Experience shows that the first wave of Internet-enabled change was tainted by irrational exuberance. A sober analysis of today's trends reveals that this new participation is both a blessing and a curse. Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery... (but) the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with the relentless change.
- Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics, page 15.
David Cameron is a Research Analyst at New Paradigm. David previously held a co-op position as an associate at Mezzanine Business Consulting, focusing on marketing and Web 2.0 initiatives for their technology clients. David is currently in his fourth year at Wilfrid Laurier University pursuing an Honors Bachelor of Business Administration, and Honors Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
Starbucks has finally taken a page out of Dell’s playbook by launching their own Ideastorm called “My Starbucks Idea” hosted by salesforce.com.
As of today, the ideas that have garnished the most votes are as follows:
* Providing embedded orders in Starbucks cards
* A nominal incentive to re-use the Starbucks cards
* Loyalty programs (buy 20 get one free and free birthday drink) Read More »
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.
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 »
I know that sometimes it is difficult to explain how the new Web 2.0 technologies work, and how they can be useful in everyday life. The following are a few examples from CommonCraft which provides “Explanations in plain English”. Since I spend a lot of my day playing around on a wiki, I thought I would post their plain English version of the video.
I came across an article this morning on Jimmy Wales, and an announcement he made to a room of 100 of South Africa’s top IT personnel. It seems as though Jimmy Wales plans on expanding his Wiki style projects under a company named Wikia. The plan is to take the Wiki concepts to other types of websites, and communities as well as expanding outside of the not-for-profit sector.
On the left is a screenshot of his project and on the right is a screenshot of a Facebook profile.
While he claims this is a search utility, it appears to me to be a social utility. Maybe it is some sort of cross-bread between social networking and search, but to me it looks pretty close to Facebook. Who knows maybe we’ll all be a part of some sort of wiki-Facebook project creating the largest open-source social networking too…. we’ll have to wait and see.
We all know how the Do-Not-Call list is used to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, well AOL has announced they will be supporting a Do-Not-Track list to prevent unsolicited tracking of your online behavior.
Companies like Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been tracking everything we do for years. Although these companies claim that they only record demographic information and surfing behavior (i.e. you’re a 26 year old female, and frequently visit parenting Web sites), it really doesn’t take much to connect the dots and find out your name, address, and phone number. We saw how easy this was last year when AOL released users’ search data to the public, claiming to have no personally identifiable information. The reason why it is so easy to gather information is a result of human nature; everyone does a search now and then on Google to see where you show up on the search results, or look up on Google Maps to see your house from the satellite view. Now your online privacy isn’t so private, and heaven forbid you enter your credit card information, or phone number to see where that shows up.
Although I do support the efforts of a Do-Not-Track list, and preventing people from mining my information, I think it will have a small and unnoticeable impact on information gathering as a whole. AOL may stop tracking me, but I already know MySpace, Facebook, Google, and the list goes on, is already tracking everything I do and using it at their own discretion.
While you may not be able to stop yourself from searching on Google, you can change your searching behavior, and limit your use of non-essential Web sites. See an earlier post on four reasons you should remove yourself from Facebook.
In no order of importance, the following is a growing list of concerns I have with Facebook.
1. Facebook employee perks
According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?
2. Facebook Applications
Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of your personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.
3. Targeted advertising
Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.
4. Personal Privacy
Remember the announcement of Facebook’s public listing search? Announced on September 5th, you will now be able to search on Google, or any other search engine and see the profile picture of one of the 50 million people on Facebook. Thankfully I’ve already opted out of this service, but for those of you who didn’t set your privacy controls, the display picture of you drinking with your buddies may be plastered all over the web for future employers to see.
This is just a short list of the growing fears of misuse of personal information; there are numerous other reasons why I would consider removing myself from Facebook. I already know that deep in the Google vaults is a long list of search queries, browsing history and information on who I associate with. How long until all of my information gets linked together and everything I do on the World Wide Web ends up in one person/company’s hands.
On October 1st, we first blogged on how Radiohead lets you name the price when downloading songs. Well, we have a bit of an update with how successful that has been (aside from the obvious publicity). According to Forbes.com, the number of legal downloads is currently at 1.2 million from the Radiohead website, and the number of illegal downloads (from torrent distribution) is at 500 million.
When at first glance it seems odd that so many people would be downloading the album illegally, I mean after all why would someone pirate a song if they can theoretically download it for free? The answer is simple, and the author explains.
Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. “People don’t know Radiohead’s site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day,” he says. “It’s quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”
The article goes on to talk about how Radiohead has obviously benefited from the publicity, and has successfully received the attention of the recorded music industry.
“The recorded music industry … has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold,” writes Guy Hands, EMI’s chairman. “The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead’s actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy.”
I have to say I agree with the argument that this is a matter of habit, rather than of economics for illegal downloads. Until it becomes easier to obtain songs and files through legitimate channels than it is through the pirate bay, this kind of behavior will continue.
An announcement was made today on the launch of the Microsoft HealthVault. The website’s services include: a free personal health record, and a search engine designed for health queries.
The website is a portal to your personal information, locked securely in the Microsoft “Vault” equiped with encryption and high security. The information placed in there would be done primarily by doctors, and health care partners that you have given specific permission to have access.
