Good friend and fellow Rebooter Peter Rukavina asked me to write about Instapaper, as I was raving on about it when we had our annual meetup in Copenhagen.

I thought it a difficult thing to write about, other than providing a link, and a one line explanation - it stores web pages for later reading.

Literally that's all Instapaper does. So far, so delicious et al. But that's where the comparison ends. First, there isn't any tagging involved with Instapaper, just a simple 'I'm letting myself get distracted, I'll save this for later' bookmarklet.

Secondly, what the Instapaper does so brilliantly, is convert overstuffed webpages to that highly readable format, plain text. A bookmarklet grabs the current web page I'm reading (invariably I seek out the single page, print version) and 'saves it for later'. So, when you eventually login to Instapaper, you have a pile of saved articles waiting for you.

Here's where the service really comes into it's own - you have the ability to look at a beautifully rendered plain text version, without the visual clutter of those pesky, blinking, revenue generating ads (fwiw, I often choose to visit ads, particularly on the print/single page versions offered by websites, to encourage these views).

By the way, another tool worth mentioning at this point is the excellent 'Readability', a bookmarklet that converts a web page into a quiet, plain text version sans ads. I often use Readability to read pages, in deference to Instapaper.

I suppose both Instapaper and Readability raise an interesting business model for online writing; pay to have less on a page - not just less ads, but less everything. Interestingly, some sites have made efforts to block the javascript techniques that Readability uses to 'clean' its pages - perhaps those sites would benefit from thinking about why people are using such techniques (cf. the business model in the previous paragraph).

And I haven't even got around to mentioning Instapaper's rather lovely iPhone app yet. Peter's a die hard Nokian, so he'll have to make do with accessing the plain text versions (as I did on my e61), which is still a hugely useful experience on a small screen device.

But the iPhone app takes Instapaper to another level. After Mail and Safari it is the most used app on my phone.

It takes your 'read later' articles queue from the instapaper website and downloads beautifully rendered plain text versions to your iPhone. With an optional night time mode with tilt/rotate prevention. So you can read at night. It's such a brilliantly simple idea, superbly executed.

Other use cases: commuting without cell coverage. Plane rides. Bus stops. You get the idea.

The usability of this app all flows from it's deep support for plain text versions of text. I find the more I create and consume text, the less abstraction I want from that text. You know, like a book presents text. Less distraction, less noise, more reading.

The ultimate manifestation of this approach is naturally the book, so the circle was completed I suppose, when a bright spark decided to publish a bunch of their Instapapered plain text articles into a physical book.

I really liked that idea, so I asked a few friends if they fancied doing the same - ploughing through my 'to read later' list and each selecting a few articles. Which we did. And we also used Lulu to (privately, because we didn't want to breach copyright) publish the book, which came out rather nicely (more photos):

The irony of taking what was often a print publication's electronic edition of an article, pushing it through a service that converted it to plain text and then printing a physical edition of that book isn't lost on me.

But novelty aside, the ability to curate, with friends, a set of articles, was a great experience.

The latest changes to the Instapaper website and in particular, the iPhone app, have been focused around curation: starred items, folders, and being able to access other user's saved articles.

So, there you go, Peter - the blog post on Instapaper :-)

_UPDATE: I forgot to mention http://blog.newspaperclub.co.uk - it's a venture setup by some nifty Brits; they've created a business from the blog–newspaper idea they had last last year._

It's interesting as it uses the low costs of spare newsprint capacity to create, well, newspapers from curated web content.

So, here's a list from notes made from a talk by SocialText's Ross Mayfield (who along with Lee Bryant, lead the thinking in the 'social enterprise' area) Enterprise 1.0 to Enterprise 2.0, which I think summarise the 'social enterprise' trends I've been observing (and trying to influence) in my clients:

• document-centric to people-centric
• structured to freeform
• taxonomy to folksonomy
• folders to tagging
• knowledge management to knowledge sharing
• need-to-know to need-to-share
• one-to-many to many-to-many
• centralized to distributed
• top down to emergent
• rigid to flexible

The rest of the article requires less than a minute to read, but has a tight summary of Mayfield's views on the roles of intranets, and 'social messaging'. Also worth a skim are Mayfield's slideset on SlideShare.

