My initial reaction was there is no excapite meme. If anything in retrospect the problem with the excapite experiment was the objective was to create patterns of meaning by generating a new meme per day.

Upon reflection I think maybe if an excapite meme does exists then it is simply this: The ideas and myths we have created about the value and impact of the Internet, the MobCon and the So.Me are worth examining, testing and exploring to their logical – and in some cases illogical – conclusion… regardless of where those ideas may take us.

With that in mind I thought I would update the roadmap from Metcalfe Law to Chaos Theory with a few of the new ideas we have been exploring in more recent times. e.g. Thinking about Marshall McLuhan and the emergence of the Time Wallet, The Long Tale of the Zipf Curve, The fauxion will be an endless mashup, Just how efficient are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as Real Time Media Channels?, If you are the product. Who’s buying?, You say you want a fauxion? and In the future which box do you want to call home?

Needless to say, just like the original mashup, it means something to me but I suspect that by now I have lost most of you in translation.

Unfortunately by doing so you are missing out on te 100+ posts that have been published on the new blog (See excapite)

If you have registered over the past 2 months, or have yet to update your reader with the new feed, here are the links you need to make the transfer.

ATOM Feed or RSS

Again. Thanks for your ongoing interest and support.

With Steve Jobs officially calling it a day it seems like a good a time as any to call it a day on the Excapite experiment here on WordPress.

After all if Steve Jobs has one lesson to teach all us is it is the science of execution rather than the art of ideas that counts more when it comes to being successful in business.

But don’t despair if you are still seeking your weekly fix of MobCon Theory and the Fauxionary economics of the So.Me. I am in the process of moving the blog across to Blogger. The primary reason being the iPad app for WordPress in basically unusable and the web interface is not much better. Plus the stats engine on Blogger appears to be better.

The latest post explores the economics behind  Marc Anderssen’s Why software is eating the world and discovers (somewhat surprisingly) that the business models of the Web 2.0 start-ups are no more efficient (indeed most appear to be less efficient) than their “old school” equivalents.

You can read the post here… The business of profiting from bits.

But I guess that’s what convergence is all about. Industries coming together to think the same way and operate using the same methodologies.

A kind of media tech nirvana if you like where the winners will be the most talented, agile, fleet of foot, innovative group of youngsters in the game. Right?

Wrong. While everybody is chasing the group think the next generation of winners will be those who think differently.

This isn’t to suggest that the old advertising, media and tech companies will survive by just doing what they have always done. It is merely to suggest that it will become very crowded in this convergence space if everybody is thinking and doing the same thing.

In the end the reason I think this model will fail is because the existing players in the media and tech landscape will struggle to attract the best young talent.

Take the advertising industry for example. Throughout the 20th Century advertising attracted the best young talent not because these energetic young minds wanted to make TV Commercials or Glossy Magazine Ads. In reality they wanted to make Films, write books, have their own radio shows, make pop music or photograph magazine fashion spreads. They wanted to make media their way. The reason they chose advertising is because they couldn’t afford to do any of these things. The barriers to entry were simply just to high.

What advertising allowed them to do was to leverage other people’s money to explore their ideas and their art. The result was a generation of campaign advertising where Art was tagged with a brand.

Today those barriers to entry simply no longer exist. Information technology has brought the cost of entry down to practically zero. Today anyone can take photographs, make films, write an eBook… etc and then distribute them on the web. The best compete with the worst for their 15 seconds of fame.

The same applies to the established technology brands. It doesn’t really matter if its hardware or software. The barrier to entry are negligible. So why aspire to spend your day in a cubical when you can sweat it out with your mates in your own garage band?

The reason traditional media, advertising and now information technology struggle to attract the most talented, agile, fleet of foot, innovative group of youngsters in the game is simply because they just don’t need to be there to do the things they want to do with their lives. Either today or tomorrow. They just don’t need their ideas, their technology or their art to be branded anymore.

“We are living in an increasingly post-idea world, a world … [where] Bold ideas are almost passé.” – Neal Gabler The Elusive Big Idea The New York Times.

