For the sake of candor and clarity, let me be explicit: we are in an economic recession.

Let me also be explicit about the impact of the recession on the IT industry:  we are already in the midst of a significant downturn in IT spending - not only for small and mid-size businesses but for “the enterprise.”  This downturn is reflected in traditional symptoms, and predictable consequences: 

1. Yahoo announces layoffs.  For every company that publishes a layoff strategy, there are dozens of others now doing so without fanfare.  In this business, they are called RIFs (Reductions In Force) and are executed in a stealth fashion but with the same objective: temporarily improve operating margins.  The fact that layoffs have long-term negative consequences never prevents executives from pulling this trigger.
2. Apple warns The Street about the next quarter.   For every bellweather company (i.e., stocks that are worth holding for the long-term) that has the courage to forecast their concerns, there are dozens scrambling to tightly manage expenses (postpone implementations, terminate consulting contracts, institute hiring freezes).
3. Consumer Confidence wanes.  As I have stated to analysts for five years, there is no difference between enterprise IT spending and consumer confidence statistics.  Companies are simply aggregated consumers.  Consumers worry about their jobs and mortgages; companies worry about stock prices and nervous customers. 

I said this yesterday in a phone call with a New York analyst with whom I’ve worked for many years.  She asked the question that haunts everyone who invests (either their time or their money) in tech stocks:  Is there anything on the tech horizon that can be viewed in a positive light?

I’ve been considering the question all night and morning, but before I offer my tentative and humble response, two important disclaimers:

• I do not own any tech stocks, nor am I affiliated with any institutions that benefit from them.
• I might be wrong.  But I don’t think so.

The current recession/downturn is not new.  The 80’s and 90’s have clear examples of similar events, and the process for unraveling the complex issues leading to a rebound always take longer than most economists care to admit.   The current mortgage crisis is different than the “bubble burst” of 2001-2002 (the natural ebb and flow of exuberance followed by caution and/or panic) because of our national debt.  It was only eight years ago that we benefited from a balanced budget.  I hesitate to introduce politics into this discussion, except to point out that when we (as individuals or as a nation) are in massive debt, our capacity to rebound is severely limited.

The Fed reduction(s) in interest rates are important, and certainly helped to avoid a disaster yesterday on The Street, but we can’t perform such tricks every day.  We simply don’t have enough silver bullets.  And Congress?  The overall economy will be worse by the time legislation passes, and frankly, if I am one of the lucky ones to get a rebate check, I’m not going to suddenly feel better and start buying new gadgets with my $800.  I’ll pay my rent or my Blue Shield bill.

What could the Congress do (not in any current plans that I have heard/read)?

The best business incentive imaginable would be to substantially reward companies that retain as many employees (or, even better, have more employees) at the end of 2008 than they have today.  In other words, motivate employers to keep their employees on the job.  Jobs = Confidence = Spending.   Seems sensible, so why haven’t we ever implemented such a strategy?  Because reducing costs (layoffs) has a short-term boost on operating margins, and investors remain overly focused on next quarter’s results.  Our focus on next quarter is a disease for which there is no cure.

For the discerning reader, I haven’t forgotten my colleague’s question: Is there anything on the tech horizon that can be viewed in a positive light?

Positive trends for 2008 will not be evident in the next six months.  Consider this the winter of our discontent.  But the first signs of recovery (by the end of this fiscal year) will likely be seen here:

• Mobile Devices and the content transported to them - because they are ubiquitous, and they are the platform for the younger generation of consumers who will graduate into the workforce and replace (because of lower entry-level salaries) those of us with grey hair who may or may not have our current job by the end of this year. 
• Advertising - because it is the pathway to new customers when your company has lost revenue.  Increased IT budgets will be one of the last signs of recovery; advertising budgets will be the early indicator.
• Innovation within IT organizations - because of necessity (innovation’s mother), we will be driven to build solutions that cost $40,000 instead of buying one for $400,000.  When IT begins to create solutions that can be re-packaged and sold, we become a revenue-generating team rather than a cost center; slowly but surely, we’ll be allowed to spend some of that innovation-driven revenue with our vendors/partners who, by that time, will be heavily discounting products.

This isn’t a pretty picture, folks.  2008 (the entire year) will be characterized by cost-cutting, not spending.  As for the national debt, it will be another 6-8 years before we can repair that damage.

The recession is here.  Don’t debate it.  Deal with it.

