The Blog of Burgher Jon

Lincolnish!!!

Fox News this morning exposed how Wikipedia and schools have combined to convince school children that pedophilia is not a bad thing.  If you can’t smell the sarcasm on that statement, you should stick around the blog and get to know me better.  Here’s the second paragraph of the article:

Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles to use Wikipedia, which can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country, to further their agenda.

This is blatant scare tactics against one of the greatest innovations of the information age (Wikipedia).  I find two things wrong with this ONE sentence.

1. “Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles” – what does that mean?  I can find at least 3 or 4 chatroom posts that suggest just about anything.
2. “can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country”  Do you know how many sites kids have access to where people can place their opinions?  This sentence implies that pedophiles are regularly modifying the entry on pedophilia (not true) and that children are regularly accessing the entry (I highly doubt it, do teachers often assign projects that require doing google searches for pedophilia?) and that a child smart enough to search on wikipedia for “pedophilia” would just readily believe some clown that says pedophilia is cool.

If anything Wikipedia is the ultimate way to stop opinionated people from biasing reference materials.  For anything to be considered “fact” on wikipedia, a vast majority of the editors must agree that it is fact.  This effort to slander one of the (inherently) least bias sources of information on the planet is ridiculous.  What I wrote up in the title of this post was ACTUALLY the title of the fox news report, fair and balanced.

I noticed this chart on Pingdom this evening and had to pass it along.  A couple of thoughts:

• I don’t believe this is sustainable for Google.  I think companies spend too much time trying to maintain these numbers, and its exactly what kills them.  When I get news like this out of Google I start to think that they’re stifling ideas to maintain profits and that will kill you every time.
• Apple is riding huge margins.  How long can the amount of profit produced outpace the amount of value produced?
• I’m impressed with Oracle and Cisco, both are doing better then I would have guessed.
• I’m disappointed in Amazon and Dell, both aren’t doing all they could.
• Love them or hate them or both, it’s hard to imagine any technology company will ever be as consistently successful as Microsoft has been the last 25 years.
• Twitter would be negative.
• I saw a link to this chart from 37Signals, what do you think there number is?  I’m thinking it has 7 digits.

As I have mentioned before, my day job is in enterprise IT.  I work helping some of the largest companies in the world upgrade their IT to match the demands of their business.  I have argued before that there is a simply ridiculous amount of waste in corporate IT and that I expect this waste to dwindle rapidly.

I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day and a clearer way to present the waste in IT occurred to me in the form of the graph above.  The green line represents the rate at which companies are gaining access to new technologies.  The red line represents their competency in deploying these technologies.  The level of waste in IT is directly tied to the distance between the red and green lines (assuming the green line is above the red line).  When this happens, you have CIOs who are flying by the seat of their pants.  They don’t actually understand the technologies that their company is attempting to implement, so they waste money figuring it out.  They don’t know how to hire people to manage the technology once it is implemented, so they hire three people hoping one is competent.  I could keep going about how not knowing costs them, but I think you can see the point.

The good news (or bad news if you’re one of the leaches making money off the waste in IT) is that both the technology and the skill of the people managing/implementing it are changing.

• The pace of new technology is slowing.  This is particularly true in the corporate IT space.  Let’s be honest, the way you use your computer at work has not changed fundamentally in the last few years.  Neither has the way your IT department provides it.  Virtualization has had an effect, increasing the efficiencies of deployment, but this is nothing like changing from a mainframe terminal to a PC or even like changing from floppy disks and CDs to shares on network attached storage.  This is why the green line has leveled out somewhat*.  This is giving IT organizations a chance to catch up with technology.
• Those IT organizations are getting more comfortable with IT.  The CIOs that are being named today had computers in college.  The ones that will be named CIOs in 10 years will have used computers to do research as early as 5^th grade.  These CIOs will have a better understanding for what they do and don’t know about technology and will increase the slope of the red line.

The bottom line is this.  Enterprise IT budgets will not keep increasing at the rate they have in the past and enterprise IT organizations are going to be much leaner and meaner.  If your IT organization can’t keep pace with this kind of advance, you should be seeking help from your favorite cloud provider ASAP.  If you’re an IT professional and you don’t think you have a home in a leaner IT environment then you should be polishing the resume or heading back to school.  If you’re working for an IT vendor that relies on a spiffy sale pitch intended for the wasteful CIO, you better look for another company.  However, if you’re rooting for an efficient American (and international) economy that can get more done with less, you’re in luck.

