound gorilla of mass participation: The Wikipedia itself.

A corporate blog does not make you web2.0, it just means that the suits are going to tolerate one of the better writers in the office spewing out random thoughts on– from what I can see from most corporate blogs, how cool it is to spew out random thoughts on a blog and get paid for it.

Community interactivity, real participatory involvement with the course of a site, requires much more. It requires a trick, a hook, a passion that brings people in, let’s them alter or enhance or goof over some digital property in the commons, and then get a pat on the head for their contribution. On one hand we have the wikipedia building the Encyclopedia Vulgaris Populi, on the other hand we have farkers building a library of photoshop cliches that are still funny after 6 years.

I am proud to say I have contributed to both. I am also proud to tell those clowns at project restripe that they had better come up with a better idea. I don’t get the feeling that The Economist tolerates lay-abouts very long.

The legal term corpus juris is used to note a book or record that has legal ramifications. The U.S. Code is so massive, unfortunately, that judges or lawyers will often use the overwhelming volume as a tool for their judgements, even if the plantiff or defendant had no idea what was written in there. Who has time to read through the whole thing? nobody. Nonetheless, that ‘ignorance’ does not diminish the validity of the code.  Similarly, a wiki with thousands of pages can assume a similar characteristic: massive amount of data with poor visibility from the sheer size.

The wiki is a wonderful thing for producing documentation and letting 10,000 flowers bloom. As an intranet, we are seeing processes, proposals, ideas, vendor backgrounds, monthly reports, and a myriad of details throughout the company. There are over 11,000 pages so far in the company. Unfortunately, no one has time to read it all. Worse, the very passive nature of it, and now the sheer volume of text, loses the punch for communication between managers.

“Where are you on project X?”
—- “DId you look at the wiki page for it? We wrote everything down.”
“No, I don’t have time. So where is it?”
—- “Okay. Let me esplain it to you in a meeting.”

Ah, the meeting. Like an over-friendly guest, there is no escaping the meeting.

Even then, the dense textual nature of the wiki (great for encyclopedia or software documentation) discourages the interactive dialogue that people use to sell each other on their concept, or their interpretation of the data. Alas, we are still slaves to the Powerpoint presentation.

There is some redemption here– and this seems to be the best use: insist that everyone at least skim through the wiki page before the meeting. If you write well enough, they may actuall read the whole thing. The wiki page becomes the primer for the discussion. If everyone has read the script, the play will unfold much more smoothly in the meeting. Also, the wiki makes a great place to gather all the source material for that *gack* Powerpoint (or OpenOffice presentation as I prefer) slides when you have to put them together.

So, what have I learned in the last 2 years with a wiki as an intranet?

1. Wikis are passive. They do not shout out and grab people’s attention. They are like great sponges that soak up facts, but are no good at reaching out and giving you those facts on a plate with a nice side salad.
2. Wikis are very good at collaborating texts from disparate contributors. This requires some force to get going, but once people catch on, they’ll never go back to attached MSWord documents
3. Wikis are good source material from which to build a presentation
4. Wikis are lousy at the actual presentation (no showmanship)
5. Wikis require a handful of bold editors and combiners, who will mash pages together and build those collaborative texts (see #2). Otherwise, every department would keep their own version of the story
6. The Recent Changes page is addictive.

So, all told, I am very happy with the wiki as an intranet. I overestimated people’s level of reading through the liber. There is no escaping the showmanship and the summations that managers want to see. It’s a great tool to get everything written down– if anything to make sure your peeps are doing their homework and actually researching things. In otherwords, just about anyone can bullshit their way through some bullet list powerpoints, but it is very difficult to bullshit your way through the longhand text of a wiki page: people cannot write lies that long, unless they are going for absolute fiction, which shows up in the text soon enough.

We are the priests of the Temple of Syrinx
Our great computers filled these Hallowed Halls

How much data does a business need to store? How much does a dot-com need to store? What about SOX? The storage vendors must be pouring money into congressmen’s pockets to make requirements all the more heinous– every email, every photo, every random document and the full diff history of everything so far. EMC must be salivating at where the requirements are headed.

I’ve been trying to work it out on the thumbnail math level. The metric here should be 1) product, and 2) customer. Every product has a text description, photo(s), price history, qty, and a half-dozen other table entries. The photos are the biggest wildcard here– the other stuff is really just some text. The product metric is trackable. I (as CTO) can set it to what I want. I can tell Marketing that they get xx kilobytes per product, or rather they tell me what the want to do, and I can do the math pretty quickly, and tell them that storage will cost X.

Customers are another story. There is seemingly no end to the amount of data to track there. We’re way past phone number and shoe size. Every click, every photo uploaded, downloaded, product added to the cart, not added to the cart, and the timestamps on every freaking event since Goldstein set up the first cameras all over Airstrip One. Beyond that, there’s all the derivative data: take any two or three data points that I have mentioned so far, mash them together, and voila! A whole new data set that needs to be put somewhere, with it’s own little dashboard.

There is an economy of data– and it’s not the cost of physical storage. It’s the cost of eyeballs on all these little numbers running around. It’s the Kuhn-like convincing of truth (not Truth) to your peers that your statistics are the right ones to measure. Who wins in middle management? The person who can convince as many other employees that _their_ view of the numbers is correct.

Punch cards begat tapes; tapes begat disks; disks begat databases; databases begat data warehouses; data warehouses begat “business intelligence”. BI begat dashboards. Everything up until that last step was sheer fecundity. The BI–>dashboard stage is the first step toward a “meta” level synthesis from all that data. We now have too much data to comprehend. But will the trend continue toward less presentation? Will it swing back toward the swamping? Who can trust the synthesised conclusions? Where is the rigour around the methodologies that produce these dashboards? What next? “data consolidation”? “derivative decisionment”? It doesn’t really matter to the storage people: every derivative, every summary, every consolidated report still requires that much more storage. Every time we breed one set of numbers with another, we need to store all the children.