Will Everything be Free? – My Review of Free

So, I’m on a roll now. As promised I would share my review of several books. This is the next one: Free by Chris Anderson. An article in Wired about Free triggered me to read this book. Free is a big deal nowadays. Many products and services are offered for free. And people are making lots of money charging nothing. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough…” (p. 3)

Free has always been around a long time, but it’s changing. The internet seems to be doing something interesting to what we pay for things. “Somewhere in the transition from atoms to bits, a phenomenon that we thought we understood was transformed. “Free” became Free.” (p. 4) This book is about this phenomenon.

Chapter 1-3 dive into the fascinating history of free. And the different kinds of free: direct cross-subsidies, three-party market, freemium and nonmonetary markets. (p. 23) Free started out as a marketing method. Now free is an entirely new economic model. (p. 12) The old free was based on the economics of atoms, now it’s based on bits. When something becomes software it inevitably becomes free, in costs and often in price as well.

Interestingly Anderson shows how humans are wired for scarcity. We focus on the things that are scarce, e.g. time and money. While there’s abundance of lots of resources now. We have to get used to that. And work with abundance. “When abundance drives the costs of something to the floor, value shifts to adjacent levels…” (p. 52, 131) And: “… the highest profit margins are usually found where gray matter has been added to things.” (p. 54, also refer to ch. 13 and 15) So knowledge is added, ideas are shared. Why are ideas so interesting and important in this context? Let me share two interesting quotes from the book:

Ideas are the ultimate abundance commodity, which propagates at zero marginal costs. Once created, ideas want to spread far and wide, enriching everything they touch. (p. 83)

Information is how money flows; aside from the cash in your wallet, that’s what money is – just bits. Information is how we communicate, as every call is turned into data the moment the words leave our lips.” (p. 92) “Information wants to be free.” (p. 95, ch. 6) This means: “Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive. (…) Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive. (p. 97)

So, information is abundant now. Where’s the value now? Anderson quotes Herbert Simon on this:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. (p. 180, relate to this blogpost for more about information and attention.)

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies of the digital age. Computer processing power halves in price every two years, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. The internet combines all three. (p. 13, also refer to ch. 5) Google is mentioned as a company that makes more money as the costs of information falls. (p. 125)

Chapter 4 is about the psychology of free. It’s about the excitement we experience when something is free. But free also makes us think the quality must me less than with a paid product/service. And do you care about something you get for free?

What are the free rules? The ten underlying principles of free or abundance thinking are (p. 241):

1. If it’s digital, sooner or later it’s going to be free.
2. Atoms would like to be free, too, but they’re not so pushy about it.
3. You can’t stop Free.
4. You can make money from Free.
5. Redefine your market.
6. Round down.
7. Sooner or later you will compete with Free.
8. Embrace waste.
9. Free makes other things more valuable.
10. Manage for abundance, not scarcity. 

I enjoyed reading this book. The visual examples of free throughout the book explaining how free is/can be applied in different markets are insightful.

I’m not an economist. I read these books because they take me to the edge, challenging me to think and reassess what I’m doing. A big question for me and my work is: How far does free go for a consultant? For instance, I love to share what I know about certain topics. I’d happily go to a company, share my knowledge and leave without asking money for my vision/advice. When do you stop giving/sharing for free? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bonus: I’ve collected some links about ‘free’ here. Hope this helps.

Enough Information

When do you have enough information to make a next step or a decision? As you may know I love to process lots of information. Depending on the type of information I'll dive into it deeply or just dip my toe in it. After processing lots of information deciding when enough is enough has become easier for me. But it's hard for me to describe when I stop taking in information. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model has helped me in this sense. (By the way Snowden is currently summarizing the Cynefin model/approach/concept in several posts.

The Cynefin model basically says: look at cause and effect. Is the cause and/or effect clear? Is the relationship between both clear? Depending on your answer different 'next steps' should be taken. For instance if the relationship between cause and effect is completely unclear. This is the complex domain. Probing is the thing to do. Don't go a read volumes of books and articles. Probe and see what happens, then act, etc.

Even though I love to read lots of information I don't believe in perfection. That's one of the great things I learned from social media. Don't think you will be able to write a perfect report, blog post or book. Don't think you'll be able to process all the relevant content before you start communicating your opinion about the topic. Release as early as possible to get early feedback, to learn more quickly. Listen, think, share and learn.

How do you decide you have enough information? Do you have a problem to 'release early'? If so, why?

Requirements for Document Management Systems

Recently I was honored to co-write a paper with Olha Bondarenko and Ruud Janssen. It is titled: ''Requirements for the Design of a Personal Document-Management System" and was published in JASIST.

