 |
|
October 6th, 2008, 09:00am
|
The HP Social Computing Lab has taken an interesting look at the dynamics of crowdsourcing in relation to content consumption. Noting that we are in the midst of an inversion from the traditional model where relatively few people produce content and the majority simply consume it, the authors seek to explore an apparent paradox - why growth in content provision continues to persist, given that the structure of crowdsourcing would predict a tragedy of the commons situation. More simply, given that we can all just sit back and free ride off of what everyone else is doing, why aren’t we all sitting back and taking the free ride?
In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point. Read More »
|
|
October 3rd, 2008, 09:15am
|
The makers of NBA 2K9 have come up with a very, very cool way to promote the game, and get users engaged in an ongoing way. It’s called The Other Season, a unique combination of video games, fantasy sports, and celebrity endorsement. Eight NBA superstars (real ones like Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash) own “franchises” within the game, which are competing with each other over the season. How they are competing is by selecting a team of gamers to join their respective squads. In other words, I, Denis Hancock, could be drafted by Steve Nash to play for his team, the Nash Potatoes- an MVP staple that always delivers.
Read More »
|
|
October 2nd, 2008, 03:57pm
|
Andrew Cherwenka posted an interesting article last night called Antisocial Web Marketing: Why McCain is Losing. While I’m personally not willing to jump to the conclusion that what’s happening on the web is the main reason he appears to be losing, the comparison between how the two leaders (& parties) are represented is startling. One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama’s online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain’s team to focus on this… but apparently not.
Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Most interesting stat in the story? The top-20 user uploaded YouTube results for McCain are negative, and the top-20 for Obama are positive. Read More »
 |
|
October 2nd, 2008, 09:24am
|
I’m back studying at Queen’s University, and last weekend was Homecoming. In recent years, Queen’s Homecoming has become an annual pilgrimage for Southern Ontario’s Net Gen. Thousands of them, from Ottawa to Windsor, descend on Kingston for a 24-hour party that begins with 9 AM pancake keggers and culminates with a booze-fuelled riot that sees hundreds arrested, dozens injured, and three years ago, a car flipped over and lit on fire.
A group of Kingston residents, fed up with students’ intolerable behavior and the inability of police and university administrators to stop it, have turned to transparency as a weapon. On Homecoming, and for the past month, members of SaveOurNeighborhood.ca have been patrolling Kingston’s student neighborhood to take pictures of young people committing debauchery and posting them online for the world to see.
Read More »
 |
|
September 30th, 2008, 08:43am
|
Carleton University has been in the news lately for being the victim of a hacking attack. Erm, more accurately, Carleton has been in the news for having a student, Mansour Moufid, identify a serious security flaw in the Carleton Campus Card, which enabled him access to the email passwords of 32 of his fellow students. Moufid then wrote a report on how he was able to breach the school’s security, and snail mailed it to the school’s security department, who ignored him (says Moufid).
Ten days after mailing the physical copy of the report to Carleton, Moufid emailed the 32 students whose accounts had been completely compromised, and informed them that the school had been made aware of the attack on security, and had decided to ignore it. One of the students happened to be an intern at a CBC newsroom, and her supervisor found the story to be interesting — it grew from there. Carleton said that they only received the package the same day that Moufid emailed the 32 students, leaving them with no time to do anything at all. Read More »
 |
|
September 30th, 2008, 07:13am
|
I know that in the past I sure have, and it appears that a number of employees at enterprise software company Citrix are now also doing the same.
Instead of the typical “here’s your company laptop - enjoy!“, Citrix is one of the few companies to have gone public with a Bring Your Own Computer policy and they are experimenting with giving employees a stipend with which to purchase their own machine. With a $2,100 allowance, employees can purchase a PC or Mac of their choice, so long as it comes with a three-year service plan and carries guaranteed next day on-site service.
There are obviously a number of challenges posed by the infinite number of options that come as a result of a customized computer program, but the program brings with it at least one important reward - and one that our research has shown to be particularly attractive to the tech-savvy Net Generation - Customization.
Much more than just a machine on which to complete work (and sometimes play), laptops, like many other tech devices have become an important means of self-expression (enter the Mac marketing strategy). The option to customize also goes far beyond the Mac vs. PC debate by allowing employees to purchase a machine that best suits their desired specs i.e. screen size and port availability vs. weight, speed vs. storage capacity etc. Read More »
September 29th, 2008, 07:12pm
Here’s the situation: you are at home watching your favorite television program and just as the scene ends you exclaim, “I KNEW that was going to happen!” Well if you ever wanted to put your powers of prediction to the test, then tvClickr is a great way to showcase your television smarts. As mentioned in my previous blog, tvClickr is a Facebook application that was developed by LiveHive Systems and it is based on the idea of NanoGaming.
