Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Of all the "ists" in the world - artists, motorists, psychologists, anesthetists, equilibrists, whatever - the one type that probably everybody dreads in the very type I am due in just a few hours today to meet for the first time in my life: an oncologist.

Let me say this as gently as I can: no one wants to experience the kind of involuntary system re-boot that is involved whenever something as radical as Whipple surgery is involved. But Whipple patients still have a whole second challenge ahead of them: even if, as in my case, the surgery is completely successful, the recommended Next Steps involve chemo.

While not as debilitating as some other forms of chemotherapy, the drug Gemcitabine (a.k.a. GEMZAR) is most likely to become my new poison of choice. I won't know until the oncologist tells me how long the treatment will last, but I gather it may come in 21-day cycles. Given the proximity of Cloud Expo New York, I certainly hope the chemotherapy is a resounding success!

Meantime, I will continue to work even, if as in this photo, I have had to be creative at times...to avoid creasing my stomach where the scar from the Whipple operation is still knitting together only very slowly. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention!

How the Web Can Help Fight Cancer

There is really no other way to do this than just to blurt it out: six weeks ago I was diagnosed - unexpectedly and completely out of the blue - with pancreatic cancer.

What has one of the deadliest forms of cancer got to do with "New Media"? Quite a lot, it turns out. Because thanks to the Internet, I was able - before my consulting surgeon could even say it to me - to learn that in cases such as mine where by some quirk of fate pancreatic cancer is detected early enough, there is a very radical surgical procedure that is claimed to be curative. Curative as in, if everything goes okay, you emerge from the operating theater cancer-free.

Needless to say, Wikipedia played its role here. Its entry on the so-called "Whipple procedure" is a classic of detail and balance.

But Facebook wasn't far behind. There is both a Pancreatic Cancer topic page and a separate, and invaluable, topic page on the Whipple procedure. Honestly, who'd a thunk it?

The final new-media pièce de résistance came when I was thinking about what to do, having had Whipple surgery just ten days previously, with the entry I had already secured last December into this year's San Francisco Marathon on July 31.

The answer was obvious: use the Web to transform it into a fundraising run, a personal 26-mile journey toward helping raise funds towards doubling the pancreatic cancer survival rate by 2020.

Here is the donation link: I am not saying that it is exactly a barrel of laughs to have cancer diagnosed one week, Whipple surgery three weeks later, and chemotherapy due to start just three weeks after the surgery...but I will say that, if you have to undergo such a fate, then using the Web to make it easier to endure, manage and understand is definitely the way to go!

A Twitter Epiphany? The Power of a Hash Tag (#jan25)

As America - on the East Coast anyway, including in Washington, DC - tucks up in bed, the sun is rising on Egypt. Which seems an appropriate time for @jg21 to briefly explain what I had in mind when resolving for the past 12 hours or so to re-Tweet as many of the comments and links flying around via Twitter as I found meaningful, informative, and (often) inspiring.

"Freedom of expression is a human right," blogged Twitter co-founder Biz Stone Friday, on Day Four of the blockage by the Egyptian government of Twitter and Facebook. And this was not mere opportunism by Stone, because it is the exact same thing that he said four months ago. Here is what he said already in September:

"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."

So that is the proposition I set out to test. Does Twitter really have the power to increase the sum total of empathy in this often troubled world? Call it, if you like, an exercise in "empathetic calculus."

One kind and co-hearted soul has already been kind enough to mention - via Twitter of course! - that my "barrage" (his word, but I make no objection!) of re-Tweets had an effect on her, and a good one:

"@dasSuiGeneris
#FF @jg21 for a barrage of #Jan25 & #Egypt Retweets. Reading about the situation in Egypt makes everything else seem... minuscule in scope."

In a follow up exchange, he was even kind enough to say "good work sir. We are in dire times. The horrors of the world cannot be hidden thx to technology. We are ALL of this world." So I feel that I haven't intruded in vain upon people's attention-span, even if my chosen means was a little front-on, I feel certain, for many people.

In a follow-up post over the weekend, I will try and analyze what my Twitter-fest did for me personally, as opposed to my Tweeps - whose forbearance I call out here and for which I shall be eternally grateful.

This much I can tell you in advance: it has been a transformative experience, so far as my view of microblogging is concerned.

Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USA

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it is impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future.

Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared, adding:

"Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing."

As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks:

"There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though."

Durden's gripe is with the unreality of Obama's praising Google and Facebook so highly in an America where 26 million people are unemployed or underemployed. It is with his failing to address that while the salaries of U.S. CEOs are up, the average median employee salary on a comparative basis is stuck somewhere in the 1970s.

"This is our generation’s Sputnik moment," Obama said, in the most-quoted sentence of the entire address. America, in other words, needs to enter an Education Race akin to the Space Race that it entered in 1958.

