QOTD: Matthew Ingram on The Change

From mathewingram.com/work:

If the news is that important, it will find me.

So true! And it's true for a lot more than just news.

UPDATE: I was reading this article in the NY Times tonight: Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On, and came across the same quote:

Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

It's a good read on the importance of social networks and how the expert is being disintermediated. Worth reading.

Google Maps gets wikified

Google has opened Google Maps to the world to annotate: It's your world. Map it.

Now in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, you can log into your Google account to edit a place on the map. You can even mark that a business has closed to save someone an extra trip. Of course, we've taken steps to help protect accuracy -- for example, you'll still be able to see the original listing information along with the history of changes made.

That is so impressive. Google has taken a very successful product and turned it over to the people as a wiki. That takes guts. My hat is off to Google!

QOTD: Michael Idinopulos on publishing

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.

Filtering on the way out as an enterprise strategy

So you want some of the peer-production hyper-productivity for your organization? I was thinking about this some this morning and came up with some guidelines:

• Include everyone you possibly can
• Your borders, no matter where you draw them, will be porous -- error on the side of porosity
• To make it work you need lots of people-- so don't put up barriers to entry
• Exclusivity is for country clubs not social networks
  
• Flatness, transparency, and the freedom to create are essential elements
  
• Micro-management will kill the conditions which make these tools work
• Publish/Release each piece of content when it is ready
• The overwhelming majority of people come to content conversations through search. They go directly to the information they are seeking
• Most look at a single piece of content conversation and leave
• There's not a single good reason anyone can site for waiting
  
• Every piece of content conversation stands alone
• The only thing that should tie one piece of content conversation to another are relevant and embedded hyperlinks. Period.
  
• Filter on the way out as an enterprise strategy... (one of David Weinberger's four pillars from Everything is Miscellaneous recast in a slightly different manner.)
• If you must do QC then do it at the last minute -- just in time...
  
• Do not filter on the way in... (See the first bullet)

These are mine.. Can you think of some more?

Google and Orkut

CNET columnist Charles Cooper raises some interesting questions on why Google isn't trying to replicate Orkut's success in Brazil in North America: So explain again why Google doesn't clone Orkut?

So would the same formula, tailored for a North American audience, work the same magic north of the border? I put the question to Joe Kraus, whom I bumped into Monday at Adobe's San Francisco get-together. "Forget it" was the answer. Kraus should know: he directs product management at Google.

I'm completely with Charles in not getting Google's strategy. I'm all for putting all your eggs on OpenSocial, but why not turn Orkut in North America into the OpenSocial playground? This could so work. Nothing is stopping North Americans from using Orkut right now. Anyone can create an account. It wouldn't take much to build some tutorials around Orkut, encourage people to play, and turn loose the engines of creation.

I'm thinking this is a no-brainer. Why would Google seed this space to others? So color me confused at Joe Kraus's comment as well.

What's her email address?

I had a first today which has got me thinking. It started early this morning when our systems manager asked me for someone's email address. The person he was asking about is someone who I have been working with professionally for over six months. She is a person who I have had frequent and quite regular conversations. The funny thing is that I'd never once exchanged email with her. All of our conversations have been through Facebook or Second Life. Not once in six months had we exchanged as much as one email. So when he asked me for her email address I had to ask her--which I did through Facebook.

Are you finding that you are connecting with your peers more through Second Life, Facebook, etc. and sending a lot less email? For me, this was a real-life example of why mining my Gmail address book to determine my social graph is particularly useless. I suspect that I am not alone in sending a lot less email than just two years ago. How about you?