Governmental Consolidation

An interesting article on this week's economist points out how Julian Assange's Wikileaks diversifies its operations across different countries to use each set of legislative nuances to its advantage. In this way, no single government can "prevent a document from being published or force its removal." Apparently Wikileaks calls itself "multijurisdictional."

To me this is a nice example of a long term trend that most people like to contradict: governments will eventually have to merge.

I see a few influencing factors that will push this forward: economics, politics, and social movements.

First are the economic pressures. We already have the EU, an economic block that to a large degree exists to minimize cross-border economic frictions. A single currency bolsters trade, reduces monetary redundancies, etc. Especially for small countries, it makes a lot of sense to want to join: more access to capital markets, and less fiscal overhead. The Euro and dollar are currently the two de-facto reserve currencies. There will be a handful of others, but eventually all the small countries will have to accept that the cost of sustaining a proprietary currency does not justify the benefits of an individual monetary policy. We will have a world with just a few currencies. This is the first step towards blurring national boundaries.

Second are the political pressures. These are exemplified well by Wikileak's strategy. The cost of relocating a company is smaller today than it has ever been. Often there is not even a need to relocate, you can headquarter your company in one place, operate in several other places, and be regulated by the legal framework of yet another place. More and more, governments will have to ask themselves, what country does this company belong to? How do we tax the company? We already have a widely accepted set of international accounting rules, but the next step that necessarily follows is a widely accepted framework for determining taxation, rule of law, etc. Take Wikileak for example. They operate in the fringes of several legal frameworks, thus effectively setting themselves outside the reach of any. Its legal jujitsu. Governments cannot sustain a capitalist model in which they have no control over taxation and legal oversight of the very companies that make up the economy. Eventually, they will have to agree on an international standard and this too will further break down national boundaries.

Finally, there are the social pressures. These are perhaps the most important as they affect people directly. I offer myself as an example. I am a dual-citizen. This means that, with two passports, I have certain advantages when it comes to travel, labor choices, etc. My brother has three passports. I know two people with five passports. For obvious reasons, governments don't like dual-citizens. They find it tricky to control their usage of identities; how to make sure that they do not use one identity for nefarious purposes while maintaining another identity for a clean getaway? Governments are still grappling with how to best deal with "us." The problem is that people are what make a nation, they are who elect and shape government; trying to fight back a mass change in the social-structure is like fighting the tides. A losing battle.

I sometimes sit and think what the world looks like when dual-citizens are not the minority but the norm. I don't know if this will ever be the case, but if you take two reference points, 100 years ago and today, the trend is very obvious. I offer this very extreme example to underscore my point: The fastest growing minority in the US are Hispanics, and to a large degree Mexican immigrants. Demographic projections show that they could grow to be a national majority in less than 100 years. Throughout this time I would venture to guess that the political bonds between these two countries would strengthen. The question I raise, and I raise it primarily to provoke people, is: given the above hypothetical, what is the purpose of a national boundary when the US majority is of Mexican descent? How would these people perceive this separation? Wouldn't they tear it down? You can replace the illustrated countries with any other two, I merely use the US as a point of reference because it is "the melting pot" and currently, most of what's coming in is Hispanic.

For a number of reasons, people don't like this future. I can understand their hesitation, but I don't think this has to be a pessimistic scenario. The outlook can be very positive.

Google Reader bankrupt

Recently I’ve taken note that a number of media outlets have spoken up against mindless regurgitation of content. The most recent example is this complaint on the louisgray blog.

The most dumbed-down, and perhaps most honest, version of this phenomenon is the rampant automation of reblogging or reposting of content. I’m guilty of this myself: I feed my Google Reader favorites through friendfeed and tumbr- who knows where the rabbit hole ends. Less honest is to regurgitate or paraphrase someone else’s thoughts without a mention or a link-back to the original author.

