Pledge Drive Allegiance

The blogosphere is not the silver liming in the demise of the traditional news media. It's NPR. Without it journalism would be relegated to teabagger guerillas posing as ACORN show-and-clientele. Some of last week's All Things Considered led with the immunization delays that are endangering the lives of Haitian earthquake survivors. Anticipating the gathering storm of post quake outbreaks is not something visual media is equipped or inclined to do.

That's a depth of commitment that outstretches the collective attention spans of every network and cable news network. Instead of following "if it bleeds it leads" NPR positions its news according to whether it resonates it deliberates.

It would seem that so long as coastal education elites are caught in traffic this caliber of reporting will endure. It would figure that the reserve of mostly white mostly liberal mostly guilt could fuel a mad dash of pledge drives in perpetuity. But if there's a blinding sun spot on NPR's horizon it's not the familiar righty complaint of lefty bias. It's the conceit baked into the lonstanding business model that local NPR operators are the judge and jury for what goes out over their audio streams. How aligned are their programming choices with the pulse of their listenership? That's the 900 pound guerilla question. That's the uninvited guest. That's the nagging doubt that we're not quite factoring in "all" things considered.

NPR affiliates fail to announce how well their drives are performing seeded from fears fear of failure (the phones are dead) to trepidations of success (they're over the top so stop yammering on about the Ken Burns gift set already...)

Given NPR's reliance on its "public" it's hard not to feel a slight condescension -- mother ship knows best, standing on pinwheels of sanctimony. My first whiff of imperious NPR came when local Boston affiliate WBUR canned -- first its founder-host Chris Lydon -- and then the show itself. That was a double ouch because the unflappable Dick Gordon was an improvement on his undisciplined and self-referential predecessor.

This kind of cannibalization is another reminder of NPR's largely unrattled cage. On the question of journalistic integrity NPR is largely peerless. It's chief rival is no more Fox News than any frequency on commercial or cable radio. It's NPR itself. Boston can't support two teams in the same sport but now we get to see if can support two public talk radio affiliates. Earlier this winter WGBH quit classical music for the influential pastures of news programming. The results were not auspicious. There was no wellspring of original content but a pick list of every syndicated show not picked up by rival WBUR -- sort of an expansion draft of past prime broadcast-offs.

I can imagine that its hard to grow local talent and original programming takes time to nurture and root. But if WGBH wants to distinguish itself it needs to grow a farm system for cultivating that talent. And I'm hardpressed to think of a more fertile hotbed than the colleges and universities which make higher education the top industry in the very same radio market.

Pledge Drive Allegiance

The blogosphere is not the silver liming in the demise of the traditional news media. It's NPR. Without it journalism would be relegated to teabagger guerillas posing as ACORN show-and-clientele. Some of last week's All Things Considered led with the immunization delays that are endangering the lives of Haitian earthquake survivors. Anticipating the gathering storm of post quake outbreaks is not something visual media is equipped or inclined to do.

That's a depth of commitment that outstretches the collective attention spans of every network and cable news network. Instead of following "if it bleeds it leads" NPR positions its news according to whether it resonates it deliberates.

It would seem that so long as coastal education elites are caught in traffic this caliber of reporting will endure. It would figure that the reserve of mostly white mostly liberal mostly guilt could fuel a mad dash of pledge drives in perpetuity. But if there's a blinding sun spot on NPR's horizon it's not the familiar righty complaint of lefty bias. It's the conceit baked into the lonstanding business model that local NPR operators are the judge and jury for what goes out over their audio streams. How aligned are their programming choices with the pulse of their listenership? That's the 900 pound guerilla question. That's the uninvited guest. That's the nagging doubt that we're not quite factoring in "all" things considered.

NPR affiliates fail to announce how well their drives are performing seeded from fears fear of failure (the phones are dead) to trepidations of success (they're over the top so stop yammering on about the Ken Burns gift set already...)

Given NPR's reliance on its "public" it's hard not to feel a slight condescension -- mother ship knows best, standing on pinwheels of sanctimony. My first whiff of imperious NPR came when local Boston affiliate WBUR canned -- first its founder-host Chris Lydon -- and then the show itself. That was a double ouch because the unflappable Dick Gordon was an improvement on his undisciplined and self-referential predecessor.

