Kellblog

Hats off to Maureen Dowd at the New York Times for the creative idea of interviewing Twitter founders Biz Stone (great name, reminds me of fishing guide Jack Trout) and Evan Williams in 140-character format.

Excerpt:

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)

I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.

ME: You say the brevity of Twitter enhances creativity. So I wonder if you can keep your answers to 140 characters, like Twitter users must.

Clever idea. You can read the full article here.

I found this post today on the Infectious Greed blog which features the transcript of a Steve Jobs deposition in what, judging by the questions, appears to be an option-backdating matter.

I encourage everyone to read a deposition now and then, so they can get a concrete feel of what they’re like, and to see how emails, press releases, and other communications can pop up, sometimes years after they are written or sent.

Back in the “good old days” when companies got sued when their stock dropped (as opposed simply falling with the imploding market), I encouraged marketers to periodically read class-action complaints for the same reasons. It’s one thing having a conceptual notion of something; it’s quite another reading a transcript.

The fun part about this transcript is you get some free insight as a by-product: into Steve Jobs, into the mind of the CEO, and into stock options in general.

As Kedrosky points out, you have to love the parts where he says he doesn’t really understand what the board secretary does (pg 77) or what GAAP is (pg 84). And the capper, which you have to work to find (pg 115):

Q. As a member of Apple’s Board of Directors does it concern you that there are signed minutes for an Apple Board of Directors meeting that never took place?

A. Of course.

Q. And why does that concern you?

A. Well, because it’s not true, you know. Yes, it’s deeply concerning.

Here’s the full document.

In talking about web 2.0, we often think about ideas like mass collaboration, a participatory web, the web as a communication platform, and generally speaking The Wisdom of Crowds in building and establishing knowledge.

I’m a big believer in the power of functional (or wise) groups to make better decisions than even the most talented individuals. I learned this first-hand years ago when I took LDP at the Center for Creative Leadership and we did a survival exercise similar to the one detailed in table 4 of this document. In our exercise, every individual — including a Brigadier General — was outperformed by the group in prioritizing a list of items necessary for wildnerness survival.

So I believe that groups guess jellybean jar counts better than individuals, that PageRank generally works for finding web pages, that feedback (used to) work on eBay (until they said sellers can only say positive things), that Diggs are useful way to identify interesting content, that Wikipedia is a great way to build an encyclopedia (particularly a technology one), and generally most of the other stuff I’m supposed to believe as good, web 2.0, Silicon Valley guy.

I believe this so much that we invited James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, to keynote our user conference coming soon on May 12-14, 2009. So I’m on board with the program.

But I also wonder about the opposite, what I’ll call The Madness of Mobs. From financial bubbles to looters to Spring Breakers to a dozen other examples, we can all find examples of where everything cuts exactly the opposite way: where a wise crowd transforms to a mad mob.

So I was quite interested to find this article, Swine Flu: Twitter’s Power to Misinform, which talks precisely about how the “mass brain” of Twitter appears to be shorting out when it comes to the topic of swine flu. Excerpt (edited for brevity, and bolding mine):

Thus, Unlike basic internet search — which has been already been used by Google to track flu trends — Twitter has introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do, or simply gain more popularity.

In such situations this, there is some pathological about people wanting to post yet another status update containing the coveted most-searched words – only for the sake of gaining more people to follow them. And yet the bottom line is that tracking the frequency of Twitter mentions of swine flu as a means of predicting anything thus becomes useless. (However, there are plenty of non-Twitter options summed up nicely on Mashable)

Hum. I should probably cop a maybe-guilty plea on blogging on swine flu. Like moths to a flame, we bloggers are drawn to hot topics.

The article continues:

If you think that my concerns about context are overblown, here are just a few status updates from random Twitter users:

I’m concerned about the swine flu outbreak in us and mexico could it be germ warfare?

In the pandemic Spanish Flu of 1918-19, my Grandfather said bodies were piled like wood in our local town….SWINE FLU = DANGER

Good grief this swine flu thing is getting serious. 8/9 specimens tested were prelim positive in NYC. so that’s Tx, Mexico and now Nyc.

Be careful of the swine flu!!!! (may lead to global epidemic) Outbreak in Mexico. 62 deaths so far!! Don’t eat pork from Mexico!!

Swine flu? Wow. All that pork infecting people….beef and chicken have always been meats of choice

Be careful…Swine Flu is not only in Mexico now. 8 cases in the States. Pig = Don’t eat

If my reading list on Twitter was only restricted to the individuals who had produced the posts above, by now I would be extremely scared … In moments like this, one is tempted to lament the death of broadcasting, for it seems that the information from expert sources should probably be prioritized over everything else.

Now, I’m pretty sure the counter-arguments to The Madness of Mobs goes like this:

• Not all groups are wise. The Wisdom of Crowds relies of wise groups.

• You can’t cherry-pick the scariest contributions to argue that The Wisdom of Crowds doesn’t work. Much as the abortion page on Wikipedia is the result of a rugby scrum of passionate, oppositional forces, so will be the mass brain of Twitter on swine flu. You need to look at the whole picture.

In fact, Surowiecki outlines failures of crowd intelligence and finds root causes which include groups that are too homogeneous, too emotional, too centralized, too divided, and too imitative.

Hopefully, we’ll hear more from Jim on this topic at the user conference and, in the meantime, before enslaving yourself to The Wisdom of Crowds, ponder if your crowd is a wise one, and whether you’re actually dealing with The Madness of Mobs.

Related Information / Stories

• Follow the CDC on Twitter. (A nice government 2.0 example, though they might have picked a better username.)
• Google Helps to Track Swine Flu, Twitter Catches Criticism
• Twitter Catches Swine Flu, But Don’t Shoot the Messenger
• Trying to Track Swine Flue Across Cities in Realtime (O’Reilly Radar)

Swine Flu Tracker Map

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

As part of my company’s focus on the media industry, I sit on a few industry groups where I have the opportunity to spend quality time with senior media and publishing industry executives.

Like any CEO, I have a natural tendency to believe that my company is, if not totally counter-cyclical, at least somewhat immune to the effects of the economic downturn. I’ve heard enough CEOs make the claim (cf: this query), often where it’s ostensibly absurd, that I should ask myself if I don’t have a case of CEO denial. Am I arguing something akin to the rise in bedbugs is good for the hotel industry or not?

So when a recent publishing executive group I sit on started to discuss the economic downturn, I turned up my defenses to make sure I didn’t have my happy ears on.

But executive after executive said that they believed the downturn is accelerating the digital publishing transformation. Not because I said it. Not because, as a technology supplier that helps companies transition, I want it to be true. But because about a dozen senior folks from many different publishing sectors said it.

Why?

• Foot-dragging in some publishing sectors has already gone on almost a decade, slowly whittling away at the traditional models and those who support them.

• As the decade has passed, the top brass at publishers continues to change, slowly replacing less tech savvy executives with more tech savvy ones.

• Enough time has passed that there are now examples of both new and traditional publishing companies who have successfully transitioned business models. The “it can’t be done” rationalization starts to wear thin.

• Hands are being forced. Seeking to cut costs, publishers are forced to make real trade-offs between investing in the future and preserving the past. When forced, most executives will bet on the future.

Now that I see the picture, it’s clear: after roughly a decade of fence-setting, the downturn is forcing publishers of all ilks to move. The downturn is accelerating the transition to digital publishing. And that’s not happy ears.