Cubegeek

How Google Becomes Lorite

What Google is extraordinarily good at is evolving the metadata of search. It knows how to search so many things so well, that it can begin to be thought of as an association machine. It's quite robust, and it is doing so on a completely unbounded problem - that of finding anything in the entire domain of the internet. But what if you added bounds to that problem and allowed Google to add additional and interactive metadata to that of some small bit of expertise?  Would it scale semantically?

What I have in mind, of course, is the Lorite Interrogator, which is like one of Iain M Banks' drones connected to a ship mind and assigned to your protection. It can know human information - all of it. But specifically, the Lorite Interrogator will find your affinity toward philosophical systems of thought and help you to know the logical conclusions of all of your assumptions about the world. I'm not sure, but I think this is a sort of Kantian proposition.

Right off the top of my head, I think that some weighted graph between questions and answers might be the appropriate metadata. There would then need to be some self-evolution involved that helps such a system recognize relevant questions. So far, I think Google can do this, but is a bit more linear than a human being might be. If I asked the basic question, "Is prostitution good?" Where would we start? What we find is that people ask that question in any number of contexts. So it is the management of question context that is where our metadata needs bucking up. A philosophical framework is what we need, and thus some way to take all of the sentences and premises and conclusions and link them together. It is search plus metadata, and Google has shown that it can be scaled up. Computationally, there isn't a problem. It's just getting some way to get many eyeballs looking for those kinds of answers and diverting some slice of all of Googality in that semantic direction.

 

 

The Journalism Problem

Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.

It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.

The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.

What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.

The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?

You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.

Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.

If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.

Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.

--

Here's the technical view:

• Curt Monash on Ike Pigott
  
• Information Ecosystem Framework
• Retention of Everything

Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.

It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.

The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.

What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.

The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?

You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.

Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.

If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.

Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.

--

Here's the technical view:

• Curt Monash on Ike Pigott
  
• Information Ecosystem Framework
• Retention of Everything

A Note About Reputation

Craig Newmark of Craigslist is thinking about a better way to solve the world's problems. Let me state an important rule that everybody seems to forget.

I don't trust you and you are not my friend. But.

If I can't say this at any time about anybody then all of the reputation management that we have in social software begins to resemble that episode of the Twilight Zone where little Anthony Fremont was the king of the world and because of his powers, he made everybody act happy all of the time. That's what Facebook is becoming - a shiny happy place full of people you can't get rid of. I think it's kinda creepy when everybody can only vote to like you.

Chris Hughes is another chap out to change the world for the better with a venture called Jumo. My first piece of advice to him is that if he expects to do global development the first thing he needs is an online distributed way to develop global consensus. It's going to be impossible until he builds an XRepublic sort of system. And one of the keys to the success of an XRepublic sort of system is reputation management.

Why don't I like you? Well, it's not that I don't like you - it's that I know you and I can only trust you in certain ways. How do I trust you? Let me count the ways.

I can trust you with my girlfriend, but I can't trust you with my car. You're an honest sort of fellow, but you honestly cannot drive worth beans. You have impeccable taste in restaurants, but really, you're a slob.

Now how many websites would I have to check you out at before I can make sense of all that. Match.com, jalopnic, yelp and where else? This is the problem. All of these social websites are one-dimensional. And even that super-duper dating sight looks at 23 dimensions of what? Stuff that gets you towards a single end, LoveRomanceMarriage. So if it takes six months for you folks to find a date, how long is it going to take you to change the world?

It seems to me, primarily because I'm an amateur philosopher, that if you don't go directly for the jugulars of religion, politics, class, language and money, you are only playing suburban weekend games. How am I going to get a Sikh in Iran to trust and give support to a Hindu in the Sudan? Think you can negotiate that reputation via email or a conference call? This is another case for a system I'd like to see called a Lorite Interrogator. It would help us to understand the possibilities and the difficulties of starting and maintaining relationships of trust. Worldviews in conflict can negotiate on narrow planes of agreement, but they don't have to be friends.

There's nothing more repulsive to me than listening to pro atheletes apologize for their indiscretions off the field. I don't care what Tiger Woods does in bed, I care what he does on the golf course. Everybody is offensive to somebody in some way but very valuable in another way. Our media coverage is all wrong because it needs star quality to sell. The star quality has become more important than the skill quality.