As a competitive person I was intrigued by the idea that you could play against other viewers for points and prizes by answering questions about a live television show. Throughout the week I thought about testing tvClickr on a show that I was already familiar with (such as Greys Anatomy) but I decided that my review might be a little biased because I was already engaged by the show and not necessarily by the application. Instead, I opted for a show that I don’t normally watch to see if my attention waivered or if I stayed focused on the show. Enter the test subject: The Amazing Race. Read More »
 |
|
September 29th, 2008, 11:43am
|
We’ve written before about how Obama has deployed technology and engaged the Net Generation to enhance his bid for the Oval Office. See here, here, here, here, and here.
Here is another interesting story in today’s Wall St. Journal.
After two campaign signs disappeared from his lawn, Preston Fosback decided to monitor it via an Internet camera. From the article:
Dozens of viewers now take shifts, based on their time zones, so as not to leave the sign unwatched at any time. Viewers in Europe take over for those turning in on the West Coast, who are in turn relieved by a dedicated crew of Australians. It’s attracted more than 40,000 viewers and ranks among the top 10 most-watched videos on Ustream.tv, the Web site that hosts the video, among videos of the two presidential candidates and comedian Dane Cook.
The video (and ongoing commentary) can be found here.
|
|
September 29th, 2008, 09:45am
|
Eric Picard, the director of advertising strategy and emerging media planning at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, authors one of the most interesting blogs in relation to the future of advertising. Unfortunately a lot of people miss it because he posts basically once a month, which isn’t exactly conducive to getting found on the search engines or staying top-of-mind. When he does post, however, it’s almost always worth the read.
His most recent post is titled Appearing Soon in an ad near you. The core argument is that people haven’t considered the ramifications of Moore’s Law on real-time image processing. While a lot of people have (or are) focusing on the impact it might have on things like targeting and analytics, the intersection with computer graphics is quite interesting - a future where ads directed at you could easily feature you and prominent members of your social network, both past and current.
A hypothetical example he gives about an ad featuring a man’s wife and three kids is interesting - but the example featuring a person that is the composite of the three people you dated in college really gets to how powerful (and scary) it could be. The question in the long-term may not be so much the ability to make these ads, but whether people will accept them - but history indicates the Net Generation in particular will likely glance over the privacy concerns.
Other recent, interesting posts: Why search doesn’t really matter, Counting the streams in the new media age, & Is an Impression an Commodity?. On a side note, they might make you think that a few more people in the new/social media space should consider getting away from the “post whatever I’m thinking every few hours” mindset…
 |
|
September 29th, 2008, 09:13am
|
A little while ago we spoke to Dan Pink, contributing editor of Wired magazine and author of A Whole New Mind about his latest project; The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.
What made you want to write the story of Johnny Bunko?
One of the main things was that if you think about career information today, a lot of it is what you might categorize as tactical career information—keywords to put in a resume, questions to anticipate on the interview, company information and so on. People in the Net Generation who want that information today, they get it online. They simply don’t get it from books. And yet, there are still books purveying that kind of information; it’s absolutely insane.
Read More »
 |
|
September 29th, 2008, 09:05am
|
I’ve written several times about the impact of social networks on this year’s US Presidential election - see here and here. And let’s be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with young voters and build transparency and a real sense of community action into his candidacy.
Here’s more evidence: Obama’s VoteforChange.com is touted as a non-partisan Web site encouraging people to get out and vote (yes, even though the name of the URL is his campaign slogan). It’s a rather simple program that helps users find out where and when they can vote. But here’s the genius—this kind of transparent, easy-to-use online system is a great way to tap the Net Geners - some of whom might be first time voters with questions as to the process, and others who simply want a more accessible and transparent leader… And who do Net Geners vote for?
In short, the site does three things:
- It helps young people register to vote regardless of who they are voting for.
- It’s the first initiative of it’s kind to make an antiquated process more web friendly, and the interface is intuitive and easy to use.
- It educates young voters about their polling locations and helps then understand and get involved.
Obama isn’t explicitly telling people that he has the best value out there - he’s simply providing a trusted source of information. One more example of how he’s tapping the web 2.0 to show what he’s all about.
