I may say here that I think Sondheim is probably the greatest musical genius of our time. And Sweeney Todd is one of his triumphs. This film is a remarkably good adaptation. Burton, this is your best work since The Corpse Bride and A Nightmare Before Christmas. Well done.

Let me make this perfectly clear: THIS CAN'T HAPPEN.

With public sector access to content and private content provision, no ISP will be able to go forward with so insane a plan. This fear mongering is totally unfounded, totally unsupported and totally absurd. As a business person involved in online media I can say with absolute assurance that any business person with a brain would not actually consider such a change in the business model of the internet and telecommunications infrastructure. This is *exactly* what Microsoft tried to do with the original MSN, and found that the business failed, and failed extremely badly. Any syndicate of companies that attempted such a ridiculous move would soon find themselves broke. The information society doesn't tolerate bottlenecks to information access, and these wannabes are suggesting that major companies are stupid enough to be contemplating such a suicidal business decision - to bottleneck access and to charge a premium for full internet access. What absolute rubbish!

This video reminds me strongly of a television 'doco' I used to show my undergrads called, 'You Have No Secrets' which was completely hilarious as a warning program on reduced personal privacy, with talking heads providing harrowing tales of privacy infringement over foreboding music. This is exactly the same thing - so stupid it's funny. Now the reason why I showed the privacy video to my undergrads is because I felt it was handy to inject them with a healthy dose of paranoia, so that they would be aware but not alarmed about the changes taking place. The trouble with this new video is that people are taking it far too seriously. As usual, a bunch of shaggy geeks trying to tell us what decisions businesses are making without providing any sources and indeed with precious little connection to reality is somehow more convincing than sheer business sense. And as a result, the very real issue of net neutrality is being damaged by the simplistic and irrelevant arguments of a minority of business morons.

Net neutrality is NOT at risk from a supposed cadre of ISPs contemplating subscription based access models. It is at risk from improperly maintained networks and inadequate regulation. Don't be fooled by simplistic arguments. Learn about telecommunications policy and understand the issue; don't become a conspiracy theorist for something that has been brewing for nearly 30 years.

(And Susan Cooper fans, yes this is the heart of The Grey King territory!)

My fellow IT Strategic Partner, Pete Laurie, sent me a link to Clay Shirky's latest post on Web 2.0 being the product of a cognitive surplus, and the identification of the internet and other social media as a more productive use of our time than sitting in front of sitcoms on television. This is a cost for media, but it's not the cost I'm referring to. Besides anything else, I see the transfer of time people spend from passive to active media as being somewhat led by mainstream media; since the introduction of more channels and greater choice, there has been a growing activity on the behalf of the viewer, and with Teletext - remember that? - and interactive news services and so on, there has been a growing expectation among viewers for interactive content. The cost involved with time investment and intellectual investment in Web 2.0 is in terms of organisations having a growing expectation that their staff can use their 'free time' to research and participate in social media, related to their daily work, thus spreading the length of the working day beyond the standard eight hours, to more like 12-15 hours a day. It may start innocently enough, with people pursuing their interests. But work is an interest, and inevitably, businesses will start to use these technologies to gain competitive advantage. And the more people use social media for their competitive positioning in employment, the more that people will have to do this to remain competitive. It starts to become infrastructural as well as intellectual, with entire communities built around a professional interest.

Now - contrary to some opinions - I am not suggesting this is necessarily a bad thing. I just recognise it as a cost, and believe those of us who are calculating the benefits of these technologies should take it in to consideration when building social networks. Because when you see it as a cost and evaluate it as such, you can also evaluate the accrued benefits to the firm. So when you begin to talk about monetising social media, you should not simply be looking at the standard business models of subscription services, sponsorship/advertising and net sales. You should also be looking at improved business knowledge, reduced costs in software, increased brand awareness and improved customer relations.

The truth of the matter is that until the WWW came along, the two most powerful means of organisations accessing business services were Word of Mouth, and the yellow pages. And frankly, that provided a very skewed and rather absurd view of the competitors in the market. The service providers were in a position of power over the businesses that needed those services, and could charge much higher rates, because there was less understanding of competion. Now with almost instant access to companies and sophisticated job-allocation services online, businesses have a much better idea of what is out there and are in a stronger position to bargain on the costs of professional services. So that's a clear cost reduction. Then there's the time for services to be carried out. With an expectation of immediate responses, any company who fails to respond in a timely and accommodating manner will lose business to their competitors. You snooze, you lose. There's another cost reduction for businesses. I could go on, but the point is that Web 2.0 costs - in terms of building, maintaining and continually improving social media - are real, and the benefits are also real.

We just need to be clear that we're not saying these technologies are free, when in fact they are quite easily measured.

