In my travels today I came across some articles about how Generation Y (people born in 1980's or 1990's) use Information Technology. I'm a Generation X'er myself, so Generation Y has always been something of a curiosity to me - as other generations always are, no matter which part of the timeline you come from. The first article that caught my eye was from an Australian IT magazine and it was about how Generation Y are much more prone to forming communities than previous generations. Here's an excerpt:
"Social researcher Hugh Mackay said yesterday that younger generations were herding together like never before, using new technologies such as SMS and email chatrooms to foster tight social bonds.
Having grown up knowing only "instability, uncertainty and unpredictability", Generation Y had instinctively drawn together to cope, Mr Mackay said. [...] "They are the most intensely tribal, herd-based generation of young Australians I've ever known."
The words "tribal" and "herd-based" are words you wouldn't normally use to describe a Generation X'er. We're mostly characterized as individualistic or selfish, lazy, and cynical towards society. In some respects those attitudes were a backlash against the flower-power idealism of the baby boomers, although I'm one of those who thinks environment - or context - has a lot to do with the values and attitudes that a person or group of people has. So Generation Y are both a product of the computerized environment of the 1990's onward and are also rebelling against the "bite me" attitude of Gen X by adopting a, well, a "hug me" attitude I suppose.
The aussie social researcher quoted above goes on to say:
"I'm not predicting a revolution but I think it's the early sign of a genuine culture shift away from individualism to a more communitarian kind of culture."
I'm not so sure that individualism is on the way out, because two-way web culture promotes freedom of choice and individual creativity. But we definitely are seeing mass market culture slowly but surely being replaced by niche markets - that is, small communities of people based on shared topics of interest. Nowadays we increasingly have a large collection of small communities (niches), rather than a small collection of large communities (mass market).
btw doesn't "communitarian" sound eerily close to "communism"? or is that me being cynical? ;-)
After reading the above article, I went searching for more and came across this article from Chief Learning Officer magazine on how Knowledge Management should cater to Generation Y. They concluded that Generation Y will expect the following 3 things from a KM system: real-time access, personalization, and community. They state:
"By the end of this decade we will have moved from a workforce that often has to be sold on e-learning to one that demands e-learning, knowledge management and communities of practice."
Then I came across Dina Mehta's latest post, about youth in Urban India. I found this very interesting, particularly regarding youth's preference for IM (Instant Messaging for you oldies) over email. Dina talks about:
"...an "always on" world which is facilitated by technology like IM, VOIP, forums, blogs and online journals (have you ever left a comment at a youth journal or blog - either at a specific post or on their guestboards, and noticed how very promptly you will get a response to your comment - not just from the author but from a whole host of readers ?), simple SMS to enhanced functions offered by new generation mobile phones. How this is impacting and changing the way youth thinks, communicates, and takes decisions. And the implications this might have for the future as they enter the workplace, bringing in their new "culture-of-use", and for marketers seeking to address this segment."
As I read this it occured to me how the field of Knowledge Management is undergoing a seachange right now. Knowledge Management has been a failure for Generation X from the 90's up till now and frankly most KM consultants haven't got a clue about the changes coming in Generation Y. The very changes that Dina summarises so well.
People in the blog world such as Dina know what's up, but if you look at professional KM articles elsewhere on the Web it's the same old same old. They continue to witter on about "leveraging" or "capturing" knowledge, how to uncover "tacit knowledge", and "optimizing operational efficiency". Frankly that sort of mumbo-jumbo annoys the heck out of me, but unless you talk that language you don't make any headway in the business world. If I look at this in a positive way, maybe that's my "niche" to explore. Knowledge Management for the 21st century, two-way web style.
In other news, Mark Bernstein wrote a good post today about the recent "bad behavior" of the blogosphere (the MT pricing scandal and the weblogs.com kerfuffle). The best piece of advice in his post was this:
"Slow down. Take the time to write well. Think things through. Relax."
This was a follow-up to Mark's previous post, where he said it would be preferable for people to respond to other bloggers in their own space (weblog), rather than leave comments in another person's weblog:
"Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses -- including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate."
