Experience shows that the first wave of Internet-enabled change was tainted by irrational exuberance. A sober analysis of today's trends reveals that this new participation is both a blessing and a curse. Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery... (but) the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with the relentless change.
- Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics, page 15.
When I recently sat down for a dinner with Anthony Gold, who some people might know as the open source guru at Unisys, he posed these two very interesting questions:
Is it still six degrees of separation out there?
Is there still a need for “super connectors” to pull us all together?
As Anthony expanded on in his blog, the reason he asks these questions is a curiosity about how much more accessible everyone is in the age of the Web 2.0. After all, the six degrees of separation theory was based primarily on an experiment that involved how snail mail moved from Nebraska and Kansas to a stock broker in Massachusetts (participants were asked to send the letter to someone they knew on a first name basis that they thought would be more likely to know the broker than themselves) in the 1960s – things have changed a little since then.
For example, if you’re over 30 (which I am, even if you can’t tell from my Second Life avatar), think about how many people you were connected to in your mid to late teens. In all likelihood it was a relatively small group, most of the people probably lived pretty close to you, and over time you lost touch with many of them (particularly if you or they moved). After all, it takes a lot of work to maintain relationships with multitudes of people when phone and mail are your only options, and only a special few can (or bother) to do so – a.k.a. the “super connectors” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.
Now contrast that with today, and how connections can be made, maintained, and in many cases rediscovered through Facebook, MySpace, various other community sites, and the like. There is no denying that we are becoming more connected, and it’s far easier to maintain these connections (even the ones you might want to be rid of…) – which takes us back to Anthony’s questions.
Exactly how small is the world getting, and in the world of social networking are super connectors waning in influence?
In turn, Anthony posted a few thoughts on how this issue could start being investigated, in addition to some of the challenges tied to it (particularly in defining what exactly a connection is). Does anyone have any other thoughts on how we might figure this out?
According to MIT research fellow David E. Stone in a fantastic article posted in Wired Magazine today, the motion sensitive controller is “one of the most significant technology breakthroughs in the history of computer science.”
The Wiimote, the controller that comes with Nintendo’s Wii system, is being looked at as the key to building realistic training simulators within the virtual world of Second Life. Using this product, individuals can have the potential to learn how to perform surgery, inspect buildings, or even learn how to drive using Google Maps and Google Earth. A more intuitive and tactile human-centric controller allows one to move their avatar and manipulate their environment in a more realistic manner.
Released under GNU General Public License (GPL) (open source) the Wii4SL Sourceforge Project is enabling people to do as such. The Wii4SL extends the open source version of the LindenLab SecondLife viewer with support for the Nintendo Wii Controller. You can now navigate your avatar through virtual space with the ease of the Wii Controller.
An example of this is the video below from YouTube. Instead of sitting at the computer and having your avatar walk around on Second Life, why not do the actual walking yourself?
Or even better yet, why not just go for an actual run in real life? It’s far less expensive than having all of the equipment necessary, and I’m sure the view would be far nicer. Besides, hopping up and down on a treadmill places just as much stress on your joints and doesn’t provide you with as good of a cardiovascular workout as a run would.
Simply because something can be virtually replicated, that doesn’t mean that it necessarily should be.
However, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
“ A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions.”
Apparently the popularity of a GPS-enabled treasure hunt game known as geocaching is on the rise, so much so that a small town in Ontario called Wilberforce (where?), is looking to get itself ‘on the map’ by branding itself as the new Geocaching Capital of Canada, according to a recent article in the Globe and Mail. Players who want to participate in a Geocache hunt need only log onto www.geocaching.com (or some other caching site), download a cache’s coordinates (uploaded to the site by any player who cares to be a ‘cache owner’), and then, aided by a GPS system, go off in pursuit of the treasure.
There are few rules involved in geo-caching –the game seems mostly to be based on socialist principles of give and take…basically, if you take something from a ‘cache’ or treasure, you put something there to replace it…According to Geocaching.com, “A cache can come in many forms but the first item should always be the logbook. In its simplest form a cache can be just a logbook and nothing else. The logbook contains information from the founder of the cache and notes from the cache’s visitors. The logbook can contain much valuable, rewarding, and entertaining information. A logbook might contain information about nearby attractions, coordinates to other unpublished caches, and even jokes written by visitors. If you get some information from a logbook you should give some back. At the very least you can leave the date and time you visited the cache.”
While the article in the Globe and Mail refers to Geo-caching as an ‘environmentally friendly’ activity, I guess that depends on how many applications will promote pedestrian pursuits which leave little no or environmental impact, vs. those that will employ broadly spun treasure hunts over vast areas, designed, guzzle guzzle, to be raced across in off-road SUVs.
Although for now geocaching appears mainly the domain of the interested public, we can soon expect that dynamic to change. As the game’s popularity rises, companies, ad agencies, and mobile carriers will be paying close attention to this type of technology and thinking about ways to use it as a creative and interesting means to interact with consumers.
