From Ivor Tossell: I killed Tim Russert (on Wikipedia)
There's no shortage of ways to publish things online, most of which will start with readerships of precisely zero. The Internet gives everybody the power to be ignored. But editing a Wikipedia page that's at the heart of a breaking news story will affect thousands upon thousands of readers.
From Repository Man, Les Carr: Publishing - A One-Word Oxymoron?
Why do they call it "publishing"? Wouldn't it be much more accurate to say "I've just had a paper privatised?"
Barbara Kellerman of Harvard Business: Clinton, Thompson, and the Power of the People
This moment in time belongs less to those with power, authority, and influence, and more to those without. To be sure, there are leaders who from a distance appear impervious to the temper of the times - command and control types more reminiscent of the past than redolent of the future. But they are dinosaurs, doomed soon to be overcome by those smaller than they.
Patrick Lambe discussing the latest meme making the rounds in knowledge management circles: Wisdom Management
Show me a disaster – Katrina, Enron, 911, Challenger, Columbia – and I will show you problems with how individuals’ knowledge fails to scale to an effective organisational response. The notion of wisdom management is a gigantic red herring based on an increasingly outdated individualism.
I found this via Jeff Jarvis, and it's good stuff: Power of Information: New taskforce and speech:
The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.
The report is about the role of the UK government (and by extension all governments) in the new information economy. The report, although long, is chock-full of insight-- you might even call it a road-map.
The full report: The Power of Information.
From Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog:
You can’t “find” anybody by insisting they come to you. Old meet new.
The blog post discusses changes in media consumption and the QOTD from a few days ago, "If the news is that important, it will find me.”
If you're building a destination web site you are more than likely going to fail. You can build it, but they won't come.
From Dave Snowden: Archetypes, foolishness and false categorisation:
Putting people into little boxes and thinking that you have accounted for the complexity of a human being is crude, stupid and at times down right evil. Why anyone spends money on this I will never understand.
We attempt to do this with learners all the time; and it is crude, stupid, and at times down right evil.
From Michael Idinopulos's Transparent Office blog:
I think of this as the dawn of the "Work in Progress" culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.
Don’t think of your target audience as a noun.
From David Johnson at Lost Remote commenting on the expected layoffs at Yahoo: Yahoo looks at cutting hundreds of jobs
Is it ironic that Yahoo positioned itself as the ultimate content aggregator online, co-opting newspaper publishing strategies and partnering with the newspaper industry, and now is laying off staff like newspapers are doing nationwide?
If your business is content you need to be paying close attention. Yahoo defined content production in the Web of old. This is a lesson in scale. You can't begin to throw enough people at the problem.
David Weinberger from Harvard Business: The Year of Scale
Management by control just can't work in a scaled world. In fact, it was only by removing control that the online world was able to scale.
I'm going to be blogging a lot more on the topic of scale this year. An inability to scale is where most good ideas fail, and it is something that few people give serious consideration. We do "things" because we can, but rarely think about might happen when the demand for those "things" increases exponentially.
Sorry, I keep going back to Umair Haque, but quite honestly I don't know of anyone who is a better thinker on what's happening right now. This is related a tad to my posts of the last few days: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize...
The way we're discussing media is still focused on exclusion - "it's their service, they own you." That's inaccurate. In fact, what's strategically critical aren't the costs of exclusion, but the costs of inclusion.
And a bonus quote:
Let me try and put it more simple. Data is inherently valueless in the edgeconomy, because it's infinitely replicable. Any structure seeking to limit access to data will simply be too radically inefficient for the market to bear in the medium-long run.
UPDATE: Scott Karp says he doesn't totally agree with Umair's thinking: Data And The Future Of The Web
Umair is half right — we are increasingly overrun by data, and SOME of it is a commodity. The commodity data is precisely what Google has harnessed, which makes Google so powerful — the data on the open web.
And then for the life of me, I'm hard pressed to figure how he doesn't make Umair's exact point:
The future of the web will be determined by companies that can overcome people challenges — to bring EVERYONE’S data online, and make it useful. And it won’t be about locking up people’s data, but instead helping them be smart about the free flow of their data.
It will be about networking that data, connecting it, to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why web applications are so much more powerful than siloed desktop applications. That’s why the web itself is so powerful — it’s not just about collecting and distributing data. It’s about connecting data. And about connecting people.
And that is where I got confused, as I'm hard pressed to see any difference in that and what Umair said:
Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is - because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.
What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.
Too funny! From Sarah Fallon at Wired: Confessions of an Online Scrabble Cheat
It dawned on me that to you I was just another word nerd looking for an edge. That made me feel a little dirty.
I think it's safe to assume that Sarah won't be winning any Scrabulous World Championships anytime soon.
Umair Haque from the Bubble Generation Strategy Lab:
In case you didn't notice, Google + Skype + open spectrum/devices/apps = byebye telcos.
Let the disruption begin...
Geez, I like Harold Jarche, lots of good stuff in this post.
What business are you in - Silos or Networks?
David Cushman: Starting a fire on the village green
If and when everyone gathers around that fire, the last thing we should do is stand up and hold forth with a monologue... The moment we default to that we have to kick ourselves. Shut up and sit down, let someone else have a go!
Umair Haque on the problem with the Times Select failure: How Not to Think Strategically About New DNA
The real problem with lying is that it simply never provides the incentives for people to embrace failure - and keep failing. And so new DNA never happens.
I like that. Denying reality prevents you from learning from your mistakes. I think that's true.
From Stowe Boyd at /Message: Instant Messaging Etiquette Backwashes Into Email
The premise that an email should always lead to a response is dying, thank the many gods.
From Non-Working Monkey: Day 356
I don't know. I don't want to know. I never will know. More importantly, I don't care. Now go away and leave me alone. I'm looking at pictures of dogs in clothes on the internet.
Rex Hammock on his experience of attempting to purchase an iPhone directly from AT&T: The only thing slower than the AT&T EDGE network is…
They were handling things with all of the efficiency of a cell-phone store.
The sad thing is that we all know exactly what he means. Bonus quote:
Having just seen the difference in how iPhones were flying out of an Apple Store and being slowly “processed” at an AT&T Store, I think there is going to be some culture-clashing in the coming months.
Comments