TinkerX

[Disclaimer: By day, I work in marketing for OCLC, and our eContent division is NetLibrary, which markets eBooks to libraries, which then loan them to users. This post isn’t about that process, that product, our partner publishers or that space at all. It’s my own take on portable eBooks. Anyway… what I mean to say is that this is Tinker Andy’s thoughts, not OCLC Andy’s. Selah.]

So… two links from BoingBoing in the recent past about eBooks. One from Charlie Stoss on “Why the commercial ebook market is broken” that has lots of good ideas on the topic. It goes at it in terms of the economics, what people might/might not pay for an ebook, why we don’t have cheap readers, etc. etc. And there’s a second link to a Locus feature by Cory hisself called, “You do like reading off a computer screen,” that explains that we do like reading off computer screens… just not novels.

I don’t buy either of the arguments completely, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I am, after almost 10 years of reading all kinds of content on various PDAs and Smart Phones, completely format agnostic. The main issue, I think, is this: reading for pleasure on a portable device requires a new skill, and learning new skills — especially those required for leisure — isn’t necessarily fun.

I love books. Period. Not pBooks, not eBooks. Just books. Got that ol’ English degree from Cornell to prove it, too. Got a house full of the paper kind lining the walls. Love to buy ‘em, borrow ‘em from the library, loan ‘em to friends. I love to highlight passages, turn down corners, write in the margins. The ones that are beautiful… I love to protect.

But back around when I got my first Palm, sometime in the mid-late 90’s, I began to love eBooks, too. I owe it to the orneriness of my friend Bill (Hi, Bill!) who insisted that I try reading books on my Palm. He was also the one who insisted that I buy a PDA in the first place. Since I had, and I loved it, I was inclined to at least hear him out on the whole eBook thing… but I was skeptical.

“It’s a crappy screen for a book,” I said.

“You just need to get used to it,” he replied. “Read two whole books on the thing and you’ll be a convert. I promise.”

I huffed, but I trust Bill. So I found a free reader that had decent scalable fonts, and I got two free books from Project Gutenberg that I’d been meaning to read. I spent a little bit of time formatting the raw .TXT files in Word before pulling them into the e-reader, and then I plowed into the process.

The first book was almost literally painful. It was the “Autobiography of Ben Franklin.” Reading the novel on that little screen… with weird, three-word line-breaks… and having to hit the page-down key every five seconds… it was horrible. It made me feel like my brain was itching or something. It was icky. It was hard. It was…

New.

And I hate, more than the pain of learning new things, refusing the pain of learning new things. I’m all about “The Beginner’s Mind” some days. So even though it made my eyes bleed and gave me meningital cramps, I finished the book. It took me three months of reading here-and-there. I think I read eight other pBooks in the meantime. But I did it. And then I took a break.

But Bill had said, “Two.” So I buckled down and loaded up “A Tale of Two Cities,” which I’d managed to not read for 30ish years, despite loving Dickens and being an English major. It started out hard… but by the end… I’d gotten used to the process enough that I was pretty much ignoring the pain. It wasn’t as easy for me as a paper book. But I could see a real difference between the first and second experience. Enough that I tried a third.

And by the end of the third book, not only was it easy… I was hooked. Because my Palm Pilot had my life on it at that point; schedule, phone numbers, notes, memos, games, to-dos, etc. And for one device to have all that PLUS a couple books to keep me occupied for 5-minutes-here while I’m waiting for a meeting and 2-hours-there while I’m stuck at the airport… forget it. Done deal.

Now I read just about every-other book on my Verizon Windows Pocket PC Phone Thing. Some I buy, some I borrow, some I get for free. And I don’t really go through all kinds of sturm und drang about whether or not I’ll have a “cultural artifact” or not. If I want to read a book, and it’s available as an eBook, and I see it there first… boom. I’m an American, for the love-of-mike. That’s how it works for us. See. Want. Get.

All the arguments Charlie and Cory make are good. People won’t pay more for eBooks than paper, and they probably won’t pay, in general, a lot more than 50% for eBooks, because you don’t get “a thing” that you can put on your shelf. Etc., etc.

But we sure pay a buck for iTunes don’t we?

Even at the right price, though, most folks won’t even pay 10-cents for a novel they love if it makes their eyes hurt. And they won’t use a funky full-sized book reader if it offers no space bonus over a paper book.

But once you get used to a new medium…

Listen, o best beloved… I own “Cryptonomicon” in hard-cover. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. Last year, it got to be time for me to re-read it. Before I picked up the 2.9 lb. tome, though, I checked out eReader.com. The eBook version was about $7. So I bought it. Again. Yup. Because it was worth it to me not to have to lug that brick around for the three weeks I knew it would take me to read all 928 pages (that’s print pages; on my wee screen, I think it was 4,500 pages… not kidding).

It’s about choice. My choice.

But I didn’t have the choice until I learned something new.

Turns out I have something in common with the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Zaslow: we’ve both been plagiarized…

If you haven’t heard, CBS News’ Katie Couric recently did a “Katie’s Notebook” piece, performed in the first person [”I still remember when I first got my library card…’] that, it turns out, was written by her producer.

Surprise, surprise. Katie’s stuff isn’t written by her.

Whoops. Turns more out, Katie’s producer, Melissa McNamara, didn’t even write it (bizarre twin plagiarism angle… oh dear). I’ve read about 15 different takes on the whole matter, and kinda like Slate’s tone/angle the best.

That’s the story. Fine. But here’s what none of the things I’ve read so far have offered… Something that you’ll get right here, only at TinkerX — the inside scoop (first person, written by me, not my producer) on what it’s like to be plagiarized.
I used to consult full-time. Now I do it a bit on the side (yes, my boss knows; I’m not that dumb… about that.) While consulting full-time, I wrote lots of articles and got lots of essays posted just about anywhere I could to get my name/email/URL out there. I did it in order to generate business, establish “my personal brand,” and get good SEO for my blog and company Web site. So… long story short, lots of Andy Havens’ marketing crud on the Web.

About two years ago, I get a call from a guy I’ve never met. But he knew me from some of my legal marketing articles. How cool. He recalled my particular (peculiar?) brand of wit and wisdom. He specifically recalled a piece I wrote for my good buddy Larry Bodine at the LawMarketing Portal back in 2004, about a year prior to his calling me.