I have been an attendee of MR Rangaswami’s enterprise software conferences since their inception five years ago, and yesterday’s sessions of Software 2007 (see www.sandhill.com) deserve some response.

Hasso Plattner is a smart guy, to be sure, and his keynote address acknowledged the massive transformation we are witnessing in the software industry.  Pundits have commented on his “chalkboard-style” presentation, yet no one has yet to point out that it was simply a chalkboard font to give the illusion of personalized notes.  Shane Robison (from HP) was far too unwilling to challenge his competitors/partners (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP) by saying anything that was controversial; no one seemed to notice his lapse in logic as he reiterated that HP was serious about software, yet offered nothing new in their roadmap as they shift R&D from hardware to software.  Even the PR/Marketing gurus in the breakout sessions were inconclusive: everyone notes the importance of innovation and the dominance of communities (of users, developers, bloggers, et. al) yet none of them was willing to propose a unique strategy for enabling us/them.  Marc Benioff comes the closest with his Software-as-a-Service paradigm, which some of us have been recognizing since Salesforce.com (and Corio and Jamcracker) were called ASPs in 2001.

One obvious (to this writer) theme echoed throughout everyone’s presentations:  The Stack.

Why are we still talking about The Stack?

For those unfamilar with this stale metaphor, a simple explanation: imagine a Powerpoint diagram of ascending boxes, with “the network” at the bottom, above which is a layer of “databases,” above which is a layer of “applications” and crowning the stack, a browser-based user interface.  Every IT diagram has included a variation of this diagram for the past ten years, and it was easily witnessed again this year in the “vision” of SAP, HP, Microsoft and friends.

Yes, they also nodded affirmatively to the slow-but-sure acceptance of services-oriented architectures, re-usable components and models, and widely available (even open source) functions and features that can and will be accessed ubiquitously across a worldwide network, yet no one in the room was willing to admit what I will state here:  The Stack is a legacy system, and the institutions who still depend upon the metaphor are those who continue to build and serve legacy architectures.  Of course, The Stack will not go away (few legacy systems ever do go away), except in those few, truly visionary institutions (think: Credit Suisse) who understand the challenge is not about linking devices, but about linking people, institutions that understand that the network is not the platform: we are the platform.

We are diffuse, global, personal, and inclined toward “local” communities (of thinking and behavior, not geography anymore).

We are the fundamental components of a network that is most often diagrammed without those fundamental components. 

At our best, we are not hierarchical (The Stack is hierarchical, and therefore does not serve us at our best).

Perhaps the keynoters will begin to acknowledge this at MR’s conferences in 2008 or 2010.

We are the Platform.

With thanks to Dave Snowden’s latest commentary in our Value Networks online dialogues (see www.cognitive-edge.com)…

Dave, your latest observations about HTML lead me to relate an anecdote from my book’s research.  (I will leave the semantic and psychological variations to those better qualified, with one note: it has been my observation that we must change our words in order to change our behaviors.)

The anecdote, then.

As some of you know, my book is a series of fictions, narratives of characters who live and work in the world of technology.  One of the chapters is told from a professor’s point-of-view, and includes a description of a technical writing exercise he asks each year from his students.  In this story, the students are encouraged to consider the works of Robert Coover (Brown Univ.) and Ted Nelson (Xanadu, etc.) in three-dimensional form.

During the early drafts of the chapter, I had the good fortune to engage in actual (not fictional) correspondence with Mssrs. Coover and Nelson - and Ted Nelson, in particular, was enamored with the idea that I might send him passages of the fictional story, to which he could (in real life) respond.  In this way, the fictional conversation becomes a real conversation over the Net.  During our brief correspondence, I explained that his text in the story could be linked to his dynamic website, allowing him the possibility of editing/revising his notions about information exchange, even after the book was published.  However, we acknowledged that, upon hardcopy publication, the actual hypertext link would be “frozen in time” as published.  Finally, we then postulated that the book might oneday be electronically searchable by Google or the Internet Archive, at which point, the hypertext link to his writings would become active, once more.

HTML created and blurred the distinction between “content” and “container.”  In the old days, the text was housed in a time-based and physical ostuary (print), however, with the advent and wide acceptance of HTML, and the further expansion of dynamic links generated by software, one’s homepage might be changed via software programming, without manual intervention, creating dynamically-generated content.  Since then, we have introduced even further layers of abstraction that invites us to further blur any distinctions between content/container.