Most recent first - Moleskine have released an intriguing site that lets you create PDFs of contacts, or your own text/images, that print to fit exactly inside their lovely, pricey, notebooks.

I really like the idea of being able to customise notebooks, perhaps with some timely reading, or personal lists. Nice simple instructions, nothing beyond a dedicated attempt and a text editor...I tried this using an old blog post - doesn't seem to be able to handle line breaks (or basic html paras or lists?).

Like BoingBoingGadgets, I thought there would be a nifty way of integrating this into the notepad, but it seems to be expected to just pop them in wherever. Oh well.

And a fantastically interesting set of ideas and physical prototypes about notebooks, both from a perspective of physical manufacture/repair, and the notebook as memory and intellectual container, is Tom Armitage's post on Endless Notebooks. A fascinating idea; treating notebooks as repairable and upgradable objects, not static clumps of paper.

Last month I gave a 5 minute micropresentation as part of O'Reilly's Ignite session in Leeds, on some research I've been doing into the future of reading (follow that link for a separate blog I've started)...

( Detailed notes of my talk).

Too crammed, not enough preparation (er, none), and I talk too fast...but hey, it was only for 5 minutes...

It was a great night (props to Imran Ali for curating it) ; lots of micropresentations that I really enjoyed. A few that spring to mind:

• My life in 20 graphs
  
• Aid 2.0
• Mass customisation and the one-to-one future
• The politics of patterns

Google unveils smart electricity usage monitor software

Another interesting move in a nascent space...this from google.org, who announced GoogleWatt, their 'strategic' renewable energy investment program earlier last year.

Ambient data management, and visualisation at a personal level, along with the massive aggregation of zillions of households, plays right into Google's core strengths...a lot like the really interesting Google Flu Tracking initiative that uses their search data to detect trends in search terms that predict early outbreaks.

Wait for the inevitable tie-ins with new 'light consumption appliances' at the household side, and Google selling energy usage data to renewables companies and energy futures traders...

For a hardware appliance that tackles similar energy use analysis, it's worth taking a look at Ambient Device's Energy Joule, a plugin smart monitor with a realtime display of energy pricing from it's built in data feed over FM. Very er, smart.

(Via TechMeme.)

Open Environment

• It’s powerful and effective to let people shape their own software ‘experience’
• Wiki content creates accountability and visibility on project deliverables
• People can see and learn from other people’s content

Dealing with Initial Resistance

• Broadly speaking, managers are more resistant to change than team members
• Wiki content creates accountability and visibility on project deliverables
• Some people instinctively didn’t want open info (e.g. on project deadlines)
• People are addicted to email (cc lists, ‘paper trail’. ‘I told you in email’)

Stick with it

• Initial resistance dies down; some of key advocates were initially very sceptical
• Organic growth is unpredictable; usage has occurred in unexpected places
• Multiplier effect; as people use the wiki in their own areas, more people get exposed to the wiki

A culture of prototyping

• Everything’s fast, low hassle, low cost and open; e.g. asking people to vote for new features
• Iterate content; more comfort with ‘early and often’ iterations (and easier to build content as a team)

Why have wikis worked (and other tools failed?)

• Open ‘adult’ system; unlike KM systems where control/mistrust built in
• Contributors able to shape and manage their environment to fit needs * no templates/required fields
• Organic, completely optional use. Wiki was ‘sold’, but didn’t impose a top-down mentality
• Primary focus was a social/people project and not an IT project

Wired has an interesting intro to a book on attention:

"The other important thing is to discuss interruption as an environmental question and collective social issue. In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice."

