(2005-07-13) Michalski Push Rogues Trust

Jerry Michalski gave a talk at the Push2005 conference profiling "rogues" who assume that Amateurs can be trusted to do things, and create tools/structures to help them do that: Christopher Alexander, Alice Miller, John Taylor Gatto, Lars Von Trier, George Fox (Quakers), Richard Stallman, David Bohm, Russell Ackoff...

Update: semi-related

• Peter Merholz wrote recently about giving up control to please your users - I think this is the Mix And Match Loosely Coupled thing - the big question being how many people will give a dang as the Adoption Life Cycle moves along....

• Jim Moore on the web-EcoSystem stuff he's interested in investing in. Web superservices provide essential functions for solving problems (such as search, storage/archive, security, pooling of information, notification of changes, identification of relationships, analysis of memes), are available on the web as public or near-public global resources with enormous Economies Of Scale and scope, have very simple open APIs, and can be integrated (scripted together and/or customized) by users or near users to provide custom solutions to important problems.

• Mark Bernstein commenting on the previous items. I'd always thought that one-server was merely a stepping stone or an affliction. Looking back, when Blogger turned into a machine in a borrowed closet with a quarter of a million customers and no revenue, that was just an anomaly. Blogger needed to be bigger than that, and when it got the cash to be bigger, it got better. But some valuable services belong at the one-server scale. Weblogs.com is a terrific B-to-B service. It wouldn't be better if it did more: it just does enough.

• It seems an open question to me as to whether there are actual Business Model-s behind any of these things.... (which doesn't that they aren't good for Evolution, it just means they may not be Sustainable, but maybe that's ok too, kinda like Built To Flip)...