TPPR was published on the business utility of blogs in the Letters Column of the Financial Times on 16 November. This letter was then picked up by Freelance News. Other commentary on the new media that may be of interest can be found at:

http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/10/21/working-the-facebook-system.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/9/10/second-lifes-consequences.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/11/2/on-sexual-honesty-web-20.html

It strikes us that there are two separate sets of project for analysts who want to go beyond exploring the technically possible and assess what is going to be commercially, socially and politically effective. It is their effectiveness and not their technical possibilities that will dictate where business opportunities within the new technologies will lie.

The first set of projects is the identification of micro-uses of web 2.0 that will enable current needs to be met and which will segment markets into niches with sufficient critical mass to hold real capital value.

The second analytical process (a very different set) is to predict how the availability of new tools will change how society is structured - and so the nature of individual and social needs and wants. 

This is the long term question about what new markets will arise - and how traditional businesses will need to adapt in the longer term. Above all, what sort of 'creative destruction' will we witness in the next cycle? 

Commentators often confuse the two sets of analysis but quick fix problem solutions within this cycle may not be enough for longevity of enterprise in the decades to come.

Our instinct is that we are about to shift radically away from 'market services' to the provision of 'public services' (much as we shifted from 'manufacturing' to 'market services' and from primary production to manufacturing production in previous long cycles). 

Raw materials are still required and they need to be made into things but the proportion of the economy devoted to these tasks has declined relatively in favour of services. Just as types of manufacturing displaced each other and then were displaced by services, so types of service will displace each other in the next cycle.

As for social change, our assumption is that the new technologies permit mass and individual wants (mostly, in fact, emotional needs and not invariably benign) to be satisfied far more easily and with diminishing customary and community constraints. 

The new technologies will accentuate emotion and cheapen reason just as, in a previous cultural cycle, reason was accentuated over faith by the technology of print. This is going to be a world where wants will over-master needs or will become confused or identified with needs. But a world where business no longer creates needs and wants as in the consumer era proper but has to meet demands that may be cultural, social and political as much as economic.

The political logic is for the public, as it becomes more demanding, to prefer 'guided democracy' that delivers results in preference to any form of politics that presents itself as democratic and yet rules incompetently or makes claims to some abstract legitimacy that no longer stands scrutiny except on a high emotional level.

It is not political authoritarianism but traditional liberal democracy that will be most challenged by a technology base that favours populism, quietism and anarchy in equal measure. Political skills are likely to be defined as effective to the degree to which they balance emotional appeal with actual service delivery. 

But all this is speculation ... and only the beginning of the journey.

www.tppr.co.uk

As It Happens tends to major on international relations and politics on the United Kingdom but it is also the official blog of the TPPR group.  This comprises not only TPPR itself but Pendry White, a company providing strategic marketing services for international businesses.

Sometimes you come across the dream client that combines intrinsic interest, nice people, honourable conduct and the opportunity to use the skills of both companies.  Such a client is the Schoyen Collection which is the the largest private manuscript collection created in the last 100 years. 

Martin Schoyen, who created it in the course of half a century, is a passionate believer in publication.  The failure to publish has been one of the great drags on the progress of archaeology and its kindred areas of specialist knowledge.  Some of the great archaeologists and antiquaries were excavators and lecturers but could be poor publishers of their work.  Some 60% of the holdings of the Schoyen Collection is presently under research and publication in the Manuscripts in the Schoyen Collection series and this is a remarkable achievement by a private collector, a breed that would be hunted to extinction by some radical ideologues of public ownership.

But this blog posting is not about current cultural policy - a contentious matter at the best of times.  The Schoyen Collection's opinions on these matters are laid out clearly enough on its website, both in the news section and in the main body of the text.  The Press Office is always happy to answer reasonable questions.

What should be equally interesting is the website itself which is an unusual public resource. The Schoyen Collection is not only committed to publication, notably through the Manuscripts in the Schoyen Collection series, but has made an effort to place a representative range of material on the web for the general public and scholars to see, with useful background commentary. Of course, the website does not contain everything. Resources are not limitless and priority is given to scholarly publication, but the Collection's efforts mean that a good deal of it can be accessed anywhere in the world at any time by anyone with access to the internet.

