chris horn's blog

The text below is from an invited talk I gave this morning to the COMREG (the Irish Communications Regulator) annual conference in Dublin.

It was deliberately a little provocative,  to catalyse discussion in the audience.

Just a short reminder that I'm running a parallel blog to diary my work this year as President of Engineers Ireland - quite busy and an awful lot going on ;-)   Hope to put some more thoughts here in this blog when I eventually get a chance :-)

As part of the work for the Innovation Taskforce, I was interested to see a survey of all Irish technology related companies since the start of the decade.

I tweeted #itaskforce and asked whether anyone had seen one. Joe Drumgoole, a friend of long standing, was kind enough to share a list which he had put together, although his list is primarily ICT companies and excludes the life sciences. A few other people also kindly replied to my tweet with data for some specific companies.

The Irish Venture Capital Association have some excellent data on their web site on venture deals closed in Ireland, and update these on a quarterly basis since the start of 2008. Sadly however, they admitted to me this morning that the IVCA does not itself routinely collect exit data and valuations.

I have approached Enterprise Ireland to see whether they have comprehensive data, and are in discussions with them.

In the interim, I used Joe's data as a starting point and then did a web trawl myself. I also searched the CRO to find each company's start date, so that the age of the company at its exit could be found. My data and list are here as a .pdf file.

The first meeting of the Taoiseach's Innovation Taskforce took place yesterday at Government Buildings from 10am to about 4.30pm.

As has been noted elsewhere, the taskforce is relatively large. There are representatives of various Government agencies and Departments, and the presidents of TCD and UCD. In addition there are a number of individuals who collectively have personal experience in innovation, enterpreneurship, start-ups, multinationals, academia, and venture financing. The taskforce is chaired by Dermot McCarthy, Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach.

As our economic recession deepens, leading astrologists are lobbying to have their profession revered by the Irish public and policy officials. Since astrologists have predicted 24 of the last 3 solar eclipses, they clearly could play a major role in influencing Irish enterprise strategy and policy.

In the light of some astrologists incorrect conjectures in 2008 that the Irish economy would have a soft landing from the global downturn, it has emerged that in fact a range of alternative predictions for the recovery or otherwise of the economy were actually made by their colleagues: a U-shaped recovery, a V-shaped recovery, an L-shaped stagnation, a W-shaped double bounce, an O-shaped Groundhog-day stasis, and an I-shaped off-the-cliff collapse. Astrology therefore clearly has the ability to predict any specific actual outcome.

Posted my talk this afternoon at the Engineering in Context symposium here.

Its main focus is the impact of the internet on education and teaching; and the role of mentoring and coaching by professional engineers to young engineers.

Just a note to say that I've started a new blog specifically devoted to the next 12 months as President of Engineers Ireland.

I'll keep this blog for musings, opinion pieces etc, of a more general nature....

I reproduce below an invited keynote talk which I gave this morning at a seminar organised the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in University College Cork, on the general topic of entrepreneurship and start-ups.

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Exactly twenty years ago, American Airlines and Hewlett-Packard Corporation took an initiative in the global software industry to interconnect distributed software applications. The initiative rapidly gained momentum, with all major software suppliers - with the sole exception of Microsoft - quickly joining. Yet by 1996, a small company from Ireland, IONA Technologies, was a widely recognised world leading supplier of products to interconnect distributed software applications, ahead of such major vendors as IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Digital and Sun. As a result, IONA had major customer contracts with companies such as Motorola, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa and Hong Kong Telecom. How can a relatively small player punch way above its weight ?

I was approached by John McGowan, former President of Engineers Ireland, back in 2007 and asked "Chris I know you're very busy right now, but what will you be doing in two years time ?". So, I signed up to be put into the pipeline of Presidents for Engineers Ireland, and last night my twelve months started. Martin Lowery (ex IDA and Coilte) will take over from me this time next year, with PJ Rudden (MC O'Sullivan, Bord Gais and now RPS) takes over from Martin in two years time.