Yep I’m a week late on taking a look at this one and I think Neiman Labs have probably already nailed the qualified response (i.e. “the essay’s wrong, actually, in an interesting way. Gabler is making a big assumption: that the Big Idea is Big precisely because it is, actually, big — largely acknowledged, largely apprehended, largely accepted“) but what interests me is the connection Gabler has made between the end of the big idea and the rise of the internet.

After all the internet was born out of the big ideas that fueled post-modernism. A cultural revolution that dealt in the currency of collage, chance, anarchy, repetition (see Prospect Magazine’s Postmodernism is dead). So perhaps simply because of its DNA (i.e. the great grand child of Dadaism) the internet  was never really going to be a forum for exploring big ideas? maybe it was always going to be about collage, chance, anarchy and repetition of existing ideas (i.e. From Dada to Gaga)?

So perhaps the biggest idea we have today (i.e the Internet) is in reality just a hyper connected mash-up of all our yesterdays reconstructed as tomorrows? The intellectual equivalent of Dorian Gray if you like.

For the internet to qualify as a big idea it has to take us to places we have never been before.

The question is has it done that? Has the internet delivered to us a hyper-yesterday or a new tomorrow?

Take Web 2.0 or what I like to call the So.Me for example. Here is a post-post-modern (i.e. Modern Rococo: MoRoCo) mash-up of old ideas about the value of networks, influence, conversations and listening wrapped up into a compelling story of self organising communities. A virtual world where social actions speak louder than words and pictures.

In reality we haven’t so much as created a new social construct for tomorrow but a mirror of our fractured reality today. A virtual scrapbook of post modern life’s hopes, fears and discontents. More a frenzy of activity sans thought than a global forum for exploring big ideas.

“If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?” – Jarad Lanier quoted in the New Yorker article The Visionary

The same goes for the future of the software industry. For all Marc Anderssen rhetoric in the WSJ today (Think Why software is eating the world) the stark reality is the software industry today is now facing the same “Analog Dollars = Digital Pennies” commercial pressures that the media industry failed to address 10-15 years ago. These new technology start-ups that Anderssen so vigorously claims are disrupting the real world are in most cases merely disrupting the established players in the software market by offering niche application and/or data mash-ups in the cloud for free or at a fraction of the price. Not so much a new way of doing business. Just a new way of distributing and connecting to the information that invariably drives down the costs of doing business (at least once you remove the transport costs and the bi-annual investment in new gadgets out of the equation).

So we are not seeing wholesale innovation or renewal in the software sector. Just the inevitable maturity in the product cycle driving the shelf price of COTS to zero.

Here again is an industry that is surprisingly running on empty when it comes to big, bold innovative ideas at the moment. Even Facebook reads more like “CRM for the rest of us” than some revolutionary new global communications platform.

Take a quick look at this archival piece from the Information Design Lab that Business Insider dug up earlier this week. A video of a Tablet Newspaper from 1994. What the video illustrates is just how little our thinking has evolved over the past 17 years. this was the future of media (i.e. the iPad) two decades before it became a mainstream hit.  Which leads us to the question did Apple really revolutionise media with the iPad or did it just pick up all the pieces of the jigsaw after everybody else gave up on the idea? In reality it didn’t have an epiphany or game changing idea. It just executed the mash-up better than anyone else who had tried to deliver this idea to market over the past two decades.

The quote that struck us as most impressive for the time? “We may still use the computer to create information, but we’ll use the tablet to interact with information.” – Business Insider Tablet Predictions

What the explosion of sales of the iPad and the drop off in PC sales also suggests (as do the failure of the earlier efforts to create a tablet that was more like a computer than a TV) is that there is a global trend is towards idea navigation and consumption of ideas rather than idea creation.

This transition from interactivity as creation to interactivity as consumption and mash-up (i.e. Productivity to Gaming) is a trend worth considering within the context of the future of ideas.