Here are some of the treasures you can see for yourself (this is a personal choice of just fifteen of them and is certainly not the choice of the Collection - you can click on the pictures to get a fuller view):-

• Valdivian or pre-Valdivian stone plaques or star charts which are the earliest evidence of "writing" from the Americas
• The earliest known record of music and musical instruments in history
• The oldest known mathematical text
• Mankind's oldest reference to the Deluge which is, together with 1/3 tablet in Philadelphia, the only other tablet bearing this story in Sumerian
• The Royal Annals of King Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria which document two previous unknown wars!
• The earliest surviving manuscript of Hesiod's poem, and also one of the earliest MSS of Greek literature
• Remarkable collections of Dead Sea Scrolls and papyri
• The oldest Septuagint Leviticus extant - the greater part of the papyrus is not represented on any Dead Sea Scroll so this is the oldest MS of this part of the Bible
• The earliest Matthew in any Coptic dialect
• The monumental Shepochkin Apostol, which is the only copy of such a Russian Church Slavonic Apostol in private hands
• The earliest surviving manuscript [in Nahuatl] of the Scriptures in the Americas, a primary document concerning the introduction of Christianity into the New World
• The earliest Magna Carta in private hands
• The only extant contemporary literary parallel or actor's part in manuscript of any of Shakespeare's plays - only 2 more manuscripts from Shakespeare's lifetime are known
• The oldest surviving copy of the Nepali (or Bihari) Devimahatmya, Praise of the Great Goddess.
• The Ledger of Chief Little Shield, a participant in the Platte River Indian war - Little Shield was a Cheyenne war leader who also participated at Beecher Island, Washita, Summit Springs and the Little Big Horn battles.

That's enough for now, though I have had to leave out Australian aboriginal treasures, Chinese oracle bones, ostraca and what-have-you - a magnificent collection by a dedicated collector.

[Expression of Interest - TPPR acts as adviser to The Schoyen Collection.  Its subsidiary, Pendry White, runs its Press Office and handles the technical aspects of web content management.]

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Welcome to As It Happens, the TPPR commentary on international relations and developments in British public life.  Our aim in this blog is to give you a flavour both of our work for clients and as analysts of the environment in which you have to make important decisions about your business and your livelihood.  We do not pretend to have all the answers.  We tell our clients always to seek a second opinion on anything that we say that may be instrumental in making a decision but we have a track record in predicting trends that has stayed a secret for far too long.

Since 1998, and our work surrounding global insurgency before it became sadly fashionable with the assault on America in 2001, we have tracked world events from an unusual perspective.  A lot of our work is based on reverse-engineering the 'spin' supplied to the world's media - why this or that story appeared at this time, what purpose it serves in soft power terms and what it means in terms of facts on the ground.  We are interested in understanding disinformation and the costs of group-think within our elites and we are not afraid to seek analogies in history to explain what may be going on.  Our work, based on our analyses of ideology and culture as much as of politics, should be regarded as complementary and not competitive to analyses based on best assessments of economic and micro-political factors such as the actual composition of elite groups.

In practical terms, TPPR is primarily concerned with bespoke analysis and with crisis media relations, especially pre-litigation support alongside the legal community and support for family office interests in protecting the reputational position of significant individuals.

In addition, we have, within the Group, a full service strategic marketing agency - Pendry White - which supplies Press Office, research and new media content services to clients as well as retained and project management marketing services that are primarily but not exclusively designed for the services sector.  Pendry White, in turn, is part of the Eurocom Worldwide network (one of the ten largest worldwide) which gives Pendry White access to virtually every country in the world, including such centres as Dubai and Islamabad.

As It Happens will report on Group developments as well as provide comment on international affairs and domestic British politics.  More information on TPPR, on Pendry White and on Eurocom Worldwide (Pendry White's global network partner) can be found in the sidebar.