The most apt metaphor for the future of hardcopy publishing is reflected in my experience during the production cycle of my book, The System is a Mirror, which I finished writing in December 2005.  If I had wanted to publish the work on the Net (via an extended blog or narrative-based website), it would have been available to readers within days.  However, the manufacturing and marketing cycles of the book led it to an August release, more than seven months after I’d finished writing.

For those of us who continue to learn and adjust our conceptual models, seven months can lead to significant changes in one’s thinking - perhaps work on a second book is well on its way when the first appears for readers, whereas the currency of web-based publishing (events unfolding in text as they are unfolding in the world) affords near real-time exchange of views, a “faster” absorption of other views, a more complex and adaptive system that emulates the natural behavior of a human network.

One final note, as confession: I am a book lover.  Leather-bound first editions of fine literature are among my favorite objects in the known world.  Unlike hundreds of years ago, however, they are no longer bound by a specific time.  Our networked collaboration - due to the ubiquity of markup languages and standard Internet protocols - indeed, this very blog is no longer constrained in this way.  It is text in the present tense.

During today’s presentation to the San Jose CIO Community of Practice, several underlying themes (of the book, of these blog commentaries) were discussed; as promised, I will note them here, so that the attendees of the session have an opportunity to “extend the discussion…”

As with last week’s presentation at the Naval Postgraduate School, though with a very different audience, much of our attention was paid to the very difficult task of explaining complex technology to non-technical (though nonetheless astute and/or intelligent) audiences, particularly in the context of corporate institutions that produce technical products and services.  Most often, the non-technical audience are executives, and just as frequently, the significant events occur in relation to budgets.  As our technologies become more complex, the requisite challenges to explain them coherently (or risk inadequate funding) are also becoming more complex.

The key, as those familar with my work will already know, is narrative and metaphor.  And, as in  last week’s sessions with the admirals, the attendees at today’s session seemed most interested in the stories and metaphors “that have worked,” i.e., have conveyed the lesson that might otherwise have remained vague or confusing.

In my entry of March 6, I noted two interesting “metaphorical scenarios” re: enterprise search, and two-factor authentication.  As a result of today’s session, I have added a new “category” to this site, so that any of the postings containing a metaphor/analogy (of possible value in a broader context) will be tagged appropriately.

I’m inclined to re-iterate the underlying strategy.  Metaphors and/or narratives are not the end state in communication.  They are creative tools to be used when the audience needs more from the speaker/writer than mere description.  For example, some of my friends have jokingly told me that I’m at my best when I am a router.   My professional colleagues understand the reference, but my wife’s colleagues (psychologists, analysts) may not grasp the true intent of the sentence.  Therefore, one approach would be declarative: a router is a device on a network that distributes tiny packets of information according to a pre-defined set of rules.  OK, now they might understand what a Cisco router does literally, yet they still may not understand why some of my friends think I am a router. 

However (from the book) if a complex network were explained, in metaphorical terms, as a city bureaucracy with many layers, many different functions and departments, and a possibly arcane set of regulations governing a citizen’s interactions at City Hall, and that Stuart (the guide, or the router) could welcome the citizen to the bureaucracy, quickly determine their needs and their authenticity, and help them navigate the circuitous hallways and offices in order that the citizen’s packet (license, ticket, fee) as delivered as efficiently as possible to the correct location.  Routed.

Armed with last week’s “Stump the Consultant” anecdotes, one of today’s attendees (while waiting in line for me to sign a copy of the book - another subject worth a few words) asked what the metaphor would be for autographs.

Autographs.

With a disclaimer that the “system” being discussed was the book I have written, the autograph might serve as a personalization detail at the presentation layer, a unique key underscoring that person’s ownership of the book.  Pretty simple.  I was ready to move on to another subject, but they asked for another layer of detail, something less obvious, something directly involving technology.

And so, the following story:  in 1972 and ‘73, I served as a congressional intern for Senator Adlai E. Stevenson the 3rd (Illinois) as part of my college curriculum (Oberlin 1971-75).  My first task was sorting mail which, at that time, was a tedious and manual effort absent any glory or significance.  However, if one demonstrated exceptional skill as a mail sorter, an intern could quickly be promoted to use the AutoPen.

