Endless Knots

Kudos to Ian and The Industry Standard

Huge congrats to Ian Lamont, whose work with The Industry Standard has been recognized this week with three awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers! Ian's awards are in "three online categories for small websites:" Projects (his ongoing series called "Where Are They Now?");  Creative Use of Online ("10 'Net services that will succeed (and 10 that will probably fail"); for his own blog posts, where four of his best pieces are called out.

Diligent readers know that I've done some writing for The Standard so I'm particularly pleased to see this publication and its fine editor get such well-deserved recognition.

The "you never know" principle

I'm a believer (wasn't that a song?). Countless the times when something of the vin ordinaire varietal transpires - give a talk, write a book, take a workshop, go hear someone else's speech - and then eons later, something else happens that connects back to that moment, one that you'd never imagine could have grown from that. I mention the "give...write...take..go hear" because in a few cases that I can quickly recall, such things have resulted in unusual follow-ons, sometimes years later, of which one came to pass yesterday.

It all begins in 1984, when Jeff and I were faculty in the School of Management and Strategic Studies, the first online executive education program. Click around on that link and you'll get the flavor of the students, their sponsoring organizations, and other faculty. Quite an honor to have been faculty -- and the setting was, hands down, the most beautiful place I've ever given a speech: La Valencia in La Jolla, California, where the meeting room overlooked the Pacific and the people at the front, i.e., the speakers, got to look out rather than in. I think of it often, especially when speaking in meeting rooms with no windows, no ventilation, and that are typically freezing.

OK. Point is that Don Straus, who passed away in September, 2007, was a student in that class, representing the American Arbitration Association, the organization that he headed for many years. You must read Don's bio at the link in prior sentence. His patrimony is astonishing: his paternal grandparents died on the Titanic, his grandfather having been a co-founder of Macy's. (There's more too.)

Soon thereafter, Don said we had to meet his son, David, who lived in Boston and who was doing work with similarities to ours. The titles of David's books scream the connection: How to Make Meetings Work (his classic with Michael Doyle, who also passed away in 2007) and How to Make Collaboration Work. David also co-founded Interaction Associates (IA), a consulting firm that specializes in these topics and over the years developed unique expertise in the collaborative process. I could go on but I'll leave it here: we got to know one another, did some stuff, Jeff and I spoke at two landmark IA conferences, and we became acquainted with IA's spinoff, Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC), a nonprofit founded in 1993, whose clientele is the nonprofit sector.

Fast forward to last fall, when out of the seeming blue, we receive an email from IISC's Curtis Ogden, pictured (not well but you get the picture, so to speak) here. Curtis had just read The Age of the Network, networks being a big part of what IISC does, noticed that we live in West Newton, and asked to get together. We had a great meeting at, yes, of course, Taste, and agreed to hold a "download" session, in which Jeff and I would share our story around our work with networks.

That session took place yesterday, historic for us in that we've never been asked to tell the whole story of how we developed our work in networks, what got us started, what we've learned, and how the whole thing has played out to date. Quite moving for us and useful, I think, for the IISC folks. One interesting element: IISC's colleague Louise O'Meara videoconferenced in from Belfast, Ireland, which was an ongoing reminder of the challenges and advantages brought by the virtual world.

So back to the title of this post, the "you never know" principle: Had we not taught in the program in La Jolla, we would never have met Don Straus who would not have introduced us to David who would not have invited us to speak at conferences in 1995, which would not have led to our book being in the IISC library, which would not have meant our telling our story for the first time ever yesterday. (And I won't bore you with all the other connections, including one of my oldest friend's being IISC Exec Director Marianne Hughes's former housemate, etc.). Here we are with the group (that's Marianne in the pink sweater in the front). Many thanks. Still whirling inside.

Pamela Erens's "The Understory" online

At times, small press publication poses problems (oh dear, four ps in a row) for writers. Many factors can contribute to excellent work not being available - distribution, short print runs, even wrong listings of titles, viz. our book, Virtual Teams, which was originally listed on Barnes & Noble's site as Visual Dreams (I still want to write that one).

Thus, creative writers fall back on their native muscle to allow readers access to their work. Pamela Erens is among them. Her award-winning first novel, The Understory, is now available for download - free (click the link). But, but...don't let me dissuade you from attempting to buy it here.

Like so many fine writers, I met Pamela through Zoetrope.com and thus became aware of her distinctions: The Understory won the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

But don't just take it from me. Here's what the Chicago Tribune says about the book: "an elegant, understated study of physical and psychic dislocations...artfully detailed and beautifully rendered."

Or Small Spiral Notebook which said: "Jack Gorse, the bookish, obsessive protagonist of Pamela Erens' debut novel, is part of a long line of literary wanderers. Like Binx Bolling, from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Jack is an astute observer, a metaphysician of the ordinary, but a faltering amateur at living the life he so skillfully dissects.... The Understory is a worthy Northern counterpart to Percy's metaphysical exploration, and a reminder that originality and depth can be found in a fiction's language, not just in the breadth of the experience it represents...Not your typical debut.... The soul of this novel is its meditative lyricism, rendered in language that is as exquisite as it is penetrating."

