The Economist’s double holiday issue has an interesting little article called The accidental innovator, which is all about Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger.com and Twitter.com. A few of my favorite quotes from it:

Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious. - This quote, and the underlying innovation process and corporate ohilosophy,  ties to the three insights that Williams accidently “stumbed on”, which are outlined in the opening paragraph of the article. Williams is by no means unique in these beliefs (basically you can’t really plan out the discovery of new ideas, if/when you do stumble on them they are very hard to explain to others, and with the benefit of hindsight all good ideas seem blatently obvious in retrospect), but they are worth repeating every now and again.

 “… in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways. Google values official brains—the credentialled, academic sort—whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.” I find this interesting because, in the eyes of many, Google is the anti-bureaucracy, and certainly not the type of place where credentials would be more important then ideas.

“We have an itch that we scratch, and that becomes the thing.” - William’s concluding quote about the innovation process at his firm… there’s a lesson here for both individuals and massive organizations alike.

Further to my earlier post, there is a nice article in FCW written by our friends at the National Academy of Public Administration. It lays out the benefits of collaboration in the public sector and references one of my favorite government 2.0 examples: the Transportation Security Administration’s Ideafactory - an idea marketplace for transportation security officers (the kind folks who marshal you through security at airports around the United States).

“At TSA, Hawley has launched an internal collaboration site, at least in part to provide a place where the 43,000 transportation security officers (TSOs) can share important information and techniques for improving the security of our country’s airports.

TSA’s Idea Factory is a secure intranet, restricted to registered users inside the agency. It has become an instant hit. Airport TSOs now share ideas for improving their workplace environment and strategies for making the traveling public more secure. Within a week of its launch, TSA employees had submitted more than 150 ideas, offered more than 650 comments and voted on ideas more than 800 times.”

Too bad it’s not open to the public — I’d love to know what kind of ideas they’re cooking up and I bet road-weary travelers like myself would have more than a few proposals for them to consider.

It’s easy to berate government agencies for being slow to use popular web 2.0 platforms like YouTube and Second Life to deliver public services or engage citizens in dialogue — I certainly have. I have little doubt that governments must establish a genuine presence in these participatory online communities as they struggle to maintain relevancy and legitimacy in today’s world. But when you start to consider the legal and political risks that agencies take on when they use third party channels for engaging with the constituents, you can at least sympathize with their dilemma.

This report produced for the Queensland Government in Australia outlines many of the legal issues that agencies must consider as they migrate to a web 2.0 environment. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for riveting holiday reading, but it’s a must for public sector practitioners who want to ensure that their first foray’s into web 2.0 don’t end in political disaster. Here’s an excerpt:

“Increasingly, young voters feel that they cannot communicate with governments and with politicians. Young people often use online and digital environments—websites, bulletin boards,forums, social network platforms and virtual environments,instant messenger, SMS and Voice over IP—to converse with each other about things that are of importance to them. The topics of these conversations—education, the environment,policy, economics, human rights, sexual identity—are inherently politically relevant. Consequently, if governments are to have meaningful interaction with young people, it is important for them to engage in these communication platforms. . .

The current generation of internet platforms have the potential to provide significant benefits to organisations that wish to
interact with their audience—whether customers or constituents—in a more direct and immediate fashion than has
been possible with established communication channels. . .

Organisations wishing to make use of these Platforms must be aware of the legal risks which may arise from their use and
take steps to ensure that those risks are actively managed and minimised. In particular, any organisation using the Platforms
must develop and implement policies and procedures addressing issues such as:
• behaviour and conduct of Platform participants and
the organisation’s employees;
• the dissemination of illegal or inappropriate material;
• copyright infringement; and
• management of the organisation’s own intellectual property.

It’s been a bit of a slow (or is that busy?) period over the holidays, but here’s an assortment of various wikinomics-related news stories of interest from the last few days that might be of interest:

Warner selling music without DRM: This falls into the “it’s about bloody time!” part of the news spectrum… but I’d be willing to bet that this transition to DRM free music still has a few more major hurdles to cross. You know, like if the recording industry incumbents were stupid enough to sue people for transfering music they legally bought in CD form onto their computers. Wow.

