Posts filed under 'collaboration'
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May 16th, 2008, 01:26pm
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Clay Shirky gave a speech at a Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago that made an entertaining connection between societal transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there was a sudden shift from rural to urban life that was so wrenching that scores of people needed to drink heavily to cope - gin as the critical technology for the industrial revolution. Only after the “collective bender” did people wake up and build the “institutional structures” we associate with the industrial revolution today - he lists libraries, museums, democracy, broad education.
As you could probably guess from the title of this post, Shirky then claims that the sitcom is the 20th century equivilent of gin. Underlying this argument is that shortly after WW II a whole whack of people suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time - something they’d never had to manage before. In turn, they panicked and watched sitcoms for 50 years or so. He then goes on to effectively argue that, as a society, we are coming out of the collective “bender” - of 200 Billion hours a year watching TV in the U.S. alone - to use that “free time” for something more productive. The age of participation.
I don’t want to go too much further into his details then that, but rather stay at this level and focus on what is becoming one of the more interesting questions of the day. Read More »
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May 16th, 2008, 09:01am
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Check out all the mash ups, and the original of course, at Dilbert.com.
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May 13th, 2008, 01:19pm
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I just wanted to provide a heads up to wikinomics readers about a great resource on the web they might not know about - the “Interviews with Innovators” series by Jon Udell, available on the ITConversations Network. I must first note that all of the interviews are in audio file format, which I generally find annoying (I greatly prefer text files that I can scan through), but this is one of those cases where the content can be worth the time commitment. To quote the site itself, Udell uses the conversations to explore:
a wide range of issues at the intersection of technology and society. These conversations are sometimes deeply technical, sometimes broadly social, and frequently both. They always aim to connect the dots.
As of today, the most recent (and the one I’m listening to right now) is an interview with Lucas Gonze reflecting on how we all discover, share, and experience music in the digital age. Others of interest include Deepak Singh (co-founder of Bioscreencast.com) discussing the Web 2.0 in science, Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing.com) on a social catalog for book lovers, Carl Malamud (a 4.5/5 star rating!) discussing online access to Public Information, and particularly Adrian Holovaty, who recently launched a site modelled after ChicagoCrime.org called Everyblock.com- hyperlocal news and data across a variety of cities.
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May 13th, 2008, 10:08am
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Let me preface this post with a warning - rockets are dangerous. Please be extra careful if you even think about experimenting with them. Now onto the fun stuff…
With the exception of solid fuel model rockets, actual rocket engines have been out of the reach (and budget) of most DIY’s. However, there’s an older rocket technology called a pulse jet engine which is making a comeback amongst do it yourselvers. It was first invented by Germany and used in their notorious V-1 rockets (buzz bombs) in WWII. One reason they’re popular today is that they can be built with no moving parts. Here’s more info on how they work.
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May 12th, 2008, 03:20pm
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Ad Week had a great article by Brian Morrissey go up today called “These Brands Build Community: How these web 2.0 companies build good relationships to build their brands.” Here a few choice quotes from the piece (the one from Kalmikoff is my favorite - just managing parameters is a great way to think about wikinomics strategy):
“We think our brand is going to be different because we want people to feel there’s a real person they’re connecting with, whether it’s when they call us or through Twitter or any way they come in contact with us” - Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and probably the only CEO who gave away shoes via Twitter this week.
“All we do is try to respond to what users are asking for. That’s how we set our priorities. Users aren’t asking us to run ads, so it doesn’t come onto our radar.” - Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist
“By choosing to invest in consumers over advertising, Google is a living example of a deeper truth: The future of communications as advantage lies in talking less and listening more.” - Umair Haque, Havas Media Lab Director. Check out the bubblegeneration blog.
Read More »
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May 12th, 2008, 11:34am
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As part of my research on next generation customer experiences, I was re-reading a great book by Pine and Gilmore called The Experience Economy. It was chapter seven that particularly piqued my interest, notably the section on the four forms of theatre - platform, matching, street and improv as they laid out in figure 7.1 (I have quickly re-created it in the link below).
four-forms-of-theatre.ppt
The basic idea I am building towards is that wikinomics and collaborative experiences is about moving more and more of the business away from platform theatre and into improv - with street and matching theatre being steps along the way. But before getting there, some background on each is required.
