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July 26, 2006
Daylight Savings for SE Qld!
I have begun a petition to introduce Daylight Savings for the Sth East Queensland corner. Now I REALLY need everyone's help with this. I am unwilling to tell people to pass on an email to everyone they know, but if you can manage to get enough signatures on this petition, hopefully the legislators will see the light (quite literally) by the time Daylight Savings starts again in the southern states.
As someone who has to deal with time shifts for appointments every day of my life, I'm consistently frustrated with the changes between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane time over the summer months. I know I'm not alone. And those who cite the heat and the 1992 Referendum result as arguments against Daylight Savings have got to be kidding themselves don't they? The population and business development in Brisbane and the Sth East Qld corner have changed dramatically over the past 14 years, so the 1992 referendum result is utterly irrelevant. The heat is less of a problem for the Sth East corner than for FNQ, and importantly, the light in this part of the world lends itself to Daylight Savings - instead of sunrise at 5am, and a hot and uncomfortable trip in to work at 7:30am, we'd have sunrise at 6am and arrive at work before the heat of the day sets in. Let's face it, we live in the best part of the world for long balmy evenings. Yet even in the height of summer, the sun goes down before 7pm.
It's time we woke up to the beauty of Daylight Savings and enjoyed this most gorgeous place at the end of a productive day. Please join me in signing this petition and bringing the Sth East Qld corner in line with the rest of the eastern seaboard.
Posted by jj at 8:29 AM | Comments (15)
July 24, 2006
Happy Birthday Andy G!
Just a quick message to wish my big brother a very happy birthday for today! Hope you have a great day AG! Love you heaps!
Posted by jj at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
Business Matters Podcast
Last week I was interviewed by the Director of SMP Brisbane (Strategic Marketing Partners), Tyson Barker, for his new podcast series and now the interview is live on air. You can download the episode (which includes a discussion with Sauce Software CEO, Brett Hooker) here. SMP are doing some innovative stuff in the eBusiness domain, and I am happy to recommend the marketing firm to a number of my consultancy clients. Congrats, Tyson, and keep up the good work.
Posted by jj at 8:55 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2006
Oh dear
For reasons that go way back in to my past, I have a fairly high pain tolerance to school bands. But the one playing on the main stage at the Racecourse Road Festival is testing even me. Actually that's probably unfair. The band is quite competent. The lead saxophone is even very good. The girls they have singing in front of the band can barely hit a note. It's making the rest of the performance frightening. And it's so loud that I can't escape. It's as if I have my CD player on in my lounge room. And it's on the street. I'm thinking a quick jog down to Newstead may be in order to escape the rampant tone deafness today.....
Posted by jj at 10:41 AM | Comments (1)
Locked in
One of the 'benefits' of living in a famous street of Brisbane, is that very occasionally, you get locked in for a day. Today is one of those days. The Racecourse Road Street Festival has been revived today as part of the Brisbane Festival, and I can't get out of my driveway for the next 20 hours. And in about 3 hours the blaring music and smell of street stall food will accost my residence for the duration of the day. The weather looks dreadful (cool and showery) so I suspect the turnout will be poor.
Hmm. There better be good food.
Posted by jj at 6:47 AM | Comments (1)
July 20, 2006
Heaven!
I want to offer a HUGE thank you to Raechel for recommending Rainesforest. Have just returned from a one hour massage, followed by a private spa and sauna session, with camomile and peppermint tea, biscuits and jelly beans. I smell of green tea body lotion and my back has had genuine deep tissue therapy for the first time in ages. And I feel wonderful. This place is heaven on earth. Go. Now. It is wonderful!
Posted by jj at 8:45 PM | Comments (1)
July 19, 2006
2006: The Year of Web 2.0
I have just been composing the opening of another paper I'm writing and felt the following was worth blogging, because it's a rather nice summary of the extraordinary growth of Web 2.0 applications and sites during this year....
During 2006, MySpace overtook Yahoo as the most visited domain among US citizens, and attracted over 17% of June website advertisements in terms of daily impressions, YouTube cracked 100 million video downloads per day (with over 65,000 new videos being uploaded every day), and Flickr has partnered with mobile communications device manufacturer, Nokia to enable ease of image uploads. Technorati now track over 35.3 million individual blogs online, the US Government invested US$450,000 in research on how best to mine information represented in blogs, and nearly 10% of all internet users identified blogs as a news source. AJAX-based tool Google Maps is now a popular means of identifying locations of events occurring in real life locations, and AJAX itself has been identified in Computerworld as the future of application development.This is, indeed, the age of Web 2.0.