Charles Eicher has a fascinating article in the Register entitled How to copyright Michelangelo, which details how cultural icons can become commercial properties. To give you a bit of a taste for where this article goes, it starts with Pope Sixtus IV, goes all the way to Bill Gates, and ends with the sentence “but copyright only works if we can reign in the robber barrons.” Personally, I would have like to have seen the article written in the form of “Bill Gates, Michelangelo, and Pope Sixtus IV walk into a bar…”, but that’s just me… it’s an excellent read.

AOL announced it’s discontinuing support of Netscape Navigator, which I’m sure is a shock to everyone who thought it was discontinued many years ago. The only reason I mention it is that apparently 90%+ of the web population used it in the mid 1990s, and now about 6 people do… things can change quickly.

The New York Times has an interesting article on what the legions of newly-minted Google millionaires are looking to do next… which is apparently much more than swim around in pools of their money like Scrooge McDuck. The most interesting quote from the article in relation to wikinomics: “We are planning to bring all the ex-Googlers who are starting companies and investing in companies together to tighten up the network.”

Match.com has become the first dating site to partner directly with Facebook, via the “little black book” application.  It will be interesting to see if that works, because a lot of the dating sites are in a hecukva lot of trouble right now (Match.com’s daily traffic ranking has dropped from about 100 to about 600 in the last few years).

While everyone is paying so much attention to the looming Microsoft / Google slugfest, few have noticed that none other than Paul Allen is saddling up to bid on U.S. wireless spectrum through his company Vulcan Ventures. What Mr. Allen does might be worth paying attention to.

These are just a few of the stories that abound… and we look forward to bringing more of them directly to the wikinomics community in the new year.

In case anyone missed it, Business Week published their innovation predictions for 2008 last week.  Now I’m not going to offer any of my opinions on them just yet, but I think it’s worth quoting a few snippets from the introduction in order to highlight what I might call a “wikinomics theme” that seems to be emerging:

… expect the whole realm of social networking to change in 2008. Just when you “got it” and thought it was all about open, personal, and casual online relationships, social media will morph into another ecosystem—one with lots of gates.

As for hot products in 2008, prepare for yet more surprises. The triumph of opening up the cell phone will create an array of new applications we can only dream of right now. GPS may seem old hat by next summer.

And the Big Idea for 2008? Stop competing against your competitors. Your traditional rivals aren’t your biggest worry. Disruptive innovation is hitting corporations from outside their business.

Very, very interesting. And if you like the intro, it’s worth flipping through the 16-screen slide show that highlights some more specific predictions. Some that I find quite interesting:

#5: Presidential policy on innovation.

#6: One Laptop boomerangs.

#9: Unfriend me.

#10: Mobile Explosion.

#12: It’s all about me.

#15: Shape shifting enterprises.

Having spent most of my afternoon discussing ways to collectively share knowledge with my peers, while implementing some of these features I actually stumbled across something quite useful and intriguing and felt I best share it with the wider community. The PEW Internet & American Life Project has released some new findings on teens and their use of social media. Some interesting statistics from the report are as follows:

• 35% of all online teen girls blog (compared to 20% of online teen boys)
• 55% of online teens have profiles on a social network
• 57% of online teens say they watch videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube.

It is a great 36 page report, while I must admit I haven’t had time to read all of yet. If you’re looking at where Teens are spending their time online, I’d suggest you have a look.

There is no winner in this format war – and even if there was, it will be short lived. As they fight each other out, many seem to forget the underlying technology that makes HD possible on both optical disks is the H.264 video compression. And H.264 isn’t exclusive to either disc; it is actually the opposite as the standard was developed to be as flexible as possible. You’ll see it implemented not only on optical media, but on low and high resolution video files, broadcast, RTP/IP packet networks, and multimedia telephony systems. But the best for last is H.264’s integration into Flash 9 – giving fans of video streaming sites something to be excited about. Look how fast this HD video stream loads under Flash 9.