I attach below the inaugural speech which I gave last night at the headquarters of Engineers Ireland. Apologies for the length! The main points are:

• Thanking my colleagues.
• Innovation now being Ireland's highest strategic priority: in my view, innovation is rather different from invention, and is also not limited to scientific and technology discovery.
• Regret that the national transition year scheme appears to be being diminished, since it will reduce discovery, innovation and team work with our young people.
• Engineers Ireland to take an initiative on the teaching of higher level mathematics, applied mathematics and pure sciences in our schools.
• Increasing Engineers Ireland's recent initiatives to assist unemployed Members.
• Opening up Engineers Ireland to a much broader membership:
• Opening up full membership of Engineers Ireland to ordinary bachelors degree (level 7) graduates of accredited engineering courses, in addition to honours bachelor degree (level 8) as at present;
• Opening up full membership of Engineers Ireland to level 7 and level 8 graduates from "cognate" courses in mathematics and sciences, provided that the individual is in practice working in an engineering discipline.
• Chartered Engineering status for graduates from 2013 will require masters (level 9) education, or demonstrated experience equivalent to masters level.
• Encouraging and frankly expecting most, if not all, faculty members of universities and institutes of technology to become Members of Engineers Ireland, and ideally Chartered Engineers.
• Engineering is an altruistic profession, serving society. Engineers have a duty to articulate concerns about the safety, health and welfare of society
• Engineers in Ireland today have concerns over infrastructure issues relating to water, broadband, roads maintenance, and strategic vulnerability of national electricity supplies and grid, amongst other issues.
• Activities in Ireland in any engineering discipline - such as civil, mechanical, electrical, bio-medical, software, petrochemical... - which impact, or could impact, the safety, health and welfare of individuals or society should be regulated so that approval is required by a Chartered Engineer. Engineers Ireland will push for regulation, and may in the short term initiate a voluntary disclosure and public register of projects which have been duly approved.
• Ireland has suffered severely from governance failures in various sectors. Engineers Ireland already has a strong code of ethics. There is currently no national embracing legislation for good faith reporting. Members who in good faith report concerns about their employer or client, or even another Member, concerning the safety, health and welfare of individuals or society, and who subsequently feel inadequate action was taken or even worse that they were sanctioned, can bring this to the attention of Engineers Ireland which will if necessary defend such a Member.

The full text follows:

Earlier this month, the Pope Benedict XVI visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. He said the suffering of Holocaust victims must never be denied, belittled or forgotten. As a child, Pope Benedict grew up in Nazi Germany, and joined the Hitler Youth as was expected of young people at the time. The role of some of the Christian Churches in Germany and in their occupied territories during the Second World War in the holocaust has always been a painful and shameful memory.

In 2008, I visited Rwanda and blogged about my trip. On my first morning, I visited the Kigali Memorial Centre and was particularly saddened by the stories and personal tragedies which children suffered. Some of their testimonies and memories, with photographs, clothing, tools used for maiming and murder, and other mementos are there for us to absorb and to try to understand. The Centre also has a section on genocides which have occurred elsewhere in the world, including those during the Second World War.

This week in Ireland, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was published, receiving widespread international coverage as well as domestic revulsion.

I attended the third annual conference Science, Engineering Communications and Outreach conference earlier this week at Engineers Ireland. As incoming President of EI next week, I had the privilege of presenting the annual award for Science, Engineering and Technology Awareness to Jim Cooke.

I had not met Jim before, but had heard of his remarkable work. Jim has been a physics and mathematics teacher at the Christian Brothers School in Synge Street, in Dublin city centre, for over 40 years. He also reintroduced the teaching of Applied Mathematics at the school, after it had been absent from the school curriculum for a very long time.

It's election time again in Ireland folks, and so roll up and vote for your favourite European MP, local county councillor and, if you're lucky, by-election TD.

It can be a tough choice. Unless you really know somebody well, you don't really know their values, their ethics and their objectives. Is the candidate whom you see arguing in a heated TV interview or debate really like that in real life ? Does that manifesto really reflect the candidate's beliefs ? Is that opinion piece really what that politician thinks ?

Social networks provide political candidates with yet further channels to reach the electorate. Despite the popularity of Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and others here in Ireland, remarkably few of the Irish politicians appear to have embraced the medium. Obama set the gold standard during the US Presidential campaign. But for me, the challenge of the internet is confirming the authenticity of what is presented.