Video:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#Closed-source_freeware

Images:
http://www.picnik.com/
https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html

Drawing:
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.freebyte.com/graphicprograms/

Sound:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

And when it comes down to it, OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) for documents, presentations and spreadsheets and Google Groups/Google docs for collaborative document management is sufficient for pretty much anyone outside a large-scale commercial enterprise. So there's really no excuse for wasting your money on software these days!

(Oh and anyone who has any other suggetions, please feel free to add in comments below!)

The event is to be held on 4 June at the Cavendish Conference Centre in Fitrovia/Noho in London, beginning at 9am. The event is focusing on the application of social media in business contexts and is specifically targeted at problem solvers, entrepreneurs and decision makers who should be using social media for the benefit of their organisation - both in terms of internal communication and the supply chain, and in terms of customer-facing activities.

I approve of these kinds of events: there needs to be more practical advice out there about how social media can be used to help influence communities of users. There's a lot of stuff out there about how marvellous social media is, and what tools exist, and not a lot about how it may be deployed strategically. Unfortunately the whole notion of 'strategy' seems to be have been lost in the technology revolution. (I have even known technology exceutives who don't know what the difference is between a strategic plan and a business plan!) But events like these can assist in renewing interest and focus on thinking strategically. I'm looking forward to my session and hope anyone interested (and based in the UK!) will consider registering.

First of all, I have to say I am a bit of a fan of Leadbeater's methods and vision. As an advocate of these technologies it's fantastic to come across people like Leadbeater and Shirky and Rheingold and others who share my sense of the value of social networks for changing the way we can behave collectively. But even when I come across a 'kindred spirit' in social technologies, I need to ensure I think critically about what is being set - not to criticise, but rather to critique. And as such, I was drawn to the issues raised about mass innovation and the claims made by so many theorists about the reducing costs of production with social media.

I've said this myself. Certainly social networking tools such as blogs and wiki do provide the users with the tools to publish their opinions for a general audience, and for those blogs and wikis that attract significant traffic, there is also the opportunity to engage in sustained debate on issues raised (or at least continue the conversation for longer than an hour or a day). And there is no doubt at all that the greatest advantage of these technologies is that they enable mass access to knowledge which is collectively and collaboratively created. (Incidentally, someone pointed out to me on this blog the other day that the word 'collaboration' could have negative connotations for some people, due to use of the word in 'collaborating with the enemy'... so perhaps 'cooperatively created' may be a better expression). The value of wikipedia as a current and remarkably accurate resource for information on virtually any topic is profound. Regardless of all the attempts to denigrate wikipedia as a popular reference, with its volunteer editing force, the phenomenon keeps proving the doubters wrong, coming up as more reliable and certainly more current than any other major reference source.

The only problem I have with the notion of social networking and collaborative innovation and knowledge sharing is that it's actually not as cheap as everyone thinks it is. And that's the only thing that really concerned me about Leadbeater's presentation last night.

Here's the thing: the truth about Wikipedia and other social networking platforms is that they are hugely expensive to run. Hosting costs on the Amazon S3 platform may be cheap but they are not zero. Not by a long shot. But more importantly, there is massive time investment from a volunteer force of editors at Wikipedia who strive to ensure information is accurate and up-to-date. These people believe strongly in the principle of providing access to information. And they spend hundreds of unpaid hours ensuring that the hackers and even the well-meaning but misguided posters to wikipedia are kept under control. Now money may not change hands, but the time costs associated with editing are phenomenal.

And for more commercial sites and social networking platforms, delivery of professional content, editing of user generated content and responding to the needs of the users generally involves the employment of staff for those roles. Further, the ongoing bug fixing and continuing development of functional components that improve the accessibility and accuracy of information presented is an ongoing cost - and a large one.

This a problem I have identified before in Benkler's work on the cost of information filtering. Even where there is not a monetary cost associated with accessing specific and targeted information, there is often a cost associated with generating that knowledge. That could be a financial cost or a commercial (advertising sponsored) cost or an opportunity cost if the information is not gathered in time or for the benefit of the gatherer. There are a series of other costs too, associated with marginal value added and investment return for information searching, as well as intangible costs and benefits of social connection and productivity disruption. These are all familiar to economists, because they are the costs that are associated with sales and with acquisition of property. But they keep getting ignored as costs for social networking technologies. They exist, but we advocates all rather conveniently ignore them.

And at our peril: the costs of keeping information accurate and current could generate a new hierarchy of information wealth - those with the means to be able to support information searching, and those who must resort to the more mundane resources online. And there is already a new industry of agents emerging who specialise in data mining and network theory as a means of extracting information efficiently and generating connections more efficiently between key players in a system. These are premium services, requiring highly specialised skills and technologies, and no matter how collaborative people may be in publishing the specifications of a data mining technique, the cost of integrating these specifications and the first mover advantage in deploying them for the benefit of a corporate player are both colossal.

