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January 31st, 2008, 06:13pm
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As I was sifting through all of the RSS feeds that had accumulated over the holiday season and I came across an interesting post by Bob Warfield, which conveniently was titled New Year’s Resolution: Keeping Head Above Water With RSS Feeds. The post gives readers 8 tips to help them manage what can at times seem like an overwhelming amount of information.
The reality is that for both new and veteran users alike it is easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of information that flows into your RSS reader. The great advantage of RSS is supposed to be that unlike email, users can control what information is delivered to them by selecting feeds. So really you can only blame yourself for becoming buried in 1,000s of blog posts, but it’s a trap that many of us fall into.
I have highlighted his 8 points below, but you should definitely read the post as he goes into more detail.
- Develop a Triage Mentality
- Scan First for Low Hanging Fruit
- Relegate Whole Categories to Low Hanging Fruit
- Create a Few Tags for Your Major Interests
- Zap The Oldies
- Learn to Quickly Triage the Biggest Posters
- Dump Your Least Favorite Bloggers - note: this rule does not apply to the Wikinomics Blog
- Put a Time Limit on Your Blog Reading
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January 31st, 2008, 02:21pm
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In the late 17th century, English philosopher John Locke, one of the fathers of liberalism, noted that patents were the just reward for inventive activity, and the “natural right” of the inventor given their time and labour invested in the effort. Subsequently, and for the more than 300 years since, we’ve seen a difficult balance evolve between the rights of inventors and the rights of society at large.
As I highlighted in this previous post, there’s a large following that would like to see the strength, breadth and application of patent law extended in order to ensure that their competitiveness in a global economy are protected. But where does the right afforded to a corporation to protect its competitiveness infringe on, or supersede, the rights of society?
Nowhere is this debate more important than in pharmaceutical research and agronomy, especially in relation to patents that affect developing country access to drugs and seeds.
An interesting development in this field was the USPTO’s recent decision to overturn a patent held by Gilead Science on four HIV/Aids drugs. The decision, while not yet binding, could open the patents on these four drugs for distribution by generic drug manufacturers. In India, this would have dramatic ramifications on the cost of HIV/Aids treatment and the ability for developing countries to access it. For example, Cipla, an Indian generics producer, would change $700 for annual per person treatment of one of the four drugs under review, compared to the $5,718 charged by Gilead. Seems like a no-brainer.
Read More »
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January 31st, 2008, 12:24pm
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I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across this movie on the internet. A little behind the ball on this one, Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary originally created for the Danish National Broadcasting Television network that was eventually released for free on the internet in 2007. It first appeared on The Pirate Bay and then was officially released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
GCBC is a insightful documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, and is directed by independent Danish directors Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. The film goes around the world, showing the changing attitudes toward art and culture in Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, the UK, and in the US. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers such as Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons, Tiamo and Anakata from The Pirate Bay, music producers, and controversial music artists such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse who, as we all know, created the Grey Album by mixing The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album.
Even MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) CEO Dan Glickman makes an appearance. He briefly comments on the MPAA’s involvement with the raid on The Pirate Bay. Glickman states that although he knows piracy will never be stopped, they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.
Amongst the most interesting segments include a trip to Russia to look at the rampant bootlegging that occurs there, the perspectives of the Nigerian film industry and the Techno Brega musical movement in Brazil, which has been using a business model for years that was originally considered to be pioneered by The Pixies, Metallica, and Phish back in 2004.
What becomes obvious progressively throughout the film is the death of the current business models used by the record industry and the lack of control which is becoming more prevalent in the current consumerist climate. The old vanguards are fighting to retain their revenue while people are endlessly re-using and recycling copyrighted material in order to create new art-forms.
I would highly recommend this light-hearted and neutral account of the current state of copyright to anyone. The link to download GCBC can be found here. Feel free to donate something to the makers of the documentary if you enjoy watching it.