Downloading and streaming high definition movie files (both .FLV and .MOV) is increasingly becoming both quick and convenient through the combination of the H.264 compression codec, high-speed internet connections (getting faster constantly as Rogers now offers 16mbit down connections, and Verizon offers 20mbit), cheap hard disk storage, and decreasing bandwidth costs - the perfect storm. It resembles the MP3 phenomenon of 2001 that was accelerated by Winamp and Napster.

 

The Net Generation norms include Speed (we want things NOW), Freedom (when and where WE want them), and Entertainment (keep everything fun will you?). As David pointed out earlier in his post here, we Net Gener’s are not against spending money. We’ve grown up in fruitful times (which may be ending very soon), and have always been able to scrounge up money to spend (credit – could be why things may turn bad now). A lot of us choose to pirate because it’s just that much more convenient and flexible. We can grab the files via Bit-Torrent, watch them when we want on our PCs, burn them into a DVD, resize them for our iPods and mobiles. One file – many screens. Read More »

Hands down, my two most favorite blogs on the web at this moment are by Curt Schilling and Gilbert Arenas (a.k.a. Agent Zero). If you are not familiar with these guys, the first is a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox (baseball), the second is a point guard for the Washington Wizards (basketball), and what they have in common are big mouths, bright minds, great senses of humour, and a remarkable ability to stir up a heck of a lot of controversy. Apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks they’re great: check out these celeb blog voting results.

What’s brought a lot of attention to Schilling’s work in the last few weeks is the opinions that he’s put forward in regards to the Mitchell Report (see this Wikipedia article if you don’t know what this is, while marvelling appropriately at the fact Wikipedia stays so up-to-date). By far the aspect of the report that’s attracted the most attention is an accusation that Roger Clemens took steroids and HGH, and Curt has basically said that if these accusations are true, Roger should give back all the awards he’s recieved since 1997… or alternatively, he should prove his innocence and Curt will respect him again (he has about 3,500 other words on the topic if you want the details). In an era where athletes so often bite their tongue, and a conspiracy of silence is a big part of the reason baseball got in this mess in the first place, Schilling’s candor is refreshing.

Now as an aside, it shouldn’t exactly be a shock to anyone that Clemens took some roids. At the age of 37 or so, as it appeared his career was winding down (as it does for most pitchers of that age) and he was fattening up, Clemens seemed to suddenly double in size, but this time in pure muscle, started dominating games at will again (in fact, more dominant than he’d ever been), and started acting like a crazy person on the mound. If anything, it would be a shock if he wasn’t on something - as far as circumstantial evidence went he might as well have walked onto the field with a syringe stuck in his butt. If he actually took the stuff/ the report is true, of course. If not I, too, hope he clears his name, etc, etc, disclaimer, disclaimer.

But that’s not really the point of this post - the point is how Schilling is using his blog to engage with fans and express himself in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. He talks about the Mitchell Report, gives his opinions on trades his own team may or may not be considering, various charity-type things he’s into… when it seems like pro sports just aren’t worth following any more, and athletes are so out of touch and/or doing terrible things, it’s guys like Schilling that make you think again. I think it’s great for the sport, great for the fans, andI just hope Clemens didn’t have a roid rage when he read it :).

And then there’s Agent Zero - by almost all accounts, one of the funniest and craziest people around, and he makes me laugh out loud everytime I read what he writes. Like Schilling, he totally speaks his mind on his blog, about whatever is going on at the moment, with a particular focus on his own sport, and it can rub some people the wrong way. For example, if he, I don’t know, ridiculed some of his fellow players for not taking the contracts they were offered last summer:

So now, Luol, you’re over here in a contract year and you’re not doing so well as a team. You get paid as a team. Now you’re going to be a free agent, and if you keep this up, that $12 million might not be on the table. So he turned down $12 million, Okafor said he wants Dwight Howard’s money … I mean, you ain’t Dwight Howard. It’s like them two had a discussion together about turning down the $12 million. Then Iguodala turned down $12 million … What is going on in the NBA? Iggy, you’re from Arizona, baby. You don’t turn down that much money. I don’t know who your agent is, but Agent Zero says you don’t turn down that $12 million.I just don’t understand it. Then Varejao, he asked for $60 million and ends up with three years for $17 million. You could have got that contract last summer! You done missed 20 games of the season getting paid the same money you could have got last summer. For the deal you just signed, you could have got that this summer from the Cleveland Cavaliers without losing no basketball time. By the time you’re playing again and are ready back in your form, I’m going to be playing again! It’s a damn shame.

