Entries in 'books' ↓

After posting my article on the anatomy of Kaplak Stream I found this brilliant video featuring Dan “back of the napkin” Roam. Incredibly insightful stuff, about something we all can learn from and be a lot better at : visualizing and communicating our problems, visions and solutions. Please enjoy :

You can support Kaplak and buy Dan’s book here if you are going to buy it anyway. I know I am.

I’ve had a few days these past weeks where I’ve been kicked out by a fever and a sore throat. When you’re sick you’re not up to much. And when your 8-month daughter is sick too, it’s really no fun at all being sick, if that wasn’t enough.

On the bright side, this gave me some deserved time to finally get into Carsten Jensen’s epic Vi, de druknede (in English, We, the Drowned, appearing later this year). I’ve been looking forward to reading this novel for a long time since it was first published in 2006, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

It is an epic about the history of a 100 years from 1848-1945, not through the eyes of kings or generals, but from the perspective of the sailor, the adventurer, the flogged, the fugitive, the runaway, the outcast, the drowned (in all kinds of meanings of that word), and the wives and children who were left behind without being asked, all native to Marstal, a Danish port town on the island Ærø. With the obvious exception of the shrunken head of James Cook, which figures prominently in book. The novel leaves one with a few interesting perspectives on things global and local, which is inspiring, not least in the context of the global internet, and in the context of Kaplak.

In a Danish context the novel is not exactly marginal. It received rave reviews and has been extensively marketed by it’s publisher and by booksellers, and has sold well. In this sense, it is an industrial product, mass produced and sold via traditional book selling channels. The book’s IP (i.e. translation and distribution rights etc.) has been sold to more than a handful of other countries.

On the global web, however, the novel is a marginal niche product. It exists at the mercy of search and an exponential growth of information on the web. In this sense it faces precisely the same challenges as a completely unknown novel by a completely unknown author, if it wants to move beyond the local context and use the internet as a marketing or distribution channel. Like many similar products, Vi, de druknede has it’s own website, but to find it one almost has to search for the book’s exact title. At least, one doesn’t find it by searching for the author’s name, which was my first choice, because apparently Carsten Jensen doesn’t have his own website! The first hit is to an architect of the same name, and another to a LinkedIn profile for a CEO with the same name. And Carsten Jensen is even supposedly the most prominent “Carsten Jensen” in a Danish context, which would lead one to think that he had a greater amount of links pointing to information about him and thus a higher Google PageRank. The most authoritative (international) source on Carsten Jensen remains a stub on Wikipedia.

Even if one does manage to find the book’s website, one will find that it is only available in Danish. Apparently the publisher has thought only about using the global internet for targeting the book to a Danish audience, even if the book rights have long since been sold to a number of other countries. This of course just underpins the status of the novel as an industrial product, which seeks to appeal to a national, mainstream audience. An English reader will learn more from this article, which appears as the second hit, when one searches for keywords such as marstal + sailors.

As a niche product, Carsten Jensen’s novel doesn’t fare much better on the web than most niche products, despite local rave reviews and traditional marketing campaigns via conventional channels. It is as less or as much seen, as it has customers who search for it. Making this easier for potential readers has apparently been of very little concern to the publisher, if one takes this superficial analysis at face value.

We, the drowned is an obvious metaphor for all the unanswered queries of the web. When writing this article I had to find out what a “shrunken head” was in English. It is easy when you know it, but how do you show a search engine what you mean? I knew the Danish word, “skrumpehoved”, but finding the English term was pretty tricky. Kaplak doesn’t have any ambitions for creating new or more intelligent ways to search, but we do think the activity of our network will likely help generate more relevant and context-rich web results, which will more likely cover a much much longer tail of niche interests and pursuits, than is the case today.

Nicolas Carr has written an in-depth analysis of Google and the implications of the company’s rapid growth and business style, which is well worth the read. It is a clearheaded and concise piece, which is a must read for anyone with even the slightest interest in Google’s business model. Here’s an excerpt :

The way Google makes money is actually straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet. [...]

For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive ad­vantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements is expanding into ever more industry sectors.

Carr’s latest book The Big Switch came out earlier this month (January 7th), and I’m looking forward to reading it. I’m curious if there’s a level in the book beyond the dreary dystopic visions of a future beyond our control, which is a dominating theme in many of the reviews I’ve managed to trawl tonight.

At first mention, I have difficulty swallowing Carr’s notion of a World Wide Computer. Yes, it is true we leave information everywhere about ourselves and our online behaviour patterns whenever we use the internet, and companies (such as Google) are able to collect and analyze a lot of all this data. What’s critical IMHO, is not that this data is available and can be analyzed by individuals as well as companies, but that the means of creating the technological architectures of it’s control are as widely distributed as possible (as well as, which follows, the tools and methods of collecting, analyzing and consuming the data produced by these architectures). Which is why open source software, or more importantly free software, is so important, and why the use and spread of open file formats (as opposed to proprietary formats) should be as widely encouraged as possible by policy makers.

I also have some difficulty with the idea (in the excerpt) that everything happening on or with the internet is somehow beneficial to Google. At a superficial level, Carr is right, new websites is the lifeblood of Google, but the same lifeblood may choke the company, if it doesn’t develop methods of finetuning or reforming search as a method. Google as well as other search engines face an unprecedented growth in the amount of accessible information globally which presents great difficulties for search fundamentally as a method of finding information, at least as any kind of general purpose tool. Anyone who in recent years has experienced lousier and lousier search results can testify to this.

On a related note, I’d like to highly recommend David Vise’s The Google Story for anyone who’d like an enjoyable introduction to the amazing story of the rise of an amazing company - also available in a convenient audio format.