We don't trust the mainstream media primarily because they try to turn all of our diverse skills and qualities into something palatable for everyone. The fewer qualities we capture in the digital world, the more we follow in those shallow footsteps.

The Secure Document Web

The problem with Web 2.0 is that people thought they could reinvent the entire thing. That's crazy. One should expect a heterogeneous web from this point forward. The browser vendors can handle it. So let me propose a sub-web. What I have in mind is something to save journalism, although what happens to newspapers, I don't care. I do care about good writers, and I care about the writers that good writers care about. See where I'm going?

This sub-web works on three principles.

The first principle is that your basic document is secure. It is not only secure itself, but can be internally fractionally secured. So imagine it's a PDF - let's say version 12. So the author of this document can control what part of it is free to copy and what part is not. Let's remember something. Some huge fraction of all the bleeding of the universe of online journalism is done with copy and paste. It's so obvious that that has been disable-able in PDFs for years. OK so now people will do print-screens. Are the people at Adobe so incompetent that they cannot get Microsoft to disable that function in Windows? If you were the NYTimes, how much would you pay? Exactly. Done.

Back to the document. Attributes of the document can be free or micropayments. The document itself could be virtual such that acles to it are server based, just like the streamy stuff on YouTube and elsewhere. The whole document could be a plug-in based deal. Like Acrobat.

The next principle is an adaptation of another existing technology, PGP. Excepting that it's a kind of Twitterized PGP. You subscribe to a feed of news or documents or authors or subject matters. When you're legit in the system, you get your feeds with the abstracts at Twitter length. The embedded bit.ly style links do authentication to you. Maybe it's a penny a read. But you only get keys to documents because you have a key yourself.

So as an author, I publish to a feed, I encrypt my document with its compartmentalized content via my public key, or however that's done in PGP and the unique key for the document which is available to subscribers. Click and you get the document key the secure doc decrypts in your client. You can't copy or paste or screen print it.

Complicated enough?

Third and final piece is reputation management and network effects / link analysis.

All I need is to start with a reputable blog, say American Thinker or First Things. Then I follow trackbacks. What's new is that I am known as a reader because I am a subscriber.

You know I thought about this before, two years ago in fact. It was all about securing RSS. I was dealing with that clusterbomb Sharepoint, and like most people who understood the blogosphere, I couldn't stand it. But the one thing that the blogosphere does not have is a way to secure RSS. Really that's all that is needed.

Let me add that 95% of what newspapers want is a scoop. So all of the security I'm talking about only really needs to exist for a short period of time. I know Schneier would slap me for adding that wrinkle because to make a restricted item self-expiring invites clock spoofing. Maybe we can leave it locked down. But I think there's something to that, even if it just means changing the price.

I will add one more thing, which is that this micropayment stuff already works, and I can't imagine that Lexis does business without it. All that is necessary is to scale what they do in the open. On my political blog, I get paid by several aggregators, including Amazon for my Kindle subscribers. It takes me two months to reach a threshold where I actually get money sent to my PayPal, but I trust their accounting, and it works today. But I digress.

The trick is to keep the reputation management fresh. It has to be authoritative. There has to be some sort of certification that involves something more than just Digg-like popularity, or Wiki-like persistence. There need to be key authoritarians in the chain, people who would certify. And there needs to be limits on how far those certs can go. This is the trickiest part. It's something I'm sorta working on at home with my kids' curfew. Whose house do we trust them at? And how far do we trust the friends of friends?

If you look at something like XBox Live, you meet almost nobody with anything but a five star reputation. People who get PNG'd just buy a new subscription under a new name. Hmm. Like I said. Tricky.

--

Deal Architect talks about Twitter vs RSS. I take RSS.

Bumptop & Manual Labor

There's a new cool pen-centric GUI out there called Bumptop. I just learned about it half an hour ago and it reminds me of Glasstop, my BI centric 'surface computing' multitouch metaphor. 