*If you’re wondering why I didn’t call out the future spike in the green line that occurs at its very end, it’s because it’s not related to the point I’m making in this post.  If you’re curious why it’s there; I believe that as the techniques behind social media advance, there will be an extremely rapid advancement in what this “new” internet can do.  For more thoughts on that, see this old post.

Twitter announced on Monday via their blog that they would be introducing Twitter Places over the next couple weeks.  After quite a bit of thought, I’m not sure if it will take off or not.  On the one hand, the additional context for tweets can be extremely valuable.  On the other hand, I think that many people will prefer to “check-in” using one piece of software and tweet using another one.

While many people use Twitter to update their status.  Literally making posts like, “I’m watching the World Cup Game at Piper’s.”  Many other people (like me) only occasionally use it for this purpose.   I’m much more likely to post, “Read this interesting article on Tech Crunch” or “Here’s what my new blog post is about.”  Perhaps I’m a little bit biased, but I think these posts are where the real value of Twitter comes from; and for these it not only doesn’t matter where I am, I’d usually prefer not to say.  Twitter needs to be careful to ensure that Places isn’t so invasive that it drives people away from the service.  That said. I do use FourSquare, and think it will soon be an invaluable tool for making the social web in to a social world.  That said, most of the people who follow me on Twitter wouldn’t care to hear my FourSquare updates and vice versa.

On the other hand, more then occasionally, I make posts for my Twitter followers that deal directly with my current location.  For example, if I really am watching the World Cup game at Pipers, it’s the kind of thing I would want to point out to everyone.  I would likely check in on FourSquare and have it push to Twitter.  If, after I checked in, I noted that Pipers had an exceptional deal on Blue Moon I might choose to make a Twitter update like, “Great special on Blue Moon at Pipers.”  The location context would allow me to say, “Come get a Blue Moon for $1!”  For these cases, I’m excited about Twitter Places.  Just as long as when I make fun of the English goaltender or publicize my last blog post Twitter lets me (easily) turn off my location.

MMOs are a good place for anonymity, message boards are not.  The difference is that the first is recreation and the second is information.  Information is too valuable a commodity to allow people to spread it anonymously.  For an example take the 4Chan stunt where they rigged the voting in the Time 100 Poll to make the top 21 spell “Marble Cake Also The Game.” While this stunt was cute, it robbed us of the opportunity to see what Time readers actually felt were the top 100 most influential people in 2009.  Even though this stunt is not a particularly big deal, it does show that information can’t be trusted in the hands of the anonymous.

Hunch is an example of what the internet will become; a collection of personal and social data that makes a seemingly endless sea of information seem like it was created just for you.  Today, Hunch announced that they will cease allowing people to surf and use their website without logging in.  Caterina Fake (co-Founder) in an interview for TechCrunch reported that logged in users were getting results that were 20 to 30 percent better then users who were not logged in.  This doesn’t surprise me at all, in fact it’s core to one of my theories about the future of the internet.  Yesterday I posted the paragraph above as part of a little rant about how a better internet will surface (here’s how I described a “better” internet in a previous post).  I assume that Caterina (originally a Pittsburgher) and Chris Dixon (a fantastic blogger), read my post and immediately decided that they needed to discontinue anonymous, unregistered use of the site in order to create better information.

This move will result in better information being fed to Hunch as well as better information being given by Hunch.  It also has two nice side-effects.  While Hunch is entirely an individual sport at the moment (you can have friends but their choices do not effect yours), a firmer relationship between user and information will open up the use of social data.  The other side-effect is making it easier to imagine Hunch monetizing their progress.  After all, an identity is a potential customer.  All in all, a beneficial move for those of us who use Hunch regularly.  Hopefully, this is yet another step in its transformation from nifty toy to practical decision model.

Note:  Chris Dixon’s blog post today is about Pivoting and starts with urging you to ask the question, “if you had it all to do over again, what would you change?”  Think that’s how this change came about?