April 2004 Archives

I just came back from Istanbul, and I bought a carpet there.
After many suffering many assaults in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar from usual carpet sellers who try to crimp you and won't let you go ("Where are you from? Come in. Cheap price, sir!"), we finally went to a place recommended to us by the Consul General of France. So we met Yashar Aksoy at the Arasta Bazaar under the Blue Mosque. Yashar spoke French and greeted us in his shop with a glass of hot tea, and we started talking about ourselves. After twenty minutes of small yet friendly talk, he showed us at least twenty different carpets, each time explaining the origin, the history, the signification of drawings, showing what was remarkable, what needed to be fixed etc... He took almost two hours of his time to teach us what we needed to know before buying a carpet.
When we finally selected the top five, he told us to go home, think about it and come back the next day in another place where he had many more to show. The consul's wife told us that he was reliable because he made most of his business with French expatriates, knew the buying habits of French people -very different from Americans- and was very cautious about keeping his reputation of honesty. Therefore we should expect him to go down directly to his final price leaving very little space for bargaining.
When we finally decided on a Umurbey carpet (the one below left on the picture), he offered us another glass of hot tea, walked us back to our car which was ten minutes away and kissed my wife goodbye s we left.

I like to think of this as excellent salesmanship: I bought a carpet, but I also learned a lot.

My friend and colleague Gilbert Brault (absent from the blogosphere) just developped today a nice little goodie for our Domino-based Lotus QuickPlace (QP) environment here at Schneider Electric. What it does basically is allow a registered user of a QP to post messages in whatever "room" of the collaborative space using e-mail as shown here:View image

A simple string of metadata included in the e-mail title allows the message to be routed automatically in a specific page other registered users can see and subscribe to (...)

From Prof. Albert Anghern of Insead:

The Russians rioted in the 1840s when the government tried to persuade them to grow potatoes. Why? Because being used to living mainly on rye bread, they suspected a plot to turn them into slaves and force a new religion on them. …and yet within fifty years they where in love with potatoes!

What happened? The explanation is that they added the same sourness – kislotu – which had always given savour to their food, and which was what they were ultimately addicted to.

Moral: "Every people puts its own scent on its food, and it accepts change only if it can conceal the change from itself, by smothering each novelty in its scent. Optimism about change, whether in politics, economics or culture, is only possible if this premise is accepted. ” Theodore Zeldin - An Intimate History of Humanity

Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of UNC Chapel Hill just completed an extensive empirical analysis of p2p sharing which concludes that

Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Now that's interesting. Is the battle for IP protection based on false assumptions? Could it be after all about maintaining a status quo, so that intermediates who used to provide a valuable service before P2P technology existed can still make money even though the value of the service they provide has reduced dramatically?

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools. A must read by Jon Erickson (or so it seems) which strongly suggests that the Open Source movement will have a central role in developping those collaborative tools, because they must be interoperable to work, and because they are inherently people-centric

Open source software offers an excellent and underutilized avenue for disseminating innovations in user interface. Researchers should be writing plugins for widely-used open source applications, such as the Mozilla Web browser, instead of developing prototypes from scratch. Open source developers should be scouring academic publications for ideas, rather than simply duplicating the user interfaces in commercial products.

About "I'm blogging this - A closer look at why people blog" (via Lilia), 5 nuggetts and related personal comments linking weblogs and innovation:

1- Blogs are often thought to be mundane and superficial. Yet, as Nardi writes

Many of the blogs we analyzed combined thoughtful commentary on serious topics of general interest with revelations of deply personal experience

Exactly. Blogging is often the easiest way to add your "two cents worth" on a publication, based on personal experience. If an article or a post resonates in the blogosphere, it doesn't necessarily mean that it attracted a large audience like a TV channel or a magazine, but that some people wanted to add something to it. Bloggers typically don't comment too much on someone's post. They rather backtrack it and enter a new post on their weblogs. Blogging is not so much about giving your opinion than about contributing. It's about dialogue more than about discussion.

2- People also blog to

get information to people who might probably miss it

The famous Trent Lott case is a good illustration of the role of weblogs as amplifiers of faint signals.

3- Blogging is also

for people for whom thinking and writing are basically synonymous

or to put it differently, for people who are not satisfied with their thoughts unless they write them down in a coherent and logical form.

4- Blogging plays a role in community building. That's what we experienced with blogwalk 1.0. Blogs are natural community building tools for people whose practice is to write and comment on the writing of others: researchers, poets, journalists, and to a lesser extent sofware programmers... and who typically obtain recognition from their written work, which by the way is the major hurddle to overcome in business environments, where people typically write to cover their asses only. See my previous post on Blogs and CoPs

5- Blogging may bring some fame too!

certain poetry bloggers were "touchstones" of the community because they were known throughout the network and their blogs were regularly read and commented on

. Same for research: look at Lilia, Jim, Judith and Sebastien

Article about corporate weblogs Fast Company | It's A Blog World After All talking about employees "playing with dynamite".

IBM began blogging in December, and by February, some 500 employees in more than 30 countries were using it to discuss software development projects and business strategies.

Example at IBM: Ed Brill's weblog