This kind of cannibalization is another reminder of NPR's largely unrattled cage. On the question of journalistic integrity NPR is largely peerless. It's chief rival is no more Fox News than any frequency on commercial or cable radio. It's NPR itself. Boston can't support two teams in the same sport but now we get to see if can support two public talk radio affiliates. Earlier this winter WGBH quit classical music for the influential pastures of news programming. The results were not auspicious. There was no wellspring of original content but a pick list of every syndicated show not picked up by rival WBUR -- sort of an expansion draft of past prime broadcast-offs.

I can imagine that its hard to grow local talent and original programming takes time to nurture and root. But if WGBH wants to distinguish itself it needs to grow a farm system for cultivating that talent. And I'm hardpressed to think of a more fertile hotbed than the colleges and universities which make higher education the top industry in the very same radio market.

Rush Limbo

"Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change the Way We Think?" in the January 18th issue of Newsweek is a terrific refutation of our human webscapades -- the unquestioning assertion that any thought worth thinking is worth documenting and any documentation worth preserving needs to be online. Newsweek's cognitive beat columnist Sharon Begley argues that the Internet is not a wellspring for sparking innovation but a lap dog for rehash and retreat. Perhaps we're sparking up the wrong tree of knowledge when Evgeny Morozov writes:

"The Internet is causing the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence -- our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached from the most recent of pasts."

The political arena is a ripe example. How else to explain that the permanent Republication majority of 2004 became the second coming of the new deal by 2008 and boomerung backwards before the mid-terms were even penciled in? Ken Auletta's "Non-stop News" piece in the January 25th New Yorker offers the testimony of New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker. Baker concludes that perspective is no longer "a calling" but a luxury:

"A reporter covering his beat ten years ago had the luxury of writing for the next day's newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, access information, to provide context."

Former White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn describes the rush this way: "When reporters call you to discuss a story, it's not because they're interested in having a discussion. They're interested in a response."

"Our minds struggle to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu," says Howard Reingold. Focus is no longer a virtue but an indulgence -- one that we've lost the ability to command in others or respect in our own loss of concentration. levels that flicker like enfeebled WIFI signals.

"The ubiquity of information makes us less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet," according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Our own musings are tethered to electoral textings. If our ideas and our actions are not attention-grabbing they are invalidated by the surface noise that rumbles above the silence and stillness of these deeper contemplations. This deeper offline connection is what David Wallace Wells is railing against in the issue prior to Begley's piece when he questions the reverence towards hive mind or the notion that originality is an idle curiosity to a wired and wary world:

"Why are we so enamored with wikipedia, the signal achievement of the web 2.0 era when it has channelled so much intellectual energy into a reference project that is at best only as good as the book it replaces? Do we value knowledge so little that it excites us only when it is free?"

To the contrary the replacement of the fallen tree-in-the-forest metaphor with the positioning of search results as the proverbial radar argues for the kind of sense-making and correlative pattern-matching that falls outside the boundaries of software engineering or the Blackberry-screen-sized perspective-building of modern news analytics. That's the kind of reconstruction we experience when it's too late to prevent a terrorist from exploding in mid-stream. Not only is his name buried on the do-not-fly list but the context trailing explosions of the future will not fly either -- not in the unsustainable ways we have come to inform our sense-making machinery -- a process that feeds on fear to the impoverishment of perspective.

Says George Dyson: "Access to facts increases the need to correlate them, distinguish between primary and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense take over." But there is no likelier a common fact base than there is a common sense arising from an evidentiary bias towards a common purpose or unifying theme.

Perhaps our reticence is not our ability to think independently but the trepidation that we'll be drowned out or spooked by dissenting voices: "Our knowledge seems more fragile since all facts are open, and thus open to challenge," writes Dyson. Another fault line for shattering confidence in the quest for truth-seeking is the notion that rumours can be attached to talking points the way explosives are fastened to motorcades. No matter how poorly improvised the falsehood it must be diffused or the accusation it carries takes on the payload of a grounded assertion, an emotional truth if not a supportable fact.

One way to hurdle wikipedia as a barrier to creativity, Dyson suggests, is to compare our pre-web notions of comprehensiveness with the virtual recognition that human knowledge is limited by its reach into an electronic form -- not by how we experience that understanding or petition it on our own behalf:

"What once required collecting all fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge now requires ignoring or removing unnecessary information to reveal the shape of the knowledge hidden within."

