xander's endeavours Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

25Jan/105

“Fuck you and crowdSPRING too.” – Who’s hatin’ on crowdsourcing now?

Here's an old article, but since I'm sitting at a talk discussing the wisdom of crowds, it seems appropriate. Crowdsourcinging has become an increasingly dominant force on the internet ever since "social media" became a meme. Anyone can produce anything, and distribute/produce it for a fraction of the traditonal cost. This is a big win for consumers of content and the advertisers that support it, since distribution is basically free and the directory of content on the internte massive. People who believe in open-source, free access, and free content are nearly religious in their support of it. One simplely needs to observe the sheer number of manhours going into the Linux, or Mozilla project so see how much people care, and love to hate on things like DRM. Some are killed off publically by the old model of business (Napster comes to mind), but they're quickly replaced by analagous services that make it even harder to derive value out of consumers of content.

Whether this is good or bad for the world at large is debatable, and there's an increasingly vocal group of individuals, organizations, and companies opposing this disruptively open world, and their ranks seem to grow with each new web service designed to leverage the masses. The claim is made that today's internet model is devaluing the work of traditional creative forces everywhere, music, movies... to which the average American consumer (and certainly, moreso elsewhere in the world) discounts as corporate greed. While the local-culture movement has helped sustain small-scale artists, ultimately if/when they get signed by a larger label, the ultimate value that can be derived from their work is declining.

However, now a couple new startups, crowdSPRING and 99Designs, are quickly bring this to another group of creative forces: artists and designers. These services allow a content consumer (for example, a business needing a logo), to connect with a huge number of designers. For each post, submissions can be received from several designers, for which, only the poster selected work receives compensation. Clearly, this is great for the consumers of content, but what about the producers? Judging my the backlash against these sites, designers don't seem to like being reduced to doing "speculative work" without any guarantee for pay. Then again, maybe this is just market forces at work. Jeff Howe writes that, "The demand for low-end design has ballooned in recent years... so has the supply of what we might call "low-end designers" (amateurs, recent grads and the like)." He goes on to mention that there are some eighty thousand freelance designers in the U.S., a shockingly high number, but if there's demand, why not create the market?

The two startups are certainly doing well--and for creating a marketplace where creative forces can meet consumers, why not? Apple did it with it's App Store, and Microsoft with Xbox Live. Yet there's a fundamentally different dynamic here; in that while the aforementionde two services help producers find a market of consumers, crowdSPRING exists more to level the playing field for designers. "Professional" designers now compete in the same space as freelancers, and that's where the complaint's come in.

In my mind, all this yelling is a sign that traditional economic models are changing; some win, some lose, but those doggedly holding onto the old will most certainly fall. If you, as a professional designer, can't compete against new college grads, and hobbiests, too bad. There area couple instances where I feel the model fails, for example this story, where it's said the Twitter "bird logo" designer only got paid $6 for his work, seems a little unjust. But this may be just a matter of too much supply--when you have 80,000 freelance designers, it's not too hard to find someone that will work for just a little less.

Ultimately, it's still a free market; if designers don't want to work for $6 then they don't have to. Tough luck for design firms; hopefully they'll be able to find a way to differentiate their services. I do have one small consolation for the $6 designer; he might as just made the Twitter bird for $6, but I bet his next assignment will come a lot easier.

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24Jan/100

NYC

There's something very magical about the largest cities of the world; whether it's in Asia, Europe, or North America, every time I'm in one, I'm inspired by the energy of the citizens, enthusiasm of travelers, to a point where I'm completely content just to walk the streets and watch people go about their day. I've felt this in Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and now finally, New York City.

Of course, out of all of these, New York is probably the only place in North America that can compare with the other "major" cities of the world in terms of sheer size and pace. The entire downtown of Seattle could probably fit in one East/West strip of midtown Manhattan, and it was incredible seeing endless rows of skyscrapers knowing that there are just as many rows behind them. From the Avenue of the Americas, to the Canyon of Heroes, to Broadway, New York doesn't disappoint when it comes to showing you how big Manhattan life can be.

NYC also had the unique feeling of being the Mecca for all things that matter in the mainstream America. San Francisco has it's tech niche, Seattle has music and art (and some tech), but get to New York and make it big; that is, success in America. Whether it's in finance, performance, international politics, tech success, culinary mastery, fashion, entertainment, get recognized in New York and it's the world giving it's cheers. I've got to hand it to New York for being one of the world's living, beating centers of human existence. I wonder if I would perceive it's glory if I had grown up there, but for an outsider, taking my first real taste of the city, it's truly something else, and a place that everyone must see.