Within the context of the modern world new ideas were created by the simple equation 1+1=3. So theoretically access to the internet in a post, post modern world should expand our ability to create new ideas exponentially (i.e. (1+1=3)^n). Theoretically the internet should be the greatest ideas and innovation engine the world has even known.

If we are living in a post ideas world then it is largely because the internet has failed to take us to these new places. And if that is the case then perhaps it is simply because the internet makes it easier to explore yesterday and share today rather than to help us to create tomorrow.

Perhaps, largely thanks to the internet, we find ourselves simply more adept at discovery ( i.e. creating endless lists of likes and navigating the hyperlinks) and curation rather than experimentation and creation. More adept at generating patterns and searching for insights within these patterns than engaging in the battle of smashing disparate ideas together to create bold new ideas. More interested in exploring variations and mash-ups of old tunes than making the mistake of playing some new tunes we have never heard before.

In the end, as Picasso said, ”all artists are thieves”. The new feeds off the old. But in reality things only really get exciting when the new rejects the old and tries to rediscover the world through new eyes and then goes on to reconstruct (as opposed to deconstruct) the world in its own image.

Perhaps here then is the seed of the next big idea that may yet come out of Gabler’s musings. The need to discover a new type of thinking that is more about experimentation and creation than discovery and curation. A revolutionary new type thinking that isn’t interested in accumulating Traffic, Page Views, Fans and Likes but in breaking all the rules. Being bold enough to believe that what we are trying today with the internet just isn’t working and if the internet is to deliver on its early promise we need to start thinking and doing things differently.

After all if the future of the internet is just about converting paper into bits (e.g. Money) and personal memories into databases (e.g. Social) haven’t we already been there and done that?

In the end, and at the risk of doing a Marshall McLuhan, perhaps the big idea that is the internet isn’t to be found in the nodes or the connections scattered across the Zipf Curve but in the yet to be explored negative space of the network.  What we may come to think of as the holes in the landscape or the “antipattern”.

Back in April Business Insider published a chart that suggested on 51% Twitter’s 175 Million users had no followers and only 10% follow more than 50 people. This doesn’t account for the number of inactive users on the network but it does provide some insight into health of the network.

You may also recall that back in February Jim Edwards examined the LinkedIn IPO documentation only to discover the surprising admission that “a substantial majority” of the network’s members “don’t actual visit the web site on a monthly basis” (See LinkedIn Confesses That Most of Its “Users” Don’t Use the Site). Again it was a case of the majority of page views being generated by a minority of power users.

Which raises the question. Why is this so? Why isn’t LinkedIn engaging enough to keep the substantial majority glued to the site on a daily basis?

Today there is a lot of discussion about social influence. What we don’t hear too much about is the correlation between influence and intimacy. Or, how in a social world, some actions are more equal than others.

I would postulate that in a social world my level of influence in a relationship is directly proportional to the level of intimacy expressed by the relationship . Or, put another way, I am more likely to swing the deal over a beer, lunch or a cup coffee than I am by Tweeting or updating my LinkedIn or Facebook status.

Of course Social Circles is often touted as what makes Google+ different (Think: David Armano’s Google figures out humans) and this diagram below expresses both of these ideas by showing the degrees of intimacy in the relationship. As you can see Social Media is peripheral while the mobile phone and sharing food are central. (This is what made Jonathan’s Card such an interesting social experiment and why in this context RIM’s “Crackberry” handset business represents a more interesting business networking model than LinkedIn)

The level of intimacy in Social Circles

This is in the end is the LinkedIn challenge. It doesn’t solve the real problem. It doesn’t even help me to solve the real problem. At best it represents a remote opportunity to explore the problem.

For example: If I am having a beer with a mate and he introduces me to a friend of his and we get talking about a deal. The next step is to send through the IM or the Business Case that is on his iPhone. What happens next? Does he invite me to join him on LinkedIn and then share the IM via LinkedIn? No. He just emails it to me. Why? Because we have already jumped passed the LinkedIn stage of intimacy. If we do go back later and hook up on LinkedIn it’s because we are using it as a memory stick or because we which to make a private:public statement. Nothing more. At best a minor measure of social success. At worst a meaningless metric that allows the So.Me guru to measure influence.