But here's the real kicker. The more I think about Glasstop and reread it, the more I think about the possible conversion of computing to manual labor metaphors. Here's the short version of the thought. When the Wii came out, a bunch of people thought it would be a good idea to transform all of the gaming metaphor to that. I said no way. I now have a Wii and I don't like it but primarily because I haven't bothered getting a grownup game on it. But the real objection I had was that I like games that exercise fine motor control. There's something about a driving game or a first person shooter that allows me to be very precise with my thumbs and I like that. And of course if you talk to any PC gamer about consoles the first thing they will tell you is that there's no way they can exercise as much control over their avatars with their thumbs as with the combination of mouse and keyboard. 

But most of this is, when you think about it, a very small subset of what hands can be trained to do. Which is why I think about assembly line workers and musicians when I think about the future of computer GUIs. If and when we perfect some fine and large and quick motion capture for the hands - which I think will happen first with multitouch and multitouch plus pens, we are going to really revolutionize the kinds of things we can do, thinking more like musicians do in dealing with data.

For me it's about dealing with data, with diving through and manipulating huge datasets finding patterns, sorting, simulating, issuing commands, putting together sparse pieces of information from a broad selection. It's what I do now, but with very simple typewriter & television metaphors in browsers, spreadsheets and query tools. 

While I'm speculating about the future let me pull in one more idea which is something somebody said today about the problem with Google and generalized search. They keep trying to contextualize free text, and it simply is not going to work in the long run. In the end, we really want to be spoon fed by experts. Please keep that in mind. Google is a giant leap forward, but it's free for a reason. It can be. But debriefing a CIA agent will always be expensive and exclusive for the same reason sitting in a classroom with a real professor is more expensive than just getting the syllabus and the books. A lot of the computer assisted stuff is going to be free. 

Search is commodity. Human structured data in KM domains with specific UIs is the high end future. Ask Bloomberg.

On Complexity & Emergent Behavior

Riffing off Tim Burke:

There is a fundamental problem with building efficiencies into systems. There are essentially, with regard to white collar productivity, two schools of thought, Deming and Hammer. Deming for constant quality improvement and Hammer for business process re-engineering.

The Deming approach requires a certain understanding of the process in which all workers are engaged. From the standpoint of a software designer, it can all be conceptualized in terms of a workflow. Person A has tasks 1,2,3 Person B with function X has tasks 4,5. Task 4 requires 2, etc on down the line. The willingness of software engineers to absorb the details of workflows in business is highly limited - and the ability of managers of such processes to communicate their complexity and possible efficiencies and chokepoints, etc. is also highly limited. Furthermore the willingness for software engineers and business managers to deal with each other on a long-term basis is slight. Both see their time more profitably spent elsewhere. This is especially costly to the Deming scenario, and so what generally happens is a Hammer implementation.

This does damage to the process by obviating some complexity. So you actually have more complex and new systems shoved into a process which is actually dumbed down because of the communications limitations of managers and engineers. Then what ends up happening is that those employees in the process chain make up the difference by partially working with, and partially working around the new system in ways they have no incentive to explain, and often in ways their managers are unaware of. The outputs of these systems as well as their inputs may be manipulated because those processes to which information technology is applied are rarely end to end systems. So there is a complex adaptive dynamism at work and in the end describing these systems are like describing the flow of molecules of water down a stream. They are chaotic, somewhat random, extraordinarily complex, yet at a macro level comprehensible and predictable.

Once a system becomes predictable at a macro level it gets frozen into place as the practice of the business with all of the inefficiencies and mysteries locked in.

And then the boss changes and all of the internal stresses on the system lose particular incentives.

Systems engineers generally don’t have patience for such matters as conventions of using three employees to do a job that one person with an improved system could do. In the process of conceptualizing the system they are responsible for improving through information technology, they will be introduced to more information about the process than those people we call ‘functional people’ aka staff. This generally causes tension and a resistance for staffers to be forthcoming about those skills which be rendered obsolete.

Furthermore systems engineers have incentives to build generally applicable systems. Laziness is good quality, that is to say that re-usable systems which might be applicable to multiple businesses and their processes are always seen as more valuable to one-off custom systems.

Business managers generally don’t have patience or tolerance for such systems which make transparent the operations of their staff. There are often common sense improvements that can be made which exposes them or their superiors to an embarrassment.

In general, business process improvement / re-engineering projects and deliverables benefit most from being transparent and self-explanatory. You want God powers immediately and you want control over as many aspects as possible. However once these aspects of the system are established you want them to respond to the changing nature of the business. There is a fundamental conflict between thoroughness, time to implement and adaptability. Pick two.