He wanted to know if I was aware that another fellow was using this material, almost word-for-word, in his hand-outs at a professional marketing seminar.

Gulp. No. I was not.

My reader faxed me the materials. Yup. Almost exactly the same stuff. In fact, it even had the same cheesy clip-art that Larry pasted into the story (Hi, Larry!).

I contacted the fellow. I told him what I’d discovered and asked him what was up. He told me… that the piece had been put together by one of his subordinates.

It had his name on it. The name of his marketing firm was his name. The presentation at the gig where my reader had found the piece was given by this guy, and it was his name on the program. He explained that his workers “assembled” lots of his marketing material (hand-outs, fliers, Powerpoints) for him.

Then he assured me that the fellow in question would be fired. That he (the owner) took this sort of thing very seriously and had a zero-tolerance policy about plagiarism, and that I could rest assured that it wouldn’t happen again.

I told him that what happened between him and his staff was his business. I just wanted to be sure that anything I’d written was attributed to me.

He, again, made the point about firing the subordinate. He said something about him being “a relatively new guy.”

Again, I said, “That’s up to you. It’s your company. How you handle it internally is your business. I just want your word, since it’s your name on my work, that this won’t happen again.”

He, again, told me that the person in question would be fired.

He didn’t get my point. I said, “I don’t need you to do that. I need you to tell me you will be responsible for making sure this doesn’t happen.” He agreed to that, still not getting it, I think, and we never spoke again.

I hung up the phone feeling very, very shaken.

Why? Because one of two things had happened.

1) He lied to me. Which, if I had to bet money, I’d bet on. For a whole string of reasons that I can get into based on the professional services marketing industry, how we come up with stuff, what we let our “people” do for us, etc. etc. But that’s my gut. I don’t think there was “a new guy.” I think it was a put-on to get me to go away.

2) He told the truth, and fired some kid who’d made a mistake. A bad mistake, yeah. And a mistake that, frankly, isn’t one where firing is an inappropriate reaction. But I think that, on some level, if somebody on my staff had done something like that… I would have blamed myself a bit more than this guy seemed to. And if my name was on something like that…
I’d take it a lot more seriously than Katie et CBS al seem to be doing.

The date on which that post went up on the CBS blog page now reads:

Correction: The April 4 Notebook was based on a “Moving On” column by Jeffrey Zaslow that ran in The Wall Street Journal on March 15 with the headline, “Of the Places You’ll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?” Much of the material in the Notebook came from Mr. Zaslow, and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece. We offer our sincere apologies for the omission.

We “apologize for omitting… ” Err… Yah. McNamara (bio still live on CBS site… interesting) was fired for “omitting.” Sins of omission. That’s kinda funny. Where I come from, we call plagiarism “stealing.” Which is a sin of “commission.” You know… walk into a store, take something, leave without paying. Oh. I guess that’s kind of an omission. Never mind…

Here’s the thing: the (maybe) kid that lifted my essay, and/or his boss… that’s pretty minor stuff. One of the reasons I didn’t make a stink is that my “personal brand” has a good dollop of live-and-let-live. I’m a peaceable guy. The piece was a fun little deal that, I hope, sent a few readers to my site/blog. Making a big stink would’ve been more trouble than it was worth.

And yet… and yet… I really, really wish that the dude had said, “What can I do, personally, to make this up to you? Can I send you an Omaha steak? Or make a contribution to a charity in your name? Can I put a mention of your services into my next seminar kit?” Nope. Nothing.

And who is he? Some small-time, Kinko’s-materials consultant like me. But to make it good, he should have offered something.

But… Who is Katie? She’s the $15 million spokes-face on one of the Big Three evening news shows. News. Not fashion. Not punditry. Not opinion. News. You know… that thing with journalism and facts and stuff.

Katie’s post clearly made it seem as if she wrote it. The op-ed “feel” of a story that starts with, “I still remember…” is unmistakably intended to leverage her $15 million-ness into getting us to pay attention to what is, frankly, a pretty lame, puffy piece.

So if Katie didn’t write it, but felt OK about using it glommed onto her image/ego to begin with, and then was (as far as the public is concerned) the face of the company that did the plagiarizing… what should we expect from that organization?

Right. Fire the producer. Not the one worth $60,000/day. Not the face we trust (who apparently doesn’t read the WSJ). Not the one who clearly doesn’t write her own notebook/blog, even when it’s in the first person. Not the one who didn’t take any responsibility for plagiarism, but who had “Editors” apologize for “omissions.”

Is this what Katie wanted for her career? Regardless of the plagiarism… is this what she signed up for? To be part of a news team that writes her “personal thoughts” and then covers for her to an extent that is, frankly, grotesque? Is her own sense of what she brings to this enterprise so withered that she can’t even sign her name to the apology?

Quit, Katie. Just quit. Not because you’re really responsible for the plagiarism. I don’t think you are, nor do I think you should be fired. The ding-dongs in charge at CBS are even less in control and less worthy of it than are you. But in the immediate aftermath of this situation, nobody’s first response was, “Yoiks! These words came out of Katie’s mouth… she should be the one to apologize!”

That they didn’t — that you didn’t — is bad. Real bad. Prove to all the kids in my History of Advertising class, and all the junior copywriters out there, that the Top Dog cares about this. That in the age of easy, Internet Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V, the people we turn to to make sense out of our lives are ones who take that responsibility seriously. That when we turn on the TV to watch somebody talk about war, government, education, health and all kinds of other issues… those issues mean something when applied to her own field.
All I wanted, when somebody stole the words out’n my mouth (er… page), was for the guy in charge to take responsibility. His version of that was to fire the kid who did the lifting. That didn’t cut it for me, and I don’t think it cuts it for Katie.

The $15 million bucks stop somewhere. And it ain’t on the desk of a junior producer.

So, Katie… Make a point about responsibility and theft. Quit in protest over how poorly CBS has handled this situation.

And, since that won’t ever happen, how about you just personally sign your “mea” to the editorial “culpa”?
[Note: I will almost never be this smarmy (mean, call it what you will) again on this blog. I don’t like the tone I’ve chosen, and am *this* close to not publishing the post. But I really, really hate plagiarism and really, really don’t like it when crap like this doesn’t get taken seriously enough by the people in charge. For those of you who prefer my usual, light-hearted, pseudo-intellectual side… it will resume shortly. My apologies for being more churlish than I really rather prefer.]

