The folksonification of the web is creating new methods for sensemaking. Tag clouds are everywhere now. They originated as a categorization identifier or label. Now the tag cloud method is being used for full text analysis — where every word becomes a tag.

For instance, the image below shows Chirag Mehta’s method for parsing presidential addresses using tag clouds.

I played with this a few weeks ago. While it’s very creative I can’t parallel process it — meaning there are no remnants of the data when you scroll across the timeline. To be very useful at comparisons I need to be able to compare across the timeline beyond what ghosts in my mind’s eye as I scroll through. Regardless, it’s a very creative and clever way to use the tag cloud method.

I applaud the New York Times, whose graphics I often critique, continually pump out new ways to interact with “the news” and information. Below is a more artistic rather than analytic approach to looking at Bush’s State of the Union history:

Gillette is a software company.

Hardware companies make money on infrequent higher margin items. Usually they involve productions systems built with large capital investment and are built to run as fast and error free as possible.

The best software companies build for design speed (as opposed to production/operational speed) and identification of errors. These errors or deficencies are then fixed or improved as quickly as possible and released back to the user base. They either run on a continuous subscription based model or charge for major updates/releases.

There is fertile ground to talk more about the distinctions, but most importantly, I want to draw out how the two companies differ regarding innovation (and how that manifests in increased revenue). The basic model of selling hardware — houses, appliances, cars, etc, involves a longer production, buying, and “service” value chain. It’s capital intensive, which induces a sort of efficiency intertia: if it ain’t broke, don’t fixt it.

Selling software — cereal (yes), digital applications, digital cable, etc, may involve intensive capital investment, but selling it means rapid prototyping and constantly introducing new value. Consumers really “consume” software. Its value is in its use rather than its possession. The mantra for selling software is rapid improvement, iteration, and change. The inertia is stuck on “different” — it’s the ball in motion to the hardware’s ball at rest.

The way to apply this distinction is to try to define your company — put it in one of the boxes. Then imagine if you flipped — that as a car manufacturer you became a software company instead of a hardware company. How would you operate differently? What would be different about the organization? How would you make money? Where and how would you invest R&D budgets? Marketing and sales?

Gillette really turned a hardware business model into a software model. They are wildly successful and demand huge premiums on what was considered a commodity — a series of sharpened metal edges mounted in plastic. The key is that they didn’t just build a product to wear out (some would say we need to design our hardware to fail earlier so people will have to repurchase), they actually improved the use through software. They could be better though… they could extend the software metaphor further by allowing backwards compatability to a point that it no longer made sense. All the heads should work on all the bodies unless the connection mechanism changed to improve performance (as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any innovation on how the razor head attaches to the handle). Imagine them stretching the metaphor even further — what would Gillette as an open source software company look like? How could they design in Web2.0 patterns into the blades? I’m reaching… but you get the point.

There is a company who already thinks like this: Doblin. They have a pdf that outlines a strategy to create business concepts. Even if you are a hardware company (or expand the spectrum to the full array of business models), you can take advantage of software company processes like rapid prototyping. Before you invest to change capital-intensive systems, you can concept artifacts and experieces to evaluate innovation opportunities. You can innovate your business model with very little investment.

The key in initiating something new and different is to find metaphors that link the unknown to the known. Revolutionary items don’t have much of a link to the present — they usually destroy the value of the current system. This is difficult to manage both internal and external to a company (investing, changing, and building in a current organization — and then conveying that to consumers of the product).

All this stems from thinking about the iPhone… Jobs tried to use the metaphor of a do-it-all device. I’m not sure that’s the best metaphor. Consumers have to value the idea of a do-it-all device. Simple is better. I’ll try to come up with better use metaphors for the iPhone.

It’s difficult to perceive the world in new and different ways. CES, Macworld, hundreds of blogs, my clients, my co-workers, my friends create my homophilous network of stimuli. I see the value of the subtle improvements in the UI of a website, the features and functions of a new mobile device, the social impact of Second Life. But it’s all about context.

I spent the weekend in a small town (18,000 pop) in southern Illinois. My wife and I visited my Grandma. I don’t think she’s ever used a computer and has no desire to. I, on the other hand, jonesed for a web-fix and couldn’t find the wifi network my brother claimed he found last time his family visited Grandma. So early Saturday morning I headed out to a coffee shop we always pass on the way to Grandma’s from the highway. I remember it for its name “The Common Ground” and that it advertises “Free Wifi.”

I bought a cup of coffee, fired up the laptop, got good signal strength from the the access point, but no dice on connecting to the Internet. I moved around to different tables and got odd stares from a group of three older men sizing up the new guy. Without success and two large cups of coffee later, I went to plan b. On that same stretch of road the coffee shop is on so too sit tens of gas stations and fast food joints. I had also filed away the advertisement that scrolls on a big LED on the Dairy Queen roadsign: “Free Wifi.”