I asked a question of Leadbeater last night about the possibility of an emerging hierarchy of information haves and have-nots on the basis of such powerful costs in information filtering, but Leadbeater responded in terms of social hieracrhies and not financial relationships. In all fairness, the way the questions were posed (3 at a time) made it hard for questions to be answered successfully, so I completely understand his difficulty with my perspective. And when I perhaps phrased the issue a little more succinctly later, he expressed a keen interest in seeing how these little information empires are being built. But it's something I think we all should understand. Social networking technologies are revolutionary in their potential for information access. We just need to be aware now that if we want to sustain that democratic accessibility of knowledge, then we are going to have to consider the economic and social ramifications of the perennial drive for more and more accurate knowledge, as well as more and more beneficial connections between people.

There was a sense amongst those present last night that cultural education has suffered in the drive for improvement in literacy and numeracy as well as the weighting of scientific and mathematical education. Whilst nobody present would have overtly stated that such enhanced literacy, numeracy and scientific education is unnecessarily time-consuming (and perhaps even partly irrelevant), there was a distinct sense that the skew of education towards purely pragmatic subjects has deprived current students of a sense of the value of cultural products and creativity, and engagement with artistic ventures.

What concerned me about the discussion last night was the assumption that only educational institutions (admittedly in partnership with cultural bodies) were responsible for cultural education. As was identified in the debate, only 20% of children's waking hours every week are spent actually in class at school. My question is - what happens in the other 80%?

If the ambition is to develop a more culturally aware, creative and engaged generation then what happens in school time is important but it is not the silver bullet for cultural education. By its very nature creative engagement and cultural appreciation is a collective and performance oriented activity. It is not merely a matter of filling an 'empty vessel' with knowledge and formulae, but rather a process of understanding and creating an aesthetic which reflects the current and historical image of society. As such, it is woefully inadequate to assume that cultural education can be achieved entirely within the confines of an educational institution. Families need to support cultural engagment, and parents in particular, have a responsibility not only to introduce cultural content to their children, but to seek to understand it themselves, with their children, in order to truly expose children to the whole process of cultural understanding.

Art is not an object, but a journey. Schools can assist cultural education, but until the hearts and minds of parents and the broader community are captured by culture, I hold little hope for the development of a dominantly creative and culturally articulate generation of school leavers.

Honestly, girls, get a grip. A chocolate bar costs a quid. Your passwords and private access data could release everything from your bank account details to your taxation records and health information. Get some understanding of the damages that social engineering can do, and for goodness sake, keep this kind of information absolutely secure.

But this is the same problem that faced the development of the internet over a decade ago. The promise of connectivity only became a reality when broadband became affordable and the social and usable tools of the Web 2.0 era began to emerge. For those of us building websites in 1994-1997 (and I was one of them) it was blindingly obvious to see how the accessibility of the web lended itself to information exchange and brought down the cost of access to information. But as advocates of new technologies, we lived through a period of doubt and refining of the technologies before we could demonstrate what we already understood about the WWW. And - to be blunt - some of that waiting period was effectively a form of waiting for people to die. Since 1995, all those business leaders who were technology doubters in their 50s and 60s have either been forced to adopt technology or they have retired. Now we're on to the next wave of doubters about social media, and to some extent this is an even tougher cookie to crack because the promise of connectivity and collaboration can potentially break down the natural authority developed by hierarchical decision making.

Essentially however, this is another generational window. In another 10 years, I'm confident there will not just be comfort in the notion of collaborative decision making, but there will be legal imperatives for transparent business decision making that go much further than current corporate governance recommendations.

And the thing is, as a business leader, I can say comfortably that there will always be authority in upper management, because it takes a particular personality to be able to look after the interests of a business, financially, socially, and strategically. What is needed is the kind of manager that will adapt to the idea of collaboration but will maintain a cognizance of the legal and social ramifications of responsibility for decisions made either hierarchically or collaboratively. Because ultimately, all the social media in the world is not going to take away the generations of business and trade law that will still identify a Director when business relationships and business productivity fails.

All that aside, I believe the most significant weakness in strategic analysis of social media is that the measurement techniques used are often completely inappropriate, and occasionally completely misread. Because there is no generally agreed technique for identifying an appropriate data analysis method for various iterations of social media, there is little basis for predicting future behaviour among users of social media, thus it is particularly difficult to determine how social media can be monetised or have sustainability over time. I'm still convinced that the problem with evaluating social media is more about the differences between value and utility, but I'm hoping to articulate this more clearly in my next book!