Impersonation and fooling the public is a popular theme in the movies for a very long time. The Prisoner of Zenda presents a mere commoner to impersonate his distant relative and the true would-be king when the latter is kidnapped before his coronation. The Great Impersonation provides a complicated web of intrigue. Kagemusha tells the story of a mere thief posing as a deceased Japanese warlord.

For the Irish public, and I suspect elsewhere, ghost-writing of articles and opinions on behalf of politicians is not uncommon. I have little doubt that a political candidate may argue that given the pressure of work, it makes sense to have someone else - especially a PR specialist - to spin a particular issue in favour of the chosen position of the candidate. With the advent of some political blogs from Irish politicians - including in one or two cases blogs which have only very recently suddenly popped up in the run up to the imminent elections - no doubt the temptation is there to sub-contract the authorship and content of the blog to an appropriately supportive ghost-blogger. Social networking contributions may equally be vulnerable to ghost-submitters working on behalf of a particular candidate.

It therefore is often challenging to read a political blog, or a political social network entry, or a political tweet, and know that whatever is said is actually said by the attributed politician. Perhaps some may feel that my observation is irrelevant: as long as the content is accurately ghost-written to reflect a candidate's true position, and their character and their personality, does it matter ? Maybe I am old fashioned, but actually I believe yes it does matter: if something is written by a named author, then I - naively - expect that that author actually wrote the piece. I am also naturally very happy to read something written on behalf of a politician by some third party who is not a ghost, but openly declares their authorship.

If ghost-contributions on the internet are supposed to be acceptable to the public, then is impersonation also acceptable ?

We laugh when we see comical impersonations of politicians: Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin comes to mind. But is it OK to laugh when a politician's views are impersonated in a tweet or blog or social network contribution ? If it is OK to be fooled by a ghost writer acting on behalf of a politician, then is it also OK to be fooled by a troll writer undermining a politician ?

Remarkably few of the Irish politicians and candidates have a web presence. Irish politicians and candidates are therefore vulnerable to having their web identity obtained by someone else. It would be all too easy for a well known politician to apparently start not only blogging, but to start socially commenting and tweeting. It is a particular risk for senior politicians, since their views are widely followed including by international media. And if some of the media are lazy in verifying web sources, such as a wikipedia quote from the deceased Maurice Jarre which in fact was invented from UCD student Shane Fitzgerald, then surely our senior politicians are very vulnerable indeed ?

The is of course the law of defamation. But a week can be a very long time in politics, and a defamatory comment (or tweet or blog or social comment) incorrectly attributed to a politician could cause significant political damage, even if the real author was eventually tracked down after lengthy forensic work, possibly over international boundaries, and perhaps ultimately brought to court in some jurisdiction. The political cat would be out of the bag well before then, and the political damage well caused before the author was found.

What if a (apparent) senior politician started tweeting on what "really" was said at important meetings ? Like when Mary Coughlan and Willie O'Dea went to Michael Dell ? Or what Brian Lenihan said about the prospects of an early general election to international bond investors ? Or what Brian Cowen said to Angela Merkel in Berlin on the Lisbon Treaty ?

The web, and particularly the social web, is a wonderful opportunity for politicians to reach out in a very sincere way to the electorate. But it is also potentially a very dangerous tool by which a politician could be severely undermined by opponents or even by naive cynics.

I believe that politicians ignore the web at an extreme peril. They should go out of their way to claim their identities on the web as a matter of urgency, and be brave enough to then use it honestly and ethically to the electorate.

Computers are designed, at least at the high level, by people. Computers thus in turn reflect human intellect - innovation but also copying, sheer brilliance but also blind shortcomings. Like any engineering discipline, there is much to be learnt not just about technology but also about psychology and sociology by examining the design of computers.

If you are at all interested in computing, you really should visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

The museum is hosted in what used to be a Silicon Graphics building, just off route 101, and in fact in which I recall I had several business meetings a decade ago. Now in the foyer is one of two magnificent working reproductions of Babbage's Difference Engine - the other is in the Science Museum, London. Every hour or so, two curators give an enthralling demonstration of how the machine operates, the mechanics and the arithmetic behind it, to calculate values of arbitrary polynomial equations.

