The Smallification of Work

Free Agent Nation, Daniel H. Pink's great Fast Company article about the smallification of work, includes an interesting observation on the issue of job security:

[Deborah Risi, a 40 year-old, self-employed marketing professional] feels more invigorated than she ever did in a traditional job. No surprise there. But -- and this is one of the many counterintuitive truths of Free Agent Nation -- she also feels more secure. She pilots her work life using an instrument panel similar to the one she uses for her investments: plenty of research, solid fundamentals, and most of all, diversification. Just as sensible investors would never sink all their financial capital into one stock, free agents like Risi are questioning the wisdom of investing all their human capital in a single employer. Not only is it more interesting to have six clients instead of one boss; it also may be safer.

Like it or not, the population of Free Agent Nation is likely to expand, as corporations attempt to adapt to and leverage the Flat World. It's a sweeping change, to be sure, but for people who are prepared to to take advantage, this represents an opportunity to align Life and Work to produce something new, something better.

Connecting solar power and open source software

Jason Brooks, writing in his eWeek Linux and Open Source Blog, offers an interesting comparison between the impact emerging solar power technologies will have on traditional electric power generation companies, and the impact of Open Source software on Microsoft and similar players:

While the technologies required to harness the Sun's abundance remain, for now, on the horizon, the means to tap the equally unbounded intellectual potential of people around the world has already been invented—particularly where software is concerned. Just as new energy technologies will cut back on—and, in time, will likely erase—the need for massive, centralized power production infrastructures, the Internet is already dissolving the requirement that software be developed at and distributed from sprawling corporate campuses.

Not surprisingly, the companies who've counted on collecting cash from every person who consumes software—chief among these being Microsoft—are regarding these changes with no small measure of discomfort. Microsoft, having amassed the means to tap the unlimited store of human knowledge in a way that hadn't been possible for just anyone to do, is watching new technologies threaten to open up those unlimited stores of power and profit to anyone.

Yet another example of Smallification.

Fighting to maintain the Smallification of Music Broadcasts

I've already contacted my senators and representatives, urging them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act.

It's good to hear that efforts to combat the new royalty agreement that threatens the incredible diversity to be found on Internet "radio" stations as reported in NPR, Others Challenge Online Royalties, from Yahoo Finance.


This quote from that article puzzles me:

Normal radio stations don't pay those royalties for regular broadcasts since radio airplay is seen as having value for promoting sales of music CDs.

Is it possible that the people behind this boneheaded royalty plan can't see the promotional value of Internet music broadcasts? Given that sites like Pandora and others make it so easy to purchase songs/CDs from iTunes or online retailers, it's clear that the people behind the royalty plan have: a) never visited any of these sites, and/or b) have an interest in driving Internet music services out of business.

Smallificated Wind Power

Interested in wind-generated electric power, but concerned, for various reasons, about giant, whirling propellers? This article from CNET News.com discusses several companies that are taking a different, distributed approach:

Placing a 300-foot high turbine in downtown San Francisco is problematic. But distributed, or on-site, electricity generation systems can help customers get around the transmission bottlenecks and reliability problems of the wholesale electricity grid, Day said.

The idea is to place a network of much smaller wind turbines on rooftops in urban areas.

But why not extend that idea to individual homes? And what about adding photo-electric solar panels to the home mini-grid. Then instead of relying solely on large-scale power plants, we could generate cleaner, greener power through a distributed network of power-generating widgets.

Open Source, P2P, Weblogs, and Slime Mold

Back in 2003 I was gently coerced by cool dude and all-around smart guy and Daniel Steinberg into writing a blog for java.net. The item below is the only post I ever published on that site, reprinted in its entirety because it's what Smallification is all about.

Open Source, P2P, Weblogs, and Slime Mold

How often have you asked yourself, "What do Open Source software, peer-to-peer file sharing, and Weblogs have in common with, say, a big lump of disgusting mold?" Never? Neither have I. But that's no reason to leave the question unanswered.

In a chapter in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, author Steven Johnson describes the apparent intelligence behind the activities of slime mold. Slime mold is just what it sounds like -- imagine a school cafeteria desert that's about three weeks past its prime and decides to venture out into the world. That's right, slime mold is self-propelled goo. But that's not the interesting part.

Slime mold is actually a collection of tiny, individual mold cells that get together when the mood strikes them to form into a single unit and move to a different neighborhood, where there's more of whatever it is slime mold needs to be healthy and happy. There's no central brain, no single point of consciousness, no hulked-out single cell with a big ego telling the other cells what to do. Each cell acts in its own self-interest. From this individual action emerges a collective intelligence, in this case a free-ranging aspic on a mission.

And so it is with OSS, P2P, and Blogs. The genuinely mind-boggling thing about these concepts is that never before in human history has there been a way to channel and capture the collective intelligence that emerges from the utter chaos of millions and millions of human brains all flailing away at who-knows-what. It's grid computing, using human grey matter instead of PCs. OK, maybe CB radio came close, but...

Think about what has already happened. The music business is in a major snit because the vast music listening public has discovered a way around cookie-cutter radio stations and other mass-media outlets that dictate what's hot and what's not. (Don't get me started...) If the business is to survive it must learn to tap into the emerging intelligence of the file-sharing community in order to identify the real markets. (Hint: there's more than one.)

OSS, P2P, and Blogs are collaborative concepts that embrace chaos. They reveal chaos as nothing more than a collection of problems that will solve themselves -- if we allow them to, if we learn to recognize the patterns in the eddies and currents of the human enterprise. These concepts and technologies allow us to finally catch up to slime mold, which figured this stuff out a long time ago.

Radio: Too Big for Its Own Good

Writing in The State of Radio, Plain Dealer reporter John Petkovic offers this:

To reduce costs, staffs were chopped, formats were programmed from afar and DJs were piped in - often making taped token references to a local market that were flown to a broadcast to make listeners think that the DJs were actually there.

That radio is losing market share to Internet radio, iPods, and similar alternatives is no surprise. The same failure to recognize the folly of a mass-market mindset has knocked the broadcast TV networks out of their perches.

Even cable networks now face unexpected competition from YouTube and similar sites, as viewers learn that real people can be -- by accident or design -- at least as interesting and entertaining as anything a studio or network can produce. While DVRs and On Demand programing have significantly changed viewing habits, the ability to use keyword searches and RSS to filter and access video programming gives YouTube and similar services a level of personalization the even cable TV can't match. Not yet, anyway.

As Petkovic's article reports, change is in the airwaves, as the realization sets in among stakeholders in broadcast radio that a return to a local focus might save their bacon. As TV networks begin to offer their content online, jeopardizing the role to the local TV station, it's likely that we can expect a similar shift to a more local focus, beyond that already available in news and sports coverage (though I'm loathe to use the term "news" to describe what is often presented).