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January 30th, 2008, 12:54pm
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There was a great piece in the New York Times about how Subway is suing Quiznos over the ads that their customers created in a contest the ran called the “Quiznos vs. Subway TV Ad Challenge”. Apparently “many of the homemade videos made false claims and depicted its brand in a derogatory way. Subway is also objecting to ads that Quiznos itself created, showing people on the street choosing Quiznos over Subway.” So now companies are suing each other over the opinions expressed by their customers? What is next, Subway suing customers for talking about Quiznos subs while within 100 feet of a Subway store.
The website has since been taken down but you can view the winning video here. Quiznos take on the whole thing seems simple enough “We’re just facilitating consumers who go out and create their own expression in the form of a commercial,” said Ronald Y. Rothstein, a partner at Winston & Strawn, on behalf Quiznos.
Now, I don’t pretend to grasp the legal intricacies of corporate advertising but from what I have understand ads that contain ’slanderous statements and false claims’ are supposed to be off limits. However, from what I have observed as a consumer doesn’t seem to be that cut and dry. Coke and Pepsi used to run blind taste test about which was better, Bud and Miller Lite continuously state they taste better than the each other, and what about the Mac ads? They are hilarious but I would think they have to be pushing the boundaries with the whole Vista sucks by a Mac angle in their latest campaign.
Personally it would make more sense to me if the lawsuit was aimed only at the ads Quiznos created and maybe the way the instructed customers to portray their subs as being better, but to sue over user generated content seems a little odd. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Hopefully it won’t kill this type of engaging and entertaining advertising that allows companies to connect with their customers and spice up the marketing industry.
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January 30th, 2008, 01:01am
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Oddly enough, the RIAA has never sponsored any of our research programs. Who knows why? Perhaps it’s posts like this, this, this, this, this, and this. Trust me; when we use terms like “house of cards”, we mean that in the most positive possible light.
A couple of items piqued my interest this week. This article describes how, for the first time, weekly album sales have fallen below 7 million and the #1 album by Alicia Keys has the second lowest sales for a top album in history. If I moved next week to Pitcairn Island, I might well be the best hockey player in town. Doesn’t mean that I have a decent wrist shot.
A more distressing article appeared in the Economist (and received wide play on the blogosphere) that discussed how free CDs do not appear to be a good enought deal. From the article:
… EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
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January 29th, 2008, 02:22pm
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A recent estimate by Bernstein Research analyst, Toni Sacconaghi, indicates that 27% of iPhones sold in the U.S. since its launch last summer were unlocked. This means that the handsets were made to work with network providers other than the iPhone’s “exclusive” partner - AT&T. In addition, another report suggests that as much as 40% of European iPhones are unlocked as well. In Canada, where Apple does not yet have a partner, iPhones can easily be spotted on the streets.
Admittedly the iPhone is an amazing product, however, the business model could hardly be worse. Sacconaghi estimates that Apple could lose $500 million in revenues if the company sells 10 million iPhones till the end of the year. If almost three out of ten customers are explicitly telling Apple that they want to choose their own carriers, it can be expected that a whole lot more are thinking it. For once, it might actually be beneficial for Steve Jobs to listen.
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January 28th, 2008, 05:47pm
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President Bush recently called for the US administration to dramatically curtail earmarks (essentially pet spending projects that members of Congress insert into the federal budget), saying he will veto any appropriations bills that don’t cut the number of earmarks in half when they come to him during the remainder of his days in the White House.
The Washington Posts reports that the budget officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) knew at the time that the White House would need an earmark tally if they were to measure progress toward the president’s goal. But rather than proceed in the usual fashion, the OMB launched a wiki and invited employees from across the government to pitch in.
With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.
The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress. . .
It has 5,500 members and is growing by hundreds each month. A number of federal agencies are creating their own pages on the wiki, taking advantage of its automated tools and services that can perform multiple budget scenarios and analyze data.
