Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Blockchain and the Promise of an Open, Decentralized Internet

The January 21 issue of the NY Times Magazine included a very good article, Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble, by science writer Steven Johnson.  His article aims to explain what blockchain, cryptocurrencies and related technologies are all about as well as their potential impact on the economy and society.  These are not only complex but esoteric subjects, as nicely illustrated in this funny video.  While blockchain and Bitcoin have been frequently in the news lately, beyond knowing that they have something to do with money, most people don’t really know what they are or why they should care.

This is not surprising.  In their early years, it’s hard for most people to appreciate the potential of a transformative technology.  There’s generally a considerable time-lag between the time we start reading articles about their exciting potential and their adoption by companies and industries across the marketplace.  This is particularly the case for general purpose technologies, like electricity, the Internet and blockchain, which are the most potentially transformative due to their widespread use.   Their deployment time-lags are longer because attaining their full benefits requires a number of complementary co-inventions and investments, including additional technologies, applications, processes, business models, and regulatory policies.

The Growing Importance of Storytelling in the Business World

Communications have played a major role in my work over the past few decades.  During this period, I was involved in organizing emerging business opportunities at IBM, including the Internet and Linux.  Since retiring from IBM in 2007, I’ve continued my involvement with technology-based initiatives, - AI and blockchain most recently, - through my consulting and academic activities as well as the weekly blogs that I’ve now been writing for the past dozen years.

Over the years I’ve learned that when trying to explain a complex new concept or product, it’s important to engage in a kind-of conversation with your intended audience, where you talk about what's in your mind, your questions, your doubts, what you know and what you don't know.  In short, you’re telling a story about the concept, product or brand you’re trying to explain.

While storytelling is mostly associated with entertainment, education and culture, it also plays a major role in business.  Storytelling is widely used in the development of brands for products as well as companies.  And, the more powerful, important and complex the brand messages you are trying to convey, the more important it is that you do so by telling a compelling but simple, - i.e., understandable, - story.

Good storytelling is particularly important when introducing a complex and potentially disruptive offering in the marketplace whose value is not well understood.  It’s a natural way of explaining what the new innovation is all about.  As a concrete example, let me share my experiences with the development of IBM’s Internet and e-business strategy in the mid-late 1990s.

The Public Face of Science

Last month, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences launched a three year initiative to address the complex relationship between scientists and the public.  The Public Face of Science project will explore the interactions of the general public with science, technology, medicine and related areas.

Throughout the 20th century, polls have consistently indicated strong public support for science and technology, especially during the Cold War decades following World War 2.  But recent polling data, - and in particular, a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center, -  reveals a more complex relationship between the public and science.  While scientific achievements are still recognized and valued, there is a large opinion gap between the general public and scientists on a number of scientific issues.

The Pew findings were released in a January, 2015 report based on two surveys of science-related issues conducted in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  The first survey is based on a representative sample of 2,002 general public adults and was conducted by landline and mobile phones.  The second survey was conducted online, and is based on a representative sample of 3,748 US-based scientists who are members of AAAS.

Is a Backlash Brewing Against Silicon Valley’s Perceived Insularity?

“Empire of the geeks… and what could wreck it” was the featured cover story of The Economist’s July 25 issue.  “Silicon Valley should be celebrated.  But its insularity risks a backlash,” reads the tag line of its leader article.  Last year’s anger at the private buses that take employees who live in San Francisco to their workplaces 30 or 40 miles south, is but one of the signs that a backlash might be brewing.

You can sense the reaction against the perceived excesses of its culture in a pair of recent articles, - Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem in the NY Times Magazine, and What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women in Newsweek, the latter visually making its point in its cover.  You can feel it in HBO’s no-holds-barred namesake TV series. And then there is Peter Thiel, - one of Silicon Valley’s most successful, outspoken, and wealthy entrepreneurs and VCs, - who adds fuel to the backlash fire with his controversial views on a wide range of subjects, including women, democracy, capitalism and education.  

Reflections on Ten Years of Blogging

The Internet era was born around 20 years ago, when Netscape went public in August of 1995 and caught the world by storm with its highly successful IPO.  For many people, myself included, the Netscape IPO marked the passage of the Internet from a network primarily used by universities, research labs and the technical community in general, to the universal platform for content, communications and commerce it’s since become. 

