digital culture

For years now, it has been self-evident to us at RedMonk that programming language usage and adoption has been fragmenting at an accelerating rate [coverage]. As traditional barriers to technology procurement have eroded [coverage], developers have been empowered to leverage the runtimes they chose rather than those that were chosen for them. This has led to a sea change in the programming language landscape, with traditional language choices increasingly competing for attention with newer, more dynamic competitors.

The natural consequence of this tectonic shift has been uncertainty. Vendors for whom supporting Java and Microsoft based stacks was once sufficient are being forced to evaluate the array of alternatives in an effort to maximize their addressable audience. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stacks like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are perhaps the best example of this; the differentiation for each at launch was in part their support for multiple independent runtimes from JavaScript to Ruby.

A service economy is certainly one looming possibility for the US economy, but a service economy per se is unlikely to be an American success story. In effect, a service economy with sharply lower incomes and standard of living for most people will be politically unacceptable.

Instead the needed transition is from a factory economy to the Creative Economy. The Creative Economy is one in which both manufacturing and services play a role. It is an economy in which the driving force is innovation. It is an economy in which organizations are nimble and agile and continually offering new value to customers and delivering it sooner. The Creative Economy is an economy in which firms focus not on short-term financial returns but rather on creating long-term customer value based on trust.

By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.

Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.

Apple's share of the global market in mobile phones -- not just smart phones, but all mobile phones -- has expanded from 3 percent in 2010 to just under 9 percent today. That doesn't quite sound like the dominance you'd expect from the world's most profitable technology company. But then you look at the profit pie, and boom: Apple devours three out of every four dollars of mobile phone profit in the world.

The Scratch Online Community allows young people to share and remix their own video games and animations, as well as those of their peers. In four years, the community has grown to close to a million registered members and more than two million user-contributed projects. Andrés Monroy-Hernández — the developer of Scratch, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and Berkman Fellow — presents a framework for the design and study of an online community of amateur creators, focusing on remixing as a lens to understand the social, cultural, and technical structures of a social computing system that supports creative expression.

You can come up with rules for how people should do things, and come up with tables of authorities and permissions and what-have-you. Much of the time, all you’ve done is lay out a rulebase that can be automated. And perhaps should be automated. But maybe it’s too late for that. Today, we’re seeing a shift from process to pattern, a shift from rule to principle, a shift from hierarchical to networked, a shift from centralised to edge-based. No more repeatable processes. Values-based activity. With domain experts dotted throughout the organisation, engaging with customers who expect the people they’re dealing with to be empowered to deal.

In last week’s SEC filing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poked a huge hornet’s nest when he referenced “The Hacker Way.”

But while Facebook participates in some parts of the larger hacker culture — including using and writing free and open-source software, hosting epic hackathons, and encouraging dissident thinking and individual contributions — it might have been a mistake for Zuckerberg to refer to Facebook as a company that embodies the hacker way.

To dive into this reference, which itself speaks volumes about Facebook’s own culture and agenda, we contacted a handful of well recognized hackers, including PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman; and Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and editor of The Jargon File (warning: don’t click that link unless you have some serious time to kill).

We’ve also got commentary from the real hackers at Facebook, the team that works on the social network’s open-source projects, from HipHop to the Open Compute Project.

The entertainment industry has lost the fight over SOPA, its legislative proposal for stopping Internet piracy. Now some want to try again with a revamped bill and a bigger push. But the same approach could stunt Hollywood's clout in Washington.

That's because the industry still doesn't understand its adversary. From the start, studios saw the fight over SOPA as a struggle with a bunch of other companies -- Google and Internet service providers among them -- that were hoping to profit from the Internet travails of the entertainment industry.
That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the industry is fighting what amounts to a new popular culture.

Over the years, the term “hacker” has had a tough time, used most often to describe high-tech malfeasance. For instance, the vile behavior of Rupert Murdoch’s staffers who violated the phone and e-mail privacy of sources, is casually referred to as “hacking.” This is an insult to the proud hackers of yore, but there’s not much anyone can do about it. Language takes its own course. The good news is that more and more, people are using the term “hacker” in the original sense. And Zuckerberg’s letter will contribute to the term’s rehabilitation. “Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done,” he writes. “Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

By elevating the status of hackers to a level that would presumably entice investors to take a stake in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has done a great service to tech in general. Well played, Mr. Z.

Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.

However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).

The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.

How long before we have open source anti-drone missiles?

Today, more than a quarter of a million people* watched the first Presidential Google Hangout with President +Barack Obama from +The White House. The archived video, below, comes courtesy of Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa, whose shared his review of President Obama’s first Hangout at Reuters.com. For the best reporting I’ve seen on the participants and questions, read Sarah Lai Stirland on President Obama’s Hangout.

My immediate takeaway? The forum featured real questions on significant issues, with genuine citizen-president interactions, with back and forth conversation. That was precisely the promise of the platform that I considered ahead of time, when I asked whether a Google+ Hangout could bring the president closer to the citizens he serves.