What role will New Media activities play in all of this? Facebook may be many things, but a tool for better education is not one of them. Google stands a better chance in that regard. But Twitter? Can tweeting really help restore America's lost position in the world?

Those who live by new media die by new media. The 44th president of the United States of America needs to be careful when hitching the wagon of his presidency to stock prices and IPOs...can we all really have already forgotten the Dot-com bubble, which peaked in March 2000, when the NASDAQ lost nearly nine percent of its value in just six days and many dot-coms began to run out of capital and were acquired or liquidated?

What do you think? Is the 'Sputnik moment' a metaphor that can help re-boot America? What web-based organizations instil more hope in you, commercial giants like Facebook and Google...or non-commercial minnows like Wikipedia? How can we best preserve a World Wide Web in which there is room for both?

Is Ballmer Bailing?

"Even though this is a personal financial matter, I want to be clear about this to avoid any confusion," wrote Microsoft CEO Ballmer on the Microsoft website, to quell fears that his sale of $1.3BN worth of shares in the company was maybe a sign of an imminent departure from the hot seat that he has occupied for the past ten years.

He added:

"I am excited about our new products and the potential for our technology to change people's lives, and I remain fully committed to Microsoft and its success."

For those with a good memory, they may recognize that this same exact wording is what Ballmer's advisers have also used in the past. Such as in May 2003, when he also sold some of his holdings of Microsoft stock "to gain some diversification of his financial assets."

Why Blogging is Not a True Co-Technology

Speaking today in Tokyo at The New Context Conference 2010, the founder of Twitter, Biz Stone (pictured), put onto the record two sentences that will stand the test of time in the era of social computing:

"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."

Interestingly, Stone makes this observation in the self-same week that saw the sale of TechCrunch, Inc. to New York-based AOL - triggering a spate of commentaries along the lines of This Is the Death of Independent Blogging.

Is this an inflexion point? Hell, yes. And a big one. This week is also the week in which, as Guy Kawasaki reminds us, that Twitter's traffic overtook that of MySpace.

So what is going on? Why is independent blogging being characterized as dying at the very moment that tweeting is becoming as natural a part of the interconnected world as breathing?

The key, I believe, is in that word "ïnterconnected" - because blogging, for all its merits, has always suffered from that one huge shortcoming, namely that (notwithstanding the excellent innovations like RSS, Trackbacks, the Technorati real-time APIs and even Google's Blog Search) it truly isn't very interactive. I blog, you blog, he/she/it blogs. We hyperlink to each other, but that is about it. Blog feedback threads are frustratingly isolated silos. In fact, to be blunt, blogging is about as innovative a use of the Web as propping open your office door with a Xitami web server.

Tweeting, in contrast, is quite another pair of shoes. Twitter is a true co-technology. And only co-technologies will truly flourish, in the second decade of the 21st century.

Biz Stone is right: "A more connected world leads to a more empathic world." That is after all one of the pillars of co-intelligence, of the belief that none of us is as smart as all of us.

It is going to be the most interesting decade ever. You heard it here first!

Disclosure: I have never been a huge proponent of blogging, as made transparent by this 2007 article.

Will Oracle Bid for HP?

"Larry Ellison is borderline bat-shit crazy on a good day," the analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying in a piece last week by Sam Gustin - a senior writer at DailyFinance, an AOL Finance & Money site.

Enderle was prompted to utter this remark by speculation that perhaps the Oracle CEO is about to embark upon the acquisition of his life: of HP.

"I think his bet is that he can damage HP enough that it drops in value and he can wander in with an offer," Enderle is quoted as having added.

So is it possible that Ellison the Conqueror, CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977, truly has the $90BN HP in the crosshairs of his acquisition rifle-sight? Can a $120BN company somehow buy and absorb a $90BN one?

Well certainly he now has on board the exact right man to tackle the integration of such a purchase: none other than HP's own former CEO, Mark Hurd. And, as Gustin expresses it:

'Ellison is a man with ambitions as big as his MIG-29 fighter jet is fast, and he's got a history of stating that the info-tech industry will further consolidate in the same way the auto industry consolidated into the Big Three in the U.S.'

"When your end goal is global dominance, difficulty is a mere distraction," Gustin notes.

Enderle was quick to highlight a revenge-is-sweet angle to, to the possible scenario.

"[W]hat could be sweeter revenge for Hurd than winding up running HP again - as a part of Oracle?"

Credit for first raising the possibility of an Oracle-HP bid goes not to Enderle or Gustin, btw, but to former FT journalist Tom Forenski, who was already writing speculatively about such a scenario back in mid-August - that's to say, before Mark Hurd had even been made Co-President of Oracle.

With cloud computing now driving a sea-change in how enterprise IT datacenters are put together, one thing is certain: more consolidation is right around the corner.

Only time will tell if an Oracle bid for HP will be next. This one, as they say, will run and run.