Naturally, the problem gets back to everyone. Take my Google Reader for instance. I subscribe to a number of blogs, aggregators, etc. On top of this, Google Reader shows me what my friends share. On any given day, I may read a good post directly from an author, then see it again several times via various aggregators, and then one last time if friends “like” it. Not to mention all the “copy-cat” content that gets spawned shortly thereafter and that is also fed back to me.

The result is that my Reader quickly gets overwhelmed with noise; before you know it, I am “Google Reader bankrupt.”

Ultimately I think the solution will rest in the advancement of the very systems and tools that allow for this data overload. If you Google “Oil Spill” today you will get to a screen that showcases news articles and also lets you click for “More like this.” To state the obvious, this means that Google’s algorithms are able to categorize by similarities. Google Reader doesn’t appear to have the same algorithm as yet. Nevertheless, I see tools like Google Reader advancing to incorporate similar filters that could eliminate duplicate content and either hide or de-prioritize copy-cat content. I would be surprised if this was not already in the works somewhere.

I see part of the garbage-content problem as being rooted in the fact that most content sites are still very much silos, and everyone is trying to drive traffic in-house. This is changing.

Take for instance the “More like this” link. When you click on it you have the ability to sort by date, a useful feature that lets you read content in the order it was generated to follow the progression of a story in chronological order. As more stories get linked back to each other, another great feature that I would like to see is a sorting by chorological link-back. This feature would allow you to follow the evolution of ideas. This would be great because today it is really difficult to capture how an author’s post influences another or how it fosters creativity in general. I would posit that blog posts are often real discussions. They are not appreciated as such because, again, each blog is a silo. There are a number of companies tapping at the door of these issues. Disqus, for example, does a great job at opening the discussion potential of blogs. The problem, however, is that blogs remain silos and the discussion that disqus fosters is largely trapped in a single blog ecosystem. Food for thought: why can’t a blog post be a blog comment at the same time? Why can’t it exist simultaneously in both formats? Why does a discussion have to exist solely in one author’s blog? This, I think would be a great additional feature for disqus – the choice of having a comment be automatically posted on your own blog. Such a comment would be akin to a spore, spreading the discussion to another blog ecosystem thus growing the audience and participant body.

These types of advancements in technology intelligence will render the garbage-content problem obsolete and will make for a much richer media experience. I don’t’ see myself as Google Reader bankrupt in the future.

BuzzMe Equals Game Changer

I want to share a moment of revelation that I experienced recently. It occurred earlier this week when I watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Ajay Madhok, CEO of Equals. In the demo embedded below Ajay describes a new product they will introduce in a few months – BuzzMe. I think its going to be a game changer.

The basic idea of BuzzMe is to optimize the use of existing communication channels by making the selection of said channels context and relationship dependent. The premise is the following:

We have and use a vast array of communication tools/ channels: voice, email, SMS, IM, etc. There is a time and place for each of these tools, but unfortunately sometimes we find ourselves making use of a channel at the wrong time/place.

We all communicate with many different individuals, and our relationships with each one is unique. We communicate differently with each person depending on the relationship we establish with them. For example, you might communicate differently to a colleague than to a friend or your boss. Furthermore, communication is also influenced by our context. Where are we, what are we doing, how busy we are – these all make a difference as to how we communicate.

BuzzMe is basically a virtual agent that will keep track of your context (via Google calendar or your tweets, for instance), analyze incoming communication, and determine the optimal communication channel for you to use given your current situation and your relationship with whoever is trying to reach you.

So let’s say you are at a meeting or conference. You probably don’t want to get calls, at least not from everyone. So BuzzMe will send the average Joe to your voicemail, but will transfer through really important people whose call you cannot miss.

Say you are driving and shouldn’t really be reading emails. BuzzMe will transcribe the email to voice and read it to you while in the car. Alternatively, you may be in a situation where you can’t pick up the phone, but would like to get voicemails transcribed into text and sent to your email.

Say you are abroad. The BuzzMe agent will forward calls to a local phone.