Since posting my thoughts on YouTube’s activities around the presidential candidates race, I’ve been in conversation with Stacy Becker who runs the Minnesota Anniversary Project (MAP150), a forum for reinventing policy-making by reconnecting the vision, values and voices of Minnesotans with policy-making on the issues that matter most to their future.
Like me, Becker worries that most of what passes for Politics 2.0 today is a mere veneer on a fundamentally broken system. Just because you can post a video or a comment on a public policy forum does not make you a genuine co-producer of public policy. At best, most 2.0 initiatives provide citizens with one more means to provide input into an effectively undemocratic process where the real decision get made behind closed doors.
I think Becker put it well when she said “Politics 2.0 is not about finding different way to “engage” citizens by plugging them into tightly controlled, rarely informative, almost always boring policy process. Policy-makers need to make citizens an integral part of the process…and not just those citizens with an axe to grind.”
Becker points out that Politics 2.0 today looks a bit like what happened when computers became widely available in the 1980s. As she put it, “Organizations automated existing processes, rather than using technology to improve and streamline their processes.”
Some politicians and public officials would genuinely like to strengthen representative democracy. The reality is that getting to genuine citizen engagement is hard–it entails a truly massive shift in the culture of government and the apparatus of political decision-making.
Reflecting on her experience with MAP 150, Becker points to a few of the toughest barriers: 1. Many people in positions of power don’t really believe that citizens can add value. 2. Most people in positions of power are reluctant to give up the control they have over processes and/or are scared to be held accountable for something they can’t control. 3. It’s not been done before, so we’re making it up as we go.
The editors at Mother Jones got it pretty much right when they recently said:
At best, the potential exists for the political equivalent of software’s open-source movement: a system in which the best results are accomplished not by secretive, commercial, top-down, individual effort but by communities of interested people wielding collective, uncopyrighted, free, and yes, democratic tools. . . [Open source politics] also has the potential to become exactly what Web 1.0 turned into—a delivery system where most of us are mere “customers.”
As Howard Rheingold would say: what it is —> is —> up to us. If you want to follow-up on this topic, check out the recent MotherJones feature on Politics 2.0 where you can read views from folks like Howard Dean, Esther Dyson, Larry Lessig, and Kevin Rose.
In North America, Google is seen as an information democratizer, in China, it is seen as something to be monitored and censored, and in Europe, nationalist desires to possess ‘best in class’, ‘in house’ technology cause Google to be seen as an entity to compete with, likely more so than anywhere else on the globe.
That said, European attempts to create competing search engines have been plagued by splintered financing and siloed efforts – a trend which we can expect to see continue, if a recent decision by the European Union, authorizing Germany to give $165 million to research aimed at developing a next generation search engine, is a sign of things to come. This sum pales in comparison to the deep pockets of Google, a company whose Market Capitalization is currently $162 billion.
The German funding, going towards the Theseus research project, comes in the aftermath of the breakdown of a larger consortium involving French and German firms, who had previously planned to work together to build a semantic search engine which would allow for the translation, identification, and indexing of audio, images, and text. The consortium project, called Quaero (which means “search” in Latin) was previously billed as “Europes answer to Google”. France is now seeking to subsidize the Quaero project on their own.
But with such splintered efforts, it seems hard to believe that Europe will ever have “an answer to Google”, as Google itself continues to pursue a growth and acquisition strategy which is heavily influenced by the firm’s desire to position itself as a leader in the semantic web 3.0 game.
An interesting battle is taking place in the seemingly boring area of broadband wireless spectrum auctions. Broadband spectrum, which carries voice and data to mobile devices, is leased from the government to wireless service providers. Traditionally these have been telecommunications companies, such as Verizon and AT&T, who build the infrastructure to deliver wireless services. The telecommunications companies would have near full control over their networks, being able to dictate the kinds of handsets, applications and software that worked with their system.
But the rules may change with the upcoming auction which is set to take place in the near future. Google, which is looking to enter the wireless market, has proposed four rules that would open up the access to the networks allowing more competition. The new rules would allow consumers to download any content or application and utilize any handset or wireless device they wish. Google also proposes that third parties should be able to buy access to the spectrum at a reasonable price and that different networks will be able to interconnect.
If all four rules take effect, the business models of telecommunications companies will be severely affected by the new competition. It is likely that customers would win as new entrants, including Google, create innovative services and prices are driven. It will be up to the FCC to decide whether the benefits to consumers warrant a more open approach.
Open source management and services firm OpenLogic has launched a new free download, Discovery, that will enable users to create and maintain an inventory of the open source software used on their systems.
Part of the initial success of open source in the data center - driven by Linux and Apache - came from its deployment by IT administrators without the knowledge of the CIO or IT director, but while that approach may have reduced purchasing and maintenance costs it leads to an administrative headache.
