Uh. Two people whose opinions I deeply respect, Niko Nyman and Joel Spolsky, say that 2D barcodes don't work.

In 2006, in my earlier job, I tried to push the concept inside Nokia, publicly manisested by the the pompous blog posts 2D barcodes will rule the earth and 2D Barcode Manifesto. Taking a honest look at the current state, hovever, I realize that things have not proceeded as quickly as I assumed. Yes, we (=Nokia) have put a free barcode generator available. Yes, we have put a pre-installed barcode reader in the hands of millions. Yes, we have promoted open standards, and the consensus in the industry seems to be that this is the only sane way foward. And lots of other companies and individuals are doing similar stuff.

But still, I don't see barcodes around me. I don't use them in real life. I haven't seen anyone (Japan being an exception) using them in real life, except for technical curiosity. Still, I am planning to add barcodes-linking-to-application-downloads under Beta Labs website, due to numerous requiests from Beta Labs users. I still very much want to give 2D barcodes a fighting chance.

As Joel concludes:

Sometimes when the elders say to the youngsters, "don't do that, we tried that, it failed," it's just because they're failing to notice that the world has changed. But sometimes the elders are right, and the youngsters really are too young to know the history of the idea they think that they've just invented.

I guess we'll get to watch to see whether the oldsters or the youngsters will win this one.

Pick your side:

A remarkably great opportunity for a Master’s Thesis worker in Helsinki Finland? (not 100% confirmed yet)

Would you happen to know a great candidate?

Note: this was just a heads-up: please don't clog my email inbox, I will let you know if / when it becomes available

As I watched this video clip of how Techmeme homepage changes over time, revolving around a limited number of hot topics, I couldn't help but wonder: isn't this a textbook example of herding phenomenon? (via Herd)

To give you some context, let me introduce you to the artificial life simulation called Boids, created by Craig Reynolds in 1986. In the simulation, boids are individual agents programmed to move around according to a set of simple rules. The fascinating part, as nowadays seen in movies and computer games, is the marvellously complex movement that emerges from the simple rules, almost as if the whole was a creature of its own.

Craig explains in his website:

The basic flocking model consists of three simple steering behaviors which describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities its nearby flockmates:

1. Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
2. Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
3. Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

Hmm... Don't these points sound frightenly similar to how the blogosphere and social media works? Bloggers, including myself, while trying to be different from each other (= separation), are heavily influenced by their blog commenters, RSS subscription list, and aggregation services such as Techmeme (= alignment and cohesion with local flockmates).

Let's look what happens in practice. Here's an example Boids simulation that has added a simple goal-seeking rule, symbolized by the green dots:

Doesn't this look exactly like what keeps happening in social media, including the blogosphere and aggregation services like Techmeme or Digg? To me, it sure looks so. A "hot topic" gets born, like Scoble's episode with Facebook, and everyone and his uncle contribute to the debate. But also, a truckload of other equally important/interesting hot topics get ignored, due to the herd phenomenon.

But what if you don't like the herd thing? What if you want to avoid it?

Looking at the problem from another perspective, James Surowiecki convincingly argued in his book that for "wise crowds" to emerge, you need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.

Guess which one of these criteria is missing from the public debate in social media?

Independence. Bingo.

At this point, you might wonder why the heck I'm writing about this mumbo-jumbo here, in this blog. The thing is, we would want to take the Nokia Beta Labs feedback system to the next level, and I'm struggling with the problem how much of it we should make public, and how much private. Making the feedback system public inspires people to send insightful feedback, and to expand others people's ideas. But then again, it throws fuel on the herd phenomenon.

At the end of the day, I think we need to have both: a public feedback system (with all the latest web buzzwords) for debating the hot topics, and a private feedback system for collecting systematically feedback about the rest.

Any thoughts?

If I had to make a single new year resolution, that would be to kick in the nuts everybody who mentions the term Web 2.0. Nothing personal. It's just something that a zen master should do as a favor, when somebody limits his thinking so harshly by clinging to such labels, and doesn't try to see the real world as it is.

Sure, the box that Tim O'Reilly defined in 2004-05 was truly a thought-provoking one; and sure, it facilitated the emergence of great new stuff in the latest wave of web innovation. But as Janne Jalkanen wisely wrote last April:

"Web 2.0" is becoming now a constraint, a convenient catchphrase, the box in which people think. And I'm not interested in boxes.

So let's all stop talking about "Web 2.0". I'm sure people understand your point if you call it plainly "the Web".

I'm not suggesting, however, that we should stop making definitions and boundaries, and just think and talk out-of-the-box or without the box. On the contrary. Here's the wisest thought I saw today, from HBR Article Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box (walled garden, sorry) recommended by Rita Gunther Mcgrath:

In our quest for breakthrough ideas, we didn't ask you to think outside the box. Nor did we ask you to think more intently inside your usual box. We gave you a new box and asked you to think inside that.

Constraints are the thing that let us function, and eventually create beauty (or innovation, or a great football game, whatever). We all need constraints, some ground rules for the game.

So off you go, and define yourself a new box.

Just do me a favor: whatever you do, please don't call it Web 3.0.