I admire the OMB’s efforts — the project demonstrates how wiki-based collaboration can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of government. I can also appreciate the reasons why the OMB decided to restrict access to federal employees. At the same time, the decision to restrict access raises some bigger questions about the role of the citizenry in governing and whether the administration’s vision for Government 2.0 is as bold and ambitious as it might be.
Citizens can already view earmark data on Many Eyes thanks to the Sunlight Foundation and some clever visualization technology provided by IBM Alphaworks. So why not ask the public which half of the 13,496 earmarks they would like to see vanish from the federal budget? People are out there discussing this stuff anyways — shouldn’t the government open up the conversation?
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January 28th, 2008, 10:15am
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Here’s a fun little exercise hosted by the USA Today that allows you to match your key priorities and perspectives on issues relevant to the ongoing U.S. presidential nominations with the positions held by candidates.
The “game” is weighted heavily towards three issues: the war in Iraq, immigration, and health-care reform but also includes a question each on the environment, experience, tax reform and same sex marriages. Aside from the sometimes surprising results, what’s not to like about this? In particular, it’s quick and simple breakdown of each candidates stance on particular issues makes for an easy to use voter education tool - something that looks increasingly necessary in a world of ever-partisan politics.
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January 27th, 2008, 10:55pm
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We were talking about call centers in the office last week and my colleague Alan made a very good observation: Why do call centers pay thousands of dollars to conduct consumer surveys, but ignore the feedback front-line call center employees get for free from irate customers?
Call center employees are probably the most underused resources in the enterprise. Most are college-educated individuals, but the collective brain power of this group is never used to its full potential. Not even close. Call center employees are rarely given the tools or autonomy needed to improve decision-making and customer service at the front-lines (basic CRM systems are not enough). Consider some of the possibilities: Wiki scripts, access to all cross-selling and up-selling channels, outlets to capture customer feedback, incentives that stress talk time and relationship-building over dials and traditional call resolution metrics, mentoring and collaborative call resolution, access to information that allows call center employees to build custom dashboards and reports, and mechanisms to impact product design based on customer feedback. Call centers really are the low-hanging fruit of Wikinomics. Read More »
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January 27th, 2008, 03:31pm
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The launch of Tata Motor’s $2500 Nano has made a big splash across the world. Although, not an immediate threat to established car makers, expertise in the design of cheap cars could allow Tata to eventually compete for the dollars of the increasingly prosperous middle class in developing countries. Obviously a huge growth opportunity for any car maker who can tap it.
However, a $2500 dollar car makes a smaller impact on your life if you are one of the vast majority of Indians who makes $700 or less per year. Even Tata’s best engineers could not make a car to serve this market. However, this doesn’t mean that India’s vast poorer classes do not have access to motorized transportation. Under these difficult conditions, a “car” called the Jugaad was created with the efforts of self-organizing rural mechanics.
The car is basic to say the least. It has four wheels, an engine and a chassis that is often made out of wood. A model with a 10 horsepower engine and all new components costs around $1000. However, since each part of the Jugaad can be replaced individually, or substituted with used parts, the price tag can go down to as little as $600.
The Jugaads operate mostly in rural areas as they are technically illegal - they do not meet any government standards, pay taxes or have license plates. However, with India’s famously overloaded transportation infrastructure, the need for these cars is likely to continue.
Although Tata’s Nano will go a long way in making the lives of millions of people more convenient, the real opportunity lies in the rural areas where a huge share of the world’s poor live. It seems that with the proven ingenuity of people in those areas a modest investment by either governments or corporations would yield a very high return in terms of development. Coincidentally, this topic was addressed by Bill Gates at the Davos conference.
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January 25th, 2008, 03:45pm
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“We plan to focus on the domestic market as we have room for growth.”
–Mr. Wang Jianzhou, Chairman of China Telecom (growing at 6 million new mobile subscribers per month) when asked on a panel “What are your plans for international expansion?”