This was all done in good fun (he’s since had to sort of re-explain himself again), and I honestly believe in order to be helpful… heck, just to be sure Agent Zero even got his own dad involved in the debate on his next post. If you scroll down his website, you’ll see he also comments on the Marbury situation (if you don’t know, you don’t want to know), his game performance (before he got hurt), how he won the best celebrity blogger, how and why teammate DeShawn isn’t shaving his beard, all kinds of info on his injury… it’s all there for the world to see, and maybe that’s part of the reason he’s pretty much the most popular Washington athlete in decades.

It’s all great stuff, and the archives on each of their blogs are well worth the read if you’ve got a few hours to kill over the holidays- two athletes on the leading edge of transparency and engagement with their fans/customers, at a time when both of their sports sorely need it.

Google Talk, the company’s messaging service, has just released a real time translation service in 23 languages. The translation is done by bots who are invited to the participant’s chat session. The service is said to be reasonably accurate, given the limits of machine translation. They even get swearing right.

An increasingly globalized world brings the need for people to understand each other in order to travel, do business and learn. However, as I have written before, the internet is not yet particularly friendly to speakers of languages outside of English, Chinese and maybe Spanish. Although millions of people are learning English, it seems that the bots are going to learn a lot faster. The technology has come a long way since its inception in the 50s. A freely translatable internet would go a long way in bridging the digital divide.

I’ve never understood this somewhat new Christmas “tradition” (at least in the U.S.) of heading to the movies on Christmas Day. Nothing says “good tidings” better than packing up the family in the SUV and heading to a dark theater to silently eat stale popcorn for the opening of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” Then again, considering how my family gets after a few hours of staring at the yule log, maybe I should consider making the movies a Christmas tradition for the Gilloolys.

But here’s an alternative for our European friends: Stay home this holiday season and catch a very interesting programme on the telly: Don Tapscott will be featured on CNBC speaking on the subject of Wikinomics. There are three chances to catch the show: just after figgy pudding on Christmas Eve at 21:00 CET; immediately following your fine goose dinner on Christmas Day at 19:00 CET; and on Dec. 29 at 20:30 CET as an alternative to the Harrod’s Earl Grey Tea Bowl parade.

The show is also expected to air on CNBC in the U.S. some time in the new year, and as soon as we have more info, we’ll update this post. My personal hope is that it doesn’t conflict with the Jan. 6 International Bowl in Toronto. I’d have to choose between watching my boss discussing N-Gen norms and rooting for my alma mater, Rutgers, to beat mighty Ball State. Considering how Rutgers played this year, it shouldn’t be a difficult choice.

A web troll is a person that deliberately posts provocatively (often in a disingenuous manner) on Internet forums in order to incite debate. It can actually become an art form. Normally, I would do a full disclosure here and describe how I used to be affiliated with the trolling equivalent of Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (the forum where we lurked has been disbanded), but I won’t — even in its death, anonymity is mandatory.

A regular denizen of the Wall St. Journal legal blog, Loyola 2L (he’s been nominated for the site’s lawyer of the year; he and other nominees pictured below), may be an example of a troll. The original poster is ostensibly a second year law student at Loyola who is upset with school administrators because he believes that they fraudulently entice 20somethings to build up huge amounts of student debt to attend what he believes is a lower tier law school which will provide them with no real opportunity to earn enough money to pay the debt off.

Loyola 2L has become something of an Internet celebrity. He has thousands of Google hits, accounts for the bulk of the talk on the Loyola Wikipedia discussion page and briefly had a Wikipedia entry. While many people dismiss him as a slacker (and suggest that if he spent his time studying instead of whining on blogs, he could finish at the top of his class and actually secure a high paying legal job), lately more of the discussion when he appears revolve around whether the new poster is the original Loyola 2L or an impostor. If deemed an impostor, discussion then goes to how effective the impostor is at capturing the L2L zeitgeist.