Posted by jj at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)
July 14, 2006
A small, but very personal achievement
Today I received the very first copies of my book with Axel Bruns, Uses of Blogs.
Posted by jj at 5:46 PM | Comments (1)
July 13, 2006
GRRROOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR-quack!
Thank you to my muse for the link to the news on the discovery of fossil remains of Killer Kangaroos and Demon Ducks of Doom in north-west Queensland. I'm so terribly afraid.
(Possibly of laughing myself to death, but hey.)
Posted by jj at 6:26 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2006
Larvatus Prodeo Guest Spot/Sport
Thanks to Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo for reprinting my previous post on the Richard Dawkins doco and for launching a vigorous debate (45 comments in 12 hours) on the subject. You can read the comments and debate here.
Posted by jj at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
'You Can't Handle The Truth', Or, Howard's Prime Ministerial Promise to Costello
Whatever happens at the end of the week in terms of the Liberal Party leadership, there is simply no way that the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer could be considered cordial. The implications of this breakdown in the relationship between players are probably minor - it is unlikely that Costello will directly challenge the leadership, and even if he does, there's still doubt any challenge would be successful - but it does raise a sense of doubt in Howard amongst the general populace. It would be strange indeed, if what brought down Howard was a late-night promise he made in Opposition in 1994, rather than the myriad of inaccuracies or unsupported claims he has expressed since he has been Prime Minister - from the children overboard affair, to the invasion of Iraq, to the Work Choices legislation ("your rights protected by law!".... not). But perhaps there is a degree of poetic justice in the notion of Howard losing the public trust by acting in an unAustralian manner, and failing to live up to this 'undertaking'. Former Liberal leader, John Hewson has said that if there were a change in leadership of the Liberal Party it would be a death wish for the government. Those who have questioned the policies of Howard over the years will probably be hoping Hewson is right.
Posted by jj at 7:01 AM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2006
The Root of All Evil
On the plane on the way home from Adelaide, I finally caught up with Richard Dawkins's doco against religion of any kind, and I was struck by his outrageous and emotive language - his own thesis as fundamentally atheist as those religions he aims to critique.
The issue I have with his fundamentalist pro-science approach is that his antipathy to paranormal and possibilities - something he calls "constructive doubt" - is precisely the sort of attitude that can prevent conceptual analysis and philosophy, and could result in prejudice and separatism. I have no problem with his advocacy of evidential scientific instruction. I have a problem with his superior attitude, and his assumption of ignorance and belittling of those who do pursue a religious life.
He invokes Darwin as a source of modern "truth". Yet Darwin's own theories of natural selection are challenged by the findings even of pro-science anthropologist, Jared Diamond. Indeed, what Diamond argues in his work in Guns, Germs and Steel, is that Darwin's theories are sensationally flawed, and that a series of opportunistic and convenience oriented aspects contribute to the development of human cultures.
But I am convinced that it is insufficient to argue that science and natural selection can entirely explain the collapse of societies and economies. It is indeed the case that cultural economics - often based on religion - have defined the strongest communities. There's a reason why religion hasn't died out. It is these communities that survive. If anything, it is religion that has provided the strength for some communities to survive. Explain it as divine intervention or anthropological community development, this has provided the basis for human survival.
I find the arrogance of some scientists absolutely disgusting, and Richard Dawkins is the most arrogant of them all. This series is worth watching to understand that atheism is as dangerous as religious fundamentalism. Moderation in all things is clearly the most peaceful and diplomatic course for a humanistic and tolerant future.
Posted by jj at 6:34 AM | Comments (0)
July 7, 2006
ANZCA update and Open Source Commercialisation
Hi from Adelaide, where the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) is having its annual conference. It's been great to catch up with people (however briefly) and to hear some interesting papers. I'll be posting the story attached to my paper some time tomorrow. The paper itself I'm submitting to the Harvard Business Review in a couple of weeks.
Another paper I've completed but am yet to find a source to publish is an update on Open Source Commercialisation. Any ideas for a spot to publish would be appreciated! In the meantime, I've included the full paper in the extended entry of this post.