A nice link from the Purple Motes blog related to my continuous partial attention post of a few days ago provides the following info:

Until the 1820s (when candle technology started to improve markedly), both wax and tallow candles needed frequent “snuffing.” We commonly misunderstand the term snuffing today — it did not mean to put a candle flame out; instead, it meant to trim the candle’s wick. If one did not snuff frequently, then the wick would grow longer as the wax melted, curving over toward the small wall of solid material holding in the melted wax or tallow. The curving wick would then melt the wall, causing the molten material to flow down the candle and be lost. This phenomenon was called “guttering,” and it ensured that the candle burned less efficiently and for a shorter time. Tallow candles left unattended might use just five percent of their material and gutter out within half an hour. …the point is that reading was regularly interrupted — perhaps every ten minutes or so — by the need to snuff a candle.[1]

This was in relation, I assume, to my musing over whether or not other ages were as distracted as we, but just differently so.
Point nicely made. I had assumed as much, and go on assuming that there are additional examples of how BB peoples (Before Blackberries) had much on their minds.

About the only way I can think of really measuring a change in the level of distractedness, is by applying it to myself over the course of my lifetime. Am I more distracted at 40 than I was, say, at 16 or 25? I’m not sure. I feel more harried at times, yes. But very little of that has to do with the state of my tools and media choices. It’s more about having a kid and a job that has more responsibility than I had at 16 or 25.

And I certainly remember being pretty distracted, harried and hyper-busy in college, even though I had no access to MySpace, IM a cell phone or email.

So I don’t know if the delta-frantic in my life is an age thing or an Age thing. And I don’t know if all people, throughout history, have either felt, in general, more hectic and pressured as their lives have progressed, or if it’s a symptom of our Modern Age.

I have, as I see it, one choice: to master the tools and skills that I feel are helpful, and to limit my interactions with those that I feel are distracting.

Which brings us back to the box. Which we’ll get to shortly.

Note:

[1] [1] Eliot, Simon (2001), “‘Never Mind the Value, What about the Price?”; Or, How Much Did Marmion Cost St. John Rivers?” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 173, 177.

Last weekend, I got about an hour into a longish post about creativity tools that I use at work and in my personal writing. And then I hit the wrong key combo and lost all that work. Pissed me off. So I don’t want to re-write that post just yet.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about another creativity tool. One that I use with my 6-year-old son, Dan. Often on the back of paper placemats at Bob Evans restaurants. I’m not sure how it started, but I do know that I made it up myself at one point when Dan wanted to draw, but wasn’t sure what he wanted to draw.

The game is called "My Team, Your Team" (MTYT). Its rules are very simple.

1. You draw a character with a power.
2. I draw a character whose power cancels your guy’s power.
3. Repeat.

You do this until your chicken tenders and smiley fries arrive, or until you run out of paper, or until you are hysterical laughing. You can intensimify the game if you like by only allowing:

• robots and cyborgs
• bugs
• dinosaurs
• robot bugs
• cyborg dinosoar bugs
• aliens
• alien robot bugs
• fire and water powers
• underwater creatures
• things with wheels
• things without wheels
• blah blah blah

You get the point. You’re really better off playing free-for-all your first few times, especially with kids, as they go bananas on you. Really. The stuff Dan comes up with blows my mind. Here’s our most recent game as an example for you. We’ve started numbering the drawings as it helps us explain what the heck was going on to Chris (Mom) later.

1. Giant Ice-Crystal Guy.

(Dan) He is made of one giant ice-crystal.
He can blow super-cold freezing wind at you.

2. Waffle Iron Clam

What do you own?

What value to I add to work that I comment on? What value to I add to things that I own when I comment on them based on work that I don’t? When is art a stand-alone proposition? When does it rely on the consensus of society? When does a conversation become content? When can I stop asking rhetorical questions and start this actual post?

A recent article in Wired addressed a situation that we all need to think about. Yes, even you, Stan. Put down your paintball videogame and think about copyright issues, software development, open source, art, creativity and the Web. Yes… you can eat a biscuit with honey on it while you think about these things [Stan is a ferocious multi-tasker, is Stan].

The basic gist of this article is that a fairly small outfit (basically a bright guy named Walter Ritter) invented software that helped people find songs they liked based on the lyrics of other songs they liked. Cool, hunh? It worked with iTunes, and Apple even linked to it from their official site.

But (cue Darth Vader’s theme), it could be used as part of your illegal scheme to download and copy music illegally. And so Warner Chappell Music (who have more money than God), sent Ritter a cease-and-desist. They also sent one to Apple. Apple ceased and desisted. Guess what Ritter (basically a bright guy out on his own) did? Yup. He ceased and desisted, too. He didn’t want to get sued into a small black chunk of smoking, bituminous coal for distributing software that furthered music piracy. So he stopped.

Which is bad. Because his software, which was cool and useful, has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy. Except inasmuch as pirates could use it to help them identify lyrics to songs they wanted to pirate. Much in the same way that murderers can use binoculars to identify victims and counterfeiters use paper to make fake money.

Now, normally… The story would stop there. But in a strange, almost "Bizzaro World" (links  1 2 3 ) reversal, Warner/Chappell has appologized to Ritter. They may let him post his software again. They may (dare I type the words)… "get it."

What do you want to own?

A great economic philosopher (it may have been me, back when I was still drinking) once said, "Wealth is a measurement of excess food." What I meant by that (if I said it; if I didn’t, then what I understand it to mean), is that wealth is everything that’s left over once you take care of necessities. So…

Stan owns his biscuit outright. Damn straight, Stan. That biscuit is so yours, I don’t even want to talk about it. Especially after you eat it, it is really, really yours. 110% Stan’s biscuit. All the way, buddy. Pride of place. You go.

One the other end of the spectrum — I think — are "nebulosities." Stuff that’s so vague that we can’t really say whether or not it’s even ownable. For example, pride. Do I own my pride? Can you buy it from me? Can I give it away? Can I rent it to some dude from Pittsburgh for the weekend who needs to confront his girlfriend about her loud, overbearing friends? Nope. Other nebulous stuff that may not be "ownable" could include talent, love, honesty, time, attention, good taste, terror, rhythm, beauty and farfegnugen.