I drove into a parking spot, laptop still on, and was successfully browsing. I went inside, got a $.79 cup of coffee (in a little diner-style plastic mug they kept refilling), and settled myself into an old wood both. The place was buzzing with customers, all aged 65+. One man, who I later learned was the town’s Wal Mart Greeter, chatted me up about Apple. He had purchased a working iMac (who knows what variant) for 5 bucks and was running OS 9 on it (he purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale). He had an odd mix of seemingly deep knowledge of technology and a naivete regarding its use.

After getting muscled out of my first seat by a 70 year-old woman defending her Saturday morning breakfast club’s area, I continued to check email, read my feeds, and surf a little while taking in the community that was Dairy Queen on Saturday morning in a small town in southern Illinois.

What made the Dairy Queen an actual hive of activity, of relationship, of comfort? More puzzling, when I followed up on Sunday, following the same routine, I was the only customer there for the first 20 minutes or so. The weather was bad, but more likely, I think the community locus that morning centered around the town churches.

As we, who make our lives thinking and building digital communities and experiences of the future, pontificate about the value and the patterns of community building it’s worth changing perspective now and again and looking deeper at the aspects of aliveness that exist in the enduring forms of human connection and communication. I think there is a lot of value at looking at the Late Adopters and Rejectors to see how they live without our innovations…

I’m a little over a hundred pages into Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine and came across this gem:

To understand how our thinking works, we must study each of those “very different things” and then ask what kinds of machinery could accomplish some or all of them. In other words, we must try to design — as opposed to define — machines that can do what humans do.

In my words, he’s taking about Designing to Define. I think that is an apt way to describe an interesting philosophy of doing to learn. In the software community the closest thing is rapid releases, rapid prototyping, etc. But what I’m talking about isn’t designing to improve — it’s designing to learn. That is something I’m not sure that product companies do intentionally. Maybe I’m wrong. But even if they’re not doing it now, they will (and those that are – you’re a step or two ahead).

Marketers, especially those of the direct variety, have always done this to some degree — if they do it right. On a very basic level they understand the values and motives of consumers through emergent design — the audience, the offer, the creative, endlessly reformulated in small increments, a plodding evolutionary approach. What makes that world complex, however, is 1) the spectrum of sophistication (or lack thereof) of other companies’ approaches and 2) the pure volume and breadth of direct marketing communication. Very few marketers actually take into account what else people are getting in their mail as a part of the audience, offer, creative equation. They don’t completely define context.

It is the proper atomization or disaggregation into component parts that is the difficult part of Designing to Define. I don’t have to understand all the workings and innards of a complex system, but rather I want to design a system that elicits the outcomes I desire in the appropriate contexts. Therefore:
1. I must be clear about my intended outcome(s)
2. I must understand the relevant components of context
3. I must be able to break the design features into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive parts

Doesn’t seem so easy when broken out that way. But the fourth element of DtoD is iteration. The outcomes, context, and design components must all be quantified and measured — then coupled in iterative ways that improve outcomes, are either specialized for specific contexts or rigorous enough for most contexts, and reduce time and cost of design and production.

I know. You’re thinking: this isn’t anything new. This is the scientific method. And I agree. But instead of designing experiments, just design products and services that are emergent and experimental while delivering value. Make the emergent qualities part of the value and assets of the company. You’ll get closer to actual “use contexts”, shorten the time to learn, reduce R&D costs in the long run, and make competively differentiated products and services that people use and will increasingly value.

I’ve been a Location-Based Services (LBS) enthusiast for a while—at least conceptually. I’m sure a lot of that enthusiasm starts with my history as a navigator in the navy. I used multiple forms of positioning – from “shooting” stars, sun lines, and moon lines to visual line of bearings to advancing dead reckoning lines to RADAR ranges to plotting coordinates from GPS. These positions were plotted on paper charts of varying scales and projections, grease penciled on to a RADAR scope, entered into the ship’s computer system to be transformed into data for all the necessary operational services, etc. Absolute and relative position (where relative can mean a host of things), along with time, are some of the most critical data points for any military unit. All the “services” units provide are beholden to this data.

The key in all of this, especially when it comes to mapping or visualizing location data, is the context of use. A GigaOM post started off this chain of thinking this morning. I think about context because all of the mapping services discussed in the post, including Google API’s, etc, are concentrating more on the data imposed on the maps, rather than the context of use. This same thinking is limiting LBS in the broader sense. While child finding, friend radar, and routing are interesting and useful services, they aren’t really context specific.

When I talk about context, however, I’m talking about it in a different way than Ferhenbacher. She states:

But set apart from those real-time mobile tracking applications, geotagging is a more subtle way to leverage location as a way to share content or connect with a community. Location is the context, not the end goal.

Location definitely provides a piece of context – but is far from BEING context. I’m not sure the killer LBS or apps are going to be about sharing content or connecting with a community. LBS of that ilk will be incremental at best. I think true innovation will be much more context specific.

I’ll lay out the elements of where that might go in the full post (follow the link below).
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