The AutoPen, a desk-sized (and curiously expensive) machine, the core asset being a brass disc at the center of the mechanism, cut like a large jigsaw piece.  The disc, when rotated, guided the pen (fitted in its appropriate groove at the appropriate angle) to apply the Senator’s signature to the document inserted at just the correct moment.  It was an exact duplicate of the Senator’s true signature, used for the dozens (often hundreds) of personal notes and sensitive responses to constituents that deserved more than a stamped signature.  It was considered, in most Senate proceedings, as the official signature, when such was needed. 

 Senator Stevenson’s real (actual) signature rarely passed through staff hands, though on one or two occassions, I was asked to provide a “quick” note or photo autograph, stopping the AutoPen at just the right moment, so that only Adlai was scribble in the same, auto-authentic manner.

Reason for telling the story?  Because there is always - yes, always - a useful metaphor or relevant narrative that could be used to convey a larger theme.  As I boldly asserted this afternoon, if you cannot find a mirror image or analogy anywhere in nature or science or art, then perhaps you should re-visit your original notion, which must might be wrong, in need of some additional critical thinking.

There must be a downside, someone asked today.  With all of the benefits of metaphor and narrative, surely such an approach comes with liabilities? 

I know them well, suffer from them, and they can be found here in the blog:  the effort to convert a complex subject to a simpler level through metaphor risks oversimplifying the subject, lessening its apparent importance; the effort to provide a narrative in lieu of more technical jargon, as we may be witnessing at this very moment (late at night, unedited) wherein a great many words have been used to say what can better be said shortly.

There is a collaboration inherent in every effort to write (what I am doing now) and read (what you are doing now).  Subsequently, there are implicit obligations to the collaborative process, and occassionally, I think it’s useful to re-state them, for those who’ve just jumped into the column and haven’t yet read anything that comes before…

First, I have an obligation to keep the column current, with a broader concern (in this case) than simply listening to myself talk.

Secondly, the reader has an obligation to, at the very least, approach each entry with a modicum of attention and respect (suspension of disbelief), and to whenever possible, add the reader’s response, whether pro or con.

Consider this an ongoing invitation.

Last night, I had the good fortune to speak to a group of Navy captains as part of their continuous learning program sponsored by the Naval Postgratuate School in Monterey, CA. (See http://www.nps.edu for more information about their mission and programs.)

The simplicity of our metaphor (we reflect ourselves in the systems that we build; as such, to transform our information systems, we must transform the organizations that design, build, and maintain them) was immediately embraced by this engaging and articulate group of Navy leaders.  Though many at the dinner seemed to believe that their particular difficulties with institutional technology were more complicated than could be addressed by such a “catch phrase,” they asked challenging questions in order to better understand these principles and how they might be applied in specific circumstances.

I’m inclined to share two of the many conversations I had with these Navy captains and admirals, not to over-simplify their very complicated technology environments, but to serve as examples as we strive to apply what we know to what we don’t yet know.

Example 1: Trying to explain complex security algorithms to business executives (for funding)…

Executives “glaze over” when asked to understand the technologies of two-factor authentication or deep packet intrusion protection. However, they understand in great detail the risks of illness, and our various tools that can be used to address them.  A thermometer costs $9.98 and effectively identifies a fever that can be addressed by ibuprofen.  Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) is much more expensive yet effectively identifies a mass in an organ that would require even more expensive oncological treatments. There is a risk-reward ratio that tells us it is ineffective to treat brain cancer simply with ibuprofen, and similarly ineffective to treat the common cold with radiation.  As parents, we make such decisions every day.  By asking the executives to understand the risks inherent in underfunding intrusion protection, and the consequences of providing the funds only for ibuprofen, they will be able to better understand the nature of the challenge and its proposed response.

Example 2:  We are convinced that a broader data search will yield more valuable results than the simple search being recommended, yet our executives don’t understand the complexity of tiered/virtualized storage.

Imagine that you are organizing a yard sale to yield some profits from your attic that is filled with no-longer-needed posessions.  You could simply provide your own used items for sale, or you could spend the time coordinating a neighborhood-wide yard sale on the assumption that there may be even more valuable items forgotten in the basement of the people who live down the block. How do you convince them to allow you to look through their basement, possibly discovering an old (inherited) painting that they didn’t remember, but could bring a substantial profit at your yard sale?  It is delicate diplomacy, requiring trust and an additional amount of administrative trivia, but the larger value to the entire neighborhood is compelling.