The Internet ushered the rise of a highly connected economy all around us, whose magnitude and implications were nicely captured by NY Times columnist Tom Friedman in his 2005 bestseller The World is Flat.  But it’s a measure of how fast things are changing that, as Friedman observed in a conference in 2011, the environment he described was already out of date.  In a short 6 years, we were already transitioning from the connected world of PCs, browsers and web servers he wrote about, to the hyperconnected world of smart mobile devices, cloud computing and broadband wireless networks, a transition that in 2015 is now in full swing.  

Friedman’s words came to mind as I was reflecting on the evolution of blogging since I posted my first blog in May of 2005.

According to Wikipedia, something like blogging got its start with the advent of the Internet era in the mid 1990s, although the term weblog, later abbreviated to blog, didn’t come into being until the latter part of the decade.  In its early years, blogging was mostly viewed as something geeks did, - technical knowledge was required since the tools were fairly primitive, - or as a narcissistic endeavor, - early blogs often felt like online personal diaries.

This all started to change in the early 2000s.  The advent of easy-to-use tools and platforms brought blogging to a much larger, non-technical population.  People started to blog about a wide variety of topics, from politics and journalism to business and technology.  Internal company blogs, only accessible to employees, began to appear.  By the mid 2000s, blogging was growing quite rapidly and had made its way from the fringes to the Internet mainstream.

The Evolution of Online Learning

Where will good jobs come from in our emerging digital economy?  This is a really important question given the dramatic changes taking place in the economy, mostly driven by the continuing advances in technology and the forces of globalization.  Unfortunately, we don’t have very good answers.

But, just about every study on the subject points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers.  Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities.  Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay.

Moreover, while the overall unemployment/underemployment rates remain persistently high, a 2011 McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills.  The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree.  It also projects a shortage of workers with technical, health care, and other skills requiring a post-secondary education but not necessarily a college degree.

This is not surprising given the central role of information and knowledge in our increasingly digital economy.  However, our colleges and universities, the very institutions to which the country should turn to help us address these growing educational demands, are facing problems of their own.  Tuition costs have been rising faster than the rate of inflation, thus making it harder for them to serve the students most in need of their services.  Many educational institutions are facing financial difficulties.  The financial crisis has been aggravating the situation, at both public and private institutions.  Government education budgets are under pressure at all levels, - local, state and national.

Big Data, Complex Systems and Quantum Mechanics

Big Data is one of the hottest topics out there.  Big data is a foundational element in IT’s quartet of Next Big Things: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud.  But, as the real world keeps reminding us, it is possible to make bad predictions and decisions even if you use tons of big data to make them.  The 9/11 attacks showed how even highly sophisticated intelligence agencies can fail to pick out highly relevant signals amidst the mountains of data being analyzed.  Our recent financial crisis showed how even the best and brightest can fail to detect an approaching catastrophic storm.  The failure of so many professional forecasters to accurately predict the 2012 presidential election shows that you can find almost any answer you want in all that big data.

Big data is indeed incredibly useful in all kinds of endeavors, but only in the hands of talented professionals who know what they are doing and are aware of its pitfalls and limitations.  What are some of these limitations?  In thinking about this question over the last few years, I started to notice that a number of subtle, non-intuitive concepts that I learned many years ago as a physics student seem to apply to the world of big data and information-based predictions in highly complex systems.  Let me explain. 

Over 300 years ago, Isaac Newton laid down the foundations of classical mechanics with the publication of his Laws of Motion.  The elegant mathematical models of Newtonian physics depict a world in which objects exhibit deterministic behaviors, that is, the same objects, subject to the same forces, will always yield the same results.  These models make perfect predictions within the accuracy of their human-scale measurements.  Classical mechanics works exceptionally well for describing the behavior of objects that are more or less observable to the naked eye.  It accurately predicts the motion of planets as well as the flight of a baseball. 

But, the idea of scientific determinism, which would in principle enable us to predict the future behavior of any object in the universe, began to fall apart in the early 20th century.  Classical mechanics could not explain the counter-intuitive and seemingly absurd behavior of energy and matter at atomic as well as cosmological scales.  Once you start dealing with atoms, molecules, exotic subatomic particles, black holes and the Big Bang, you find yourself in a whole different world, with somewhat bizarre behaviors like the tunneling effect which are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity.  The orderly, deterministic world of classical physics gives way to a world of wave functions, probability distributions, uncertainty principles, and wave-particle dualities.