I'm really interested in the ideas from this book - many of my peers feel, at least some of the time, like we've developed some level of ADD; 'thin slicing' our attention into ever smaller elements; I think it's definitely the downside of constant feeds of information and this techo-peripatetic lifestyle.

I only realised today that there's an RSS feed for my unread articles queue - here it is , if you're interested in my inadvertent web curation :-)

Crikey, there's over 650 articles in there :-| More reading now, less 'read later' methinks.

I was asked what I thought about Twitter and it's potential, or rather the concept of Twitter, for business use.

(I should have restricted my reply to 140 characters)...

Why it works

I think Twitter works well, because i) it's centralised and so it's easy to pay attention to 'flow' and for them to create ceasy connections between users ii) because, by design, it's blogging restricted to SMS length writing, and iii) they've given easy access to build lots of services around/throught it, and people can easily 'hack' it (e.g. the use of hash tags to identify 'tweets' on a shared topic).

It's too much aggro to write long posts, but quick blurts of status information, throwaway comments, etc. are pretty easy - that's why I think people like using it.

Utility

I scan it once or twice a day to see what my friends have been mentioning; friends who do use it often have an app open, which I find intensely distracting.

You could argue it's just a load of trivial sms type messages; and you'd be right - but when it's your family/friends/hero making those comments, then it becomes relevant.

I found it super useful when at conferences - I want to see quick thoughts, location, status from a bunch of people at a glance; Twitter is fantastic for acting as a central hub.

I've noticed a lot of companies/people use it as an alternative to email to provide updates and 'promotional' info, which by it's nature is opt-in vs. say, email.

Business Model

There's been a lot of conversation on the web about this.

I think Twitter will sell pro 'data mining' accounts with alerting and demographic breakdowns for PR firms and companies who want to track brand mentions and velocity through a influential groups.

They could charge individual users for retaining 'tweets' past 30 days, or for extras like image uploads etc.

And there's good old advertising...

I think the most interesting model would be the pro accounts for PR firms/brands...

And I'd definitely check out this article - it's a good insight into Twitter's popularity from Tim O'Reilly, a smart thinker.

In my original email, I forgot to mention SocialText's 'Signals' which they describe as a Twitter-like messaging environment for organisations using their nifty Wiki platform.

Last week I took part in O'Reilly's Ignite session a micropresentations style affair (nice change to talk, instead of organise...)

I tried to outline my thoughts on the 'Future of Reading' - I've put my slide notes and background research in an outline. It's a reasonable summary of my observations and thinking in this area.

The slides, with notes are here (1mb pdf) .

"It's a really tough one - classic thin end of the wedge scenario - as soon as you (inadvertently) 'socialise' the fact that you can, in fact, lock down spaces/pages in the wiki, you poison the well of openness for the wiki community at large.

The problem is, in my experience, that there's c. 5% (FBFR) [1] of information in a company that truly is secret. Lots of employees feel, proudly that their stuff should be protected too.

And over time, the wiki evolves into a set of silo'd information, that prevents the emergent serendipity of information flow and connection that we think we can help you leverage, say in 6 months time [2].

If there's one thing most companies don't need, is another set of information silos. Just ask the US Department of Defense (sic) - their Intellipedia wiki is an interesting case study for openness of information behind the firewall.

In other clients we've advocated a 'hybrid' approach - exactly like you've got in your wiki space - i.e. it's not the existence of the report/data/file/whatever that is private, but the object itself.

The binary nature of this approach means that it's really easy to socialise, and defend, as you don't end up in a "but they've got secure spaces, why can't we?" conversations.

A good comparative model is (another client) - they have multi-country, massive user and content wiki based on complete (employee only) access.

The open nature of their wiki means that people from across the org chart have connected and collaborated where they had never met or previously known each other.

They also have other wikis where everyone is given locking rights.

Guess which one the CEO gets to hear about on 'Innovation Showcase' days :-)"

[1] Fictitious But Feels Right
² I've got some nice anecdotal examples of this, that we've facilitated with some decent 'framing' of the software..

"Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like (Steve Jobs) comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up."

There's a good debate about newspapers, the role (and cost) of investigative journalism. But this isn't it.

Worth reading to see how this argument won't be won - by framing the discussion about access via 'paper-like' tablets and subscription models derived from physical distribution models.

(Via Vagueware.)

Peter Greenaway on the New Visual Literacy

"...he comes to the ICA to argue that the world of text is giving way to a exciting new age of visual literacy."

The Cybernetic Way of War

"The idea of cybernetics didn't just give rise to the internet. Through its successor discipline of network-centric warfare, it has also burrowed into American and Israeli military culture. Where did those ideas come from, and what has their effect been on the war in Iraq, 2006's Israel-Lebanon war, and the current war in Gaza?'

Pity it's just authors, and not a few actors (in the military) sense, but still...

Clay Shirky

"...returns to update his thesis about mass internet collaboration in the light of the last year and 'the Obama effect'. We are now seeing masses of people engage in both spontaneous and planned generosity online, according to Shirky,"

Saw him talk with Brian Eno last year...always interesting, but felt more of a reminder - this might be a good review of how Barama facebooked the '08 campaign.

Mike Figgis on Digital Filmmaking

"A small number of major filmmakers now work mainly or exclusively using digital film. How does digital film change the work of the filmmaker and the perspective of the audience? Mike Figgis...is here to lecture on the aesthetic possibilities latent in digital film."

In all of them, "The use of camera phones and recording equipment during talks and events in the Feedback series is encouraged.", so I'll look out for meedja of the events in anycase.

I re-read it, and realised pretty much all of it was directly analogous to using wikis in organisations (at least those companies where employees are primarily knowledge-workers).

Re-reading and editing notes helps me remember, So I’ve done a quick but of editing, a search/replace of ‘teachers’ to ‘employees’ and thought I’d share it here.

1) "Wiki's take too much time to manage. I haven't got time to update pages"

Having seen quite a few employee's workloads up close, in various organisations, any wiki implementation would need to be highly sensitive to the contribution time required/expected from employees.

One of my key counterpoints to this objection is that wiki content updating shouldn't be seen as additional work, but as a replacement for other 'content' production - email is the best example.

Think how much time an employee spends in Outlook. What if they just shifted their writing style a little for a wider group than the cc list and wrote the email straight into a wiki page, where the original recipients receive the notification? And what if those recipients, instead of replying by email, used comments and updated the original wiki page? No extra time would have been spent, but that previously closed conversation in email has now become a useful piece of information, available to others.

Additionally, if the wiki was used as a delivery mechanism for some project work, this integration with an employee’s existing workflow would ease the employee’s acceptance and use of the wiki?

2) "...Take a quick look behind Wikipedia in the community pages, and you can see a vast and complex governance framework in place. It's not completely true that anyone can edit everything."

Absolutely. But Wikipedia's structure has developed, ostensibly to combat commercial and political 'spam' and other page abuse, because the wikipedia community want to maintain open access to content wherever possible. Wikipedia is also a huge, globally distributed, high-volume content environment; a highly structured framework of editors and approvers is needed.

Companies are operating behind their own 'firewall' with company regulations and behavioural norms governing behaviour, particularly content creation (creating 'content' from synthesised knowledge in compliance with various existing frameworks is what knowledge workers d0) - it's unlikely they'll need a secondary level of organisational control over content creation.

3) "...Within a company, people will probably want to exert greater editorial control..."

Based on what insight? I think this is a dangerous assumption. I had to tackle the same knee-jerk desire for control in implementing corporate wikis - those that were open, i.e. easy to read and edit, with no control and 'approval' generated far more content and viewing than the competing solutions that led with a role-based authentication as their primary interaction paradigm.