LinkedIn is peripheral (maybe even external) rather than central to the opportunity and this is the challenge that LinkedIn has to resolve. It needs to become central to managing, exploring and executing the business opportunity.  More Salesforce than a warehouse of C.V.’s.

Here I discovered in the post Do Website have increasing returns? (published in April 1997) the long tail of web economics documented some 6 year’s before Clay Shirky’s paper on “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, and almost a decade before Chris Anderson published his widely acclaimed book on “The Long Tail” “.

Jakob updated his findings in 2006 in this subsequent post (See Traffic Logs) only to discover that the major exception to the “rule of thumb” he had discovered in 1997 was that 10 years on Google proved to be an outlier to the Zipf curve.

The key insight that he provided from these extended studies being simply that “The long tail’s end pays for aggregators who get their products from others, but companies who must develop their own are usually better served by staying away from the full tail.”

He then took his research a step further and applied the same methodology to the Social Networks (See the 90:9:1 Rule for Participation).

Needless to say I wish I’d stumbled across this material sooner. Particularly in light of the recent study of Metcalfe’s Law (see The roadmap from Metcalfe Law to Chaos Theory) and the much earlier posts on How yesterday’s news became just tables in a database and the search of a web beyond the endless lists of likes

What would be even more interesting to discover is how the strategic thinkers inside the Newspaper and Magazine industries responded to these studies back in 1997. The reason I say that is because this study clearly suggested, that contrary to industry expectations at that time, the hyper linked economy was a fundamentally inefficient form of media. At least compared to traditional broadcast media. Without the link backs provided by 99% of redundant messages (i.e. web pages) traffic wouldn’t flow around the web towards the 1% of viable (i.e. high traffic) sites. Indeed this inefficiency wasn’t just at the macro level but also at the micro level. Even the well-known newspaper brands had to generate large volumes of redundant messages to not only attract traffic to their website but to facilitate traffic flow around the site.

Here then, published as early as 1997, was the evidence to suggest that redundancy wasn’t just built into the system. When it came to online media redundancy was the system.

Acquiring IP, the future of Android, adding more pieces to the Google jigsaw and who’s next appear to be the main themes of the discussion. As yet no op:ed pieces on how acquisitions and late to market Me2′s(Think Google+) have become the growth strategy of Silicon Valley’s nextgen innovation engine but I am sure they will follow as the news cycle fades.

I won’t bore you with my take on these events. After all who needs yet another monday morning quarterback when we are already well served in these matters by the likes of Tomi Ahonen and Horace Dediu? Having said this it is an interesting game of mobile monopoly come diplomacy that is being played out across the media and communications landscape at this time. With each new move changing the relative strengths and weakness of all the players at the table.

It also illustrates just how far out of the main game the tradition media companies are in all this. Other than Sony there is no recognisable mainstream media brand at the table. It also raise the question of what’s next after the handsets. Will we see the networks come into play?

What I found interesting was watching the “twitterstorm” that was played out on Twitter around the time of the announcement.

I readily admit that I use Twitter as little more than a memory stick. A place to store articles on interest that may or may not prove useful in the context of a post I may be writing in the future. Other than that I look upon Twitter as little more than a playground for bots. When someone talks to me about trending now on Twitter my mind drifts towards the manufacturing of machine consent rather than tapping into the crowdsong. Which of course is what makes the valuation of So.Me startups so PeopleBrowsr so interesting. If the key to analytics is primarily about trust in the data what can you tell me about my audience? Are my fans and followers machines or people? More importantly who has more Klout? Man or Machine?