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January 25th, 2008, 03:43pm
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Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, was part of a panel discussion with Eric Schmidt — CEO of Google — talking about mobile technology.
Says Stringer: “I really like Google. When they get spectrum they’ll be in my world even more. The only reason I’m on this panel is to get close to him (Eric)”
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January 25th, 2008, 03:39pm
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I’m enjoying blogging from Davos. But a colleague here, Robert Scoble, is taking blogging to a whole new level. You may remember “the Scobleizer” — his blog as an employee of Microsoft. He was sometimes critical of his own employer — but his following was so huge (and perhaps for other reasons) Microsoft never fired him.
So I’m standing here in a foyer in Davos talking to some people and Robert walks up, points his little Nokia phone PDA towards us and starts doing a live video interview. He points the camera at my badge, then at me asking for comments on a topic and then goes out to his live audience who ask questions or comments on the interview. In the TV world this is called doing a “double ender” but it normally take a few million dollars of equipment and a team with a truck to execute. But here’s Scoble being a one man mobile television station using a cell phone! Actually it’s better than a TV show because it’s interactive.
I’m reminded of my November speech to the Canadian broadcasting industry that broadcasting won’t be “broad and it won’t be casting.”
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January 25th, 2008, 03:34pm
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Combating corruption in business and government is a problem around the world, and a number of sessions here deal with the issue. I was looking around for a particular session in a hotel when a World Economic Forum guide asked me if I needed assistance. I said: “I’m looking for corruption.” Her reply: “Just go straight ahead and you’re bound to find it, because corruption is everywhere.”
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January 25th, 2008, 02:29pm
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With all the discussion of the world’s problems at Davos, one can get a little discouraged. Right now I’m sitting in a session and I’m feeling positively uplifted. Inspired really. It’s a panel of 6 kids aged 17 - 20 who were selected by the British Council. The British Council has created a global network of 54 young people who have been defining what needs to be done to the world to make it possible for them to be successful and solve the many problems that previous generations have created.
The panelists were extraordinary. These 6 were all natural leaders and as activists for social change, all educated, connected and multi-lingual are completely atypical of their peers. But they are part of a global generation and values are more reflective of their generation than not. ( I speak from some experience having just interviewed 11,000 youth in 10 countries of a New Paradigm research project on “the Net Generation.” )
The panel was co-moderated by Actor Emma Thompson, who told me before the session that I should get ready for some uplifting discussion.
A young woman from Sri Lanka working to eliminate poverty and with other has created a network of youth activists. “You must be the difference you want to see in the world.” She describes how the 54 people in the British Council network all view the world the same way. She’s on to something. My research indicates that youth today have very common views about many things, regardless of nationality. This is arguably the first generation ever of which that could be said. She told a story of a 5 year old who watched her mother being gang raped and suffered major trauma. After much counselling she is now doing OK.
A young woman the USA notes “In the US we spend $21 billion every year on ice cream. But it would only take $10 billion to put every child in the world into primary school.” In high school she raised enough money to create a school in Sierra Leone. She told an amazing story of a 5th grader, who was involved in raising funds to build a school.
A 19 year old from Cape Town leads an anti-racism and human rights campaign among young people.
The panelist from Scotland fights against prejudice towards gay people. He once talked to a 16 year old male prostitute in Glasgow and asked him where he gets condoms from. His reply: “what do I need condoms for, I can’t get pregnant.” Lad was amazed that the education system had failed. Prostitute is now working in a community center educating gays about this issue.
A 17 year old male from China told a story of growing up in rural China. Every spring there were sand storms in his village and he coughed for months. He now has a project where young people are planting 365 trees per day. When referred by a questioner as “the future” he replies “True, but we don’t want to be the future only — we want to make a difference today.” He’s got a new view of peer pressure. He says we think about peers in a negative way but peering can be the opposite. We can have peer inspiration where young people can work together as peers to make great things can happen.