*
Commercial versus Community in Open Source
On 30 June 2006, Red Hat finalised its acquisition of JBOSS, a professional open source development community and producer of a popular application server among open source developers. The deal was more comfortably accepted by members of the open source community after an uneasy discussion with Oracle Computer Systems earlier in the year, who wished to enter into an uneasy mix of proprietary and non-proprietary system development in the technology sector, apparently in the interest of selling more proprietary products. Oracle Computer boss, Larry Ellison had discussed the Oracle interest in JBOSS, openly declaring that open source communities attracted developers, and more developers could lead to more sales of Oracle products. The distinctly commercial objective produced strong and negative reactions among the purists of the open source community. Participants in representative open source communities threatened to sabotage the outputs of the community, arguing that such commercial or partly commercial actions were antithetical to the fundamental philosophy of open source. But the supremacy of Red Hat in the JBOSS acquisition will arguably be premised upon a similar business model. And the community members of JBOSS or indeed any other open source community do need to accept that commercialisation is not necessarily as evil a concept as may at first be apparent.
Open source as a concept is based on shared information and collective wisdom in software development. By releasing the source code of a development platform, applications and functions can be created and shared among users. This is an application of the network effects model; the more widely a platform is adopted by a user base, the greater the value it has for all users. In the Free Software movement, the methodology was described in related literature as ‘free as in free speech, not free as in free beer’ – essentially the movement was associated with opportunities for accessing content and the notion of providing functional software in the public interest, rather than for commercial gain. In an era where technology and software were no longer a competitive advantage but crucial for business, the free software movement was designed to maximise access to functionality, and capitalise on the expertise and creativity of programmers working collectively on code bases to improve functionality. The phenomenon was in a true sense, an example, of a gift economy – reciprocal altruism based on the betterment of a community.
However, celebration of the gift economy aspects of free software were quickly absorbed across the entire open source sector, and this led to mass ignorance about the nature of open source as a practice, rather than necessarily implying free software outputs. In 1999 Eric Raymond released ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as an exploration of the open source development, saying that the egoless programming in a bazaar environment – rapid and chaotic, but ultimately open and less elitist than ‘Cathedral-style’ (or ‘closed-source’) research and development – produces better quality outputs than Cathedral programming because it facilitates a higher order of magnitude of skilled time to any problem. But importantly, Raymond does not believe that open source development is necessarily morally superior to Cathedral programming. The fundamentalist perspective of open source as moral imperative evolved not because open source advocates were calling their hacker-developers to arms, but because the notion of the gift economy was poorly understood by open source community members. In essence, there developed a committed and invested community of open source users and contributors who had moved from interpreting the model of open source as merely a pragmatic process, into a distinct philosophy of public interest software development.
The rhetoric of the gift economy has been the primary problem with perceptions and understanding of open source as a business strategy. Because base code is released as open source, there developed a belief among some participants in the open source culture that all derivatives of an open source code would be subject to the same reciprocal altruism principles that applies to the base code within the context of an open source community network. But this blanket interpretation of open source is naïve. While participation in an open source community may be altruistic and premised upon a common and sharing-oriented future, the same may not be true of the code itself, or derivatives thereof. Assuming that open source is all about the code and not about the process of collective application development is a crucial flaw in arguments about open source as free software; the code itself is still subject to the licence operating within an open source community, and where no clear licence is articulated, the participants in an open source community can find their work appropriated by third parties, adapted – perhaps even, without attribution – and sold as a commercial product without there being any financial reward for their intellectual contribution. And instances of such commercialisation of open source outputs have been the cause of serious and litigious conflict. Indeed, the very notion of appropriating open source applications for a commercial package has been reported as essentially betraying the interests and philosophy of the networked society.
At the end of June in London, Sun Microsystems chief open source officer, Simon Phipps told the audience of an international Open Source Business Conference that the future of the open source sector was dependent on ‘connected capitalism’ and not ‘free software’. The critique was valid: for too long the phenomenon of open source has been shrouded in confusion. The ideals of the free software movement have pervaded the mindsets of developers from open source communities, without there being any true obligation for open source developers to make all works created within an open source community to be made available for free.
There is a great deal of uncertainty in the open source community in relation to code ownership and application ownership. And this is where Creative Commons licensing should (but so far hasn't) made an impact. Among open source community members, the integrity of open source is paramount. For the majority of open source developers, where source code is released in an open source manner, all applications developed on the basis of that code should be shared by all possible users, for free, for all eternity. The ‘business model’ (if you can call it that) is that open source produces a great number of applications and the quality of those applications improves over time, thus reducing cycle times for interactions and improving business productivity, lowering risk. But, as most venture capitalists would say, ‘there's nothing in it for me’.