I think Olha's work in general and this paper in particular is very valuable for the whole information, content and document management industry.  Because it truly tries to understand how knowledge workers use information and documents. That knowledge is translated into requirements/principles for a document management system.

But you decide if Olha/we succeeded! I hope you like it.

This paper was written in the context of Olha's PhD research - which was finalized recently! - about personal information management. Her PhD defense will be on February 11 (at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands). I hope to be there and will blog/tweet about it.

Tags van Technorati: information management,knowledge management,document management

Too Much Communication

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC. A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters, wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.)

His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever.

This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness.

He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you don't want to get. Read from paper instead of screen (- you can concentrate on paper better than with reading from a screen, he says). And remember: the interest/importance of the message is defined by the sender.

Wow. This is really different from the trend that says we we moving to 'life streaming', 'filtering' and the 'real-time web'. I don't feel I'm becoming sick, irritated, etc. by the amount of information and communication signals I'm processing. Of course I do find we should think before we communicate and share. It should be mindful.

But I feel like I'm missing something here. Are you experiencing what is described in this post? And where can I read more about this subject, also proving the statement that more communication is unhealthy?

Tags van Technorati: communication,social media,information,information overload

Re: When Information is Not the Answer

Andrew McAfee has another really nice post: 'When Information is NOT the Answer'. I advise you to go and read it, definitely if you are in IT. And for Knowledge and Information Management experts this post summarizes what you've been trying to tell IT all along.

McAfee basically shows that not all information can be processed using IT systems. Even though many think so and heavily depend on these systems for decision making. And he gives an example of a company, Zara, that acknowledges this and works with it in practice.

In a comment on his post I pointed to two books that underline the point McAfee's making. One is 'Blink' by Gladwell. (And I'll write a review of this book soon.) And the other is 'The Social Life of Information' by Seely Brown & Duguid. (The last book is one of my all time favorites.) If you haven't read them, please do so. It's very worth your time.

In 'The social life' they have that nice example of a control tower. The tower is fused with IT. But when they really tried to understand the PEOPLE that work in the tower and how they make decisions, they arrived at interesting results. These people used sticky notes, easily processed loads of data, make decisions based on intuition and experience - not on what's on the screen, etc.

And 'Blink' is loaded with examples of 'split-second decisions'. He shows that these decision can be good when they're (implicitly) based on processing lots of information in the past and becoming expert at something. Gladwell shows that some can make good decisions even though all the (objective/general) information in the world seems to be against them.

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Tags van Technorati: knowledge management,information architecture,information overload,information

Different types of content

Mark Morrell of BT has an interesting post on the different types of intranet content they distinguish. I commented on this post, but would like to extend my comment here.

Mark distinguishes between personal, crowd, team and formal content. I commented:

Interesting post! What I was wondering is: is this list right? For you I understand it is. But can’t ‘team’ content be ‘formal’ for instance? And isn’t ‘personal’ a security issue? For instance, I’m working on some content I don’t want to share yet (so it’s personal), but in time it will be in the category ‘crowd’? I’ll blog about this and tell you what my categories are. Thanks for sparking this discussion.

I'm curious if you agree with my remarks. Do you make different distinctions?

Anyway, I think it's great BT is distinguishing between content. I find that lots of content that is now on intranets shouldn't be their anyway. And I see that BT is not only making this distinction but also providing different applications to create and share the content (blog, wiki, CMS, etc.).

As information architect I also distinguish information types. My list is:

1. product info (product data, specs, competitor info, etc.)
2. project info (tasks, calendars, meeting minutes, etc.)
3. department info (presentations, etc.)
4. process info (process descriptions, working methods, templates, etc.)

What we're seeing now is that our intranet contains all kinds of info. I find our intranet (traditional CMS with 1-to-many publish method) should only contain process information. Process information incorporates news and who-is-who info as well.

All these info types can be given authorization levels, allowing certain information to be kept personal or shared within a team or project.

Does this make sense? Again, do you distinguish between information types and manage them differently?

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Tags van Technorati: intranet,information,information management,information architecture

Where's Information Headed?

Thomas Baekdal has a very interesting post titled "Where is everybody?" His post comes along with a really nice visualization to prove his point (refer to his blog post and the picture I added into this post).
It would be interesting to extend this post and visualization with other kinds of information. For instance, office documents, flyers, etc. Baekdal also leaves out books. Books would come in between 'local marketplace' and 'newspapers', I think. And office documents (like Word docs) came around 1990-1995? I remember typing my first report in WordPerfect around 1993. At that time you were still allowed to write your report in handwriting. Wow, time flies!

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Tags van Technorati: information,information management,information architecture