Gaming environments on the other hand tend to be hermetic, even in sandboxes. There are certain aspects of the system which gives it a specific feel which must be maintained in order to keep it interesting and within a genre. The value of a game is in having a play value that keeps someone progressing towards a God level which must be entertainingly hidden. Emergent behavior in games is entirely desirable. In business systems it is discouraged.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time

There's something about soccer that best captures the spirit of HD television. But I have to tell you that a lot of sports is looking really good this season. I've been watching and recording the HD broadcasts on Universal HD and they are spectacular. Until I speed them up, and then I realize I don't know what I'm watching.

For a moment this morning I had an insight about machine intelligence from the Culture. I was fast forwarding through a bunch of commercials and then through some of the soccer game, and I realized that I was catching a bit more information on HD than I used to on the standard definition Tivo I used to own. But I was surely at the limits of human comprehensibility - there was no way possible for me to make sense of the soccer game itself. I could only recognize that it was a soccer game and nothing more, even though it was not literally a blur - several images were clear as stills - I couldn't process it with my organic brain as fast as the DVR could play it.

Suddenly I remembered a conversation between ships from 'The Excession' in which they had decided to take some action after a discussion that went for several pages in the book. But one of the ships suggested that before they do, that they ask their passengers what they thought, after all things had changed. One ship objected saying that it had polled the passengers 2 minutes ago and they had assented to go. The other said, well you know how long it takes them to decide things. You have to give them time to think.

A comic routine I heard on XM 150 the other day made a running joke about the common excuse 'It seemed like a good idea at the time'. It is the ultimate excuse. There are a lot of reasons that our human psychology makes the decisions it does, we are subject to certain inevitable biases, not the least of which is that we often make patterns that don't exist. We make errors in cognition due to a lack of time or focus or based on irrelevant data that somehow seems relevant at the time. For example, this very blog piece started off as something about the Olympics, but it is actually more interesting (now) as a thought piece on human vs machine cognition.

Being in the BI community, it is my job to see how machines can help humans make better decisions. The better I understand the business, the better I can tailor the system I'm building to assist the a limited scope of decisions to be made by the audience. When I described my gig to Unk last week, I got down to a specific job that I'm doing for a specific customer. It turned out that he had a similar issue during his days shuffling budgets as an administrator - and so he actually repeated that case back to me flawlessly.

There are lots of reasons we decide poorly, but when we are under time pressure, I think that is the reason we make the most mistakes. I'd make a final observation which is that some folks decide forcefully but then are amended quickly. That tends to be my decision making style - to set up a framework in which a good number of choices can be taken (in a fast OODA loop context) and harness as many observers in the process as possible. The quick decision coupled with authoritarian style can be very effective within organizations, but also dead wrong. In a proper framework, quickly wrong, might not be so bad.

Speed is key.

Self-Organizing Suppliers

I met an interestingly brilliant cat last night over Vietnamese in Cleveland. Valdis Krebs has been the keeper of magical algorithms with great powers over sparse matrices for many decades. He has turned it into a franchise of social network analysis, and it has taken him far and wide. Among the many things we discussed last evening was how networks of talented individuals seem to be self-organized in various industries and how they are locked out in others.

The conversation wound around to disintermediation via computer networks and re-intermediation by better networks. So we compared and contrasted Chicago Mafiosi, Detroit Automakers and Hollywood Producers. On the one hand in movie production, there is no grand plan from the top down that makes the hiring and firing and assembling of grips and cameramen and SFX techs and caterers. Instead, word gets around that a film will be shooting and somewhere in dozen restaurants, clubs, parties and soirees, people get to talking about whom they have worked with before and with who they wish to work again. There's not even a Craigslist - you either know Craig and he wants to work with you or not. The same thing happens with the Mob, except the conversations take place among fewer people in less public places. In automobile manufacture and supply, it's a top down function and there is no open networking amongst potential members.