The Googlerola twitterstorm provided me with the insight that when it is a hot medium Twitter is more like a news bidding platform than a conversational platform. I say that because the screen was awash with bids for the most astute insight into the Googlerola announcement. It reminded me of a scene from one of those old movies where the kids stand in groups on the street corner shouting “News! News! Read all about it!”. All of which confirms my initial impressions that Twitter is the world’s first multifunctional find me, find you and let’s exchange platform and that it will only realise its full potential when people start using it primarily to declare to the world “I have Strawberries for Sale!” or “I need strawberries now!” or “I have Conference Tickets for Sale!” or “I need conference tickets now!”.

Conversational platforms (i.e. Blogs and Social Networks) will always struggle to be monetized simply because they are largely passive media activities. Bidding platforms, by their very nature, are easily monetized because they are hot sweaty and vibrant. They are places that thrive on competition and trade. Twitter demonstrates flashes of this activity but realistically this activity happens largely by chance rather than by design.

But doesn’t this petty much sum up the evolution of Twitter to date… A case study in innovation by accident rather than by design.

Today Twitter functions more like the frenzy one associates with a crowd attending a Football match than the frenzy we see on the trading room floor on Wall St or at the local produce market. With Twitter we can guage just how involved the crowd is with the action by monitoring the oohhh’s! and Ahhh’s of those participating in the rituals we associate with the festival of the boot. What we don’t have yet is the level of engagement which inspires trade. Conversations maybe, and perhaps the occassional bid, but not trades.

Glisse(Dance)/Glissade(mountaineering)/Glissant(Music) all have their root in the idea of sliding. So Glissification simply encapsulates the idea of how the old ways of doing business are slip sliding away and being replaced by new ways of doing business (i.e. the old tunes are being replaced by tunes that we haven’t heard before). Plus, just like fauxionary, it’s a delicious new word to play with.

I suspect the winners in this new hyper connected economy will thrive by glissing rather than gaming the system. Having said that I have coined the word Glissification to describe what happens to those who fail to glisse (i.e. Dance to a new tune played on a new scale).

The reason I like the idea of glissing (Another made up word I suspect) is it contrasts well with the idea of gaming. When we game the system we do so to “Stack the deck” in our favor (i.e. aggressively exploit the limitations of the rules of the game and the competition to maximum advantage). In comparison when we glisse we are simply sliding to a new position and in doing so we not only take our competition by surprise, we fundamental changes the rules of the game.

When the competition has been Glissed you leave them to struggle with the prospect of declining margins, and increased costs of doing business and falling market share while you reap the benefits of their customers flocking to you.

For example this short presentation released today by Asymco’s Horace Dediu demonstrates how Apple glissed Nokia.

You make think of it as disruption. I think of it as glissing.

For me the key to understanding the potential of the internet is to forget about disrupt industries and think about glissing them.

It’s all about sliding your business into new places that has never been before.

Now some incumbents learn to gliss. They successfully slide into a new space and take full advantage of the new opportunities that emerge from embracing the hyper-connected world of online commerce. While others stand still and ultimately see their businesses fail. This was Borders and it may well be Yahoo! and AOL moving forward. Only time will tell.

What I am trying to say is the internet isn’t disruptive. Business paradoxically disrupt themselves by failing to take the opportunity to glisse as the technology emerges to help them glisse almost effortlessly into a new position of market dominance.

In this way glissing as the antithesis of the American idea of creative destruction. While creative destruction is a blunt, and dare I say immature, instrument for economic renewal glissing is both a delicate and sophisticated way of achieving the desired economic outcome.

The fundamental flaw of creative destruction is that, although it offers some hope for the future, it comes at a significant risk and that risk is you fall over and don’t get up. We see elements of that assumed risk in the bold Nokiasoft experiment being conducted at the moment. Nokia is presently being transformed by a wave of self-inflicted creative destruction. The gambling being played out is that, like a veritable phoenix, a new Nokia will emerge from the ashes of the old and rightfully resume its place as the market leader in Mobile Devices.

In stark contrast and rather than falling into the abyss of creative destruction Nokia could have simply glissed the market by giving the market what it so desperately wants.