I’m going to get arguments on "time," I know. Since, ostensibly, we all "own" our time and sell it every day at work. But I don’t think that’s really true. Whether we go to work or not, time passes. If I work hard or not, time passes. If I "add value" or jerk my company around and steal office supplies, time passes. It’s not mine to sell. Anyway…

On one end is stuff that we can be said to literally and truly own. My head. My hair. My biscuit and honey. I bought it, I inherited it, I grew it, I won it on "The Price is Right," I traded for it on eBay… whatever. Stuff. It’s mine. If you take it, you’re a thief and I can sue your ass and either get it back, and/or put you in jail. Nyah. So there.

But what about content? Said age of which we are purportedly in, says the blogger. What about our pesky thoughts? Since most content is, essentially, ephemera, it is much harder to pin down than real estate, bicycles, wigs or biscuits.

What content do you want own?

I’m repeating myself, I know. But marketing gurus are always telling us that you must repeat something three times before people actually see/hear it.

What do I own? From whence comes my wealth?

And an even better question: Why do I care?

I am forever bugging my students (and was forever bugging my marketing clients and former client/readers in my legal marketing days) to drill down to the "root why" of a situation. "We need to run an ad!" Somebody says. "Why?" you should ask. "To drive sales of the new product!" Ask yourself, "Why?" again. Keep asking "Why?" until you get to one of the root goals of your business, which is usually the provision of value to stockholders; i.e., profit. Most businesses are built on three fundamental "Why"s: owner profit, customer value and employee satifaction. Screw the pooch on any of those three, and you’re dead. Fail to link any process to any one of those, and you’re wasting time.

Meanwhile, back at my point…

Why should you care what you own? What’s the point of aquiring wealth? Remember — wealth is what Stan’s got after he takes care of all his biscuits, bedclothes and bicycles. And why, especially, should you care if you own

For example, the thought: 1-4-5

Three numbers in a row. Big deal. But if you write them: I - IV - V

Many musicians will know that you’re talking about a basic blues progression; twelve-bar blues, usually. Play that on a piano or guitar, and it will sound very familiar to you. The basis for hundreds, if not thousands, of blues, rock, jazz and other pop songs. Same thing with the "Bo Diddly" riff; a particular set of chords and a specific rhythm that’s been used in bunches of songs over the years.

Again, patient reader, I assume you are asking me to get to the freakin’ point.

It is simply this: what would have happened to music had somebody copyrighted I-IV-V or the peculiar, "bump-diddy-bump-diddy… bump-bump" of the Bo Diddly riff?

And here’s the next thought in the chain. When you buy a piece of content — a book, video, song, legal opinion, ticket to a sporting event, whatever — what part of it do you own?

What do you own when you buy content?

Clearly you DO own the right to enjoy it yourself in the medium provided. Clearly you DO NOT own the right to profit from the retooling or redistribution of the exact medium you purchased in a way that robs the copyright owner of value.

So we’ve got two book-ends; the "nobody will argue with these two ends of the spectrum" goal posts. Listening to music I purchased on a CD on that CD is fine. Making a copy for my own specific use on a casette tape is also OK. Selling that tape to somebody else? Not OK. Giving it away is also not OK. We’re clear on that, eh?

It’s all the stuff in the middle that’s weird. And it’s because ideas are so fluid. Because creativity and content feed on freedom the way Stan feeds on biscuits. For example:

Let’s say I write a song. I own the copyright of the lyrics and the music. If you want to perform that song for money, you need to pay me a royalty. That’s fair. But what if you want to perform it for free? Well… then you don’t. But to learn that song, you need to buy sheet music. Right? Which makes me some money. So… wait… you don’t need sheet music? Because you just listen to the song at your friend’s house (who paid for the CD) over and over and keep practicing on your guitar until you can do the song on your own.

And then you perform it for free. And I, as the copyright holder, get nothing. No remuneration. Nada. And you… by performing my wildly popular song, you gain credence (maybe even mojo) with those young hipsters who love my crafty tunes. You begin to get followers. Groupies. Hangers-on. A posse, perhaps. And, eventually, you begin to get offers to be paid for your own music. Which nobody was originally interested in.

All because you learned to play my song that you never paid me jack for.

Fair?

Of course it is. Because, at the same time, you were spreading the meme of my song. If you believe — even for a moment — that the playing of my song helped you get famous, then the reverse must be true; that the playing of my song was good for me, too. Because as your fame grew, so would the value of people hearing you play my tune.

Content is not a fixed asset. When you sing a song, it doesn’t get "un-sung" somewhere else. It’s not like Stan’s biscuit. Just because Stan sings "The Long and Winding Road," doesn’t mean I don’t want to anymore. In fact, the more people who sing it, the more people may want to sing it. Content is more like fire than like grain.

What scares so many of the people involved in the production of various content media is that the pace of change in the technologies surrounding distribution of those media is rendering the meaning of "value" porous.

For example — books. I love books. L-L-L-Love ‘em. All kinds of books. Hardcover, paperback, old, new, fiction, non-fiction, antique, glossy, paper and eBooks. But, in the past, very little of the payment that readers forked over for books went to the content creators; the authors. Because the process of finding, proofing, editing, printing, publishing, shipping, stocking, shelving and selling books is hugely expensive. And writing a book, frankly, isn’t.

But now… after all the writing is done… I can push a book at you for roughly…

nuthin’

What do you own when you buy a book?

Do you own the paper? Do you own the words? Do you own the right to read it out loud to your kids? How many times? Can you read it out loud at the library? What about in school? Can you loan it to friends? Can you resell it? Can you sell tickets to folks for them to hear you read it?

Do you own the thoughts?

I’ve bought dozens of marketing and business books. Many of them have very similar thoughts. Could any of the authors sue the others? I don’t know. I doubt it. Most of the "thoughts" are basic, old-school marketing fundamentals, often dressed up in new metaphors and funny anecdotes.

I’ve read dozens of fantasy novels. Many of them have very similar plots. Same question… Same answer.