The Net Generation is online at work and working at home. The combination of 1) Net Geners entering the workforce in growing numbers and 2) the pervasiveness of mobile technologies is causing a blurring between work time and personal time. On one hand, workers are demanding flexible work schedules, the opportunity to work from home, and a less draconian approach to time management while in the office. However, the irony is that the tools that enable mobility and flexibility are the same technologies that bind employees to an always-on, always connected virtual office.

Just like everything else, the chains too have become virtual. So, for example, an employee with a company-owned Blackberry or laptop has the ability to use the device for personal or work use, from any number of locations (home, the office, the train, or Starbucks), at whatever time suits their schedule. But, it’s a double edged sword. The employee’s boss and co-workers also have the ability to reach them anywhere and at any time, and may even expect a prompt response.

Given this paradox (especially among knowledge workers), it becomes very difficult to measure things like work hours, worker productivity, and work/life balance. As a society, are we getting lazier or working harder? Are we more efficient or simply defining work differently? These are the thoughts that went through my mind as I looked at some of the more recent data on time use in North America. Read More »

Online piracy is here to stay

A common misconception is that NGeners download television shows on the internet because they don’t like paying for things. While this is true to some extent, the main reason (in my opinion) is because we already have too many choices for what to do at 9:00pm EST on a Thursday night to reserve that time for Grey’s Anatomy. Why don’t I get to choose when I want to watch my favorite show? (and for the record Grey’s is not my favorite show). Needless to say, for the NGen population we want to dictate our lives, on our schedule, and torrents or online piracy are the easiest way to make that happen. This isn’t even an NGen thing anymore, you’ll find many Gen X, and Baby Boomers looking for an “easy” way as well, because now they have their children who dictate their schedule. In short, online privacy is here to stay regardless of any new legislation that is dreamt up.

New metrics (Nielson Ratings = old paradigm)

“Television is reaching a milestone where online is veritably driving on air viewership.”
— Guinevere Orvis

No longer is the Nielson Rating the true indicator of broadcasting success. For the very reason mentioned above, Nielson Ratings cannot capture who is watching television shows outside of the broadcasted time. This introduces a new paradigm of online metrics: Facebook fan group size, mashups, fan art, and BitTorrent downloads Read More »

The NY Times has a great article about some of the questions swirling around ticket scalping sites… er, I mean ticket exchange sites like StubHub.com (owned by eBay), which has had an extraordinarily successful year. On these sites people resell tickets, and the key question is how do they manage to get all those tickets to all those great events? To quote the article:

Ticket sales for big-name concerts now follow a distressingly consistent pattern: At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, tickets go on sale, and by 10:05 a.m., all tickets are sold. Yet by 10:05, StubHub and other ticket exchanges already have a plenitude of tickets listed for the sold-out event — only now, they cost much more.

Now one of the obvious answers is a few “intermediaries” using Bots- and the article notes Ticketmaster thinks that, somedays, 80% of their hits are from bots. Those bots, indeed, are the reason for those wierd visual puzzles that many sites use in an effort to thwart them. However, the obvious answer isn’t always the right one - it turns out the genius business model behind how all kinds of tickets are picked up is… paying people in India $2/hour to do it by hand.

Anyways, I won’t give away the rest of their article, but it is an interesting read that raises some interesting questions. To me, the most important question is why don’t the original ticket sellers just start an auction process from the get-go and knock those “intermediaries” out of there?

Today, Facebook just announced that it’ s opening up the Facebook Platform. In their words:

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.

The announcement in even more interesting in the light of the fact that Bebo, a founding member of Open Social, has apparently been working closely with Facebook in their release of their own “Open Application Platform” (some say it’s virtually a clone of the Facebook Platform). And Bebo’s no small potatoes either, according to comscore among social networks they rank third in North America (by number of users), and are first in Europe.