But the main part of the museum is a warehouse at the back. I experienced sheer exuberance and absolute awe by the wealth of history laid out in row after row after row. The Z3 of Konrad Zuse - a German civil engineer - is there, the world's first programmable electromagnetic computer built in 1941 at the height of the second world war using 2,400 telephone relays. The 40 rack, each 8' high, 18,000 vacuum tube ENIAC from 1946, which had to be physically reconfigured for each program "load". Gene Amdhal's PhD project, the 1955 WISC - complete with bullet holes (don't ask!). The SAGE real time air defence system from 1955, with the first ever graphical user interface. The bet-your-company IBM 360 - the first machine I used. The NASA Apollo guidance computer which Neil Armstrong had to override just before the Tranquility touchdown in 1969. The wonderful Dec PDP-8, and then -11, upon which I spent many a happy hour. The first 10MFLOP machine, the CDC6600. The IMP, the original backbone of the predecessor of the internet, and on which packet-switching was first built. The first ever computer for the kitchen - the H316 - a wonderfully funny folly. The first hobbyist machine Altair 8800 for which Bill Gates and Paul Allen produced Altair BASIC. Seymour Cray's extraordinary and aesthetic CRAY-1, -2 and -3: using cable as delay lines! The actual very first Apple-1, in a wooden box, built by Steve Wozniak in 1976. They're all there: mercury delay lines, core memories, vacuum tubes, first silicon transistors, first silicon chips, first use of gallium arsenide, huge magnetic disks, first robot arms, first computer mice, it is just so extraordinary, inspiring, and provocative.

I was recently interviewed for a podcast about my huge enjoyment of Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" - IMHO one of the very great books of the computer industry, and written by a lay reader for ordinary mere mortals. I was therefore delighted to see a Data General Eclipse and Digital VAX 11/780 amongst the exhibits, no doubt carefully placed to glare at each other across the aisle.

Sadly though, the museum feels, to me at least, like a cemetery. The entire warehouse has a distinctive smell of stale electronics, and all the exhibits are morbid artifacts, frozen and lifeless in their dusty racks and dull cabinets. Each of them yearns to be powered up just one more time, strains to feel the surge of bits pulsing through its accumulators, registers, de-multiplexers, decoders, caches, and yes switches and lamps.

On my visit, I stayed well after the curator had announced closing time, and managed to corner him. Surely each of these wonderful machines could be powered up again ? Even if the electronics in some cases were now no longer safe and thus a fire risk, why not simulate their operation by judiciously hiding a microprocessor in the background somewhere to cycle through lamp and circuit sequences and bring some of the thrill of these machines back again ? He responded that although this had been considered, there are apparently strongly held views by the trustees that such sorcery would detract from the raw stature of the exhibits, and perhaps demean their creators. In a way perhaps, I do understand: these magnificent wonders and follies of the most innovative and creative industry mankind has ever known now lay sadly but peacefully at rest for ever.

One of the core tenets of the Science Gallery, which I currently chair, is to bring science and technology to life by having researchers and innovators in the flesh present to discuss and explain their work to curious members of the public. A science museum is interesting, and it can be fun to try out experiments yourself. But the Gallery is different: the scientists and engineers are there in front of you, and in many cases can do the experiments alongside with (or even on!) you.

It would be wonderful to have all those inspirational architects and engineers behind the incredible machines in the Computer History Museum rightfully and deservedly proudly present when one visits. Sadly I guess, this is unlikely to ever happen. Perhaps at best there can be video interviews available to try and explain the sheer excitement behind the innovations they each made. Each one of them a master of the particular universe of virtual reality that they had uniquely created.

Whatever about trying to explain the creativity and discoveries made by computer engineers to the public, how on earth would one do it for software ? Yes, I am aware of the interest group on software at the Computer History Museum itself. But could there ever be a Software History Museum, what would it inspirationally show and how would it operate ?

Its perhaps conceivable to consider a Museum, or Gallery, of the history of computer games. Perhaps also of the evolution of graphical user interfaces. But a history, an exhibit, of software in general ?