In short, BuzzMe will know who your friends are, will know what you are doing, and will be able to provide you the optimal communication channel based on these two things.

What they didn’t cover in the video is blogging as a communication channel. I think it plays well into what they are doing. I may for instance, want to respond to a comment from a prominent fellow blogger more promptly than to a comment from Anonymous. BuzzMe could adequately push comments to my attention based on that information.

In my opinion, part of the genius of this whole idea is the safety benefit inherent in the service. Sharing your phone number, arguably sensitive information, with the public is no longer an issue because you have the BuzzMe virtual agent to buffer you from anyone trying to reach you.

Translate this to social networks as I think will inevitably happen. With an agent in the middle to determine how your profile is viewed it doesn’t matter what kind of information you dump into the virtual abyss.

It’s almost as if thinking about this whole social networking space as walled gardens is incorrect or insufficient. The visual is not enough. If my identity or profile is like a garden then I don’t really care to wall it off, but I want to present it differently to whoever chooses to look in. I want a transforming garden. An agent like BuzzMe could help me do that – a gardener to customize my garden for each and every one of my visitors.

What I find interesting is the thought that perhaps Google, with its FriendConnect initiative, is looking to become this middleman. Facebook seems to be thinking they own the data/ profiles/ gardens. Wrong, the users do. Google, on the other hand, seems content with being the gardener. I think this will make all the difference.

I’m now ranting and this is too long. Thoughts?

New domain name

My blog just underwent a major overhaul. It loaded too slowly and I was not too happy with its domain name. www.mymemestream.blogspot.com was simply too much. Also, as unlikely as it would be, I did not want someone else to buy my name’s url www.carlosbuitelaar.com. So I bought it through Google and transferred over my blog to it. This was simple enough. The problem here was getting my disqus comments back in synch with the blog. Jason at disqus was gracious enough to help me there. Thanks Jason and thanks disqus!

The RSS feed remains the same; too much of a hassle (for me and you) to have to deal with that at this point.

So having said that, lets test this baby out and see if this post will flow through to my tumblr, facebook, etc.

I Live Barefoot

Typically I would not write about shoes. It’s just not my style. That makes today an exceptional day.

A few weeks ago I read this post by Dylan Tweney on Wired – Are your shoes killing your feet. The take away was basically that shoes are “messing up the perfectly-balanced, coordinated bipedal gait that our species evolved over millions of years.” No good. So a company called Tierra Plana is selling shoes by the brand of Vivo Barefoot that are essentially the closest thing to being barefoot. A piece came out as well on the New York Magazine.

So I decided to go check out these mystery shoes. Tierra Plana currently only has stores in two locations worldwide. So I guess it’s lucky that New York is one of them. The first time I dropped by their locale in Elizabeth street I was frustrated to find that they had sold out of their entire season stock a mere three days after the New York Magazine coverage came out. A second (larger) season stock was ordered. I went back yesterday to find that they were almost sold out again. I think I might have gotten the last green aqua model on size 12. This was lucky because they will not be receiving any more Vivo’s until next season in September. Production of the existing season cannot be renewed, or production of the upcoming season will be delayed.

The shoes are actually incredible. They are by far the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn. They are super light, flexible and, of coarse, have no heel support to mess up that perfectly evolved gait.

Apparently the heel support on shoes forces a slight bending of the knees, hips and back to regain a vertical posture. Without the heel support a body is naturally straight. Needless to say, this is better on a number of levels. And after walking in them for five minutes you can notice the difference.

The lady at the Tierra Plana store, who I’m assuming is the manager, mentioned that the company had relatively recently been bought out by Galahad Clark – of Clark shoes. In my opinion this was probably a good investment, particularly given the fact that I may not ever purchase any other casual shoe. The Vivo’s were designed by a tennis player to avoid all forms of ankle injury. So you can actually do any type of sport activity in them. I may not even purchase sport shoes anymore.

If you can, I’d suggest checking these out – probably in September when the new season comes out.