It's interesting to note that Mark's advice seems to go against the grain of what Generation Y does - frequent comments on other blogs, using IM to converse instantly and in real time. So on the one hand Mark's advice is old-fashioned and out of touch with what 'the kids' do these days. But on the other hand I agree that we should learn to take deep breaths and compose thoughtful responses on our personal weblogs - instead of engaging in knife-fights on someone else's territory.
Related to this topic, I've just finished an experiment where I tried to publish a short and pithy post every day. Off-the-kuff things. It didn't work for me though, as I'm more comfortable writing long-form articles and pondering things before I post. But then I'm also more of an 'email' person than an 'IM' one. Perhaps there is a generation gap (I nearly said a 'disconnect', but that's a loaded term in the Web world). Whereas Gen Y like to send messages to their tribes in real-time, previous generations prefer to 'compose' their messages and 'publish' them when they're good and ready. If that's the case, is RSS Time fast enough for Gen Y's?
It's fun to be a Generalist, you get to explore a variety of different topics and it often makes for good blogging. People don't really know what to expect when they see a new Read/Write Web item in their RSS Aggregator (although given my current experiment to try and blog a "short and pithy" post every day, odds are that reader expectations have fallen somewhat). And that uncertainty, that "what the heck is he on about this time?" response that I'm sure you all have of me - or perhaps it's "what the heck is he on?" - you have to admit, it makes for interesting browsing ...sometimes... when I'm not crapping on about XHTML validation or some such boring thing.
Anyway... see I've digressed already. That just proves the point I was going to make before I got distracted - that generalists have short attention spans. The other point I want to make is that you can't earn a decent living out of being a Generalist. And you never really 'fit in' anywhere. Let me elucidate...
In my day job I'm a 'Web Producer'. What does this entail? Mainly mind-numbingly boring website maintenance. Why is this? You're an intelligent, analytical, innovative writer (I hear you saying, leaping to my defence as the loyal readers I know you are). Author of the 'Synchonicity Meme' currently doing the rounds of the blogosphere. Inventer of the Microcontent Wiki. The visionary who thought up the Fractal Blogosphere. Why is this highly intelligent person stuck doing menial jobs like creating online ASP forms and converting Visio diagrams to PDF 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week? Ok I'm exaggerating. But it's still a good question: why aren't I satisfied in my career? And the sad answer is: because I'm a Generalist.
But lest this turn into a self-pitying post, I should advise that some aspects of my job are interesting. Like managing the creation of a new Intranet for a subsidiary company in Australia, developing web strategies for one of the biggest private companies in New Zealand, and experimenting with wikis. But the reality is, because I'm a jack of all trades Generalist, too much of my time gets taken up doing menial Web things for business people - just because I can.
There's a name for this in rugby (New Zealand's national sport). The Utility Back. This is a player who can cover a number of positions in the backline - usually fullback, winger, centre, second-five, even the premier position of first-five. Now the Utility Back often gets picked in All Black test squads, because of his versatility. He can cover a few positions, should one of the specialists get injured or loses form. And a Utility Back is a perfect man to take on tour, for the same reason. So being a Utility Back is good for your career, in the beginning that is. But the problem is, once your career as a Utility Back is established - it becomes very very difficult to nail down a specialist position in the backline. So the Utility Back invariably finishes their career sitting on the bench, frustrated at not getting any play as a first-team regular. That's precisely what's happening to my career. And I've got to change - I need to specialize so I can wear the famous black jersey with the silver fern (oh wait a minute, that's another dream).
Being a Generalist is obvious too in my place in the "blogosphere". I tackle a lot of subjects: web design, web development, knowledge management, strategy, music, social software...the list goes on. Most bloggers are sensible and stick to the 2-3 topics that are dear to their heart. Topics that, in the Web Tech neighbourhood of the blogosphere at least, match their real-world jobs. Designers always talk about Design. Social Software researchers talk about social software. Developers talk about hating Microsoft. This is all very sensible. Pick a subject and specialize in it.
And birds of a feather stick together. Designers groom each others nests (er, I mean websites), developers peck away at their keyboards, researchers fly south to their conferences. What do I do? I like to think I'm Jonathan Livingston Seagull, free to do my own thing, but maybe I'm just a lost sparrow looking for breadcrumbs.
