The Internet is Growing Apace.

I just came across this CNN story from January, but I don't think it's gotten the play that it merits.

You probably know that the Internet has its roots in the  Defense Department's old Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The guy in charge of information processing for ARPA -- what became known as ARPANet -- was Lawrence Roberts. Roberts said some interesting things in January. Among them:

• Tech slowdown or no tech slowdown, Net traffic has consistently been doubling every year.
• In January, the Net handled 55 petabytes of data. For you English system mavens, that's 55 quadrillion, or 55,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In one month.
• The pace will continue to grow for another 10 years, at which point growth will slow. But doubling traffic every year for 10 years means that there will be three more zeros at the end of that already very long number above.

My question: will that kind of traffic allow all the dark fiber that was installed in the 1990s to be turned on?

[Over the Edge]

55 petabytes! Thats over 56,000 terabytes. To put that in perspective, the Library of Congress is estimated to be about 35 terabyte of data. That means the LOC moves across the net about twice an hour.

So we have a fundamental technology indicator that says growth is healthy set against economic indicators that are confused and political systems that are trying to slow down the change. I'm still betting on the fundamental ingenuity of the human animal to take advantage of new ideas and capabilities over the desire of those in power to hold onto the old. In the long run, it's always been a safe bet.

9:45:57 PM •  • comment  

Time as a KM issue:

If you're like me, you love to learn and love to absorb knowledge from other sources.  But where do you find the time?  I'm negotiating job offers right now and could use some lessons in negotations but I don't have the time to sit down and read another book or take another course - even though it may be an NPV positive investment. 

I think this is an issue within organizations as well.  Even though we may be more effective by using KM systems or seeking out knowledge, we often compete with impending deadlines and the risk of searching for knowledge for hours without being sure of the rewards it will payoff is more than we're willing to take on.  In a sense, even though the average return is positive, being risk-averse people we have a disutility for risk and thus do not invest the time to seek the necessary knowledge.  How do we overcome this natural human behaviour?

[Greg Harmeyer's KM Weblog]

You raise an issue that comes up in nearly every KM discussion I've ever had. A couple of thoughts.

A constant challenge I face as a knowledge worker is making reasonable judgments about what is important vs. what is urgent. Organizational realities favor the urgent as a rule. Can't say that I have any clever heuristics other than to stay mindful of the distinction.

One general strategy I have tried to pursue is to look for ways to embed learning and knowledge management types of activities into the work itself. So, as an example, I might draft a memo to a consulting team with my thoughts on the story line we should be developing. Rather than simply do that as an email to the team, I would write the first pass up in my weblog/journal (this was before I published any of my weblogs publicly) and then cut and paste the material into an email.  That yielded a permanent record that I could return to for later reflection. Today I would simply push that out through a project weblog, but the principle remains the same.  One psychological shift I've had to work on is becoming more comfortable sharing material earlier in the development cycle. No matter how much you label something as a 'draft' people will tend to evaluate anything you distribute as finished. There's a back and forth learning at the team/work group level that has to be negotiated over time.

9:02:36 PM •  • comment  

"Jamie Kellner controls Turner's programming riches. What he does with them could speed up--or slow down--the transformation of television....

[Kellner:] 'Most industries that don't pay attention to satisfying the demands of their customers fail. You have to realize that television has changed dramatically as much as any other industry I can think of in the past ten to 15 years. American lifestyle has changed dramatically. People are on the Internet a lot, out of the home a lot, having families at a different age than they did ten to 15 years ago. The idea that you can put programs on once a week and expect them to reach their full potential of popularity and their full audience is a joke. If you're interested in satisfying the needs and desires of our customers, we have to offer them multiple times in the week, and that means probably across multiple networks, because the broadcast networks do not have the shelf space to play their program many times during the week....'