Rush Limbo

"Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change the Way We Think?" in the January 18th issue of Newsweek is a terrific refutation of our human webscapades -- the unquestioning assertion that any thought worth thinking is worth documenting and any documentation worth preserving needs to be online. Newsweek's cognitive beat columnist Sharon Begley argues that the Internet is not a wellspring for sparking innovation but a lap dog for rehash and retreat. Perhaps we're sparking up the wrong tree of knowledge when Evgeny Morozov writes:

"The Internet is causing the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence -- our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached from the most recent of pasts."

The political arena is a ripe example. How else to explain that the permanent Republication majority of 2004 became the second coming of the new deal by 2008 and boomerung backwards before the mid-terms were even penciled in? Ken Auletta's "Non-stop News" piece in the January 25th New Yorker offers the testimony of New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker. Baker concludes that perspective is no longer "a calling" but a luxury:

"A reporter covering his beat ten years ago had the luxury of writing for the next day's newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, access information, to provide context."

Former White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn describes the rush this way: "When reporters call you to discuss a story, it's not because they're interested in having a discussion. They're interested in a response."

"Our minds struggle to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu," says Howard Reingold. Focus is no longer a virtue but an indulgence -- one that we've lost the ability to command in others or respect in our own loss of concentration. levels that flicker like enfeebled WIFI signals.

"The ubiquity of information makes us less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet," according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Our own musings are tethered to electoral textings. If our ideas and our actions are not attention-grabbing they are invalidated by the surface noise that rumbles above the silence and stillness of these deeper contemplations. This deeper offline connection is what David Wallace Wells is railing against in the issue prior to Begley's piece when he questions the reverence towards hive mind or the notion that originality is an idle curiosity to a wired and wary world:

"Why are we so enamored with wikipedia, the signal achievement of the web 2.0 era when it has channelled so much intellectual energy into a reference project that is at best only as good as the book it replaces? Do we value knowledge so little that it excites us only when it is free?"

To the contrary the replacement of the fallen tree-in-the-forest metaphor with the positioning of search results as the proverbial radar argues for the kind of sense-making and correlative pattern-matching that falls outside the boundaries of software engineering or the Blackberry-screen-sized perspective-building of modern news analytics. That's the kind of reconstruction we experience when it's too late to prevent a terrorist from exploding in mid-stream. Not only is his name buried on the do-not-fly list but the context trailing explosions of the future will not fly either -- not in the unsustainable ways we have come to inform our sense-making machinery -- a process that feeds on fear to the impoverishment of perspective.

Says George Dyson: "Access to facts increases the need to correlate them, distinguish between primary and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense take over." But there is no likelier a common fact base than there is a common sense arising from an evidentiary bias towards a common purpose or unifying theme.

Perhaps our reticence is not our ability to think independently but the trepidation that we'll be drowned out or spooked by dissenting voices: "Our knowledge seems more fragile since all facts are open, and thus open to challenge," writes Dyson. Another fault line for shattering confidence in the quest for truth-seeking is the notion that rumours can be attached to talking points the way explosives are fastened to motorcades. No matter how poorly improvised the falsehood it must be diffused or the accusation it carries takes on the payload of a grounded assertion, an emotional truth if not a supportable fact.

One way to hurdle wikipedia as a barrier to creativity, Dyson suggests, is to compare our pre-web notions of comprehensiveness with the virtual recognition that human knowledge is limited by its reach into an electronic form -- not by how we experience that understanding or petition it on our own behalf:

"What once required collecting all fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge now requires ignoring or removing unnecessary information to reveal the shape of the knowledge hidden within."

Sparing No Free Speech Expense

A week after the recent Supreme Court ruling that advanced individual rights to corporations and unions I heard an interview with a CEO / lawyer / author / ACLU guy who wrote a book called "Can they really do that?" He said that the inverse of the rights of groups to be individuals is not true. He said that employees have no rights inside corporations. The first amendment does not apply at all. That means free speech exists when you pay for it. But if you take it for free you're basically stealing from your employer.

If corporations are people shouldn't they be allowed to own guns? If unions are voters shouldn't they be allowed to purchase the holidays that will hold our future elections? If our political system is dysfunctional shouldn't self-interested groups be allowed to throw their own money at our collective miseries?

