Tempted to think about what a business algorithm might look like, we are supposed to talk about at Tim O'Reilley's Web 2.0 Expo at Berlin in November, I just invented one, translating, as it were, the general network synthesis algorithm into a specific business one.

Check it out here:
http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/ABusinessAlgorithm.pdf

I took care to preface it with three good reasons to do it in the first place: (1) cybernetics unsolved problems as recalled by Warren McCulloch, (2) Heinz von Foerster's invitation to do a communication formalism without any communicabilia entering into the formula, and (3), because there is no way to do it without it, a recall of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

Yet, indeed, the algorithm is nothing but a further look at what should be done in the not too far future, spelling all the variables out, action (overflow), talk (culture form), group (number), grid (order), and society (re-entry), and then looking at what happens at the the-entry-levels mating, gaming, tying, switching, and knowing.

Imagine any one distinction being re-entered as a nonlinear oscillator, all of them doing continuously their work of nonlinear prediction, and producing thereby, only noticed by the communication going on itself, the statistical basis for the space of possible businesses to be imagined, created, explored, and exploited.

The business algorithm is a many-sided form consisting of eigen-functions producing their eigen-behavior. Communicabilia are lacking, yet are constantly attracted, since without them, the form of business would not gain the visibility, tractability, and accountability, we need to infer the distinctions playing its recurrence and iteration.

If somebody would ask us what a perfect panel would look like in autumn 2007, it'd had to be focused on the upcoming Open Protocol and Algorithm ideas in a world based on, but beyond, the current mainstream web trends. We'd first think of our very own Tom and very dear Dirk Baecker as foundation, invite Sean Park because of his views and brilliant Amazonbay video and also Jean-Paul Schmetz as Burda's digital renegade. When it comes to eloquently gluing all that together, Ms. Bunz would be the host of choice.

Well, thanks to Brady Forrest, the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and the people mentioned above this will come true on Tuesday, November 6th, as we've been invited to organize said panel, more information here. The abstract:

"Google's commercial success is based on the idea of identifying a variety of factors, from text analysis to human interest, and use them as variables in a giant mathematical equation that generates billions of revenue, widely known as AdSense. But how would a traditional corporation look like when it'd work like AdSense? Will we offshore intelligence to machines? What are the opportunities and threats? What happens when the whole world, from culture to politics become financial markets driven by algorithms? A joint state-of-the-art review of a new breed of businesses relying on mathematical models, potential scenarios how this approach will become mainstream and what this might mean to you and your business."

Would be a pleasure to see you there, and also a week later at the second X-Organisations: Berlin Biennial for Systemic Management.

There is some irony in John Battelle's account in his book on The Search (2006) of how Google established the success of its search algorithms in and on the Web and how that may have contributed largely to what we are now accustomed to call the Web 2.0.
The irony is that by exactly re-instantiating the good old printing society's principle of producing and dealing with information the computer society could come of age. Reading John Battelle and the literature he is referring to, most importantly perhaps, Jon Kleinberg's paper on Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment and Sergey Brin's and Lawrence Page's paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, both of them dating from 1998, you come to realize that there is no web 2.0 without the preceding construction or reconstruction of authority. Ok, it's a web authority, it's an authority which relies almost (almost!) completely on the self-organising hyperlink structure of the web. Yet, it's an authority nevertheless, which reminds the old battles of the printing society to turn the authority structure of the writing society on its head. The writing society maintained that authority belongs to the sources, holy ones, to be sure. The printing society maintained that authority belongs to the experts, they themselves controlled by further experts, all of them relying on the most recent information, the information best checked according to state of the art methodologies.
And how did search engines take off? They ranked the pages of the web according to links quoting them, to links quoting them coming from pages themselves linked to by others (Kleinberg's authorities), to pages being interlinked as being most often referred to with respect to some issues (Kleinberg's hubs), to anchors describing them, and to the notorious "random surfer" Brin and Page ingeniously introduced to avoid self-circularity.
That's just perfect. Who ever would have started to search the web if only a chaos of results would have been brought to the screen!? So it's the relevance and the reliablity introduced by PageRank and other algorithms which makes us use the search, only thereby producing the clickstreams which Google relies on to make its billions of dollars selling them to advertisers. Of course, the clickstream, once having taken off, does not rely on authority any more but on the surfer's whim. But would that whim have any chance if it could not rely on authority and have its fun circumventing it? There seems to be quite some self-organised authority at the center of the flow architecture of the web, and that's interesting because it resonates with hierarchies constituting some indispensable knots (or nodes) as a gravitational field anchoring the heterarchies (circularities) we are becoming used to live with in the computer age of the society.

This morning I arrived in Milano to attend the Web2.Oltre Conference that tries to summarize the status of "Web 2.0" in Italy. I am amazed how similar those conferences are, always in a nice hotel that looks the same, no matter if you're in Italy or elsewhere and also the same format. I have to admit that I like the unconference format of Barcamps a lot more.

However it is interesting to hear what initiatives are being launched in other countries and what interesting ideas and topics occur here. I'll post a writeup tomorrow, as soon as I have seen everything. Anything special that I should take a closer look at or ask?

Sometimes you need other people to point you to things that should be obvious. I had an interesting chat with Karsten in Munich on the weekend, discussing the general problems of Knowledge Management in Organisations. He then sent me an article from Dirk Baecker from 1998 that I wasn't aware. Dirk has written a great number of articles in our journal, but in this 20 page piece he deconstructs KM in a way that is wonderful and mindblowing at the same time.

So if you search for an insightful piece that challenges all the truisms of modern management literature, I recommend

Dirk Baecker
Zum Problem des Wissens in Organisationen
in: Organisationsentwicklung 17, Nr. 3 (1998), S. 4-21

For the last couple of months we have been working almost night and day to get our ASP offering ready for launch. It is always the same story when developing software: you think you have a launch ready product and then a dozen of new tasks and wishes for improvement pop up, not because the software doesn't work, but because everything should be perfect in the eyes of the creators.

That is good and bad at the same time. Almost every developer and product visionary would buy into the common "release early release often" mantra, however most people want to launch something polished and beautiful, because they care about what they do. That makes deadlines shift, causes delays and hopefully a better product.

So please bear with us a little longer, we are just about to launch and I promise it is going to be nice! There's a lot of new features and even more improvements in the software compared to the screencast, so I bet you'll like it.

Recently we got an inquiry asking us why we developed a network data model instead of sticking to existing relational models. Apart from the general design of System One that would have made it nearly impossible to transfer the hyperlinked structure to a relational model without some cost, we are true believers in a networked perspective of information. And that perspective starts with the most basic structure that we can think of, which is the data structure itself.

One other reason is currently an issue in one of our projects, where we work with the Neue Galerie Graz and the Büro für Perspektivenmanagement to bring the complex and important topic of Fair Trade and Globalization to the Net and also to an exhibition taking place in Graz during the Steirischer Herbst.

We will use System One as general research and Storage System for all digital material contained in the exhibition. Naturally the topic itself has many perspectives that one could look at, so we decided to do some visualisations that will also be used as artwork in the exhibition. Actually the whole exhibition will be built around the visualisations.

When we started to talk about the visualisations we found out that based on our current data structure, it is very easy to provide different perspectives on the data itself without the need to reformat or restructure it. Because we look at it as objects that are related and interlinked it is very easy filter, slice and dice it according to some properties. Also simple inference is possible, showing dependencies and relations in the data that haven't been visible before.

I'm looking forward to the result and I'll share some of it here, during the process.