September 26th, 2008, 05:09pm
Don’t be evil. That’s the informal slogan at Google. It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Larry and Sergey’s brainchild has entered the world in its current incarnation. Since then, that precocious ten-year-old has introduced us to:
- The verb “to google”
- SaaS that was easy and transparent to use
- Upping the ante in the e-mail storage capacity wars
- Innovation Time Off (20% of employees can devote time towards projects beyond their daily activities)
- Android and Chrome
- Google.org (their for-profit philanthropy arm)
Read More »
 |
|
September 26th, 2008, 11:08am
|
A few months ago I wrote about the mobile banking solutions I found while travelling in Africa – essentially a series of PayPal-like systems for mobile users. Given the limited nature of financial services in the region, and the overall paucity of infrastructure, these innovations make sense.
But do they make sense in more developed markets? That’s still very unclear.
RBC (Royal Bank of Canada for non-Canadians) recently rolled out a trial for their own mobile banking solution. RBC Mobex is billed as an “innovative payment solution designed for use with your existing mobile phone to make life more convenient for you. Just imagine, you already use your mobile phone to access friends, family, work and play: now you can use it to access your money too. Use it when you don’t have cash in your wallet, there isn’t an ATM nearby or cheques and/or debit / credit cards are not accepted forms of payment.”
The value of such systems comes with scale. I may want to pay someone using this system but if the receiver isn’t signed up then I can’t. And getting this scale isn’t necessarily easy. Projections for the growth of the mobile banking section range from the objective to the fantastic: Read More »
|
|
September 26th, 2008, 11:06am
|
You must check out this very cool advertisement for Wario Land: Shake It! - a new game from Nintendo Wii. It only takes 45 seconds, and you really have to watch the whole thing to get the full effect. It’s probably the best example of creatively leveraging YouTube in a way the truly connects to the brand message that I’ve seen in a long time. Anyone seen any other great ads recently that they’d like to share?
 |
|
September 25th, 2008, 10:51pm
|
I wouldn’t consider myself a tree hugger or environmentalist by any means. However I do see their point. I bent my bike tire the other day and when I had it fixed I discovered it was twenty dollars cheaper to buy an entirely new bike. Oh, speaking of bikes and natural resources, I don’t ride mine these days for the exercise.
This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1- Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2- Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3- “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4- The need for trained workers quickly
The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.
Read More »
 |
|
September 24th, 2008, 11:02am
|
The Sunlight Foundation recently launched PublicMarkup.org–a site that provides a simple, blog-like interface for soliciting feedback on legislation being considered in Congress. The legislative issue of the day, of course, is the proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector and there appears to be an active community currently debating the Senator Dodd’s legislation online.
Having already launched a number of innovative projects that are increasing the transparency of the US government (including MapLight and Congresspedia) the Sunlight Foundation foundation believes it can help increase participation in the legislative process by providing a forum where all legislation proposals can be subject to open public review in real-time.
Some will argue that the legislative process in the US already invites input through a variety of channels. As our collaborator Beth Noveck notes in a forthcoming report for nGenera (not yet published, but watch this space):
Corporations participate through lobbyists and notice-and-comment rulemaking. NGOs funnel information to government through think tanks and their white papers and publications. Interest groups lobby and enlist their members to respond—usually with postcards and email—in rulemaking and legislative policymaking.
The problem is that the traditional “notice and comment” process tends to favor an entrenched machinery of lobbyists that represent well-connected and often deep-pocketed interests. How many ordinary citizens are even aware of the “notice and comment” periods and how many of those citizens will find the time and resoucres to make formal submissions? I’m guessing that the answer is very few.
So what is different about the more open and collaborative process that the Sunlight Foundation aspires to create with PublicMarkup.org?
One, it provides a neutral forum in which to debate policy issues. Two, by collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, it makes participation in the legislative process more accessible to citizens. Three, PublicMarkup.org could conceivably evolve into a more robust platform for wiki-drafting, complete with tools for collectively filtering, rating and analyzing evidence, discussion forums for deliberation, and a wiki for drafting recommendations. Finally, by establishing a granular division of tasks (e.g., adding links, tagging and rating content, posting comments in a forum, drafting and editing recommendations, etc.), a collaborative process helps ensure that citizens with a limited amount of time can still make meaningful contributions to the process.
It’s the group dynamics that ultimately set this new collaborative approach apart from the traditional processes for rulemaking. In a conventional rulemaking process, atomized and often competitive groups submit comments that they hope will influence the legislative outcome. There is no incentive to compromise and there is often no dialogue whatsoever among the interest groups. When the period for comments is closed, it’s then up to a small group of public officials to sort through the commentary and reach a decision.