Monks used to have to copy out books one at a time. It used to be that very few people could read. Now, just about everybody can read. And information flows from a couple hundred million Web sites in billions of page hits a day. And it keeps changing and growing and getting more interesting and funkier all the time, what with RSS and wikis and tagging and wireless and the semantic web and Web 2.0…

Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message." That means more than you think it does. We’ll do a whole rant (or 12) on that one at some point. But we’re going to be "post-McLuhan" pretty soon. We’re going to be "post-medium." Content will be without borders. Those businesses and entities that make the mistake that Warner/Chappell did — trying to get between people and ideas — will lose. Because someone else will open the gate.

Content’s not grain, people. It’s not even water. It’s fire. It doesn’t need to be portioned out. And if you try to control it, you will get burned. Your best bet? Feed the flames, baby. The bigger the bonfire, the farther away they can see it, and the more hotdogs you can cook.

People will always pay for good content. And you shouldn’t stop trying to bring down the real pirates. But we need to get beyond the idea of "owning" content the same way we "own" biscuits.

OK. Bear with me. This will take awhile to get where I’m going.

Giant, long introduction to the point I’ll get around to making eventually…

Alan Turing — who invented the idea of the modern computer (sometimes called a "Turing Machine"), and whose first real stab at which is shown here — basically said that given a recording medium big enough, and enough time, you could record and solve any problem that could be stated clearly. That’s a gross oversimplification, but it’ll do for my modest blog.

Last October, we hit the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s initial proposal for the "universal computing machine" — i.e., the computer. Von Neumann took Turing’s ideas and turned them into a reality — a machine that could process different equations, rather than solving only one. A programmable computer, that is. The first use for which was to work on the equations for the atomic bomb.

60 years ain’t a very long time, and look what we’ve got today?

George Dyson has written two really interesting articles, one called Turing’s Cathedral and one called The Universal Library that deal with how far we’ve come since Turing’s initial thoughts on the subject, and where we’re headed; specifically with regards to what Google, and Internet search in general, is doing with our "thoughts" on the Web.

Dyson does a good — and admirably brief — job of describing the history of how Turing  and von Neumann’s ideas have gotten us to modern computing, the Web and Google.  But I want to pull out a couple passages in order to make a point.

OK. So Google is mapping the Web. Big deal. We knew that. I’ve heard the metaphor before, and ain’t really surprised to hear it again. I’m not sure I buy it, as a map is fixed, and search results change, not just based on criteria, but daily, based on changes to the data landscape. But Dyson goes on to talk about the three types of computing calculations that can be done, and how most computers are built to deal with "computable problems;" those with questions that can be easily asked and solved (if not easily solved, at least being predictably solveable). The second type, "non-computable problems" have questions that can be asked, but where we know we have no way to solve them.

The third type are most interesting, most fecund, and most appropriate for creative types like us:

The example he gives is the question, "What makes something look like a cat?" A child can draw a circle, six lines and a couple dots, and almost anyone will say, "That’s a nice cat." But to get a finite answer that would distinguish that solution from, say, "What makes something look like a mouse," would be very hard. In this case, as Dyson puts it:

And at this point, while reading his essay, my brain had a "Rubix Cube" moment. Which is what I call it when various things all start twisting around and reassembling in a different array than they were a few moments ago. I’m not saying all the colors line up (in my brain, sometimes the yellow side and green side do, but rarely any more than that), but something certainly changes.

I studied some child psychology and development in school. Not much. Just a few courses. But I do remember that the human brain starts out with lots more open neual pathways than it ends up with. Babies have (if I remember correctly) something like 10-times as many neural connections as adults. As they grow and learn and try to do things, certain pathways become strengthened — i.e., "putting spoon in mouth to get food" beats out "putting spoon in ear to get food" and the latter set of neural paths eventually dies out.

[Aside: we also learned that the part of the brain responsible for processing the "don’t do that!" response to painful activities is the same part that processes the response to trying do do things in a new way after all those initial, baby-to-youngster, extra neural pathways have died out. That is, our response to change is physiologically very similar to our response to pain. We don’t want to do things that might hurt us, and we don’t want to do things in a new way, because it might hurt us. My prof explained that this is a survival mechanism; if you do things in the way you’ve done them before, it probably won’t kill you, because it hasn’t already. Problem is, from a creativity standpoing, doing the same thing might as well be death.]

Dyson goes on to talk about machine intelligence, the possibility that Google may be the basis for the first worldwide artificial intelligence, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria. OK. Not those last two. But, while I think it’s interesting and, as a sci-fi fan, not boring or laughable, AI is not something innately predictable or that I want to focus on.

I do, however, want to focus on the idea that Google is providing a worldwide brain already. Not an intelligence, per se. But a digital analog (I love saying that) to the physical, juicy meat and chemicals that make up our own grey matter and allow us to process our own biological questions, searches, answers and thoughts.

For the love of Pete, Havens… Get to the point.

OK. OK. Calm down. Here’s the point.

I have a friend at work whom I respect very much. She’s one of our web team managers. Loves wikis (as do I), but hates blogs. Because, to her, they are, basically, unrestrained "thoughts," posted to the Web. I’m paraphrasing her, but she finds most of what she reads on blogs to be drivel.

As do I. But I love blogs. Why?

Because they let everyone post their drivel, and some of that drivel ain’t drivel to me. I don’t care about the 9,000,000 teens who are blogging on what they wore to the blah blah blah. Or about many entertainment blogs. Or about hundreds of millions of other blogs out there. But I care what John Battelle says abourt search. And I care what Bill Ives says about KM. And I care what my friend Jenn writes in her poetry.

Again, I hear you say, "Get on with it. What’s the point here? That everybody likes different stuff on the Web? We knew that."

Yes, but…

If Google, by searching the Web in finer and finer increments — and, more recently, printed materials and other media — provides a methodology for me to determine which thoughts (for words, which are mostly what we’re searching for and through, are thoughts) out there are going to help me be more productive, creative, happy, healthy, etc… then isn’t Google acting as a kind of meta brain, by which everyone will be connected to those thoughts?

I’m not positing artificial intelligence here. I’m not imagining some great, Ozymandian force, rising up under the Google campus and causing us to buy more porn, redo our mortgages and connect with classmates. I’m theorizing that this "new brain" is making the aggregate cognitive abilities of everyone connected to it more… something.