The new OpenLogic Discovery product is designed to identify 5,000 versions of the 900 or so open source software applications used by enterprises today. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Sun Solaris systems. The company is also offering JumpStart Inventory, a service that involves scanning and analysis by OpenLogic. The analysis identifies not just what open source software is installed but also how many installations, and identifies which of the open source packages found have passed OpenLogic’s 42-point certification process as well as which open source licenses are used.
JumpStart inventory is free for up to 500 machines, and with pricing for the service then starting at $5,000.
Imagine the day that saying ‘cheque please’ into your mobile phone could authorize a purchase transaction of products procured on the web. VoicePay enables a very close reality. The technology, developed by VoiceVault.com, protects against impersonation fraud by employing complex voice recognition analysis to build up a profile of an individual’s larynx. It is therefore considered a rather secure method of authorizing payments, as, although it might be relatively easy to imitate someone’s accent, mimicking the shape and size of their vocal tract is a more steadfast challenge – even for the best accent hacks among us.
Currently, the major utility limiting factor involved in the service is that only products registered with VoicePay can be purchased using it. In order to buy a product the customer will either have to enter a 9-digit VoicePay code that identifies the product, or click on a VoicePay icon while shopping for products virtually on his or her mobile phone. Either action will activate the VoicePay service, which will call the customer and ask them to repeat a set of randomly generated numbers. If the larynx is a match – the customer need only say “yes” to authorize the purchase.
Of course, in classic network effect fashion, the more buyers who use the service, the more sellers who will sign up to sell thru it, and vice versa. That said, these initial offerings are likely only a whisper of what we can expect to hear from VoicePay in the future – according to a recent economist article, the company is already in talks with several banks and credit card companies who could help encourage growth in the technology’s adoption.
Facebook has made their first acquisition by buying Parakey, a Web-based computer interface which is being developed by the co-founders of Firefox. Parakey is described as “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Ross, one of the co-founders, explains that if you want to write in your blog or post to Flickr you first have to launch Blogger or transfer and upload the image from your camera. The system is designed to simplify this process which could effectively disintermediate a desktop based operating system.
As if Microsoft doesn’t already have Google to worry about, it seems that Facebook’s move could attack the software giant’s core business. As the social network sails past 30 million users while adding new applications everyday, the possibility of Facebook becoming a new computing platform is becoming more real.
In an attempt to recreate the Great Library of Alexandria, Aaron Swartz, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, writer, and web developer, announced on Monday the launch of the Open Library Project, quite possibly his most ambitious project to date.
The goal of this project is to produce the world’s largest and greatest library on the Internet. It is intended to be fully open and a product of the people: allowing them to create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.
Utilizing their own database design, ThingDB (tdb), as well as the team’s independently created wiki software, Infogami, the Open Library project team hopes to expand its framework in order to build exciting site-specific features on top of it. It has already been connected to the Internet Archive’s book scanning project, so that one can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they’ve made available. They also hope to add a print-on-demand feature in order to print copies of the scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so one could fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book they’ve always wanted.
For more information on the project, or for a demo, click here.
One of the hot debates in the human capital world is how much should recruiters review the online profile of new employees — especially those who have recently graduated from college and most likely to have less than professional content on their Facebook and MySpace pages. Anastasia Goodstein and I discussed this recently in a study we wrote for New Paradigm’s Net Generation study. An excerpt:
Decide whether or not to look. If you do look at social networking sites and blogs, create specific corporate criteria for what constitutes a red flag. Recruiters or HR professionals should not be rejecting people according to their own personal biases. Context is key. Everyone has different personas for different situations. You’re not the same person with your boss as you are with your friends. If you’re searching for information about a potential candidate, consider the context in which it is posted. Let them explain. Instead of ruling out a potential candidate right away because of a questionable post or photo, use the opportunity to ask them about it. Check the date of the post. If it’s from high school, their thinking has probably evolved. Use the interview as an opportunity for them to explain themselves to you—even talking about their mistakes can reveal a lot about character. Partying can be a job skill. If you’re hiring for a position in sales or marketing, finding a N-Gener’s profile full of party pics could indicate that they have a skill set that might be help them do their job.
In an end to a nasty dispute between the chip maker and Nicholas Nagroponte, Intel decided to join the OLPC effort to sell $100 laptops to impoverished countries. The organization already has a number of participating companies including Red Hat, Google, eBay, Quanta and Intel’s archrival AMD. Although, the OLPC effort will do a lot of good by bridging the digital divide, this is not entirely an altruistic exercise for the companies involved. They get a foot in the door as well as valuable experience in what could soon be high growth markets. This is at a time when the PC market in developed countries is maturing. Countries that have already agreed to purchase laptops include Rwanda, Uruguay, Libya and Thailand. Participants also gain experience in low cost design which can be incorporated into their existing products. Intel’s drive to develop a rival low cost laptop underscores the importance that technology companies assign to developing markets. Clearly the criticism and accusations of trying to undermine OLPC caused Intel’s change of heart. However, the company will still see many of the benefits of being a participant in the project.
