innovation

Becoming Bland: Popularity isn’t Innovation

Something has been happening at Twitter. There are rumblings of changes and re-designs. First there was the new changes that made it more “photo-centric”, then there was the talk of removing the @ reply and today the buzz is the new design making it all look more like Facebook. The photo changes have been made to challenge instagram and the re-design is to become more networky and challenge Facebook?

At the same time Facebook has been attempting to challenge Twitter and online chat with its recent exorbitant purchase of Whatsapp. Facebook’s launch of paper has been an attempt to take the market from news aggregation sites like digg.com and, more importantly, apps like Currents, Flipboard and Zite. Annoyingly, the innovative Zite has been bought by the excellent Flipboard which will decrease the diversity. Combining two nice things does not necessarily make it better.

In similar news but this is done to shut the app down.

Yahoo has announced that it wants to challenge YouTube with its own service. Yahoo also owns Flickr which has been slowly evolving. Flickr’s changes to it’s layout have made it progressively more difficult to download images and find information about the licensing which made the tool such a treasure for the open content community. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting protest about this yesterday (Restoring CC attribution to Flickr, because Yahoo broke it).

So this isn’t really anything new. But it does point to a level of stagnation in the online world. When was the last time something really new, innovative and exciting happened? When the tech world is using more lawyers than developers you know that something is up. Instead of making really good products that many people like there is a race to the bottom in order to create as many similarly bland products that few people have the energy to hate.

In politics this is usually seen when previously well defined parties race towards the middle ground in order to gain the most votes. While this may be a successful policy to win elections it does tend to create bland politics and eventually leading to a great sense of disenchantedment (this might not really be a word but you know what I mean). Once all parties have lost their identities and voters have become unhappy the field is opened up for the growth of distasteful radical politicians spouting extremist views.

How does this work in tech?

The race to similarity and the priority of lawsuits over development creates a fall into blandness. Trying to make everybody happy will make nobody happy. This may open up the chance for new devices, apps and services to come forth. Well that would be the theory but in practice the market will be blocked by patents, fenced in with copyrights and guarded by monoliths that purchase and destroy all that is new and exciting.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy today?

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Political Economy of Innovation

Here is another interesting book available for download under a Creative Commons BY NC SA license. Its Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation by Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronson. Download it, buy it and check out the blog for extra material.
download-graphic2

Innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) fuels the growth of the global economy. How ICT markets evolve depends on politics and policy, and since the 1950s periodic overhauls of ICT policy have transformed competition and innovation. For example, in the 1980s and the 1990s a revolution in communication policy (the introduction of sweeping competition) also transformed the information market. Today, the diffusion of Internet, wireless, and broadband technology, growing modularity in the design of technologies, distributed computing infrastructures, and rapidly changing business models signal another shift. This pathbreaking examination of ICT from a political economy perspective argues that continued rapid innovation and economic growth require new approaches in global governance that will reconcile diverse interests and enable competition to flourish.

The authors (two of whom were architects of international ICT policy reforms in the 1990s) discuss this crucial turning point in both theoretical and practical terms, analyzing changes in ICT markets, examining three case studies, and considering principles and norms for future global policies.

Posted on by mklang

Positive Procrastination

While procrastination is often seen as a negative act it does have a positive side. Of course if the procastination we enjoy turns out to be positive and leads to a result – is this really procrastination at all? Hmm an academic Zen koan… but I digress and possibly procrastinate.

Since returning to Göteborg from my Open Access project in Lund there has appeared a small window of opportunity to begin doing something more substantial and long term. So based upon this premise I happily ignore a bunch of more pressing, but smaller, tasks in order to create a meaningful long term project.

Thus far I have located and area, a vague plan of action, a whole bunch of related work and now I am formulating a thesis to be presented, argued and defended. So with the risk of jinxing the project by talking about it at this early stage my idea is to write a book (not very original since I am an academic) on the connection between copyright, culture and innovation.

There! It’s out now. So all I need to do now is to fine tune the thesis and begin purposely bashing the keyboard. Who said that procrastination is all bad?

From Bizzaro by Piraro

Posted on by mklang