Faster? Happier? Productive? Worried? Distracted? Creative?

I’m not sure yet. Some people I know are very distracted by the Web. I know I can be. Some are very empowered in their jobs and personal life and hobbies. There’s so much more that we can know in a few seconds or minutes than we could even a few years ago at all, or in a time span that was prohibitive. And it keeps getting better. Or at least faster, more, funkier, distractiver, etc.

Was that the big point?

Almost. Sort of. Yeah. In brief:

1. Google (and search in general) is a way to connect our thoughts across time and distance
2. Tools like blogs and wikis allow more people to put thoughts out there.
3. As Dyson says, providing a robust manner to search a "von Neumann matrix" (the Web) in a random fashion is a good way to solve the "third kind" of logic problem; i.e., rather than try to program a computer to answer the asked question, "What does a cat look like?" you search the Web for decriptions or pictures of cats until you have an idea in your head that satisfies your personal contextual need.
4. By searching others’ thoughts, we find ways to use them to solve our own problems
5. By posting our thoughts, we incrementally improve the matrix (i.e., we help the Web "learn")

But here’s an ancillary point.

How appropriate is it that advertising is Google’s "dopamine" in this "big brain" metaphor?

I know, I know. The big search window isn’t "advertising supported." The "natural" search results are based on some insanely complex calculations that are based on key words, inbound links, how often your page changes, etc. etc. That being said, Google pays for all that with advertising. That and that being said, many of the best "natural" links are buoyed by SEO strategy that is, essentially, advertising (or at least marketing) supported.

In our metaphor, then: advertising/marketing = positive neural reinforcement.

Which is true in reality when we examine how the Web works. Those sites that are visited more often are more likely to survive. More traffic equates to either more revenue — for commercial sites, that’s the definition of life — or more interest. If you have readers, sponsors, friends, authors, contributors… whatever… your site will be much more likely to flourish than if you have fewer.

I’m not saying that the model is bad. I use Google a couple dozen times a day at least. It’s a great tool. Once you learn about how to narrow and expand your searches, you can get around a lot of the crap that’s force-fed by SEO "strategies." But I am saying that if we’re going to have a global brain that’s going to help us connect to each other’s thoughts, maybe we need to be thinking about what the chemical is that stimulates that brain.

Because, if we work the metaphor backwards, an advertising model might be akin to a lima bean advertiser telling your kid, "I’ll give you a dollar to stick your fork full of peas in your ear," every time he’s trying to eat peas.

In 1979, Coke aired a commercial where a tiny, young, Caucasian boy approached an enormous, African American football player to congratulate him on a great game. After initially rebuffing the kid somewhat gruffly, the player — Mean Joe Green — swigs a Coke that the boy hands him in a long series of gulps, and then, made friendly (one assumes by the tingly, sweet concoction), calls the kid back and throws him his jersey. The kid shouts, "Thanks, Mean Joe!" and they share a nice moment. All courtesy of Coke.

Somewhat standard American advertising fare, sure. But it struck a nerve in the American public’s mind at the time, for whatever reason. Maybe it was the contrast in size between the two — the kid couldn’t have weighed 60 lbs. soaking wet. Maybe it was that the sugar water "melted" Mean Joe’s heart (I’d been told by Mr. Frost, my 7th grade Social Studies teacher that Coke could dissolve rust off a bicycle chain, so I suppose that melting an NFL player’s heart is no big deal). Maybe it was a nice moment in race relations. Maybe it was a combination of all of these, or just a really well written and well shot ad.

Whatever the reason, the commercial proved so popular, that it was turned into a made-for-tv-movie, "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid."

I am not kidding. They made a movie based on a TV commercial. That’s why I included the IMDB link in the preceeding paragraph. To prove it to you. When I have this conversation live, I often get the, "No freakin’ way," response. Here in cyberspace, I can put my hyperlink where my mouth is.

I use this event to date the beginning of the wonderful weirdness of modern genetic content mutation.

Yes, I know. Books were made into movies and plays and musicals long before 1981. Same for songs. In fact, I’m tempted to go back and revise my date to 1976, and to the making of the movie, "Ode to Billy Joe," based on the 1967 Bobbie Gentry song of the same title. I’m tempted… but I’m not going to. "Ode to Billy Joe," is weird, yes. But songs have had stories in them, well… forever. The leap of creative evolution to take one and turn it into a movie doesn’t quite do it for me in terms of calling it "mutation."

Turning a commercial into a movie though… yeah, baby… that’s a mutant love child.

Was the TV movie "The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid" a good film? Hellll no. That’s not the point. The point is that, as Forest Gump’s mama might say, "Content is as content does."

If you create something that causes an effect… it can live in other media. It can mutate and change and have a effect elsewhere, if you know how to take out the pieces of the DNA that can live in another environment. Or, as I like to ask my students, "How can you put that on a T-shirt?"

I don’t mean that statement literally, of course. Usually.

Andy Warhol saw pop and commercial culture as art. Ba-da-bing. Before that, pop and commercial culture had borrowed from the world of fine art, but had rarely been seen as art per se. Why not? Because the worlds of "art" and "business" were kept apart by people who stood to gain from doing so in most cases, either monetarily, psychologically or culturally. I don’t mean this as harsh criticism, though it comes out as such. It’s an anthropological fact, and not a judgement — people look at the segments of the society they are given and are hard-pressed to de-segment them. Church = religion. School = education. Home = family. Art = culture. Business = economics. You play on the playground, you drive on the freeway. The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only.

The problem for artists, writers, marketers and other creators, is… this kind of thinking is linear and predictable. It leads to the same place it started, often with the same results. And the same results are… well… boring. And boring is the enemy of creativity.

Mean Joe Green and Andy Warhol. Keep them in mind when you try to think of new ways to put your stuff on a T-shirt.

When my son, Dan, was about three years old, we were sitting in my big recliner, watching "Thomas and the Magic Railroad," for about the 209th time, and he asked me, as James, the Red Engine, was being pused towards almost certain doom by the evil Diesel engine (whose Christian name escapes me):

"Will James be OK?"

"Yes, Dan," I replied. "James will be fine."