With a collaborative process, some of the burden of collecting, sorting, analyzing and drafting shifts to the public, leaving public officials in a position to steer and referree the process. An opportunity space opens up for deliberation, reflection and perhaps even compromise among multiple stakeholders.
Here’s how Noveck put it in her forhcoming report:
In a collaborative government, public participation is not pro forma. Though the recommendations made by private citizens are not binding, they are taken as serious contributions to the decision-making process. At the same time, collaboration assumes that stakeholders are qualified to make useful contributions to the subject- or industry-specific work of the agency. As such, a government agency that solicits public feedback employs a system to evaluate the input of the self-selecting private citizen. Only it is not the government agency that initially evaluates public feedback. Initially, ratings and recommendations remain in the hands of private citizens. Their recommendations are vetted by groups ancillary to the government agency. These groups comprise the very individuals who have volunteered their expertise in the first place. This alleviates some of the burden that participation outside of organizational boundaries creates for government officials.
Will PublicMarkup.org attract a critical mass of participants? And, will members of the US Congress actually pay attention? It seems unlikley that the latter will happen this time, but if the site evolves into a vital hub for policy debates with a diverse group of participants, then politicians will ignore forums like PublicMarkup at their peril.
September 23rd, 2008, 08:20pm
I’m sure many of the Wikinomics blog readers are familiar with Massively Multiplayer Online Games, but there is an off-chance you haven’t heard of Trion World Gaming. They have yet to release a game, but Trion has been very active in securing funding. They just landed a deal worth $70MM from a consortium of Venture Capitalists, which brings their total VC-take to over $100MM.
So why are they “worth” that much? Well, according to their CEO Dr. Lars Buttler (a former Electronic Arts executive who worked on Might and Magic and Heroes), the reason is two-fold:
Read More »
|
|
September 23rd, 2008, 05:33pm
|
On Friday last week I was at the National Defense University’s Government 2.0 symposium talking about the opportunities web 2.0 creates to transform the way governments deliver services, organize their workforces and create policy. The event was a celebration of the Information Resource Management College’s 20th anniversary and IRM director Bob Childs tells me that it was the largest event in the institution’s history. My biggest surprise was not that so many people showed up, but that Alvin and Heidi Toffler were escorted into the room just as we were about to take center stage — talk about being in the presence of giants!
The event was keynoted by Dave Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of the infamous Cluetrain Manifesto). Having followed his work for some time, it was great to finally see him live.
I served on a panel, along with David Wennergren (DoD deputy Chief Information Officer) Bruce Klein (Cisco, US public sector) and Mike Bradshaw (Google, federal sector). Several bloggers have already produced excellent reports on the symposium (see here and here) so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but I will emphasive one point.
Government 2.0 is about much more than blogs, wikis and social networking. It’s about how the government sources expertise and how it orchestrates capability. It’s about marshalling the collective intelligence of society to address big issues like climate change and fiscal reform. It’s also about delivering services like education, health care and social security benefits more effectively by treating citizens as co-innovators rather than passive, inert consumers.
Social media has a role to play. But the hard problems relate to the people and institutions. A complex machinery of government has grown organically over the past century with multiple levels of government, hundreds of agencies, and overlapping lines of accountability. The complexity makes it difficult to implement reforms and change in the public sector is almost always slow and incremental.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a number of exciting web 2.0 projects in government (we’ve blogged about most of not all of them — check our Gov 2.0 tag). But the tendency is to sometimes assume that if an agency has a wiki, then it’s well on the road to Government 2.0. I guess the message I wanted to leave people with is that we have a long hard road left to travel.
 |
|
September 23rd, 2008, 10:26am
|
I found out about a cool new social network/application tracker/application all rolled into one called Wakoopa on the makeuseof.com blog.
Building on the idea of reality mining, Wakoopa is a social network attached to a small software tracker. The tracker updates every 15 minutes with the programs you’ve used. It’s a great way to visualize what programs you’re using, the ones that your friends are using, and (what I think is the most ingenious part about this site) the most used applications overall. What better way is there to decide what program you should use for say, managing your operating processes or to edit images, than by seeing what applications others are using, and which ones are used most. It must mean something if a lot of people are using it, right?
Wakoopa aggregates the data into pretty charts and top 10 lists that are easily navigated.
Read More »
 |
|
September 23rd, 2008, 12:05am
|
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
This week in the roundup:
- Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog
- Ian Da Silva uncovered the power of the social web for consumers
- Patrick Harnett introduced us to Wesabe and money management on the Web
- Andrea Bettello shined the light on a different type of TV experience
In case you missed it, you can catch the last roundup HERE.
Read More »
« Previous Entries