Fifty Years of Memories

On June 1 and 2 I was in Chicago to participate in the 50th high school reunion of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Class of 1962.  I have not attended previous class reunions, and was not sure I would attend the 50th reunion either when I first heard that it was being planned.  But, as it turned out, this became an event that I’ve been looking forward to for the last six months.  And, the actual reunion surpassed my expectations, turning out to be a very positive experience. 

The U of C Lab Schools was, and still is, one of the top private schools in the country.  Almost all its graduates go on to college.  Our class had an interesting mix of very sharp students, including children of faculty members and others associated with the U of C; kids from nearby fairly well-to-do, mostly Jewish neighborhoods; and other students throughout the Chicago area attracted by the Lab School’s academic reputation.  The school has long been known for the diversity of its student population, being the first private school in Chicago to admit African American students.  Our class included a number of black students, mostly from middle/upper-middle class families.  In this mix, a Cuban-born, Jewish kid fit right in.

Blogging and Personal Feelings

In November of 2008, Andrew Sullivan published an excellent article in The Atlantic, - Why I Blog, - in which he discussed the unique characteristics of a blog by reminding us what a web log shares in common with its namesake, the ship log.

“In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these [ship] logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened.  They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. . .  A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.”

“As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages - the opposite of a book.  As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems - and is - more truthful.  Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction.  They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them.  Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending.  So they have plot as well as dramatic irony - the reader will know the ending before the writer did.”

“Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world.  We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges.  We blog now - as news reaches us, as facts emerge.  A reporter can wait - must wait - until every source has confirmed.  A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world.  For bloggers, the deadline is always now.  Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive.  It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

I have now been blogging since May of 2005.  As Andrew Sullivan observes about blogs in general, my blog is a record of my changing interests over that time span, of the key items that were catching my attention, and how I felt about them at the time.  Looking back at the many blogs I have posted, I am reminded of some of the major events of the past seven years.

Would a Distributed Model of Government be More Suitable for a Complex, Diverse 21st Century Democracy?

Last week I wrote about the forces that, in my opinion, are contributing to an increasingly polarized America.  I mentioned three such key forces:  the structural changes and employment challenges our economy is going through; the changing demographics and emergence of a kind of new establishment in US society; and the technology-amplified, free-for-all conversations taking place through our multitude of information and communication channels.

How should government evolve to better adapt to these forces?  Are there innovative government models that might work better than our present ones?  Can we look at the evolution of organizational models in business over the past twenty years for inspiration and guidance?

Companies, especially large, global companies have been going through dramatic changes in the last couple of decades, driven by a combination of advances in information technologies, the Internet, the fast-changing market environment, and the heightened competitive pressures brought about by globalization.  In particular, companies have had to move away from the hierarchic, centralized management models that prevailed in much of the last century and embrace a more distributed organizational style.

A New Style of Work

About a year ago I wrote a blog on the post retirement phase of my life.  Tom Foremski, a journalist blogger and friend who reports on the business and culture of innovation in Silicon Valley Watcher, wrote an interesting comment in my blog:

“In some ways, I see your post-retirement life as being somewhat futuristic, in that it will be the way many people will be working in the future.  It's what I call an "atomic" model - collaborating with others on specific tasks/projects and then dissolving those collaborations as you work with others on different projects. In some ways, this is the way Hollywood has been working for decades.  And it's also one that I increasingly see in Silicon Valley.”

“It's a model that increases individual productivity and also organizational productivity because you bring in consultants/experts for specific tasks.  Why have them sitting around on salaries in-between projects?”

“You've retired from the old style of working and you are now pioneering the new style of working :)”

Tom himself made such a transition when in 2004 he left his position as the Silicon Valley reporter for the Financial Times to found Silicon Valley Watcher, one of the first journalists to leave a position with a major newspapers to make a living as a journalist blogger.

I have been very intrigued with this new distributed work phase of my career, where I am associated with several institutions instead of one primary one, as was the case when I worked full time at IBM until I retired in May of 2007 after 37 years with the company.  In particular, I have thought a lot about the role of the Web and related technologies as key enablers of such a distributed style of work.  

The Evolution of My Complex Relationship with Blogging

From time to time, I like to reflect on my feelings about blogging, and then write about them in an entry in my blog.  I have not done so in a while, and it has now been just about six years since I started this blog, so I thought that it would be a good time to return to the subject.

