O'Reilly Radar on Gnip

As I mentioned last week, Gnip looks to be at least of tangential interest to use in museum tech, whether because we may be involved in social software, or as a model for addressing the sort of data interchange problems we face (though of course there are alternative approaches). Jim Stodgill has written an article on O'Reilly Radar of which I understand about 30%, but which looks at how Gnip compares to enterprise service bus, in the problems it's tackling and the solution it offers. It's worth a read.

Mike Dunn on "technical due dilligence"

Extracted from an interview with Mike Dunn of Hearst, published on ReadWrite Web, these are the top five aspects of "technical due dilligence" that Dunn looks for when considering a startup for acquisition.

1. The primary things I look for are a thorough understanding of a company's current technology state and a roadmap of their future. I then fill in the building blocks to paint a picture of the company and its structure via the next 4 areas.
   
2. Staffing: The company should have a proper ratio of dedicated to outsourced staff. The focus for in-house staff should be on owning and extending the company's value-add. The focus of the outsourced staff / service should be on areas where technology is available at a reasonable price.
   
3. Infrastructure and Architectural: I look for alignment between the infrastructure in place and their roadmap. I try to understand their architecture, i.e., have they designed something that will be stable, yet scale and grow as their business requires? Have they over or under built, are their investments proper for current state and extensible as their growth requires?
   
4. Workflow and Processes: This is usually the hardest part of my interviews with startups because while most have ways they do things, they often aren't comfortable expressing them. They also aren't normally done in a way that's repeatable to the point where they could be called a workflow. This is OK. As they mature, standardized workflows and processes will be established, normally out of a necessity to ensure they're providing a stable environment that doesn't get negatively affected as they introduce change.
   
5. Costs: This is the spreadsheet part of the conversations. What has been spent to get them to the point they're at, what do they need to spend near term, possibly with funding from my company, and what do they envision they'll need to spend? I look for a grounded approach to spending.
   

With a little flipping around these consideration probably apply just as well to museums.

Good 'Times for APIs

Not quite as abstract and "strategic", perhaps, as Reuters' OpenCalais play, but the news that the New York Times is opening up as an API of some sort is significant. They have to make money from their content, and yet they look like they're giving a lot of control over it to other programmers. What stronger example could one wish for to argue that it's good to open up access to content that we actually want people to use as fully and freely as possible?

RWW's article points also to a post that I didn't remark on first time around: APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons.

Slicing the market mini-, sorry Micro-update: TO'R on MicroHoo

In his piece MicroHoo: corporate penis envy? Tim O'Reilly makes lots of interesting arguments concerning where Microsoft should be putting its energy - as far as he's concerned, it should forget about trying to grab a slice of the search market and focus instead on building the internet operating system. For Yahoo!s part, it should realise it's the number one internet media company and make the most of it. There's lots here to chew on (and object to, as Michael Arrington does here, and I happen to agree with him and Jakob Nielsen that search, especially semantically intelligent search, is far from ticked off), but the paragraph that grabbed my attention concerned a couple of other players:

Apple's apparent success with an "own the stack, from the device to cloud" strategy is misleading. With both the iPod and the iPhone, a key element of success is precisely the device's openness to what Apple does not own. Imagine an iPod where you could only buy music from the Apple music store instead of ripping your own CDs (this is Amazon's mistake with the Kindle). Imagine an iphone without the Safari browser (opening a world of web apps to the phone) or the Google Maps application. Apple owns key elements of the stack, but it's a permeable stack, and getting more so.)

This is handy material for making the argument that museums shouldn't try to (or be required to) "own the stack". Far better to focus on a layer in the stack and make it permeable. iTunes (the music store) is clearly an example of trying to corner a part of the market outside Apple's home turf, but (a) they're big and ballsy enough to try it (and who else was doing so effectively at that time? Aside from Napster...) and (b) the core offering is still actually the hardware, and it allows you to acquire music by other means. Amazon and Kindle is interesting too. Perhaps it's too early to say they've made a mistake, though they probably have. I doubt it will stay closed and succeed. Nevertheless, as I acknowledged before, they are making a grab for more of the stack. But let's not forget, they're HUGE!

What can we learn? Well there's that point about openness/permeability. If we must insist on claiming the vertical market from top to toe, from collections management system to the end user's screen, then at least make it permeable and open. Otherwise your carefully grown fruit will wither on the vine, forgotten and increasingly past its sell-by date.

Slicing the market

To follow up my recent posts on the 21st century museum and the National Collections Online feasibility study, here's a little more about the question of how funds are allocated by bodies like HLF, and how come we've tended to see them requiring digitisation projects to run from end to end, from digitisation to web publication.



I don't really know enough about the programmes that were run in the past like, for example, NOF Digitise and the HLF (still funding today). However from the projects that I do know that drew on these funding streams, it seems clear enough that concentrating on digitisation per se was never enough - a user-facing product was expected. These did have a sort of aggregated interface (http://www.enrichuk.net/, now pointing at MICHAEL UK) but not really what I've got in mind.



It's quite understandable that this practice persists, indeed there is a good case for it. For funders, they want to see direct user impacts, and a website that can generate stats is nice for that. For museums, well they have a two-fold role - to hold and to document their collections; and to research and interpret them for various audiences. Naturally, then, there will be forces within them urging them to do something with the stuff they digitise, and do it now. The downside is that this has led to fragmentation of the materials digitised for these programmes.



My argument is that for modest sized projects it's not good to spread yourself too thinly trying to do everything, but instead to concentrate on part of the value chain. It's a straighforward architectural thing, and essentially I've realised that I'm just asking for a shift in the assumptions of funding bodies from demanding vertical slices to demanding (contributions to) horizontal slices - in short, to encourage the building of a strong sector-wide layered architecture. Vertical businesses deal in multiple (if not all) links in the chain from production to consumption. This is not really suited to much of what we do. Indeed even behemoths like Amazon don't yet do this (though they a strategically building out from their core business) - they don't actually write books or commission, edit and publish them, print them, or market them, or at the other end deliver them. They flog 'em and dispatch them, and act as an agent for others to do the same.

It's crazy to ask, as a precondition for funding, that a museum or partnership does the whole chain from digitisation and record enhancement, to search engine development, perhaps aggregating records, through to building the user experience as a website, a game etc. Things get done again and again and again, effects are diluted, money wasted. Lots of good stuff will still be made, of course. I don't know what this horizontal architecture would be like, though just possibly we can see parts of it falling into place with PNDS and the Integrated Architecture, and I don't know to what degree it would play a part in many projects in which UK museums engage, but I'm just suggesting that instead of HLF, for one, getting hung up on projects doing the whole end-to-end thing they should support us in coming up with a model to slice the market differently, working on one step at a time, and recognising that the very process of creating the digitised content is a valuable step that is somewhat independent of the creation of an audience-facing instance of it. Vertical slices make silos.

For more on slicing and dicing see here. Shalom.