We kept watching, and Dan kept asking questions about upcoming plot issues. Will this-and-such happen? Will they find the gold-dust? Will the giant rats feast on the living brains of the graduate students (that may be from a different Thomas the Tank Engine movie… they all run together in my head)?

The point being… he kept asking questions about a movie we’d watched together many, many times.

Finally, I asked him, "Dan. We’ve seen this movie before. Do you understand that it will be the same every time?"

"Oh," he replied. "No. I didn’t know that. OK."

"He’s never asked me questions like that again about movies he’s seen before."

It was an absolutely explosive moment for me as a father, and as someone who thinks about thinking and learning and creating.

Why should a child — new to the world, and new to our very fast-paced, media rich world — have any idea that a movie will be the same every time? We, of course, as adults understand this implicitly. But a child’s world is different everyday. And not in the same way that our days are different — they discover the world every day; we just experience it.

So until we learn that a movie — or a book or any recorded media — proceeds along the same line each time, we have no way of establishing that this is, in fact, the case. It makes no more sense to assume a thing is one way as opposed to another.

The Buddha called this state of being, "The Beginners Mind."

The Beginners Mind is incredibly important to the creative experience. Why? Because it is, essentially, the blank canvas. Assumptions are deadly to creativity, both in one’s private, personal art, and in the art of business, marketing, commerce, etc.

My son, Dan, is now in Kindergarten. And he’s having a grand time of it. We were afraid, at first, that he wouldn’t. He goes hot-and-cold on structured learning activities. He loves picking stuff up on his own, and, if he becomes comfortable with a teacher or group of other kids… goes gangbusters. But if something makes him uncomfortable, he can really zwang off into a corner (both emotionally and physically) and avoid participation. But his teacher and  class — a public-school in Columbus, OH — are doing a great job at providing what I might call "non-threatening structure." Which is, frankly, what the Kindergarten model has been about for quite some time.

Kindergarten was invented around 200 years ago by a young German academic named Friedrich Fröbel (good article about Fröbel  at Boxes and Arrows). Before that time, it was generally assumed that kids younger than seven were unable to think and learn in a fashion appropriate for schooling. They were, from an educational standpoint, ignored.

Frightening, eh? We know, now, after two centuries of developmental psychology and physiological study, that children’s minds are most active and open to learning during their first five to eight years. So, ignoring them until they are seven or so, is not only a bad idea, it is, in fact, totally wrong-headed and counter-productive from a cost-benefit standpoint. It is, frankly, the absolute worst thing you can do.

But it took Fröbel to figure out that it wasn’t kids who couldn’t learn, but school — the old-style school for older kids — that couldn’t teach. He needed to apply the Beginner’s Mind to the subject of the mind itself.

How meta is that?

What assumptions are you making in your creative life? Who are you continually correcting or challenging, when, really, you may simply be seeing things from very different perspectives? What basic views do you have that need to be examined at a root level so that you can wipe your creative canvas clean and reinvent your process?

If you don’t start fresh once in awhile, you may be losing out on major opportunities.

Flux

At 39 years old, I’m in my 7th career. If you count being a student for 16 years as a career, it would be my 8th. Here’s the quick overview:  Arts & crafts counsellor/director at a day camp;  high-school English teacher;  PC technician / Novell network admin / software tutor / database admin;  cellular telephony — technical writing;  cellular telephony — marketing; legal marketing; library services marketing. This doesn’t count lots of piddly-ante stuff I’ve done in-between jobs and on top of the "real jobs." Food service, a brief forray into sales, etc. This is all stuff I’ve done enough to feel comfortable saying "Yeah, I’ve done that." It also doesn’t count being a writer, even though many of those jobs other than "technical writer" require lots of writing, and even though that’s what I went to school for, and even though I’ve been published a bit and even occasionally paid for writing. It also doesn’t count my vast criminal enterprises, for obvious reasons.

I was told, at the age of 25, when talking with one of the HR cats at Cellular One, that the average number of major career / industry shifts for people in our era is four. At that time I was on my fourth… Well, third, since the Arts & Crafts thing was a summer job, and didn’t really count. But still. To be on #3 or #4 at the age of 25 meant that I was already pretty much guaranteed of being well past four during my professional career.

And now gas is $3 a gallon.

What’s the connection?

In all the places I’ve worked, in all the industries I’ve seen, with all the agencies and vendors I’ve worked, there is one constant driver of success, happiness and long-term value. One that transcends retail marketing vs. B2B, service sector activities vs. products, project planning vs. process planning, management vs. labor, old-economy vs. new, bricks vs. clicks… everything. Everywhere. There is one constant fuel that never fails to grant power to its wielder in measures greater than any other resource:

Creativity

It’s a constantly misused and abused term. On the one hand, bandied about casually like something that can be brought into being at a staff meeting if you just put enough spongy, brightly-colored squeeze balls on the table and let people use scented markers on the big flip charts. On the other, it is often said that some people are "simply not creative." That creativity is inherent. A gift. A trait. Like the color of your eyes or being really tall.

Both of those angles on the subject — casual and congenital creativity — are crap.

Creativity is a study and a craft. Yes, the practice of it in certain ways can certainly be related to intelligence or artistic abilities. But just like learning to read, use a computer, hit a baseball, sing, swim, garden or whistle through a blade of grass, creativity is a skill — a set of skills — that can be learned.

And now, more than ever, we need to be learning and teaching and focusing on those skills.

Why? Because we have entered something that I called, in an article I wrote in 2004, "The Age of Content." The highest economic value today is now placed on the ability to engage in "knowledge activities." And the product of knowledge activities is content. Some examples of knowledge activites include:

• News: all kinds, depending on what you value
• Sports: both the playing of sports and the viewing and the news of it
• Music: lyrics, songs, arrangements, covers, concerts, recordings
• Art: all kinds; from the fine arts to industrial design to advertising to performance
• Opinion: essays, letters to the editor, blogs
• Spectacle: the circus, reality TV, game shows, magic, politics
• Stories: dramatic or comedic, on film, in books and plays or on TV
• Character: the details and actions of personalities in fiction or the public eye
• Consultative services: doctors, lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, publicists, marketers
• Metadata & Reference: Ontologies, tagging, links, blogrolls, lists, descriptions, friends-files, IMgroups, social ganging, wikis

I’m going to get some strong arguments against some of the above categories, and that’s cool. Lots of folks are going to say that I’m confusing "service" functions with "knowledge" functions. I disagree. For example you won’t find waiters or dry cleaners on the above list. Although you would find chefs that invent new recipes or create interesting new dining spaces, and entrepeneurs who figure out ways to make dry cleaning easier on the environment.