So what does this mean for Open Social? The InsideFaceBook blog offers a answer from Bebo CEO Michael Birch:

“What about OpenSocial?” Clearly the Facebook Platform is different than Open Social. We attend the Open Social meetings. We’ll start development early next year. We want to give developers the choice to develop on the Facebook Platform or OpenSocial on Bebo.

When Google launched Open Social, their wide array of partners and open approach seemed to catch Facebook by surprise. And yet all that perceived openness was enough to overcome some of the “not quite ready yet” problems and fragmented implementation plans among OpenSocial partners. However, now Facebook offers a way for developers to have their cake and eat it too - with a mature API that they’re willing to share beyond the walls of Facebook. It’s a big win for facebook developers, and helps thwart Google. Dave Winer calls it: “the end of OpenSocial”.

This is a very positive move by Facebook, and with a bit of luck, might signal the beginning of a new more open approach by Facebook in general. It’d be nice for Facebook to elaborate more on their approach to “licensing” to other platforms. And of course as third parties get involved there will also be some “embrace and extend” tensions as those parties pick and choose what gets implemented (something OpenSocial hasn’t been immune to either). As Bebo’s Jessica Alter puts it:

“We’re going to do our best to keep things as compatible as possible for developers. However, it will be an 80/20 thing. We want to do most of the same things with our platforms.”

With Bebo now riding shotgun with Facebook, Google has its work cut out for it if it wants to keep other OpenSocial members from breaking ranks.

WANTED: Recent Business School Graduate. Must have graduated top-of-class with 4.0 cumulative grade point average. Must also have been elected class Valedictorian. Thirst for adventure and willingness to travel the world are a must. Responsible for own travel and accommodations and must be willing to work for donations, all of which will be given directly to charity. No prior experience necessary.

Interested?

Likely not. Enter Sean Aiken - Job seeker and founder of www.oneweekjob.com. Personifying the extreme of the stereotypical restless N-Gen employee who is always looking for the next best opportunity, Sean eschewed typical high-achieving Business grad positions in Investment Banking and Management Consulting and decided to become the ultimate job-hopper, in search of the perfect career.

Beginning in February, 2007, Sean embarked on the ultimate career soul-search, with a mission to try 52 jobs in 52 weeks – any job, anywhere in the world – in an effort to “figure out what to do with [his] life”. Now a Vintner, in Yakima, Washington and in week 38 of his adventure, Sean has been all over Canada and the United States, working as everything from an Advertising Executive to an Exterminator.

Surviving on the kindness of strangers who have provided room, board and transportation, Sean has raised nearly $15,000 from his wages for the Make Poverty History campaign. What started out as a small project has turned into a new full-time job every week, and another full-time job responding to fan emails, job offers and media inquiries. By the end of week 52, Sean hopes to have helped himself, and others in his generation, “figure out what it is we should or should not be doing with our lives.”

While Sean represents the extreme of the Net Generation’s desire for, and comfort with, multiple career experiences, he really highlights the fact that for the majority of N-Geners, the days of a lifetime employer or a single career are relics of the past.

I must admit that I didn’t run a regression analysis, but I think it’s safe to assume that there is a relationship between the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” with the spike in searches for “global warming”.

As you can see, there is a steady increase of interest in the topic, and this interest peaks right around the time when “An Inconvenient Truth” wins an Oscar - Check out point ‘C’ on the graph. It’s interesting to see that a movie was able to increase people’s interest in a topic like this, and if that’s what it takes to raise awareness about pressing issues that people like to pretend aren’t there, then so be it. Angelina Jolie should put out a documentary with a compelling slide show to talk about her forays in Africa… and so on.

For the most part, the human civilization is reactive as opposed to proactive. We see all the signs, but often times, it just seems easier to avoid and deny the situation than dealing with it directly.

There are many web 2.0 initiatives out there looking to deal with this pressing issue. Some of them are even quite innovative and engaging, and you know there are definitely some social networks out there charged with dealing ’solving’ this issue. Hopefully the power of the web 2.0 is strong enough to start a mass movement towards action… and only time will tell if it is up for the challenge.