I started blogging at the urging of colleagues at IBM.  In the Spring of 2005 the company was getting ready to launch a major blogging initiative to encourage its employees to participate in the rapidly growing blogosphere.  My colleagues felt that as someone closely associated with IBM’s Internet strategy, it was important that I personally become an active blogger.
 
For several years my friend and colleague John Patrick had been urging me to start a blog.  John has always been a pioneer in embracing new technologies.  He was one of the first people I knew who had a blog, - which is still going strong after all these years.  I resisted John’s exhortations, partly due to the commitment of time and energy it entailed, and partly due to fears that I would not have enough interesting things to write about every week.  But, the excitement building up in IBM around the new blogging initiative finally pushed me over the edge.  I posted my first blog on May 16, 2005.

e-Media and e-Journalism in the Internet Age

I have been thinking a lot about the Shirley Sherrod case, not so much for what we can learn about the current state of race relations or political discourse in the US, both of which have been extensively discussed by people much savvier than me on the subjects, but for what the case teaches us about the transformation of the media industry in the Internet Age. 

The facts of the case are well known.  On July 19, Andrew Breitbart posted a 2½ minute edited video of a near 45 minute speech that Shirley Sherrod had given in March of 2010 at an NAACP event.  The edited video segment posted by Breitbart to make Sherrod and the NAACP appear racist would not by itself have been too newsworthy.  After all, we know that the blogosphere and the Internet in general are full of rumors and innuendos, as are cable channels and talk radio.  In any event, Breitbart was not a trusted source for news.  He is perhaps best known as an ideologically conservative activist, and had previously been involved in the ACORN controversy, also involving selectively edited videos.

It is also no surprise that Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel called for Sherrod’s resignation shortly after the edited video was posted.  Bill O’Reilly and Fox News in general have a strong ideological bent that colors everything they say.

Reflections on the “Post-Retirement” Phase of My Life

In June of 2007, I retired from IBM, where I had worked ever since completing my studies at the University of Chicago in 1970.  A number of friends and colleagues who are themselves contemplating retirement have asked me about my experiences.  So, let me please share what the first three years of my post-retirement life have been like.

I am no longer working full time in any one institution, but I also did not retire in the sense of not working at all.  I am still quite involved in a number of matters related to technology and business, but I am now doing so by working part-time with a few different institutions.  Roughly speaking, two thirds of my work is spent consulting on innovation and technical strategy, primarily with IBM and Citigroup, but now and then with other companies as well.  A quarter of my time is spent with universities, primarily MIT, Imperial College and SUNY’s Levin Institute.  The remaining time is spent in various other activities, including boards and government panels.

After 37 years of working full time for one company, I very much enjoy this new phase which I think of as distributed work, - being associated with several institutions instead of one primary one.  I particularly like the fact that I am now able to spend much more time with universities, in addition to continuing to be involved in business.  At this stage in my life, it feels right for me to have one foot in the private sector and one in academia, while also advising government as appropriate. 

This kind of flexible, distributed work model is one that I believe we will increasingly see, not just in the post-retirement phase of one’s career, as is the case with me, but throughout the careers of many so-called knowledge workers, that is, those “individuals who are valued for their ability to interpret information within a specific subject area,” - in analysis, design, research, strategy and development.

Cuba, the Internet and Social Media

Last week I attended the Cuba, IT & Social Media Summit in New York City.  The summit brought together leaders in the field to discuss the use of these technologies and capabilities in Cuba,  today and in the future.  Many, but not all, of the participants were of Cuban heritage, either directly born on the island like me or whose parents were.

The meeting was not political in nature.  I suspect that most attendees hold views similar to mine regarding Cuba, bemoaning both the repressive nature of the Cuban regime as well as the ineffectual, anachronistic US embargo.  But I don’t really know, because politics was not the primary focus of our discussions.

The key overarching goal of the meeting was “to empower Cubans on the island through technology, helping them to communicate with each other more freely on the island and with the outside world, to access information more freely, and to share information with the rest of the world.”  A second major goal was to start thinking about the future and specifically what is needed to bring Cuba into the 21st century technologically “once laws have been passed that allow the US and Cuba to trade more freely in technology, both in public and private enterprise, and by industry sector.”