Well I resolve to limit my weblog topics to these:
- Strategy
- Knowledge Management
- Website Management (Planning & Implementation)
- Information Architecture
- Multimedia (to keep things interesting)
That's about as narrow as I can make it. Significantly I'll try not to focus on the following things, even though they're interests of mine and I'm competent at all of them:
- Web Design
- Programming
- Usability
- Topic Mapping (although one could argue it's a part of info architecture)
- XML
It's hard for a Natural Born Generalist to ignore topics, but the reality of today's supply/demand world is that one must focus on a niche. My niche is going to be Writing, Analysis, Strategy, Knowledge Management (which I think covers all the topics above that I said I'm sticking with). Focus, dude.
Incidentally when I was 11/12 years old, I was a star left winger in my rugby team (Hutt Valley Marist). I scored the most amount of tries that year and was named Player of the Year. I kicked the goals too. I was skilful and fast. And I really enjoyed my rugby at that time in my life. I loved being the star winger. Yes yes, I know I was only 11 - leave me with my childhood dreams though :-)
To sum up: I hearby declare to you, don't let your children grow up to be Generalists. Save them before it's too late. Teach them the value of specializing in niches. And if you see me indulging in things that aren't in my list of niche topics, write a scathing comment on my weblog.
For what it's worth, I've re-validated my homepage to conform to XHTML Transitional. Thanks to the people who left comments and emailed me about issues relating to validation. The two main culprits in validation always seem to be the '&' character and non-closed <br> tags. Joe Lindsay also pointed out an undefined html entity in (ironically) my post entitled Funk. That post title is ironic on so many levels :-) Anyway, in that case I changed the French character é from the entity é to it's numeric equivalent of é. Reminder to self: remember to use HTML Tidy.
I was going to leave a comment at Lucas Gonze's weblog, but I may as well use trackback and hope he sees this. Lucas posted a follow-up to his "whine that policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag". He is considering a form of community moderation (suggested by Seb Paquet). I thought "Jim" left an interesting comment in response to this. The last thing he said was:
"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"
This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?
How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.
Good timing Google! Adding search functionality to my site was on my To Do list for this month and Google has just announced a new AdSense for Search feature. It allows website owners to add a search box to their site and potentially earn some pocket money with ads that display with the search results. In the email Google sent me, they had an interesting turn-of-phrase:
"AdSense now offers the ability to monetize web and site search! WebSearch plus AdSense for search combines Google's powerful search with monetized and customizable search results pages. Simply placing the code on any web page that meets our program criteria will generate a WebSearch box, allowing users to search without leaving your site, and providing additional revenue for you."
Monetize?! Eh? Anyway tonight I added Google Search to my blog, in the header bar. I doubt I'll be "monetizing" much out of this, but I did need Search functionality so this is very handy. You can search my weblog or the World Wide Web. Give it a try :-)
Cool, I'm Feed of the Day at Feedster! btw regular readers may've noticed I'm posting more frequently now. Shorter, pithier posts. But I plan to continue the long-form entries too (like last nights). I'll see how this experiment goes...
Lucas Gonze, creator of WebJay, said today: "Policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag. The problem is that I have to impose my puritanism on others, which is absurd."
By "puritanism" I presume he means being morally pure and obeying the law of music copyright. Now, I like WebJay and admire its goals of making it easy for people to create and share music playlists. But as yet I've not been able to 'dig' it. Partly it's because I don't have broadband at home. But mostly it's because I can't legally link to the music that I like. That is, I can't create the playlists I want to because so much of the music I like isn't freely available on the Internet.
I'll give you an example. Recently I discovered a fantastic New Zealand band called Lucid3. They're a "funk-groove" rock n' roll band, fronted by a very talented woman called Victoria Girling-Butcher (singer/guitarist/songwriter). I discovered this band on a recent television music promotion for Play it Strange, a new charitable trust formed to encourage young kiwis "to make, and experiment in, music which will reflect NZ's unique characteristics, thereby encouraging creativity and innovation in NZ music". Play it Strange is a great initiative and to launch it they had a weekend-long showcase of New Zealand music on one of New Zealand's 3 major TV networks. Yes you heard right, 48 hours straight of NZ music on national free-to-air television! One of the advantages of living in a small country... that sort of thing would never happen in the US or UK (or even Australia for that matter, I suspect).