Just "doing" something doesn’t make you a knowledge worker. Being able to effect a change in the minds or lives of your customers / audience through the application of your knowledge in your sphere of understanding does. In many cases the change only occurs in the mind of the customers themselves, or because of changes they decide make based on your work.

In short, for knowledge work, the mind is often some combination of the map, the transportation, the toolbox, the store, the delivery mechanism and the marketing playpen. Often it is all of the above.

Take, for example, lawyers. Most of the work they do is mental. "The law" does not exist in the real world. It is symbolic. There is no "box of law." There are words on paper and on computers. They talk. They send email and faxes and reams of paper. They go to court and talk more. They take depositions. More talk. But in the end… money changes hands, rights are granted or taken away, people go to jail and sometimes live or die. It’s a pure knowledge profession. The consequences are felt in the real world, but the craft is content.

Putting the broken images back together

In the Industrial Age, the assembly line was the most important new invention of value delivery. They had all the pieces… they’d been taking "stuff" out of the ground for a long time and making parts by hand for centuries. But it took Henry Ford to figure out how to really, seriously shave major time off the process of putting those parts together into bigger elements. That was very important. It was creativity writ large on a worldwide, societal, economic and, eventuall, geopolical scale. Neither of the World Wars would have been possible without the assembly line. Hitler’s idea of "The Final Solution," too, owed something to the idea of rapid manufacturing processes. We apply these big, sweeping changes across the board in many aspects of our lives. We can’t help it.

Putting smaller parts into bigger parts is one decent definition of creativity. And when you’re talking about making cars or sewing machines or toys or guns, it makes sense and it’s easy to talk about cost per unit and scale economies.

But what about when we talk about knowledge work? How does creativity apply in the Age of Content? How do we put smaller parts together to make bigger parts when all the parts are in our heads?

The problem is, our collective, social, worldwide mental head is still stuck, to a large degree, in the Industrial Age. We still think in terms of push-pull, click-clock. We still think in productivity terms that were invented for cars and bombs and dolls. And the world that came out of those terms and that thought process is the world that gave us the 700,000 casualties of The Battle of Verdun. It gave us the Cold War and the Atom Bomb. It also gave us the Internet and disco and micowave ovens and antibiotics and NASA and yogurt with fruit on the bottom and tongue piercing and Pol Pot and… you get the picture.

The Industrial Revolution fueled a world of enabled insanity on a huge scale. It brought together nations in manners neverbefore possible, in numbers unthinkable just a generation before. The Renaissance and then the birth of modern science in the 18th century had led people in Western Europe to believe that ultimate answers were possible. The general term for this set of thought was Realism, a pre-cursor to the Modernist movement in late 19th century Europe.  The Modernist movement was, in many ways, a reaction to the horror of the two world wars and an attempt to make some kind of sense in a world seeminly gone mad.

Then, of course, the Postmodern movement came along to mash-up Modernism and take into ironic question everything that Modernism stood for. So you now have a choice:

1. You can look at any subject from one, classical standpoint (Realism)
2. You can look at it from several, balanced standpoints (Modernism)
3. You can look at yourself (and everyone else) looking at it and question your (and their) ability to look at it and even your right to look at it because of the inherent problems involved in the process of language and examination (Postmodernism)
4. You can give up and go home and play Xbox.

My undergraduate degree from Cornell is in English Literature. I studied poetry during the early part of the 20th century, and T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is one of my favorite poems from that period. One of my favorite parts of that poem is:

     …for you know only
     A heap of broken images,
     where the sun beats,
     And the dead tree gives
     No shelter…

That, to me, is the essence of Postmoderism. "A heap of broken images." The sun, which is supposed to illuminate, only beats down — it causes harm, not growth. The tree — which should be the source of root images, the trunk of the Golden Boughs — gives no shelter or comfort. It is dead. All we have to work with is this heap of broken images. Because the world we knew, the classical, sensible, realistic, modern world is gone.

And gas is $3 a gallon.

Well, you know what? Tough shit. I like my heap of broken images. And it’s time to stop whining.

We’ve had almost 90 years since Verdun. And we’ve had plenty of time to figure out that people aren’t cogs in assembly lines. And now we’ve got this Internet thing and wireless phones and the space shuttle and aquaculture facilities and nuclear power and the Human Genome project and more cool stuff than you can swing a cat at. Kids in Kalamazoo are playing World of Warcraft online with kids in Karachi. GE is outsourcing its legal department to India. It’s time to start putting the heap of broken images together again.

Tinkers used to travel from town to town repairing broken tools and household items, sharpening knives and scissors and doing odd jobs. Jacks-of-all trades. They also brought news and stories. That’s what this blog will be about. Putting the tools of the Age of Content together, with an emphasis on creativity. Sub-topics might include:

• Marketing
• Communications
• Gaming
• Memetics
• Sourcing
• Technology
• Communities
• Metadata / tagging

Who knows what else. Why the "X?" Because I still highly associate myself with GenX. I didn’t know I had a generation until I read Matt Rushkoff’s "The GenX Reader." I thought I was just a little too young to be a Real Baby Boomer. After plouging through that book, though, I knew, "Yeah. I’m an Xer." You don’t hear the term much anymore. The new genz are in the news. The Echo Boomers — the kids of the Baby Boomers. The Gamer Generation, who are, I guess, GenXers, kinda, but a few years younger or something. One article I read said Boomers stopped being born in 1960 and Gamers started being born in 1970. I was born in 1966. Whoops.

So this is TinkerX. Flux for the Age of Content. "Flux" being that gooey crap you put on metal when you want to solder it together. The stuff that helps aid the creative process. Which is weird, because flux also means "constant or frequent change." Ain’t that odd? That when you want to make something stick together, sometimes you have to ensure that parts of it stay more fluid…

Creativity is the fuel. Let’s tank up.