A very good summary of the Cuba, IT and Social Media Summit, and in particular of its key conclusions and outcomes can be found in this entry of the blog El Yuma by Ted Henken, a faculty member in the departments of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies at CUNY's Baruch College.  (Yuma is a slang name often used in Cuba to refer to Americans.)  

The summit was sponsored by the Cuba Study Group, an organization founded ten years ago “to facilitate a peaceful reunification of the Cuban nation leading to a free and open society with respect for human rights, the rule of law and a market-based economy.”  Its key objectives include “respect for human and political rights and individual freedoms in Cuba, and denounce the violation of those rights and freedoms”; “substantive economic changes that improve the lives of Cubans”; and “discussion and critical analysis of ideas and formulate policy recommendations that facilitate peaceful change in Cuba.”

Blogging as an Exercise of the Brain

Every six months or so, I turn to blogging itself as the topic for that week’s post.  Perhaps, as someone wrote in a comment to a previous post on blogging several years ago:  “You know that someone has run out of things to say when they start blogging about blogging.”  It is quite possible that when all else fails in coming up with a topic, a self-referential blog will do the trick, as long as you don’t do it too often.

In reality, blogging continues to play a pretty central role in my life.  I have been blogging now, week-in, week-out, since May of 2005.  Writing and editing each post consumes quite a number of hours each week, let alone the time it takes to think what to write about and how to best frame the subject.  Much to my surprise, despite the time and effort it takes to produce each blog, I have not missed a week yet since I started doing them.  Several times I have come close to finally skipping a week when I am very busy.  Other times, especially when I am having a particularly tough time with a subject, I wonder why I am subjecting myself to such seemingly unnecessary anguish.

The truth is that few will care or even notice if I miss a week now and then.  So, why then am I so disciplined about my blogs?  Is this perhaps a manifestation of a somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality?  Is it a way of bringing a certain order to my life?  A weekly blog certainly adds structure to my life, especially now that I am no longer working full time for one company and live a somewhat distributed life, working with several different private sector and academic institutions.

Is there any other kind of activity that, like blogging, I engage in with near-religious regularity even though no one else cares that I do so?  Yes, there is one other such activity in my life - physical exercise.

Blogging and Writing

One of the biggest differences between an academic and a business career is the importance of writing and publishing.  In business, a CV (Curriculum Vitae) will generally emphasize a person’s career history and work experience, including key professional achievements and education.  Business resumes are typically no longer than two pages.  In academia, the CVs will tend to be much longer because they include a complete list of journal articles, conference papers, books and other publications.  Publications are among the most important aspects of an academic career.

Given my 37 years at IBM, about thirty of them in management positions, I have a typical business resume, long in work experiences and short on publications.  But, as my post-IBM distributed career is now about half in business, with IBM, Citigroup and others, and half in visiting academic positions at MIT, Imperial College and SUNY’s Levin Institute,  I have been thinking a lot about what I should do concerning publications.    

In fact, I have been writing a lot for close to four years, namely this blog, which I started in May of 2005.  Ever since, writing a new blog entry week in, week out, has become a major part of my life.  I have not missed one week yet.  Thinking about the subject I want to write about, writing and revising the entry, editing it up until I actually post it, and then seeing what people say about it, both through comments in my blog as well as mentions in their own blogs, takes a considerable chunk of time each week, let alone quite a bit of mental energy.

Blogging at this Particular Point in My Life

Blogging has continued to play a central role in my life since I started this blog in May of 2005.  It is something that I think about a lot every week.  First, I need to plan what to write about, as well as how to best organize whatever subject I settle on.  Then there are the many hours of writing and editing.  When things go smoothly I can probably get it done in three to four hours.  But when a subject is tough and I need to work though how to best structure what I want to say, it can take quite a bit longer.

There are also the times when I am struggling with an entry - usually because while I think that I know what I want to say, I find out otherwise when I actually try to write things down.  I then have to set aside the subject, hoping that things will go better when I later get back to it.  Typically, this is what happens, although every now and then I do have to give up on a subject altogether.       

If this all sounds like work - it most definitely is.  It is something I have been doing every week for the last three and a half years without missing one so far.  Given its role in both my work and my life, every so often I like to focus an entry on blogging itself.  Let me then quickly review my personal evolution with bloogging leading up to its current state. 