As I explained at our dinner last night, I do not mean to diminish the urgency or complexity of current technology initiatives.  On the contrary, applying this metaphor and understanding its human-centric components may add many complications we’d rather not confront.  There is no right or wrong - businesses have many constraints.  However, the application of the metaphor (and its resulting change in behavior) reduces the risk of miscommunication, and helps everyone understand the objectives in a more participatory way.  This becomes more complex, over time.  Yet there are fewer surprises (setting expectations) and less blame when projects exceed their initial timelines or cost structures.

Confirmation of these central principles comes from many places, and the opportunity to discuss my book with such intelligent readers and industry analysts continues to be a stunning and unexpected reward for the time spent writing this book.

 The latest confirmation, of course, can be found on CIO.com, where Vint Cerf offers his comments on the nature of the Internet, and how it reflects our society. (http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=28931)  His examples, of criminal behavior and intent, are certainly part of the overall framework, however, it is much more than a reflection of our worst characteristics.  Like a mirror, our systems reflect the good and the bad, the infirm and the rigid, the dynamic and the static.  Like that mirror, we tend to blame the systems rather than doing the harder work of what Steve Yatko at Credit Suisse has called “re-architecting ourselves.”

In the past few months, admittedly ignoring my responsibilities for this column in response to personal challenges, I’ve had the chance to discuss The System is a Mirror with Paul Kwiat, at the University of Illinois (Quantum Computing) who, with his exceptional graduate team, is studying this at the level of photons (when they are “split, they are called “daughters”).  They are examining the behavior of incredibly small particles, challenging the linear nature of time, and their work raises new and (in my opinion) fascinating issues about our entangled relationships, with each other, with our systems, with our data, and deeper, to the very core elements of which the universe is composed.

In IT, the “stack” will go away.  I discussed this yesterday with the President of EMC Software, though he admits that our current legacy systems remain an important requisite of our attentions.  We are moving, as an industry and as a society, to “the presentation layer” where our community and our technology converge.

This is the very heart of what we should be discussing, as professionals, and as citizens.  To remain focused only upon the machinery is both short-sighted and a kind of denial.  There are many more layers/levels of interaction at work, mirrored in the systems that we build, and it is time for a broader discussion of what our reflections tell us about where we are going, and what we should be doing, along the way.

Today’s lunchtime conversation with the CFO of Navis (www.navis.com) highlighted one of the many confusions that plague our profession: if we are plumbers, they want us to be architects; if we are architects, they want us to be visionaries; if we are visionaries, they want us to be plumbers.

It is the nature of an industry in its adolescence, wherein the needs are many and the resources are few, an industry best known for problems - inadequate backups, poorly blocked spam, legacy system burdens, staff burnout…The primary assumption: if there are no deficiencies in your information systems, you are probably spending too much money on them.

Alan at Navis is among the few Chief Financial Officers who appreciate IT, and the dedication of an over-worked staff.  Others, in my career, Mark from Documentum, Dave from Synopsys - they recognize the value of a solid infrastructure and layer of applications in the success of a modern business.   The most interesting aspect of today’s conversation was the realization that Organizational Architecture (the capacity to adapt to new projects/initiatives with an adaptable organization rather than a rigid hierarchy) presents a challenge to executives seeking competent IT managers: should they sacrifice technical skill for people skills, or will that simply create an aloof management team that is no longer capable of laying network wire or rebooting a router?

My response: with the exception of recent graduates who do not yet have any customer/business background, it is easier to take the escalator downward from solid IT theory to the application of theory in practice, more difficult to ride an escalator upward from practician to businessperson.

The inclination, among many in the profession, is to point a finger at the educational institutions that emphasize systems, or to point a finger at executives who simply do not comprehend “how their own automobile functions” yet criticize mechanics.  However, it seems to me (yet another mirror analogy) that we, in IT, need to look at our own reflections and shrug the chip of our collective shoulders.  Just because we’re under-appreciated, underpaid and overworked does not mean that we are not ultimately responsible for our own well-rounded skill set.  We cannot wait for the servers to go down or telecom systems to become unaffordable before we leap into action.  We should be speaking to our colleagues, reading about new technologies and concepts, sending our teams to training.  We don’t want our doctors to be relying upon 5 year-old information, and we shouldn’t want our IT staff to be similarly bereft of knowledge.

I recently joined Linden’s Second Life community, and the virtual world is compelling.  There is an allure to the avatars, the interactions, the new economies that exist solely on the net.  I can imagine that most of us would much rather spend time exploring this new world than taking refresher courses on email archive-and-recovery strategies.  Such apparently contradictory uses of our time need not be an Either/Or. 