I'd counsel that one should avoid assumptions about control. Instead, see how people react and contribute. It may be entirely appropriate to implement editorial approval, but I think that should be decision based on whether the emergent behavioural norms dictated it. This 'control' would be as a last resort, not a starting policy for wiki use.

4) "What about control over the user community, how do make people clean up content and keep things up to date?"

However, I think it's a terrible idea to force employees to perform content cleanup of content. The editorial role should be celebrated and given as a defined responsibility/reward.
Another, deeper approach; the potential for creating 'virtual prefects' - but with a more positive role (perhaps with an explanation/discussion of how editors work); to maintain responsibility for growing, nurturing and maintaining content areas - similar to wikipedia's editors and social standing within their peer group).
Editors and wiki guardians are the lifeblood of a decent, living wiki; no activity in the system should be construed as negative or punishment.

5) "Wikis require a critical mass of users (relative to content scope) to be effective, otherwise the content looks thin, and people don't go there..."

I disagree. Studies suggest that content/readership in any group environment is skewed heavily toward a small number of enthusiasts that will contribute the majority of content. There is an opposing study that argues in Wikipedia's case, a broader collection of contributions are made by a larger number of infrequent contributors coupled with a tiny amount of 'janitors' who maintain and format the vast majority of Wikipedia's content.

However, In my experience of running wikis over a year 'inside a firewall'; i.e. a trusted social environment, where there is almost no contentious information and contributors either know eachother or are aware of team/departmental membership, the classic Pareto effect comes into play.
I estimate that over 90% of content is created by ~10% of users - that's based on looking carefully at edit/creation in ratio to content views.

But that ratio is, in my mind, perfectly acceptable in the context of a business; people gain benefit from reading content, even if they don't actively contribute (yet). The real challenge in these 'known' environments is to get collaborative edits; where people know each other, or are in a shared social space, they don't seem inclined to edit/add to 'other people's pages'

6) "The philosophy and high level concepts within companies, (such as defined responsibilities, defined framework, the existence of governance structures, policies, the community of practice etc) demonstrate a framework of use. Such a framework of use is needed for Wikis, and something that more and more businesses will need guidance on..."

I disagree; the structural approach outlined above presents a real danger, in that it creates a particular culture of use, skewed toward the initial structure and policy that was dictated.
Far better to design the environment to be flexible; let a culture of participation grow organically through encouragement and continual refinement.

Motorola is a good example of this organic, 'discovery' model of organisational use of social software (wikis in particular). Motorola has a hugely successful wiki ecosystem, with little, if any, 'control' and rapid, but completely organic growth/usage that reflects 'real people's needs'.

The organic metaphor is a good one, as the level of content they have 'grown' (3,200 wikis, 17tb of searchable data) requires farming:

"We don't have a wiki police group," Redshaw said. "We just think it's the way the business runs. All a business is, is human beings talking to each other, trying to get stuff done." "People start using the capabilities as they become available," said Singh. "They are not advertised, but widely used." Despite the laissez-faire approach, all is not anarchy at Motorola. Managing the platform's usage are 250 "knowledge champions" who take responsibility for different subject areas in the Open Text collaboration infrastructure. The group meets biweekly to set governing processes.
(Quoted in eWeek)

To get a really detailed insight into Motorola's wiki ethos (if you've got an hour), listen to Toby Redshaw of Motorola.

It consists of clergymen, physicians and some other professions...(including) Mr Price who writes on morals... we have wine and punch upon the table. Some of us smoke a pipe, conversation goes on pretty formally, sometimes sensibly and sometimes furiously: At nine there is a sideboard with Welsh rabbits (rarebit?) and apple-puffs, porter and beer"

From Chapter One, "The Invention of Air", Steven Johnson.

Ah, a copy of the Economist article on Coffee Houses I wanted to link to...

Note to self: must start re-reading Quicksilver.

As an aside, searching for the quote above led me to the Google Books entry for Conversation by Stephen Miller. This is the first direct purchase I've made as a result of finding the text in Google Books. So there ;-p