What fleetingly passed through my head was the following idea - I think it has to do with the amount of quality control guaranteed by the market maker. But before I could speak out, he gave a counter-example of Toyota. At one point, some Toyota supplier's plant burned to the ground. Toyota had to find a new supplier for the parts and processes that went on. It turned out that the other suppliers found a way to communicate, build the same part to spec and then back off while the original supplier rebuilt. Toyota suppliers work that closely together. Ford suppliers on the other hand would engage in a bidding war to get contracts. So the owner of the distribution and branding, be they Toyota or Ford can profit on one hand, by forcing price competition in their supply chain, or by encouraging knowledge sharing. It seems to be a question of quality vs cost. In other words competitors, depending on the market maker, can be made to be cutthroat on cost and proprietary, or collaboratively redundant. The latter seems to be the more robust model. At the same time, I know that Toyota gradually reduces the number of suppliers it will certify over time. It's sort of a well-capitalized open source partnership.

The other idea that ran through my head was that in the end, even though you may do your bit perfectly, there is no telling whether or not the product you participate in building will be a success. I kind of figured this out in detail when considering the Hollywood work ethic. I observed the following in January of 2005:

After the set with Wolff last evening, I got into one of those strange situations which is the Hollywood conversation. A couple of cool dudes and several musicians were hanging back and talking with Wolff while Pops did his thing and pressed up for an autograph. Pops doing his thing is a rather unique experience, because when I'm around it means a graceful and proper introduction. It has a continuing strange and powerful effect on me even though he's done it hundreds of times throughout my life. My father always introduces me to people as if I were the most important person in the world, and he makes everyone feel it, especially me. I have yet to become deft enough to evade the implications of my introductions; I'm not sure I want to.

But I'm a scientist at heart. I'm an explorer come to map and digitize, to survey vast areas and find their centers of gravity. I am perceptive and articulate, and I judge. Such are character strengths in my line of work although my manner of doing so makes me appear to be arrogant in just about every other endeavor. My professional demeanor is both aggressive and conservative. My job is to understand problems and deliver solutions - to take mind numbing complexity and make promises that A = A at the end of the day.

So it is very difficult for me to talk about what music and other creative productions do, and in the company of musicians and creatives, I lack the technical vocabulary to last in any conversation about the subject at hand. My aim is not to deliver criticism, nor to be a cloying fan, but to collaborate, to clap or hoot on the backbeat at just the right time during the performance. And when I think about what a extraordinarily fine joint Catalina's is, to figure out how I could finance one in Beijing.

But I have started to become aware of how it is that creatives talk about their work understanding that there is no objective standard for it. In contrast, when you are 'a techie' the aims of performance are clear, and what you know in every situation is that when you are presented with a piece of code or a system that it must submit to both real time and forensic examination. At the end of the day, a good system is good in the same way to everyone who can understand it and fulfills the same needs everywhere it can be appreciated. But there is no such ubiquity of appreciation in music or film. And it is because of this that I have just begun to appreciate the ways in which the Hollywood types talk about each other.

It appears to me that for the Hollywood creative, the only constant is dedication to craft and reconciliation with self. So conversations about relationships employ references to the work in a veiled way. The overt narrative is about workmanship and relationships between working people, but only the subtext is about the work itself.

So I think of musicians and other talented professionals something alike. After 20 years of doing it, you have an almost commodity skill, but only among a chosen few. It gets less and less interesting to talk about the work itself and more interesting to talk about the people and the gig. When I think about it, when have you ever heard an interview with Keith Richards about some trouble he might have playing 64th notes? It's all about the engagement.

This sets up an interesting problem that I haven't worked out in my own industry. As I mentioned, I have two and a half blogs dedicated to technology in my industry. One is my own that I keep perfectly private. It includes all sorts of details from customers, tips and techniques I have in my own bag that I occasionally refer to. The second is this blog, Cubegeek in which I tend to talk more about the industry and bigger ideas than getting down to my own proprietary ideas. The half is my current events blog Cobb, in which I talk about personal tech in passing but almost nothing specific to the industry.

What to reveal? What to hold close? It's a very difficult question for a me as a practitioner because it's difficult to tell what Oracle's manner is going to be in dealing with its service suppliers. Will they be a Ford or will they be a Toyota, or will they go a third way? It's hard to tell, and so I remain mostly proprietary - even though I know that if I spilled my guts on this blog it would probably be good for the industry and certainly for my colleagues.