A young man from Argentina is organizing a campaign against poverty, raising awareness on the importance of every kid getting an education. Among his projects, has set up a library in Buenos Aires.
Emma Thomson asked the panel — what do you want older leaders to do? One panelist worried that as populations age, governments will do what old people want, and not what the young want. Why not youth parliaments and other creative initiatives like regional and global forums to engage young people. Another panellist suggests a World youth forum. Invite some older leaders but they would be the minority. And then listen to what the young people say: “Use your ears rather than them being decorations.”
As far as I’m concerned these are the 6 most important people attending Davos.
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January 25th, 2008, 02:12pm
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For many people, it’s a cut and dry issue - newspapers are dead or slowly dying, because the Internet has destroyed their underlying business models. But a few days ago, David Simon (who some may know as the executive producer of “The Wire”, an incredible show that everyone should see) published a fascinating perspective on what’s actually happened to them entitled Does the news matter to anyone anymore? Most of his account is based on what he experienced as a Baltimore Sun reported from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, and what he’s seen since then, with a particular focus placed on the role that consolidating monopoly power has played.
There are so many insights and questions that emerge from this piece that they are impossible to list. From a business perspective, it’s worth contemplating whether excess short-term profits were captured at the expense of destroying long-term value. As Simon notes he “did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland.” Underlying this comment is his notion that what newspapers had to do was up their game in terms of interesting content, while most did the exact opposite.
But the bigger issue here is really on a social level. Discussing the situation that now exists in Baltimore, Simon notes:
So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.
It’s obviously not hard to draw the connection between the failure of this newspaper to cover such seemingly important issues, and (say) the criticism directed towards many media outlets for their failure to ask a few more questions about (say) whether a country should go to war.
Personally, I agree with Simon on many fronts, and the article is well worth reading in its entirety, but there’s one thought that continued to trouble me as contemplated it. While it is easy to place the blame on greedy monopolist newspaper owners for increasingly replacing real investigative journalism with fluff, and it’s possible to then connect this failure with their slow demise (with the Internet acting as an accelerant), one still must consider the very real possibility that they were accurately reading the market demand.
This line of thinking would say stop blaming the owners/ writers, and start blaming the readers, because one would think that if enough of them really wanted and valued in-depth coverage on issues like poverty, the “greedy monopolists” would have had no problem giving it to them. In other words, the problem is not that you’re more likely to get an update on Paris Hilton’s escapades than (say) the Hurricane Katrina relief “effort” when you look to the news, but rather that this is exactly what people want to see.
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January 25th, 2008, 12:05pm
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For some time I’ve been concerned about a nightmare scenario whereby the Jihadists get control of the government in Pakistan. Surveys show that many, even a majority of the Pakistan population is sympathetic to fundamentalists. If this situation persists it’s possible, maybe even inevitable that through a revolution, coup, or via an election they get control of the state.
But according to Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, there is nothing to fear. Pakistani nukes are controlled using state of the art protocols, processes and technologies. This could never occur.
So he’s kind of curious: “Why does the world insist on calling this an Islamic bomb? There is no Hindu bomb or Jew bomb or Buddhist Bomb or Christian Bomb. This I do not understand. And the man on the street in Pakistan does not understand.”
Well he’s got one thing right. Google “Islamic bomb” and it’s the clear winner in Google hits.
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January 25th, 2008, 10:53am
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There’s a shocking ad that many Torontonian’s are seeing lately - one I pass every day on my way to work. I think about this ad every time I pass it, so yesterday I decided to bring my camera in to take a photo:
The image is of a woman holding a dice-sized nuclear pellet and the caption reads, “This little nuclear energy pellet powers an average home for six weeks”. I like it because it represents, in a single image, the tradeoff we have to weigh with nuclear energy - incredible power in a tiny package, but also deadly risks to health and safety from radiation. I like any ad that challenges my assumptions.