Entrepreneurs thinking about the realm of open source are studying the communities and tool development, seeking opportunities for commercialisation. For these entrepreneurs, and for open source developers wishing to protect their territory, the possibility of developing applications under a ‘some rights reserved license’, should probably be considered. An exercise of this is where a developer uses open source code to develop an application, but understands that their application could be repackaged and sold commercially. The best example of this (though from a rather unusual source) is the Everquest phenomenon, where users created objects within the Everquest environment, released those objects in to the Everquest environment, and Sony reserved the rights to use those objects in future releases and updates to the game. In the case of Everquest, there was occasionally recognition of the input of users I developing these objects either through discounted subscriptions or by-lines. On no occasion was it suggested that users should be paid a % of profits from this repackaging. However, that could be a model for other businesses.
The open source community is probably very well aware of the slow march of commercialisation in to the open source community, and thus far the usual response has been to resist it with shields of outrage. But increasingly, it may be necessary to explore Creative Commons opportunities for applications built on open source codes. The cultural of participation in open source communities is not threatened by Creative Commons, and indeed permits much more explicitly, attribution for intellectual input of developers. And under Creative Commons, the base code itself will never be ‘owned’. But the functionality, look and feel and data services improvised through applications built on open source codes may well offer many opportunities for commercialisation. So while an open source community may have provided the conditions for development of such applications and services, the result is more of an example of connected capitalism than the gift economy.
Posted by jj at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2006
WOOHOO!
YAY QUEENSLAND!!!
State of Origin victory for Queensland in my own state of origin just seems so very appropriate! :) Well done to Melbourne for hosting Game 3 and providing such a fabulous result!
Posted by jj at 5:12 AM | Comments (0)
July 2, 2006
Headlines of silence
What a weekend of news it has been. In a series of rather extraordinary incidents, ranging from the serious to the banal, the uniting factor which links these stories together is the news blanket so haphazardly thrown across these stories, as "investigations continue".
Late on Friday, the biggest drug scandal to hit the Tour de France eliminated three of the top four contenders to win the international race, and race organisers had a list of more than 50 names of riders implicated in blood doping allegations. The vagueness surrounding this incident is that it may not technically be a drug scandal. Steroids may not have been injected in to the blood taken from riders several months before the race. However, the act of reinjecting blood removed from the body directly before the race could indeed boost performance, and thus could be decreed illegal. Yes, that's right. Your own blood, taken out of your body, and then reinjected months later could be an unfair advantage. I'm not questioning the ruling; I just wonder how pedantic we've become in drug testing to vilify sportsmen and women as cheats for using their own blood supply. How different is this from dramatically changing a diet directly before a performance? As someone who recently had to take steroid based medication for arthritis, I know how much the drug does change both body capacity and personality (producing remarkably aggressive behaviour), and as such, the prospect of pre-absorbed steroids zipping through the freshly-injected blood supplies of athletes is horrific, and perpetrators should be eliminated if discovered, but I also wonder if we need to start looking at the tendency among sportspeople to resort this kind of behaviour as a means of performing well. What is this saying about the obsessiveness of competition, the incentives to sell one's soul to performance improvement, and/or the organisation and management of sports more generally?
In a completely different sphere, the activities of NASA in covering, releasing and fogging information about the latest Discovery launch have been perplexing, to say the very least. Described as a "technical glitch that could be resolved in orbit", Discovery actually has had a thermostat which is supposed to control the heater in a rear thruster of the shuttle, fail. This thruster is only supposed to be used in orbit, and it was felt that it could easily be fixed before needing to be used, however it could also be a sign that the aging fleet of the space program probably needs to be retired before any further disasters occur. NASA have refused to comment at length on the issue, but say that they are confident that the craft is capable of its mission, in spite of there being an acknowledged 1% chance of complete mission failure. The continuing delay of the launch due to bad weather is frustrating for space enthusiasts but it could also be useful, in ensuring that the equipment is indeed functional prior to takeoff. I just wonder whether we should be a tad more concerned about launching at all.
Finally in perhaps the most banal context, but the most serious implications for popular culture and human rights, the future of the Big Brother program in Australia is in doubt after an alleged serious incident of sexual misconduct occurred in the house. The web forums have all been closed down while police investigate the incident but in my humble opinion (IMHO) it was only a matter of time before a felony episode occurred in the Big Brother house. And if it is discovered that the sexual miscoduct was even more serious than sexual harrassment, and actually extended to sexual assault or rape, I suggest that the implications will extend far beyond the Australian chapter of the program. The voyeuristic nature of the program will be identified as a contributing factor to the events that occurred, and the producers of the series will find themselves being sued for damages.
And just as an addendum, I am pleased Brazil is out of the World Cup. Allez France!
Posted by jj at 8:12 AM | Comments (0)