For example, we all know everybody wants an iPhone but not everybody can afford one so the logical answer to the Apple challenge wasn’t to compete head to head with an iPhone on steroids but to launch he ultimate low-cost dumb phone that allowed the rest of the world to accessed all the games and services they could possibly want in the cloud.  Thereby offering customers all the advantages of the iPhone experience at a fraction of the price while delivering brand new revenue streams to the Telcos and the content/app developers looking to provide content and services without having the hassle of doping business through the app store. Add a secure cloud based mobile money come payments layer and the market has fundamentally changed.

The simple message being if you lose your iPhone you have lost more than your wallet. Lose the new Nokia and you lose nothing. Simply connect your next dumb phone or even your TV set into your personalised cloud. Safer, cheaper and ultimately disposable the ultimate dumb phone would have outsmarted the ultimate smartphone.

In the end glissing is about seeing the opportunities that lay well beyond the game you are playing today and then leveraging the internet to take you there. Is it a new way of doing business? Maybe. In reality is more about a new way of thinking about how you choose  to do business tomorrow.

A decade ago we would have quoted Wayne Gretzky and it’s all about learning to skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been. Today it’s all about learning how to dance to new tunes… and the quicker you learn the most prosperous you will be going forward.

At the other end of this equation is the simple reality that margins for online Bancassurance products are being squeezed by consumers saving time and money by comparative shopping of price and features on the web. So that at the same time that their opportunity costs are rising (i.e. Search Advertising costs) the bancassurance industry is now finding that it’s margins are being squeezed. This is a process I call Glissification.

Glissification and Gamification are the Yin Yang of the Google economy. Gamification being the activity of manipulating the impact of Glissification of the market in your favour through the use of bots and other activities to modify the “hive mind” that influences customer behaviour and the organic search page rankings that reduce your costs of customer acquisition.

This glissification of the digital products of the Bancassurance industry is fundamentally  changing the dynamic and the behavior of the players in the online find me, find you and let’s exchange economy. Where as before the seller of insurance and finance held all “the cards” to dominate the negotiation of the terms of the exchange today the buyer is discovering new ways to leverage the social memory to assist them in shifting the terms of the negotiation.

The same thing is happening in the world of retail. They too are finding their margins are being squeezed by this glissification of products and services. After all why buy something at the local retailer if you can find what you want online at a fraction of the price? There is a bigger range on to choose from, availability isn’t a problem and a there is a significant price advantage. The only thing that is in the local retailer’s favour is urgency.  Glissification is changing the face of retailing. Our online shopping behaviours are changing the behaviours of real world retailers. They are having to act and think differently in response to the commercial pressure of online shopping.

This process of glissification is a key element in understanding why it is so hard to measure the disruptive impact of the internet when we try to use old economic models like GDP. You see glissification doesn’t create wealth (except of course if you are the gatekeeper of the key words i.e. Google) in the old fashion way by allowing businesses to extract more from customers. It inverses the wealth creation equation by allowing customers to extract more from businesses through the online sharing knowledge of price and performance. So when measured in terms of GDP it looks like the economy is stalling or shrinking but in reality the consumer are getting more for less thanks to the price advantaged delivered though glissification.

We see this best expressed through the “flash” group buying phenomenon. Customers aggregate on an as needs basis to leverage group buying to negotiate the best price for the group.  Historically this group buying power required a 3rd party wholesaler to aggregate the activity before on selling the product to the retailers. Online group buying removes the wholesaler and retailer from the equation. Whole sections of the industry value chain are removed through the process of automating the social buying process. This in turn removes a number of layers from the GDP calculation. The consumers receive significantly more for significantly less but the GDP shrinks in the process. As the internet matures this circumvention of large sections of economic activity through business process automation will only accelerate.

This is why I think we need to explore new economic models if we are to understand how the information revolution provided the tools and the changes in behaviour that lead to the GFC and more importantly how the information revolution can provide us with the tools and the changes in behaviour to will allow us to rapidly emerge from this economic crisis and create a sustainable and prosperous future for all our children.