From the article:
The organizations that have signed up for HealthVault projects with Microsoft include the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.
I think the idea of having a centralized health care database where professionals who are put in charge of your health can see and read everything about your medication, illnesses, allergies and more is a great idea. My biggest concern is the privacy issues with having all that information in one spot, we already have companies like Google tracking everything we do in Gmail, in searches and more. I’d hate to see how personalized my web surfing would become in the future if companies like Microsoft started displaying ads for Heart medication after probing my database.
The privacy issues aside, I think it’s long overdue to have a centralized health care database, and as long as they can keep privacy their biggest concern I think it’s a step in the right direction. I wonder how many years it will be before this type of service becomes more mainstream, as I suspect this will be slow to take off.
The recording industry is an easy target for an example of “getting it wrong” when it comes to understanding their customers. In the digital age it is as easy as going to YouTube or opening a P2P program to download your favourite song in seconds. When downloading first became mainstream with Napster and Kazaa, the industry responded with lawsuit after lawsuit, instead of trying to understand their customers. It seems that the industry is still stuck in their old ways , but the musicians are figuring it out for themselves.
According to an article on billboard.com, Radiohead seems to be “getting it” when it comes to understanding their audience. If people are going to download their songs, they might as well make it easy for them to get their songs legally. On October 10th you will be able to download songs from their latest album “In Rainbows” off their website, and you (the consumer) get to decide what you want to pay.
At first glance, this seems like an odd model to work with, but upon further inspection it makes sense. First of all, it seems that artists get very little of the $19.99 price tag on the CD, roughly 72 cents; the real money is with the lucrative concert tours. Having figured out that their customers will download the song anyways regardless, they had to figure out what else a customer would want to buy from them. Instead of offering you the standard CD only purchase (which you can easily replicate yourself), you can get their new album on CD, a vinyl record and a second CD of additional photos, artwork and lyrics, all packaged in a “discbox”.
Radiohead isn’t the first in the industry to try something new, but they are definitely on the right track. Hopefully the rest of the industry will look at this as a best practice and change their tactics.
I came across an interesting blog post from the Read/WriteWeb on 10 future web trends. The interesting thing is that the 10 future web trends post was created almost exclusively from user generated content in the form of comments on their original post.
A lot of the ideas posted on the blog are extensions of topics talked about in Wikinomics and most of them are plausible, if not probable. Ideas such as using geospatial data to enhance your physical surroundings and the integration of everyday devices in what they describes as a “device pervasiveness” is likely to happen more widespread within the next few years.
Some of the predicted trends may be a bit optimistic such as having one open internet identity or a bit too futuristic such as blog posts being directly downloaded into your brain.
5. User-controlled, open Internet Identity; Thomas Huhn pointed out that “forming your online identity, controlling what personal data you give to whom and aggregating all your and your environments lifestreams in an open social network is simply essential for the further development of the web.” We’re seeing this develop now (it’s sometimes referred to as, you guessed it, Identity 2.0), but the scenario Thomas described is 5+ years into the future.
Regardless of the optimism and somewhat far-fetched ideas, it is still an interesting read.
IBM continues to engage in, and support more open source projects with their latest announcement to partner with OpenOffice.org in the development of their free productivity software.
“IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org.”
As with their other open source contributions for projects in Apache, Linux, Eclipse, and PHP, IBM will set to gain from this relationship by supporting a standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) in their Lotus Notes product and appealing to a larger user base.
They have already agreed to devote about 35 of their developers in China to supporting the OpenOffice initiative.
This announcement comes a week after Microsoft’s bid for an open document standard was denied, called the Office Open XML (coincidence that Open and Office are switched?) described here in the Herald Tribune. This paves the way for the OpenOffice Format to become the open standard for office suites, as governments’ demand for interchangeable office applications increases.
IBM has shown that supporting open source is a worth-while venture, isn’t it truly time for other companies to recognize the potential of supporting open source, and finding a way to contribute and benefit from these relationships?
With many bloggers and news sources covering the Apple iPhone price drop as well as the concurrent unveiling of the iPod touch, the big story is not the drop from $599 to $399 but ultimately the impressive influence of the blogosphere.
Within minutes of the press release on Apple’s website bloggers were quick to respond with posts on how unfair the price drop was to Apple’s most loyal customer base (and more importantly, influential bloggers).
Steve Jobs quoted from an interview with USA Today:
“That’s technology. If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that’s what happens in technology.”
Apple having realized the error of their way, and most likely an attempt to reverse the negative publicity it was gaining both from traditional and non-traditional news sources, released a second letter announcing a $100 credit to their early adopters.
“Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these,” from Steve Jobs in an open letter to their customers.
And if this wasn’t enough, their early adopters are already quick to suggest alternatives to the $100 store credit in the form of a unique item to reward them for being among the first to purchase the iPhone.
The Dumbest Generation? Have your say. I must first acknowledge my personal bias on this topic...
As a member of the Net Generation research team at nGenera (and a member of said generation myself), I am a firm believer in the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the Net Generation (those born between 1977 and 1997). So, I must say that when I [...]
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