I think the real story to be told about the history of software is not about programming languages themselves - Fortran, Simula-67, Forth, Lisp, C, Basic, Prolog, Perl, Ruby and so on. Rather it is about the evolution of programming itself: the development of data structures, the unfolding of functional as well as declarative thinking, the interplay between data and logic, introspection, aspect orientation, and so forth. Very best of all, I strongly believe that this story needs to be told plainly and simply so that the world at large can understand and appreciate how software has been evolved as we learn to reflect and begin to understand how we ourselves think and reason and learn.

I can recall after commons (the formal evening meal at my alma mater) having a heated conversation with a Professor of Genetics and various humanities students over coffee. I was the sole technologist. I fervently explained that just as there can be incredible beauty in literature and music, there too can also be extraordinary beauty in the structure of software, these artifacts of the soul and mind. However, it took a trained intellect to understand this. I was of course ridiculed, and left feeling battered and appropriately flamed. But perhaps one day, some truly gifted people will produce a software appreciation, through which mere mortals can too see the wonder, exuberance and awe of great software creations.

A couple of weeks ago on the last Saturday of March, the Irish Times, a popular broadsheet here in Ireland, included a full paper reproduction of the 4 pages of its very first edition, from 150 years ago and launched on the 28th March 1859. It is a fascinating read, not least because the entire front page is given over to advertisements. I also found the style of writing captivating - archaic but nevertheless highly articulate. The editorial contains the opening paragraph:

"The appearance of another Journal in the field on Irish politics demands a brief explanation from its projectors. It will be asked - Where is the room for this new competitor for public favour ? Is there any definite set of opinions which is not already represented in the Irish Press ? From the silly Radicalism of the Phoenix Club to the dense Toryism of the Orange lodge, what doctrine lacks an exponent, what party an organ ? If no deficiency be felt, is the multiplication of newspapers a good, per se, that the proprietors of the Irish Times think fit to add one voice more the existing Babel ?"

The editor, Laurence Knox - who personally signed the inaugural edition - goes on to justify the appearance of the new newspaper as a voice independent of politics or partisismship. Reminiscent of Deng's famous assertion a century later - "No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat" - Knox goes on to assert "Every year sees a larger and larger proportion of our population indifferent to the manoeuvres of faction...They are anxious for good government, but care little in whose hands the government may be placed".

The contemporary Irish Times commentator Fintan O'Toole recently wrote an excellent assessment of the then national context in which the Irish Times was launched. He believes that Knox's aspirations were perhaps a heroic denial of the political climate, but that from the lengthy perspective of 150 years later, Knox was perhaps not as naive as first imagined.

Ironically the same issue of the Irish Times (on 28th March 2009) also contained a topical assessment of the newspaper industry, from the paper's America based correspondent Denis Staunton. He discussed Maryland's Senator Ben Cardin's initiative to use tax policy to try and save what is left of the US newspaper industry. Cardin is of the view that it is in the US national interest, for good governance and for democracy, that at least some newspapers survive.

Devoting the entire front page to advertising may have worked well in 1859, but with advertising revenue now under immense pressure and readers migrating to free global news sources on the internet, something has to change. Web based newspaper subscriptions in general have not been particularly successful. Web based advertising is a challenging model for newspapers, in the face of Google.

What can be the future of the Irish Times, and newspapers like it ? Perhaps tongue in cheek, last January I responded to a request from the Irish Times for some crystal ball gazing - what was the company to watch in 2009 - by identifying the Irish Times itself! Will the Irish Times, and newspapers worldwide like it, survive in its current form by January 2010 ?

In my view, there are three major aspects of the essential content of a newspaper: reporting, investigation, and commentary.

The role of reporting news and events would seem well fulfilled by the density of the web itself. Timely notification of events can be reported almost by anyone: the use of Twitter by Jim Hanran, an ordinary member of the public, to first report on the crash landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson is an obvious example. What therefore does the traditional news reporter bring to the web ? The general answer should surely be honesty: readers are generally attracted to reputable reporting, despite occasional reporters such as The News York Times' Jayson Blair. Honesty on the web is always difficult to certify, but other web based systems leverage reputable participation - eBay auctions come to mind, perhaps also Wikipedia's consensus mechanism. However honest and reputable reporting on the web certainly is not the sole domain of newspaper reporters.