If the logic is a stretch so is the cognitive leap that the plural of constitutional freedoms is unlimited spending on public speech. First the lines between church and state began to blur. Could spirituality survive without organized religion? Try making that case to Focus on the Family. Now comes the collision of privileged and public communications. Parties are now treated as persons. And if those parties can operate in an unfettered political climate they are not only parties but first parties: I am. Therefore I spend my mind freely.

The goal is not about becoming the firstest of first parties but to influence the electorate/consumer. These are third parties. In the 20th century third parties were considered the influence-peddlers who pretended to have no stake in the games they were handicapping through their research and commentary. Anyone remember the run up to the dotcom implosion? It was paved with the investment reports of financial analysts whose employers sanctioned the IPOs of the same profit-challenged start-ups they were praising all the way to the ugly meltdown.

The purpose of unions and corporations is the same for all successful organizations in a capitalist system. It's to deliver to its members more wealth and power than they could ever attain as individuals. This is the practical consequence of the first amendment in our gilded contemporary age. To the individual any form of free speech is quite expensive if the goal is to slice through the din of today's media web. "Free" according to the new framings is not a limited time offer. Freedom is the right to be heard regardless of how noisy the chambering echoes of the marketplace.

If we follow money and the rationale its underwrites we see a day where super-agencies will absorb and incubate, and trial balloon policy directions like thinktanks. They will train, fund, and ultimately deploy squadrons of candidates to mouth these appeals. This is too big a temptation for merchandisers to pass up. Instead of competing against ruthless (and countless) competitors, these political factories need only face off against a single opponent (assuming the two parties continue to reach the post season year after tedious year).

For self-modeled political outsiders they will no longer be encumbered by dancing to the fundraising shakedowns that we suffered through or the horse-trading sausage barrel of cable news monkeys and their partisan medleys. They can stand up for their convictions because their political goals are in lock-sync with the commercial objectives of their affiliate factories. What could be more sincere?

Carpet-bagging will go the way of the pay phone. That's not because political talents are likelier to go homegrown. That's because we're looking to bond with people who promise to leave us alone. If we don't know our neighbors what does it matter if our officials suit up with the hometown teams? We want to be surrounded by winners -- even when these victories come at the expense of the greater community good. What could be less appealing to profit-making than catering to active communities when I can sell directly to unquestioning location-neutral market segments?

Here are some practical implications:

* Instead of the instant distrust that greets any elected official that stands by the people and sides with their backers, the new system will bring those backers and their back rooms to the clarifying front of the political stage.

* Corporations ran the world long before the United v. FCC case was ever heard. But if they are now sanctioned to run our elections the sham of representative democracy is over. Our disbelief is in permanent suspension.

* We (nation) get what I (corporate) pay for. If our concerns are not being addressed that's because there's not enough of me to go around. Another round of tax cuts won't change this.

It's not that we won't get fooled again. It's that we can't.

Sparing No Free Speech Expense

A week after the recent Supreme Court ruling that advanced individual rights to corporations and unions I heard an interview with a CEO / lawyer / author / ACLU guy who wrote a book called "Can they really do that?" He said that the inverse of the rights of groups to be individuals is not true. He said that employees have no rights inside corporations. The first amendment does not apply at all. That means free speech exists when you pay for it. But if you take it for free you're basically stealing from your employer.

If corporations are people shouldn't they be allowed to own guns? If unions are voters shouldn't they be allowed to purchase the holidays that will hold our future elections? If our political system is dysfunctional shouldn't self-interested groups be allowed to throw their own money at our collective miseries?

If the logic is a stretch so is the cognitive leap that the plural of constitutional freedoms is unlimited spending on public speech. First the lines between church and state began to blur. Could spirituality survive without organized religion? Try making that case to Focus on the Family. Now comes the collision of privileged and public communications. Parties are now treated as persons. And if those parties can operate in an unfettered political climate they are not only parties but first parties: I am. Therefore I spend my mind freely.

The goal is not about becoming the firstest of first parties but to influence the electorate/consumer. These are third parties. In the 20th century third parties were considered the influence-peddlers who pretended to have no stake in the games they were handicapping through their research and commentary. Anyone remember the run up to the dotcom implosion? It was paved with the investment reports of financial analysts whose employers sanctioned the IPOs of the same profit-challenged start-ups they were praising all the way to the ugly meltdown.

