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Abhijit at ifacethoughts continues a thread from Mike at Techdirt who writes if the programmer takes the blame for not being a user, make the user a programmer.

This is already happening, and even done well. In Excel.

Making users programmers is exactly what makes Excel so powerful. In many circles it has become the de facto management knowledge tool. And while it lets you use VB, the power of Excel is largely in its ability for users to put statements like “=sum(a1:a4)” into cells.

That is user programming at its finest. The point, imo, is to give users software that lets them simply discover and create as much functionality as they need–and no more than they have to–within that use context.

Do that well, and you’ll find people using your software for things you never dreamed of.

Tom had this to share today:

I know Dick Cheney and former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond—and for that matter, Michael Crichton—say no deal. Maybe you do, too. That is, global warming—or not. Hence the picture above is a report, not an OpEd. Apple blossoms, Boston Public Garden, 1 January 2007.

I happen to be convinced that climate change is a serious matter. The real question, in my not so humble opinion, is what do we do about it. I fear that environmentalists and anti-corporate liberals want to use the crisis to push through their own political agenda. At the same time, clearly the friends of industrial mega-corporations tend to be in a campaign of denial.

It’s frustrating. The longer we fail to have a credible strategy the more costly the ultimate corrective behavior is going to be. How long until we actually have some sensible dialogue on this topic?

Greetings and felicitations! Best wishes to everyone for a fabulous, productive, and wildly successful 2007.

Hugh McLeod is a genius. After an exchange with Doc Searls that I disagreed with, Hugh shares a seemingly disconnected thought that is so spot on the whole message thing, it’s scary.

What is an Object of Sociability [OoS, or “Ooze” for short]? “Ooze” is simply something that allows you to engage with another person. It could be anything. It could a party. It could be a bottle of wine. It could be a hyperlink. It could be a social gesture. It could be social currency. It could be doodling a cartoon on the back of a business card at a bar and giving it to the cute barmaid. You tell me….

Funny, but this ties in to a conversation I had with Juri about two years ago at a London geek dinner. We were talking about the switch in marketing away from “The Message”, towards something that one has no control over i.e. The Ooze.

The metaphor I used at the time was “wave vs particle”. At the subatomic level, things are interchangably waves or particles, depending on what instruments you are using to observe them [somebody far more scientific than me, please correct me if I’m wrong]. It might look like a wave one day, a particle the next.

A traditional marketing “message” acts like a wave. In the future, I believe marketing messages will behave more like particles [that is, if they want to succeed]. A wave stays connected to its source, a particle does not. Once the particle leaves you, it is no longer yours. You no longer control it, anymore than a dandelion spore controls the wind.

An excellent metaphor. The traditional view of a message, as a wave, suggests centralized control and the ability to modulate it at any time. Particle messages, however, live a life of their own. Once released into the wild, the source doesn’t have much more to do, except perchance to spew additional particles in hopes of redirecting attention, correcting, or augmenting prior messages.

You might call this the “bathroom deodorizor” method of message management.

You see, the human nose responds to particles in the air, unlike the eyes and ears which respond to waves. So, when you have the unfortunate experience of smelling something you don’t like, a common response is to spray a deodorizer which overpowers the unpleasant smell with more favorably smelling particles. Ahhh… much better.

Isn’t this a lot like what happens with catastrophically bad PR nightmares? When a company gets into a public crisis, it smells bad, as countless negative message particles flow into the public nostril.

Companies fixated on the wave model have been known to simply put out a press release denying the stink. Think Intel and the 1994 Pentium floating point bug. Treating messages as waves fails to address the real problem, leaving the public to stew in its own smelly frustration. In Intel’s case, they not only let the aroma waft around on its own, they left the source of the bad smell out there on the living room carpet!

More progressive companies acknowledge the problem and engage the world to fix it. They remove the source (when possible) and put out credible response particles on a massive scale, overpowering and ameliorating the stench of the offense. Think about Johnson & Johnson’s response to the  1982 Tylenol Cyanide Poisoning.