Here are some of those sites trying to educate and make a difference:

Tree Nation: Help plant one tree out of 8 million in Africa, in the shape of a heart.

MyAbodo: Cool application that teaches both adults and kids how to ‘build’ an environmentally friendly home.

ZeroFootprint: A social network aimed to engage citizens to fight climate change. The City of Toronto, has a community of their own - this is a partnership between ZeroFootprint and the City of Toronto.

A cool Mashup showing rising sea level

So, I found myself at a cocktail party abuzz with gossip that the founder of Wikipedia was one of the guests. The bad news is…they were talking about me. Here’s how it transpired. I was on my way to a conference put on by BSG Concours, who just acquired my company New Paradigm. I introduced myself to one of the event organizers, who I met on the shuttle bus from the airport to the resort. She had heard about the acquisition and said “you guys are the Wikipedia folks, right?” I assumed she meant Wikinomics and didn’t correct her. A little of the telephone game later, and I was the “guy that invented Wikipedia.”

Now, I actually know a lot about Wikipedia…and if pressed, could actually do a pretty good job at pretending to be the founder. If you haven’t seen it, rent (or download) Six Degrees of Separation which has nothing directly to do with Kevin Bacon. Will Smith plays a young man that cons some material comforts from Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing by pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son. The thing is, it’s harder to pull off such a parlor game like that…because someone could check…uh, Wikipedia to discover that Jimmy Wales is the founder (and Sidney Poiter has only daughters).

Similarly, it’s harder to get away with the fling in Cancun without your girlfriend finding out, because the vacation paramour will want to add you in Facebook. Same deal with bragging about fake athletic feats (do you know how many people I met at University that claimed to be finalists in the 100 metre dash at the provincial championships). There’s no viable way about lying about your age (I am ACTUALLY 39 this year; may be a fake 39 for a couple of more) if all of your high school friends are listed on Facebook as being much older. The only way to buy a few years here is if you are one of those creepy seniors that dated freshman girls. Full disclosure: I was on the opposite side of this supply and demand equation, which explains this home video about my first year in high school.

If you live in the U.S., or are one of the many Canadians who would rather eat glass then read the National Post, you might have missed Deidre McCurdy’s interesting article Canadian netroots rise up against the Tory copyright plans.  That would be a shame (and don’t worry, if you are one of those people here’s a CBC article on the same topic to re-balance yourself), because it’s a really interesting read.

The short version of the story goes like this: Canada is currently reviewing a lot of it’s copyright and various other IP protection laws (think DRM), and rumour has it the template we’re looking at is basically the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Some would argue this is roughly the equivilant of using Don Cherry’s Coaches Corner style guide as the template for what to wear to work. Oops, sorry for the Canadiana showing up again - I’m basically just trying to say the DCMA is a little over the top, and if I had to choose between burning it and copying it, I’d probably take the former. Eh.

Anyways, it turns out that a few bloggers (Doctorow), lawyers and assorted others were thinking along the same lines, and (here’s where the important lesson comes in)… they not only blogged madly about it and formed facebook groups and what not, about 50 or so actually got off their butts and went down and protested the Industry Minister in person. It seems to have made a difference, if only for a little while.

I like seeing stories like this, because it seems to me that - at times - this Internet / social networking thing has made us all pretty lazy in terms or pushing back against things. Heck, you can get up in the morning, hop on the computer, and have participated in 5 digital protests of some kind and signed 4 petitions before the coffee is ready.

As great as all that is, and however powerful an online list of whoever decides to sign might be, it’s often just a little too easy - and not always the best way to go about doing things. Sometimes a group of 50 or so people that are willing to actually give up a big chunk of their own time can still make a much bigger difference.

thesixtyone is another innovative site that lets users rate music uploaded by musicians. The most popular bands are displayed on the homepage after receiving “bumps” from listeners. Bumps cost points, although, users can gain by promoting music that is popular with others. The system is designed to let people build their credibility as music listeners. This innovative site is similar to Sellaband, a service that allows users to bankroll new musicians for a share of the revenues. Sites such as thesixtyone and Sellaband are quickly creating an alternative model for the discovery, financing and promotion of new music.