The purpose of unions and corporations is the same for all successful organizations in a capitalist system. It's to deliver to its members more wealth and power than they could ever attain as individuals. This is the practical consequence of the first amendment in our gilded contemporary age. To the individual any form of free speech is quite expensive if the goal is to slice through the din of today's media web. "Free" according to the new framings is not a limited time offer. Freedom is the right to be heard regardless of how noisy the chambering echoes of the marketplace.

If we follow money and the rationale its underwrites we see a day where super-agencies will absorb and incubate, and trial balloon policy directions like thinktanks. They will train, fund, and ultimately deploy squadrons of candidates to mouth these appeals. This is too big a temptation for merchandisers to pass up. Instead of competing against ruthless (and countless) competitors, these political factories need only face off against a single opponent (assuming the two parties continue to reach the post season year after tedious year).

For self-modeled political outsiders they will no longer be encumbered by dancing to the fundraising shakedowns that we suffered through or the horse-trading sausage barrel of cable news monkeys and their partisan medleys. They can stand up for their convictions because their political goals are in lock-sync with the commercial objectives of their affiliate factories. What could be more sincere?

Carpet-bagging will go the way of the pay phone. That's not because political talents are likelier to go homegrown. That's because we're looking to bond with people who promise to leave us alone. If we don't know our neighbors what does it matter if our officials suit up with the hometown teams? We want to be surrounded by winners -- even when these victories come at the expense of the greater community good. What could be less appealing to profit-making than catering to active communities when I can sell directly to unquestioning location-neutral market segments?

Here are some practical implications:

* Instead of the instant distrust that greets any elected official that stands by the people and sides with their backers, the new system will bring those backers and their back rooms to the clarifying front of the political stage.

* Corporations ran the world long before the United v. FCC case was ever heard. But if they are now sanctioned to run our elections the sham of representative democracy is over. Our disbelief is in permanent suspension.

* We (nation) get what I (corporate) pay for. If our concerns are not being addressed that's because there's not enough of me to go around. Another round of tax cuts won't change this.

It's not that we won't get fooled again. It's that we can't.

Dumb Containers

One of the moribund mysteries of KM craft is the conversational impasse that settles in around the question of who can see what.

On first blush this sounds like territorial jockeying between two rival business units. But I think the fear runs deeper while the rationale runs ... shallow. Unlike traditional competition where the enemy integrates our vulnerabilities into a nimble and customer-facing game plan these tender subjects have a lot more to do with vanity and self-preservation than with competitive advantage or go-to-market strategy.

I'm conducting a series of interviews over the coming months for KM World on SharePoint adoption. The focus is not on success but more the fear of success that sandbags so many deployments. I interviewed Marc Anderson of Sympraxis Consulting yesterday. In addition to being a SharePoint integrator Marc is a process management expert who cut his BPM teeth from the Norton Kaplan scorecarding he did with Renaissance Solutions back in the late nineties.

Storing consistently formatted documents triggered by the flow of predictable events is one of those bake-inable gains on the SharePoint adoption curve. But what happens when that reasonable goal becomes a towering expectation? Is a contract really a contract when it was called a statement of work before we merged? Is it my group or yours responsible for unpacking the backlog? Most importantly who's on the hook when our fail safe security policy takes over and "security by obscurity" is replaced by protocol and accountability?

A more interesting question isn't about permissions structures and pecking orders but how to configure SharePoint to reduce cycle times for common tasks. And those requirements extend well beyond back end administration. For instance we can move beyond search results to business results. We can deliver answers instead of documents. We can get beyond the ingrained bias that documents themselves more than the records they contain.

For example what if the golden nuggets within a large involved analysis always land in the same section or sub-clause or roman numeral addendum ad item? Microsoft didn't just add an "X" to .ppts and .xls to make a design statement or an upgrade ultimatum. They did it because XML means never having to hide behind the confinements of file formats. It means being able to chunk content so that granularity happens in the metadata -- not in the mass burial of an endless results list.

These modifications can be done without writing a stitch of XML code too by indexing lists and separating them in the results screen from the PDFs and PowerPoints in our site collection libraries. It means re-importing the familiar laundry lists that service the value propositions of most business proposals so that the value adds and situational specifics are anchored in past success and squared with the needs of the prospect being targeted. Querying against a set of tables makes imminently more sense than trying to pull and retrofit every proposal that's ever deviated from the official script since the beginning of sales cycle time.

More on this as the interviewing calendar unfolds.