That said, in the midst of all things grand, it was still the little, human things that got to me most; The hardworking street vendors closing up their shops; the crazy hobos spreading their the world-is-coming-to-an-end FUD; NYC subway crews smiling (or not) at people passing by, and so on. Instead of being a statistic in a city of nearly eight million souls (something that many from smaller towns seem to fear), each seemed to be raised up by the combined energy of the city.

The most awesome thing is, despite having spent nearly 5 days in New York, it feels like I've hardly even scratched the paint; there's so much I haven't done there that I know that I'll have to be back. A month, or maybe even a year. I haven't seen the nitty gritty yet that I know is out there, perhaps just off on another block, and I wonder if I'll eventually be disillusioned by what I perceive now to be grandeur, but I'm pretty thick-skinned, and my passions die hard.

And once again, I come back to my life routine, having witnessed something awesome, and inspired by something grand--work is a little more meaningful here, and I've been reminded about why I love to travel.

Okay, so that's enough of my summary, I'll post more details next.

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2Jan/100

“(c) 2010″ is already on the web for massively scalable services? How?

As someone avidly interested in web services and their path from concept in a vision planning room, to the point where they leave their impact on the world, I find it fascinating that Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have changed their (c) 2009 to (c) 2010 on their front pages, but Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, and even Yelp still read (c) 2009. I have my own reasons for finding that interesting, but that's not important. What IS important is when the flip happened, and the deep understandings of each that the answer to 'When?' represents.

Sure, I don't expect most people to care. This might seem like an utterly trivial, 'who the hell cares?' question to many, but when you think about it, at any given point, every piece of the a page's visible design and text has to pass through one person's yes/no decision, and one computer (likely unencrypted). Since there are so few software companies operating websites at distributed scales like this, there isn't a lot of non-proprietary software that can manage these gargantuan services. This probably means the service management software isn't very well updated with the latest data visualization software. Every change that might occur is either a bug, or something that was approved in a very deliberate fashion. Which is why when I see that several sites have already updated their copyright year to 2010, I realized that they must've had a team of people that discussed the importance of changing to 2010 immediately after the new year.

What kind of mindset is needed to get this resolved? I mean, at some point, close to the end of the year probably, some person had to stand up and say, "Hey, if we don't do this when the year runs around, then we're gonna look stupid." And because of the yes/no process that ended in agreement with this guy, someone had to stay up and edit the year in, sync it across all required web-facing servers hosting the site, and then finally, produce it on demand, to the world. What I'm really curious about is speculations on the drama that could've surrounded this process.

I wonder... Did the engineer really stay up that late at work (on New Year's Eve, no less) just for this? Or was there a decent chunk of dev/test resource time spent to make it happen with server-side code? Could he just pay Chinese gold farmers a couple bucks to press the button at the right time?

Let's remove one simple but hugely complicated problem just to make the scope of the 2009->2010 challenge easier to understand than it actually is, and assume that there's only one timezone to care about. (Actually, this might be more true than not, since most sites only have a centralized team managed page). Or maybe there was a legal team that warned the product groups that there was a potential for lawsuits if the year was misrepresented on a site with their logo. Nevermind the ridiculous legal precedent that must've been quoted to give the lawyers fear in the first place, or the BS they must've used to convince the PG it was important enough (heck, maybe the legal department was just playing a practical joke). Okay, fine, that last one is a little too unlikely.

I'm going to bet that this miraculous change was the decision of a single engineer, with a religiously singular internal desire to see this ridiculously low-pri task completed, and sitting on the cloud by 1/1 12:00. Probably a program manager, but with the collaboration of someone with world-server access. They probably worked with someone in operations that snuck it in at the last second before the RTW VS. [This could never happen at any of these, now-massive corporations... or could it? ;) ]

Of course, my now immersed-in-the-web mind wonders some more: How was this change done? I wonder if a clever engineer decided to hardcode a date change script into the next build. What did this code do?
Would it still do it's thing when the year rolls to 2011... and not throw some unexpected exception and take down the livesite? Could it really have been a Find-Replace that just changes all instances of "2009" to "2010"? Nah, it wouldn't be that stupid, or we'd be seeing at least a few random instances of 2009 (that is specific to 2009) turn to 2010.
Maybe he/she made the change and had a script upload the new version at the right moment? Would they be able to secure buy-in from the deployment team for that?

[to be continued...]

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