Blogging in the Next Phase of My Career

I started this blog in May of 2005.  Over the next year, I found the experience of writing a blog so exciting and interesting that I posted several entries on my thoughts about blogging the following August and December, and then again in May of 2006. 

One of the comments I got on this May 2006 entry was that "You know that someone has run out of things to say when they start blogging about blogging."  I guess I took that comment to heart, because until now I have refrained from writing any new entries on blogging itself.  While I am still very much enjoying the experience, it is no longer new.  For the most part, it now feels that posting an entry in my blog once a week has become part of my work routine.

But given my June 1 retirement from IBM - and despite my continuing, part-time association with the company - I have been wondering what new direction my blog might take.  Are there subjects that, consciously or not, I refrained from writing about as an IBM executive that I now feel free to tackle?  How will my increased involvement with universities - such as MIT, the University of Chicago and Imperial College - start to influence both the content and style of my blog?    

The short answer is that I don't know.  From the beginning, I have looked at my blog as something personal, written by a long-time professional in the IT industry who happens to be employed by IBM - not the other way around.  The same IBM colleagues who encouraged me to start my blog to begin with, advised me to assume this point of view.  They also suggested that I post my entries in an outside blogging site, not one of the IBM sites that many employees use for their internal and external blogs.

The Essence of Blogging

Since I started this blog in May of 2005, I have come back to reflect on blogging a few times, most recently  this last May.  I received some interesting comments to that posting.  One pointed out that  "You know that someone has run out of things to say when they start blogging about blogging . . . Stick to writing about innovation . . ."  But then other comments said "I'm planning to start blogging and that was some valuable insight . . .";  "I appreciate the focus on important issues.  Including . . . the necessary introspection as we all try to understand this new form of communication.";  and "Blogging is still so relatively new that I find there is a lot of interest out there in learning more about it."  So, with your forbearance, I'd like to once more spend some time reflecting on this young form of communications. 

There definitely seems to be a lot of interest out there in learning more about blogs and their influence on society.  Blogs, for example, are playing an increasing role in political campaigns as evidenced by the recent defeat of three-term Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman by newcomer Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary, which quite a few attributed to the influence of blogs.  And as I discussed in a recent posting, a business can take quite a public relations hit when disgruntled customers decide to take matters into their own hands through their blogs.

Furthermore, I find that because this is all so new, quite a few people are very interested in discussing what blogging is all about.  To many, the fact that millions seem to enjoy blogging is a mystery confounding common wisdom as much as the rise of open source communities.  They wonder where the time and energy come from.  Why do you do it?  What's in it for you?  It is clear that quite a few are contemplating whether this blogging is something they should take on themselves, as I did for some years before finally taking the plunge. 

Reflections on Blogging - One Year Later

I started this blog in May of last year, and posted my personal reflections on blogging three months later in August, and then again at the end of the year in December.  As I have been at this now for one year, it is time once more to add to my personal reflections on blogging.

Let me start by looking at the state of the blogosphere through the lens of some information recently posted by David Sifri, founder and CEO of Technorati.  In a two part entry in his blog, Sifry commented on the health of the blogosphere.  In Part 1 he observed that Technorati now tracks over 37 million blogs, with the number doubling in size every 6 months.  Over 50 percent of the bloggers, close to 20 million people, are still posting 3 months after they started their blogs and almost 4 million of them update their blogs at least weekly.  Sifry then added in Part 2 that the blogosphere is becoming increasingly multilingual and international and, while English was the language of choice for the majority of the early bloggers, it now represents less than one third of all blogs.  Japanese and Chinese language blogging has been increasing fast, and so probably is Korean, since Sifry believes that Technorati is currently seriously undercounting the number of Korean blogs. 

Big Blue Bit by the Blogging Bug

Earlier this week, the Journal News published an interesting article on IBM's blogging initiative  - Big Blue Bit by the Blogging Bug  written by reporter Julie Moran Alterio, who interviewed me for the article. 

