Ironically, this website is somewhat of an exception to a rule — and the rule is: Information is brought to you by natural language.

On the “What is PHLAT” page, I define what I believe “PHLAT” is (supposed to) refer to — but that doesn’t mean that you (or anyone else) feels this way, can understand what I am talking about, or anything like that. However language does (do that).

Language is a truly amazing phenomenoon — and I also manage another website where I speculate about how natural languages do what “they” do (for a brief introduction into that, see “Propaganda Information Technology vs. Indigena Information Technology — the Basic Idea“).

Only very few people truly understand this (and this is probably one of the main reasons I write so much about it). Just try to imagine you wanted to achieve something without language — I don’t think you would get very far. In any case, you couldn’t use the Internet at all without using language.

I probably need to write about this until the day I die, because it is such a fundamental thing to explain how the world has changed so much over just the past few decades.

Here, in this post, I want to emphasize one thing in particular: the PHLAT.net online catalog network is (of course also) brought to you natural language … and that is it (there is almost nothing more to it than that). There is only an absolute minimum of “administrative overhead“. Administrative overhead is not always a bad thing, but it is very expensive. If administrative overhead costs ten times (10X) more than whatever you want, then you might not want to pay for the administrative cost. If you don’t need a guarantee, a hotline, support, or any other kind of hand-holding, then you can probably get what you want for much less. There will be a risk, but that risk may very well bring rewards.

We see this happen over and over again every day. Some of the world’s biggest companies want people to believe this is only possible if you use their brand name. If a company is very large, then the administrative costs are spread over pretty much the entire Earth, and then they are indeed almost zero. Yet if a customer ever wanted to actually make use of that administration, then they would find out that it doesn’t work — it is indeed worthless.

Increasingly, we live in a world in which piracy has become the “law of the land” (and not just the law of the “open seas”). We must not forget that it was predominantly pirates who pioneered some of the most important discoveries ever known to humanity. And pirates do indeed recognize the need for some law and order … and also that just a little bit can go a very long way.

I want to close with a few hat tips to people I have learned a LOT from. The full list is not possible — I don’t even know that myself. Let’s start with Esther Dyson, who apparently herself learned a lot from a group named the “Grateful Dead” (wikipedia.org identifies edventure.com as her current “official website”, yet I recall her website as being edventures.com). I also want to acknowledge my very deep indebtedness to Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay (yet I feel I also gave him a few tips “for free” 😉 ) — see omidyar.com. More recently, there is a project started by Adam Curry which goes by the brand name (he is unfortunately still a sucker for brands and branding 😉 ) “Value4Value” — check value4value.info. And last but not least let me also mention a video presentation I watched the other day by Thomas Friedman in which he mentions his “Iron Rule of Business on the Flat World Platform” — namely: “Whatever can be done, will be done“. This video presentation was given in a brand name setting, and is available in another brand name setting … and also via the author’s website [ thomaslfriedman.com ] (see “Watch a video clip on The World Is Flat 3.0 at MIT from Nov. 28, 2007″ on the media page). I guess I could simply give you the YT link, but for that I will let Mr. Friedman sell your personal data to Google instead. 😛