And yet, ask Jamie Kellner about the opportunities (or challenges) for his company and VOD [Video On Demand] won't crack the top of his list. He's still too busy making the most out of today's reality: opting for multiplay and multiplex, which he describes as the low-tech way to offer multiple viewing options, creating more network-owned content, pumping up the networks Turner already has (particularly CNN)....

[Kellner:] 'I'm a big believer we have to make television more convenient or we will drive the penetration of PVRs and things like that, which I'm not sure is good for the cable industry or the broadcast industry or the networks....

Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming....

I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial....

It's good to make it easier for consumers to watch the programs they want to watch. I'm not opposed to consumers getting a program without commercials in it. But they have to create a new model that charges them for that programming the way HBO charges them....'

Someone's going to have to recognize that once we've entered the digital world people can send out perfect copies without any costs to large numbers of people in many different territories of the world [and] can dramatically disrupt the system that we've built that allows us to produce and distribute content and pay for it and make...a profit in the investment, and that has to be addressed....'

At the end of the day, though, it'll provide customer satisfaction for cable, more use of the cable service and that's good for all of us. It's somewhat inevitable. Hopefully the ad-supported network will be protected...there was one button I heard of that could eliminate the entire commercial pod. That would just remove all the network's promotion, all the sponsors that paid for the film and obviously that's not acceptable to anybody....

The only payment for a lot [of content] is the willingness of the viewer to watch the spot, the commercial. That's part of the contract between the network and the viewer. For anybody to step in between that content and encourage the viewer to disregard the payment in time that he's making--I think everybody should fight those people...or let the viewer have a subscription model where they pay for that, in which case the monies can be taken in and distributed back to cover the loss of the ad revenue. This is the time to honestly address it; also, for people to deal with it. If you think it's something that's good for consumers, give them the choice of either watching the commercials or paying incremental money for the service and make sure that people in the business understand the economic damage they can do by licensing this product.' " [Cableworld, via MetaFilter]

You know, if Kellner had worked on a horse ranch, he probably would have expected Congress to legislate his existing industry against the "disruption" caused by the introduction of the horseless carriage.

He's in favor of convenience for consumers, but only as long as it keeps profits rolling in for him. Does he not read online articles that he should have paid full price for in print? Aren't consumers already paying a service premium just to get access to his cable stations? Isn't that the exact model he's advocating be implemented?!

I shell out for the digital premium package each and every month, but apparently that doesn't entitle me to snack breaks or working while the TV is on in the background. I'm surprised he isn't lobbying Congress to remove mute buttons and the off switches.

And consumers are definitely paying extra for the convenience of recording shows to time-shift and watch them later. But I guess since his company doesn't receive profits from VCRs or PVRs, these "extra" fees don't count. Tell that to my bank account.

[The Shifted Librarian]

I desparately want to believe that Kellner has his tounge firmly planted in his cheek, but I'm afraid that other parts of his anatomy are in a different arrangement.

Over on kuro5hin, there's one among many reactions to this nonsense that opens with the following passage from A Clockwork Orange:

"...And viddy films I would. Where I was taken to, brothers, was like no cine I'd been in before. I was bound up in a straight-jacket and my gulliver was strapped to a headrest with like wires running away from it. Then they clamped like lidlocks on my eyes so I could not shut them no matter how hard I tried. It seemed a bit crazy to me, but I let them get on with what they wanted to get on with. If I was to be a free young malchick in a fortnight's time, I would put up with much in the meantime, my brothers..." -- Alex, from A Clockwork Orange

I'm quite sure that Kellner is a fine person and an excellent executive. But his comments are a perfect example of the double-think of organizations that can talk seriously about "eyeballs" and "market segments" without ever connecting these abstractions to the living, breathing human beings they happen to know personally.

Don't for a second think that the bursting of the dot-com bubble means that the message of The Cluetrain Manifesto or the insights of Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke are any less relevant. While I frequently feel that their stridency gets in the way of their message, I can also sympathize with it when I see the kind of nonsense above

3:57:08 PM •  • comment