The particle view of messages makes sense in our post-mass-media world where communications are dominated by one-to-one exchanges rather than broadcast blasts from centralized sources.

Particles demonstrate four critical aspects of messages:

1. Once a message is in the medium, the source relinquishes control.
2. It doesn’t necessarily matter what causes a message. If its out there, it affects the environment.
3. The only way to mitigate an unwanted message in the environment is to seed new, credible replacement messages with such potency and saturation that it displaces the previous. (Preferably, one does this without offending the environment.)
4. It pays to shape your messages effectively. Make them smell good. Make them believable and understandable. Make them effective tools at helping your organization. Because once they are out there, they are out of your hands.

Number 4 is the real point of my post about the Demand for Messages.

People need messages to discern opportunities, make good choices, and take action. Modern communicators should craft messages that make the most of the particle model and stand on their own, sufficiently clear and valuable so that users understand, appreciate and propagate them.

The particle-virus addendum:

When users spontaneously propagate messages on their own, message-particles act more like viruses, which makes them even more powerful. They still act like particles, just more effective in saturating the environment. It also makes them more outside the control of the originator, just like good Ooze.

Thanks, Hugh.

Have a great New Year’s everyone! See you in 2007.

There’s been a lot said about the new Attention Economy and a lot of interest in generating value from “Attention Data.” The enthusiasm bubbles up from excitement about a new abundance to reach the conclusion that Attention is now the scarce resource that smart people will use to create wealth in our post-mass-media, post-mass-production world.

The problem starts with the excitement about a “general abundance” in our newly digital world which Wired famously referred to as The Long Boom in 1997, but we eventually realized was just the Big Bubble. The problem of the New Attention Economy then expands beyond simply a new “Economics of Abundance” with a hubristic assertion that Attention is the secret ingredient for future success, complete with calls to invent an entire new “Attention Economics.”

Unfortunately, Attention is only limited because time is limited. Its value is ephemeral at best and annoying at worst.

We each have just as much Attention in any given day as we have conscious, waking hours. It’s just a function of time. Simultaneously, Attention, once earned, has fairly lightweight value. It can be earned by a distracting but ineffective advertisement and does not in itself indicate anything other than a first-order stimulus response. Put flaming letters flying across the sky, I’ll probably look up at it and pay Attention for a moment. But that doesn’t mean I’ll do anything in response.

So Attention not only presents nothing unique in terms of scarcity, its value is intrinsically frail. That isn’t an exciting basis for a new economy.

Abe Burmesiter over at Abstract Dynamics has a different take on why there is no new “Attention Economy” (worth reading in its entirety):

Somewhere on the edge of academia circulates the idea that economics is defined as the “study of how human beings allocate scarce resources”. It’s a definition that doesn’t show up in most dictionaries, but it has a stubborn persistence…

It’s a curious distortion to make economics strictly a study of scarcity, and like the textbook chaos theory case it starts out as a rather minor disruption. Scarcity is after all essential to the generation of price and value, and economists hold those processes dear to their hearts. There is of course more to economics than just studying scarcity, but it’s not exactly an alien concept. What’s curious is what happens when non economists start latching onto the distortion, what’s curious is when scarcity meets attention from three different directions.

Michael Goldhaber, Richard Lanham and Georg Franck, all more or less independently converged on a phrase, “the economics of attention” in the past decade or so. At the core of their thought (which varies widely in quality) is the observation that in a time where information is becoming, in Goldhaber’s terms, “superabundant” what is scarce is attention…

The first irony is that if economics was really just to be about the distribution of scarce resources it wouldn’t even be about money. For money is about as far from a scarce resource as there is. It can be printed out by any government and by a skilled counterfeiter too. Or it can be generated by any group or organization with enough clout… Money is anything but scarce. The problem is not there is not enough, but that it circulates with a damaging inequality.