She asked me why IBM encouraged its employees to participate in the blogging community, to which I replied that "We absolutely recognize that blogging, just like the Internet, World Wide Web, Linux and open source, is a major initiative in the marketplace that we should be part of. The best way to be part of it is not to observe it passively but to do it actively."  I also commented on the difference between blogs and other more institutional, less personal forms of communication: "Even if you're writing about mainframes or you're writing about XML, it's your personal style that comes across. What you choose to write about is which of the contents of your head are you sharing with the world" 

In addition to focusing on IBM's blogging initiative, the article discusses the general topic of blogs by business people and corporations.  Commenting that many corporations are worried about the potential negative impact of blogs by disgruntled customers, David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, a leading search engine for the blogosphere, said that  "In the world of the Internet, you don't own your brand. Your customers and your users own your brand. You're lucky if you get to shepherd it. That loss of control is very scary."  Sifry also said that the number of corporate bloggers is growing, with about 15,000 doing so as of a survey six months ago.  "We're still very much in the early stages of how corporations are learning to use blogs," he added.

This very much reminds me of the situation ten years ago when businesses started to seriously embrace the Internet and World Wide Web.  I remember that lots of businesses were at first nervous about going on-line and providing Internet access to their applications and information to everyone out there, as well as letting their employees connect to the Internet at work.  They feared a similar loss of control, pretty much like how David Sifry describes the fear many businesses now have toward blogging and similar new collaborative innovations that are increasingly  empowering individuals and communities. 

While the particulars might be different, I have no doubt that businesses will have to learn to embrace these emerging Internet-based market forces just like they did ten years ago.  It will be fascinating to see how it all develops this time around. 

 

Reflections on Blogging

It is fitting that my last blog entry for 2005 should focus on blogging.  I think that years from now I will remember 2005 as the year when I started my personal blog.

In my very first entry, which was posted less than eight months ago on May 16, I said that I anticipated an exciting journey.  It has been that and then some.  For years I had resisted starting a blog because I thought that it would have been primarily an exercise in narcissism.  But in the last year, I was frankly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging, and by the number of people I knew and respected who had started personal blogs.  So, when colleagues at IBM encouraged me to start one myself earlier this year (when we launched the IBM blogging initiative), I finally took the plunge.

Blogging Round Table in Mexico

I spent most of last week in Mexico City.  The main purpose for the trip was to participate in an "InnovatorsTour" with colleagues from IBM's technical community in Mexico and from our growing Hispanic technical community in the US.

We had a very good dialogue with faculty members and administrators from some of the top private and public universities in Mexico.  We discussed the increasing focus on innovation, the growing need for technical talent and the kinds of jobs where we can expect higher demand in the future, as well as the various programs we have in IBM aimed at universities, faculty and students.  The Innovators Tour also included meetings with groups of students in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Cuernavaca where we talked about some of our most exciting initiatives in IBM and tried to encourage them to pursue technical careers.

Blogging, the Web and the Emergence of Collaborative Knowledge

I posted my first blog just about 3 months ago.  I said in it that I was anticipating an exciting journey, so let me spend a little time reviewing the journey so far.

I was honestly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging.  My friend John Patrick, with whom I worked very closely at IBM in organizing our Internet initiative, had been telling me for years that blogging was one of the major next big directions for the Internet, right up there with ubiquitous wireless access.

John Patrick's Blog

My friend and colleague John Patrick posted a very nice story about my new blog in his own patrickWeb blog.  To me this is about as close to an official welcome to the blogosphere as there can be.  John was one of the first people I knew who had his own website, and he started his blog before anyone called it by that name.  I remember that a few years ago John was talking about blogs as one of the most powerful forces driving the future of the Internet.  I have to admit that at the time I was incredulous.  As I told John, the only reason I took his comments seriously is because of his incredible batting record in calling The Next Big Thing in the IT industry.

My Blog

One of the more enjoyable facets of my job is communication. So, as blogs have become an increasingly important medium of communication in society, I am starting my personal blog.

In my blog, I will write about the topics I deal with in my job -- Information technology areas I am involved in, including the Internet; servers and supercomputing; standards and open source initiatives like Linux; the evolution to Web services; and content management. I am particularly interested in the application of IT to the solution of increasingly sophisticated problems in business, government, health care and education, along with the tools and processes to help in the development of such applications. Public policy issues such as support for R&D; reasonable IP practices; and programs that encourage innovation will be a focus as well. As someone who was born in Cuba, I am concerned and involved with efforts to support diversity in education and the workplace and would expect to comment from time to time on those issues.

I also have interests beyond my job, such as films, Latin jazz and baseball. At this point, I am not sure how much of those interests will be reflected in my personal blog, but time will tell.

I anticipate an exciting journey for me. I hope it will have some value to those of you who read my blog.