Anyway I saw Lucid3 during the Play it Strange launch and was blown away by them, so I bought their debut album Running Down The Keys. It's been out for a couple of years, so I'm slow off the mark. In fact their second album All Moments Leading To This was just released today and I intend to go and buy it at my earliest opportunity.
But, here's the thing. I can't point you to a legal full-length MP3 of any of Lucid3's singles. The best I can do is point you here, which has 45-second samples of some of their songs. And you can't really get the feel of this band within 45 seconds. They're a groove band, so almost by definition their songs take time to get into - because they're so laid back. And their songs are the kind that you need to hear in full to truly appreciate them, which is testament to Girling-Butcher's songwriting ability I think.
So even if I wanted to (and I do), I can't include Lucid3 and a lot of other kiwi bands in any WebJay playlist. It's frustrating for me as a user and it's frustrating to Lucas no doubt because it places limits on his service. But the thing which really gets me is that the band itself, Lucid3, is missing out on a pretty good opportunity for promoting their music to overseas punters. OK WebJay is a small drop in the sea in terms of numbers of users, but it's growing fast and you never know who is tuning in. Maybe the playlist which includes Lucid3 gets passed around the link chain of the Web and eventually a record company honcho in the States clicks on the link...
Some people have gotten around this moral dilemma. One example from my blogroll is Keith Robinson's Song of the Week feature. Every week Keith uploads a song he likes to his custom-built Flash-based application, so his readers can listen to it. It's a nifty little feature and he gets good feedback from his readers on it. But interestingly, he doesn't pay any licence fees for the songs and he's not overly concerned with the legalities of it. He says:
"I think as long as you stick to one song from an album and go no further than that my guess is you’ll be fine. I doubt the Performing Rights Society would go after you for something like this, but that is just a guess."
He also points out elsewhere that he's promoting the artist and essentially doing them a favour. I agree (see above), but I'm not so sure as Keith that using only one song from an album is a legal defense. I probably wouldn't get it away with it using NZ music. One of the disadvantages of living in a small country is that it'd be relatively easy for NZ music copyright authorities to track me down and punish me for my 'crime'.
By not having the opportunity to legally link to music for playlists or 'song of the week' purposes, the users of the websites lose, the owners of the websites lose, and most importantly the artists loses (it's essentially an opportunity cost). Who wins? The bloody lawyers of course.
Unless... unless Lucid3 give me permission to link to a couple of their full-length songs for a playlist. That would make me happy. Hope for a free culture springs eternal.
Don't worry I still like blogs ;-) I was thinking it would be amusing to change my name to The Artist Formally Known as Read/Write Web and write a post entitled 'Slave to RSS'. But that would be a bit silly. Besides, I don't have enough graphical ability to design a symbol! I do need a logo though...
mediaTIC blog from France linked to my Bore-osphere post yesterday. My message sounds much more arty in French (I love it!):
La blogosphere est-elle ennuyeuse?
Essai de définition de la bore-osphere par Richard MacManus.
In answer to all the blogs I've read today:
1. No I don't want a friggin' Gmail
account.
2. I don't want to read your opinion on Dave Winer closing down 3000 weblogs.com
blogs.
3. I don't even care about Firefox 0.9 being released.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood today. Sigh, I think I'll read a book tonight.
When I was a very young child, perhaps 5 or 6, I wrote a poem that got published in The Timaru Herald newspaper. My first published writing.
I think I may've dreamed recently that I'd found a copy of it on the Web. I can't recall (I'm not good at remembering dreams). Or maybe I saw the newspaper cutout not long ago, but I've since forgotten about it.
So tonight I tried to search for it online. However even though the Timaru Herald has archives dating back to June 1864, sadly my early poetic output is not on the Web. I'm hopeful that my parents kept the cutout. Right now it'd be all yellowy and dog-eared, maybe trapped inside an old photo album...
Here's what I think the poem was, accounting for fading memory:
There once was a spider
Fishing on the deck
The spider dropped its fishing rod
And shouted out "Aw heck!"