An innovative business model for the music industry has emerged in China. The leading search engine Baidu has teamed up with the record label Rock Music Group to deliver a free streaming music service to users. The companies, in turn, gain by splitting the advertising revenue.
If the United States is a difficult place to do business for record companies, China should be nearly impossible. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates that as much as 85% of all music consumed in China is pirated. An extreme environment such as this drives business model innovation. While an ad-supported music business model is nothing new – think radio – streaming puts the user in control. It seems that Western record companies will have to learn that you can make money by giving customers what they want.
Regular readers of Wikinomics.com will likely know that we’re gearing up to publish version 1.0 of the Wikinomics Playbook — the first peer produced guide to business in the twenty-first century — this fall. To keep the momentum going over the summer months we’re issuing weekly challenges to the Wikinomics community. Last week’s challenge was to rethink public relations for a world where traditional PR and spin are increasingly impotent tools. 6 days, 12 editors and 34 edits later, the Wikinomics Playbook’s Chapter on Open PR was written. Here’s an excerpt:
Traditionally the role of the public relations department was to control the flow and angle of information that went to company stakeholders. Making that process open and transparent involves rethinking the relationships with all your stakeholders, including the company’s own employees. Leading companies struggle with the concept for a number of reasons.
Losing control of the information – PR departments struggle with the concept of not controlling the flow of information, or even having it released by other parties in the organization. It is a challenge for PR to understand that the message they communicate can be edited, added to and altered by other employees within the firm.
Privacy and Intellectual Property – A companies worst fear is having trade secrets, new products and other private information leaked to the public by employees. The suggestion of Open PR will have legal departments scared stiff, now that anyone can post or private mission critical data on the web. The fact of the matter is that you must treat employees like adults. Typical employees don’t share company secrets on an internet chat room where they can potentially remain anonymous, so why would they post proprietary information on an Open PR wiki where their contributions are clearly tracked.
Open PR but is great, but don’t tell sales and marketing – This is a problem that has cropped up in a number of large IT, software and manufacturing companies. R&D and product development teams are more than willing to be open and transparent with customers and clients, because there is an understanding that in the information being conveyed is in ‘beta’. Some of the ideas may never come to market, some may unofficially be released to the community, but never sold as part of a branded offering. The fear is that if Sales and Marketing get a hold of this information they will start selling and marketing these products that may or may not ever exist. This creates a disconnect between customer expectations and creates mistrust between employees.
A special thank you goes out to our leading Open PR editors Alex Todd (a Stakeholder Trust Consultant), Kate Raynes-Goldie (a PHD Candidate in Social Interaction), and (Business Model Strategist) Ron Long.
In this week’s challenge, the Wikinomics crowd will be opining on the future of popular culture. How might mass collaboration transform music and other cultural products? Could the masses have written a better end for the Sopranos TV series? Thousands of fans are writing their own endings anyway - so why not harness this enthusiasm? Does Wiki culture have a dark side?
One of the most innovative areas in marketing today is the development of search driven online advertising models. Google and Yahoo, the two leaders, are working to improve methods of delivering advertising to users at the moment when they are most likely to purchase the given product or service. However, in their efforts the two companies are taking a slightly different approach.
Google, the inventor of the pay-per-click model, has launched a pay-per-action beta test. The new pricing model charges advertisers not when their ad is clicked but when a specific action is taken by a potential customer. These actions may include an actual purchase, a request for more information or a filled out questioner. The parameters are defined by the advertiser. While this does not necessarily improve the relevance of ads, from an advertiser’s point of view it is a model that delivers guaranteed results.
Yahoo’s recently announced SmartAds program tries to overcome the shortcomings of Google’s approach by making the ads more relevant to searchers. SmartAds allow for the creation of custom ads by combining data about the user with information about the marketer’s products and services at a given point in time. For instance, a searcher in New York types in “latest Harry Potter book” into the Yahoo search field. Yahoo will quickly create an ad on behalf of a book store displaying the availability and prices of Harry Potter books in New York. The model takes a step closer to one-to-one marketing.
While both models are attractive to advertisers, it seems that Yahoo’s will be more appealing to consumers. It will be interesting to see if SmartAds help Yahoo come back from the recent slump.
The Dumbest Generation? Have your say. I must first acknowledge my personal bias on this topic...
As a member of the Net Generation research team at nGenera (and a member of said generation myself), I am a firm believer in the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the Net Generation (those born between 1977 and 1997). So, I must say that when I [...]
del.icio.us
Digg it
Furl
reddit