Goldhaber and Lanham though don’t seem really want economics to be about money anyways though. They’d much rather refocus it all around attention. It’s an act of overstatement that probably does them far more harm than good. They get to make exaggerated statements about the need for a new economics, perhaps it makes their observations seem bigger, but it also makes it far easier to ignore them. They might want it all to be about attention, but quality and accuracy still have a bit of value left in them. Someone is going to make a career pulling attention scarcity into the wider economic stream of thought, but it just wont have the extreme ramifications the attention lovers vest into it.

In short, thinking about Attention may be intriguing, but it isn’t going to be the foundation for a new economics. It isn’t going to reinvent how we do business or how we work as a society.

So, despite others’ feverish efforts to the contrary, I’ll go on the record as stating unequivocally, 2007 will not be the year of the Attention Economy. Neither will 2008, 2009 or 2010.

For my money, I’m betting on Intention, VRM, and ComplexSearch.

Doc Searls and Hugh McLeod apparently agree that There is No Demand for Messages.

But that’s not really true. There is huge demand for clarity and understanding. And you only get that through messages.

Doc says:

Let’s face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It’s not coincidental that they’re both ugly. Beauty isn’t a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information.

This assumes individuals know what they want. Yet, people often don’t know what they want and the yellow pages and classifieds are often incapable of breaking through that disconnect.

Does anyone remember 1994? Where in the yellow pages did you find a good web design firm? (I know, I had to try to tell the phone company which category our firm belonged.) And if you don’t know about the special promotion this weekend at your favorite store, you may never visit the store, even though you definitely would if only you knew about it.

People want to know about unique opportunities. Consider the Thresher phenomenon in the UK, by way of Hugh. 40% off. Limited time only. It was not only a huge sales success, it became a news phenomenon.

Seriously, people wanted that message. And it wasn’t classifieds or yellow pages.

Also, people want to know about their options. We can’t look in the classifieds for something when we we don’t realize there might be something there that fits our needs.

We live in a sea of information from friends and media, from which we pick and choose how we might go about filling our needs. Often it feels like information overload. In order to understand our options, we need clarity. We need to be able to discern how specific offers fit into our world, how they create value, and how we can take advantage of them. Only with that clarity can we actually perceive choices, and only from those choices can we take action.

Here’s an example of a failure to communicate, one that is one of my favorite modern branding catastrophes: Tivo, that lovable little device that has reconnected so many people with their addiction to passive entertainment.

I bought my brother and sister-in-law a Tivo for Christmas last year and they didn’t bother to install it for four months. Four months! They had heard about it. Didn’t get it. Didn’t think it would be worth the hassle. Eventually they got around to it.

And now they love it. TV was always a constructive part of their household, with a pro-active stance regarding what & when to watch and a social practice of watching as a family. Tivo made all of that easier, more fluid, and more accessible. In put them in control of when and how they were going to watch TV and it made their life richer.

But before they had the product working, they had no idea.

They never would’ve gone to the yellow pages or the classifieds. They never would’ve gone to Circuit City to buy it. Unfortunately for Tivo, none of the Tivo’s communications managed to deliver a clear, understandable, and memorable message about the true value of the product. If it had, they would’ve bought one long ago.

So, back to Hugh’s original question:

As traditional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising gets more expensive and less relevant by the day, as the traditional mainstream media advertising business model gets continues to nosedive, where is all the client’s business going to move to, as it seeks out greener pastures?

The business is going to move to conversation agents who help them talk with people clearly and credibly about products and services that meet real needs.

Most companies invest far too much in execution when what they first need to do is figure out strategy. Once you understand what your message needs to convey, and who you want to reach, then and only then can you execute–creative concepts and delivery channels–in a way that reliably delivers the right message to the right people.

As media changes, society and markets change, and the execution tactics necessarily change. But the need for a clear message remains.

How do you create value in my life?

That’s the message people demand.

Firms that help companies converse about creating real value in people’s lives will do just fine serving clients in the post-mass-media, post-Madison-Avenue world.