For me, the image is shocking. I get an immediate aversion just looking at an photo of someone holding something that would, if the image were real, likely kill them - the image is so far from the truth that (I believe) the pellet would be too hot to even touch! If the photo depicted someone holding their hand just inches above a bear trap I’d probably have the same reaction.
Yet, on the other hand, I also look at the size of that pellet, and wonder how many square meters of surface of the earth torn up from the oilsands or what size of coal-plant-produced cloud is required to produce the same amount of energy. And then also need to ask, where do we store that pellet afterward? Most of our power generating capacity has terrible side effects.
Raising Nuclear energy is sure to raise some hackles - but if sharing this image sparks anything, it should be about getting people thinking about the real problem - reducing consumption. It’s hypocritical to stick our finger at any single method of power generation while continuing to use more energy per capita than almost any nation in the world. We shouldn’t be forcing ourselves to choose one undesirable side effect over another in the first place.
This one has definitely given me food for thought. What’s your reaction - either to the ad or the topic of energy tradeoffs in general? Maybe it’s time for mass collaboration on some of our energy consumption choices.
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January 24th, 2008, 07:18pm
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Earlier today I spoke with the Chief of the Population Activities Unit of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Our discussion focused on demographic trends in Europe, and the associated social and policy related impacts but unlike the usual focus on today’s youth, we focused on today’s older demographics.
As Western populations go through the end of the demographic transition, the age structure is increasingly weighted with older citizens. As this OECD graph shows, Southern Europe and Japan will be amongst the hardest hit. Evidently this has huge implications in the work force and for public sector service provision but what about for policy and politics?
We tend to make a big deal about the power of today’s youth in politics. They’re connected, they’re networked, and they want change. So whether it’s related to proposed Copyright legislation (see Ian’s post here), or Barack’s run for the White House (see Naumi’s post here), youth are supposedly in the drivers seat. And in the US this will probably be true for quite some time given the low share of the population over 65.
But what happens in countries where there’s more 65+’rs than there are 18-28 year olds? E.g. Japan. Do copyright legislation and primary school funding take a back to healthcare reform and pension security?
Evidently, things don’t operate in a vacuum so neither group will be shut out of their respective country’s political economy, but in a political environment where short-term tends to trump long-term, neither will today’s global youth be able to dictate the flow of policy as easily as sometimes we tend to think.
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January 24th, 2008, 06:12pm
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Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Remember the good ol’ days? I sure do, and so does my “favourite” organization – the MPAA, for they seem to still be living in this fabled period of time…
This post was inspired by the coincidence of two pieces of related news that really got my attention yesterday – the admission of a very significant error by the MPAA and a blog post that I read, highlighting the potential for an increasingly affected Net Generation to exert their influence in the next Canadian federal election.
In a report released Tuesday, the MPAA revealed that a major statistic from its groundbreaking 2005 study proclaiming that college students were stealing nearly half of their industry’s revenue was wrong – nearly 300% wrong. The original report claimed that 44% of the motion picture industry’s domestic revenue losses were a result of illegal downloading over campuses’ high speed networks. While skeptics knew that 44% seemed quite high, students were an easy target, and the study was used to encourage (and almost legally mandate) that colleges across the US beef up their anti-piracy efforts. Yesterday’s release proves that the skeptics were right and that such gaping losses were NOT caused by student downloads (but rather by a stone-aged business model – sorry, I couldn’t resist interjecting my two cents) and that the true figure is actually closer to 15%, with “human error” to blame for the discrepancy.
While the MPAA data are based on US figures, the issue of campus downloading and piracy is also hotly-contested in Canada, and it has the potential to significantly influence the next federal election, as Michael Geist points out in his recent post. Geist highlights what he calls the Copyright MPs (Members of Parliament) – MPs who won their last election by a margin of less than 10% and whose riding is home to a university. The table below illustrates the ten closest such MPs:
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