Stunning, brave writer. Congrats on your ingenuity, Pamela, and your fine work.

"Information wants to be free"

In 1984, Jeff Stamps and I taught a course on networking for the first online executive education program. As Steve Teicher commented below, that course brought together interesting faculty, including, while we were teaching, the unusual thinker Stewart Brand. It's a sign of the years going by that when I recently gave a workshop to a group of people early in their careers none had heard of The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart's early masterpiece.

Stewart's remarks that day (he taught after we did) have stayed with me: "Information wants to be free," he said, an expression that I've heard others lay claim to over the years. He illustrated his assertion with evidence that people were using the technologies available at the time -- rudimentary email and Xerox machines -- to pass information around and no copyright rules were going to prevent people from doing so.

Here we are nearly a quarter-century later and these fires are burning hotter than ever. In the last week or so, three independent bloggers have each brought up the issue again, this time in regard to academic journals. Each takes a different tack but all are getting at the same thing: If information is really important, it wants to - and likely should - get out, which flies in the face of the economic realities of journal publishers. Take a look at these posts and see what you think.

1. danah boyd says she's not writing for subscription-only academic journals any longer in "open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals."
2. David Weinberger is down with the idea that Harvard faculty vote yes on a proposal "to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals." He just wants it to go further: giving faculty points in their tenure hearings for doing so. See "Harvard to vote on open access proposal."
3. And then there's "You Can Take Your $15 and ...!" over at Paul Levy's blog. He's calling for journals to release important articles with broad public policy implications: "When a respected medical journal issues a press release about a given article that has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article, it is a bad thing." He got fed up after an important JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article was released and unless you have a subscription - or pony up $15 - it's not coming to a website near you.

Anything but Standard

For a long time after it ceased to publish, I continued to peruse the airport magazines stands (the ones near the gate where issues are free for the ride) looking for The Industry Standard. Its appearance a decade ago on the publishing scene was a grand marker of the dot-com era and its reappearance yesterday, albeit in a different, let's say, 21st-century format, with its focus on "prediction markets," offers an interesting twist.

We won't be able to pick up the magazine at the airport but we will be able to read it online, where in addition to good old tech reporting and opinion, it promises also to tap "The Wisdom of Crowds." James Surowiecki's book by that name points to a favorite topic of ours - that collective intelligence, group smarts, is/are  generally of a higher quality of discernment than any single individual can produce and that such thinking can probably predict what's coming up.

All of this means that "prediction markets" will be a prime feature of the new Standard. Readers can participate in online "bets" about what's going to fly and what's going to crash in the technology world. Don't worry - it's not really a bet and it's all legal, being virtual and all. Take a look and you'll see.

Watch for this news to whip around the blogs and take a look at Betsy Schiffman's piece in Wired.com's "It's Baaaaaack: The Industry Standard returns:"

The Industry Standard, the web 1.0 bible, launched a decade ago, in 1998. In two short years, the magazine set a publishing record for selling 7,558 advertising pages. At its peek, page count for the magazine grew as high as 300, but its business collapsed along with the dot-com bubble. IDG bought the its assets in bankruptcy court for roughly $1 million, and the brand has pretty much sat dormant ever since.

"We found that the brand had quite a bit of equity left," Butcher says. "People remembered what the brand stood for before. Still, there's obviously going to be a new generation of people who have no idea what it is."

Come with me, meet an editor

I had a period a few years ago when, on the train to or from New York, next to me was seated a writer. Always. I've posted here about my adventures meeting another writer time and again in the nut aisle at Whole Foods. (We met for coffee there earlier this week, a location she proposed in an email with the subject line, "chock full 'o nuts.")

A few very close to me say it's my fault, that I strike up these conversations, that these poor writers likely cherish their privacy and I'm barging in on their otherwise contemplative lives.

Explain this, then. Yesterday, coffee (though first I had green tea and then water) with Hal Richman, whom I've corresponded with over the years about collaboration, virtual teams, and the like. Hal was passing through on his way from Nova Scotia  to Indonesia and happened to be staying here in Newton, Mass. for a night.

We talked so long that we closed up one joint (don't get excited, closing time is 4 PM on Saturdays) and moved to a second coffee shop, across the street, although, again, no coffee was involved. (He had ice cream, this was when I drank the water.)

Yammer, yammer, we went, what about this connection, what about that...and off I was talking about the trend whereby medical institutions now also are literary publishers (Bellevue Hospital in NY, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, a few others). Bellevue also publishes books, I said, repeating what I'd read in the NY Times (not just on some unreliable blog).

At the next table were a mother and daughter (also eating ice cream). We smiled and I noticed that she had on a cool brown suede vest with no collar, nice buttons.

"Excuse me," she said almost in a whisper.

"I'm sorry for eavesdropping but Bellevue is publishing books?"

"Um, yes."

She must have seen the question about to come out of my mouth. "I publish a literary journal," said she, poet Jenny Barber, founder and editor of Salamander, now in its 15th year and housed at Suffolk University in Boston.