Create an avatar that looks and talks howsoever you want, and have the avatar become your research assistant - the Second Life world can be a diversion but it could be much more: a training tool, a team-building environment, a place to test your hypotheses with others who may have much more experience than you do about the very problems you are trying to solve at work.  That world can be as collaborative as any real-time data center, in fact, at its core, it is a real-time data center with a sophisticated user interface.

It need not be a game, this thing we do.

Since I was 12 years old and first realized a writer’s words (books, poems, essays) can actually be extended independently to a broader audience, I have remained fascinated with the possibility of the Idea being received before rather than after Proximity.

Therefore, many of you (visitors to the site who have never met me) will be inclined to respond to the latest postings, or to offer your own ideas - please do so, for if this were not dialogue, I could simply write a white paper and publish it on my website.  Agree where you can, disagree where you must, you are invited to engage in any manner suited to the topic(s) at hand.

For those of you who do know me, either from another universe and time zone or from previous events and conversations, I hope that you can read the book and extend it in these postings:  perhaps you will question a paradox based upon what you know beyond the covers of the book, perhaps you would prefer to speak with one of the characters directly, or just remind me that I’m being a bit redundant in these entries…

Every reader’s perspective creates a new entity.  Like the photon experiments or Schroedinger’s Cat or the wave/particle definition, these stories now exist in your minds, in your universes, and with every new reading, the Idea expands, takes a different shape, a different meaning.

My preference, at this stage (having written these stories over the past two years) is an investigation of Time (non-linear, subjective, and the possibility that interacting with point C (in this blog, for example) before you have traversed points A and B creates a different framework, a different architecture.  (The classic conundrum of time travel - if you traveled back to your grandfather’s youth and killed him, would you cease to exist, and if you ceased to exist, will he live on?…)

In my opinion, it is not a matter of physical travel, but of synchronous thought.  It is not a matter of proximity in space, but rather, proximity in time, and the possibility that one may move along one’s path in ZigZag form (with apologies to Ted N. for the use of his term in a different context) or in years that are cubes positioned side-by-side.

Imagine our chronology of thought as a Grid, infinitely matrixed, multi-directional, affording many more plotlines (Q Narratives) than merely A->B->C. 

Consider the consequence of computing services (University of Illinois) that can answer questions before they are asked.

Consider reading the last chapter first or these blog entries in reverse order, or not at all.  Then, and by all means, respond… 

By this, I am not suggesting that the Net is simply an immense (Borges-like) storyline with myriad plots, characters, and authors.  It is, however, a useful metaphor in the examination of several principles inherent in the system/mirror theorem.

The first, of course, is the quintessential element of Time, and the unusual (but not unique) tension between what you are reading now (which is also what I am writing now) and what I have written over the past two years that will be published next month.  For further notes on this apparent dichotomy, see the earlier entry, “Time (Is Not an Arrow).”

The second principle to benefit from this metaphorical perspective is the expansion/contraction/expansion process embedded in the following scenario: 

As I was writing the initial drafts of the book, I included some referential URLs to Ted Nelson’s website discussing his notion of “zzstructure.”  Though the embedded link was “dynamic” on my system, it lost this interactive quality as the chapter was moved through Wiley’s production process, and in the published book, the referenced URL is a “static” string of text. 

Let us further imagine a future state, when the book’s contents are indexed by Amazon (and others) for search capability.  In the newer, re-produced electronic version, the URLs once again become “dynamic.”

The question for this day is as follows (with kind regards to Ted N. who informs me, in today’s email, that he will soon be providing software that answers this question): 

What happens if/when Ted’s website is updated (while the book is in production) and the newer content no longer reflects - and perhaps contradicts - the text in which the URL was originally referenced?  And what can we learn about this period of “uncertainty”  during which the static link points to a location which is shifting?

It is an issue underlying any interactive site, even this one.  I pose these questions on July 5, and they may not be read until days/weeks later.  In the interim (when ”uncertainty” allows for all possibilities) the world itself may be transformed by the slouching progress of history.  It is this interim period, this uncertainty zone, that challenges our notions of linear narrative, that underscores the essential difference between the Net and the Book, between hypertext and the printed page, between what you are reading now (about the book) and what you cannot read (the book itself) until August 7.

I find this “uncertainty zone” compelling and mysterious.  It is the realm of all possibility, until choice (yours/mine) sculpts the next, very real, event and presents it for our observation.