What about investigative reporting ? Most democracies can point to occasions when an investigative reporter brought malpractice to light. The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposure of the Watergate scandal is possiby the most renowned. Here in Ireland we still mourn the Sunday Independent's Veronica Guerin, assassinated for her investigative reporting of drug trafficking.

Investigative reporting surely serves the public good. Will our democracies come under threat if there is no longer a business model for newspapers to exploit, and thus no money for investigative reporting ? This thinking seems to overlook the integrity of most members of the public: ethical employees can be appalled by what they see in their organisations, and can and do speak out. Sherron Watkins at Enron blew the whistle on her employer's malpractice. In Ireland, James Gogarty's whistleblowing led to the Mahon tribunal to investigate payments to corrupt politicians. With the internet, whistleblowers can quickly bring concerns to global public attention - India now has several public web sites (eg corruption in india, and whistleblowers) devoted to whistleblowing, particularly following the murder of Sri Satyendra Dubey. Democracy and accountability is probably best supported by well considered whistleblowing processes, which both protect a valid whistleblower but also protect an organisation from inaccurate allegations. Democracy need not rely on the finances of newspapers to underwrite investigative reporters.

Commentary, opinion and analysis is perhaps where great newspapers add most value, separate the significant from the trivial, and correlate patterns to extract observations. But there appears no inherent reason why articulate observation should just be the preserve of a newspaper: the online community and bloggers can equally serve society at large.

Clay Shirky recently blogged that the current business model of newspapers seems doomed, and replacement models have yet - if ever - to appear. Jeff Jarvis argued back in 2005 that saving newspapers is not the same as saving newspaper jobs. Perhaps it really is time to confront the unthinkable: the newspaper, as we know it, may be doomed.

Does the internet really signify the demise of the newspaper ?

Most newspapers do serve the public good. Senator Ben Cardin's Newspaper Revitalisation Act would enable US newspapers, if they so chose, to become not-for-profit organisations, thus benefitting from tax exempt advertising and subscription revenue. Members of the public could make tax deductible contributions to their favourite newspapers. I understand that public service broadcasting is similarly tax exempt in the US. Using the tax code in this way may be an approach, but I do wonder how effective newspapers may be able to operate if they come to rely on regular voluntary donations from their reading public to cover their costs of distribution and of professional staffing.

Are there any other different business models for those online newspapers which do serve the public good ? In Ireland, we have a national license which every TV set owner is supposed to pay to the Government, which in turn is used to support public service broadcasting. Could there be an online tax for public service newspapers ? Perhaps a Government could impose a tax on all internet service providers nationally, since they represent the national access points by the public to the internet: then directly, or via a neutral third party agency - use the money collected to allocate to online public service newspapers. An interesting thought perhaps, but I'm unsure the economics would really work: would internet users really accept what would amount to a personal daily tax of several euros just to support online newspapers ?

Some have given thought to a micropayment model for individual newspaper contributions. This would presumably operate something akin to iTunes: individual newspaper articles could be disaggregated - like tracks from a music CD - and made individually readable and paid for. But a musical track is a marketing teaser to promote itself: if you hear a piece of music and like it, you'll want to hear it again (and perhaps again and again) and so may be tempted to buy it from an online store. A newspaper article is typically by contrast a singular experience: having read it, you are unlikely in most cases to seek to read that particular article again.

As I reflected on the demise of the newspaper, I also reminded myself that a newspaper is a mirror held up to reflect society and the world to the eyes of its readership. It informs its readers about what is happening, and tells them something about themselves and their community, in the terms and ways to which they relate. If newspapers were to disappear due to the impact of the internet on their business model, what could be done on the internet to replace these lost mirrors on society and the world ?

In a newspaper, a selected few contribute articles and news, with feedback from ordinary members of the public filtered through the letters to the editor page. In the internet world, everyone can openly contribute. We can read posts and comments and blogs and emails and tweets from anyone. We can use Google to try and find interesting items, but even then it is easy to get lost in the morass, and perhaps miss what we ourselves find particularly interesting and significant. The specific newspapers we buy by contrast in general do a good job in only presenting articles which we ourselves find interesting and significant, filtering out the mundane, and presenting information and comment which in general match our own particular ethos and values. Any online replacement of a newspaper is going to have to do something similar.

In my view, wiki technology already provides the basis. A wiki is a web site in which not only can anyone read its content, but anyone can also edit the content, as result of Ward Cunningham's work in the 1990. At first this sounds extraordinary - what prevents somebody from editing accurate content and defacing it ? In fact, the answer is nothing, and defacement happens - however, the wiki keeps a record of who edited what, and what was the previous version (and the previous version to that and so on). Anarchists and political pundits can quickly be identified by the community of like-minded readers, isolated from the wiki so that the wiki refuses to accept any further edits from these rogues, and the maverick changes made by these fraudsters are quickly unwound.

The consequence is that the community of bona-fide contributors work together to make the wiki better and better, capturing the best inputs from everyone, and discarding the weaker edits. The system becomes Darwinian - in the view of a specific community, the best survives for that community, and the weakest is dropped. A wiki thus captures the "wisdom of a crowd" - the collective wisdom of a particular community of readers and contributors.

Social networking sites - such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others facilitate loosely coupled communities to evolve. Communities of people with common interests can quickly emerge.

Is it not possible to think of online newspapers evolving to become social newsworking ? A (potentially large) group of people with common interests and ethos could share their reflections on society and the world at large using technology derived from the current generation of wiki support and of social networking. Different social newsworks would of course emerge, reflecting the diverse opinions across societies. Each social newswork would combine - as today's paper based newspapers do - reporting of news and events, including of an investigative nature, with analysis and comment. But unlike a newspaper of today, a social newswork can reflect the wisdom of an entire community of like-minded individuals, rather than just of its editor, its staff and its contributors to its letters pages.

Social newsworking as a concept is not novel. Apart from user contributed newsites such as Reddit and Digg, one of the most interesting from the my perspective is Newsvine. Anyone can write articles, and discuss items submitted by anyone, including by professional journalists, but unlike a wiki cannot update in place previously submitted text. But in my view and as I understand it, Newsvine just aggregates and links articles together, but does not merge and synthesise. Some newspapers - such as The Washington Post and The New York Times - also actively link to internet articles outside of their own web site, and thus attempt to aggregate: but there is no merge and synthesis.

Wikinews is another social newsworking site, and does allow users to edit and update the text of others, just as for Wikipedia encyclopedia entries. However Wikinews itself aspires to offer a neutral perspective, and to be even handed.

My own view is that social newsworking can only succeed if each site in fact does not try to be even handed and neutral, but instead biased towards the ethos and philosophy of its community! Misinformation and sensationalism arguably thrive on sites such as Digg and Reddit because anyone can post, and anyone or small group can contrive to vote specific postings up or down the popularity charts. On the other hand, wiki technology could be used by a group of like minded individuals to ensure that only postings which match their ethos survive the evolutionary editing process. Rather than trying to be all things to all people and thus neutral - such as wikinews - it is probably more pragmatic to instead focus a social newsworking site around a community of like minded people who can reinforce their particular beliefs. After all, in my view, that's what our current newspapers already try to do.

A social newsworking site can of course be a free service to its community. However, an online community of like minded souls is more likely to be a successful opportunity for targeted advertisements, which raises the possibility of an effective and focussed business model. Perhaps the advertisements themselves could even become wiki based, and thus allow the content of an advertisement itself to be updated and edited by the community of its consumers. A social newsworking site could, in my view, have a viable business model if so desired, despite competition from majors such as Google or even Craigslist.

Laurence Knox, the first editor of the Irish Times, saw in 1859 - perhaps pretentiously - that his newspaper would represent a particular section of Irish society, distinguishing itself from others sets of opinions already available in the Irish press, and perhaps severely limiting his market (!):

"On intention, in short, is to make the Irish Times a first rate Irish newspaper, complete in its details, sagacious and consistent in its policy, and faithfully reflecting the opinions of the most independent, intelligent, and truly progressive portion of Irish society."

Social newsworking has the intriguing possibility to combine focussed audiences with a wider democratic reflection on the presentation and analysis of news, than can today's newspapers which are hampered by advertising based and subscription business models and in almost all cases, their shareholder returns to their owners.