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May 6th, 2008, 08:11pm
My name is Caleb. I am another new guy here at nGenera aka (New Paradigm). This post is about a bone that I, and many other students, have to pick with the current education system.
In college, everyone has those professors that can really get under your skin. It drives us crazy because, when they look at you, you can almost see their mind weighing the value of your comments and opinions upon the number of degrees you have. If you’re a freshman, you might as well be five years old. This attitude could be one reason why many frustrated people view school as being “just another hoop to jump through.”
This message is not a shot at professors…well, maybe some professors (the kind nobody likes, that get the frowny faces on ratemyprofessors.com), but more a shot at the way many universities see their students. Are students assets or liabilities to administrators? Read More »
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April 25th, 2008, 09:57am
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A cool new mashup at Dilbert.com allows users to create their own punchline for the famous Dilbert comic strip. Focusing on interactivity, the site plans to eventually let users rewrite entire strips. This is a great example of an innovative way to engage consumers in a way that traditional newspapers are not able to do. When asked whether he expects to see funny suggestions, the original creator Scott Adams replied:
I think 99.9 percent of the submitted punch lines will be less funny than my original. After all, I’ve had a lot of practice. But with volume, that still leaves room for lots of comics that are better than the original. But we’ll see. This new model makes mocking your co-workers and boss a competitive sport, so it should be lots of fun. I submitted two alternative punch lines today myself, trying to top my original. It’s addicting.
Our very own Danny Williamson is part of the funnier 0.1% remashing the comic strip below: Read More »
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April 24th, 2008, 04:30pm
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The Arduino is an open source hardware platform that’s used for electronics projects. It has a growing base of fans among DIY hobbyists and artists alike. Arduino.cc describes it:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Because it’s open you can either buy the Arduino from a variety of people who manufacture it (for example robotshop.ca in Canada) starting at about $35 each, or you can simply build one yourself out of parts.
While the Arduino is an amazing product of mass collaboration itself, it has also spawned an interesting community of innovators who use it. Searching youtube for “arduino project” reveals dozens of results - from funky lights and robots to a visualization of voice patterns. Other companies have even integrated the arduino with mobile networks and GPS for example (there’s a contest to win one if you develop an interesting project with the arduino), the robotshop.ca site even has one with built-in Zigbee wireless capability. It will be interesting to see what new innovations come out of this little $35 hardware platform.
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April 21st, 2008, 11:40am
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David Browne published an interesting piece in the NY Times this weekend entitled On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My’. His focus is on how the ‘My’ prefix is attaching itself to so many things online - see MySpace, MyCoke, MyAOL, MyIBM, etc. - in an “increasingly customized world of technology.” Quoting Pete Blackshaw from the article:
“Companies are trying to connect with consumers in more meaningful ways. They’re trying to emulate consumer behavior. Everyone’s trying to be more authentic and connect with consumers on their terms. They can look more real, sincere and authentic.”
However, looking more real, sincere and authentic is different than being more real, sincere and authentic - and various people are quoted towards the end of the article explaining why the “my” phase is going away. There speculation over what will replace it centres around “we” - because as Nick Bartle notes:
“In our research, values like participation now vastly outrank self-interest. People want to be connected and part of a community.”
Indeed they do - and I would surmise that people don’t particularly care about whether “we”, “our”, or “exo” is the prefix of the day in some marketing talk. What they care about is companies being real, sincere and authentic - so the question is how would (say) an “OurCoke” strategy operate differently than a “myCoke” one?
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April 18th, 2008, 11:32am
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Here’s a neat example of crowd sourcing in action. “Ten Thousand Cents”, is a digital artwork project by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. The project consisted of drawing a digital picture of a $100 bill. The catch here is that it divided the bill into 10,000 pieces and sourced each piece individually. The project payed 1000’s individuals, each working separately from one another, one cent per section paid through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - making the total cost of the design work $100.
According to Koblin and Kawashima, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”
You can purchase prints of the project directly from the website for, of course, $100. The proceeds of each print will be donated to the One Laptop per Child project which, as they point out on the project’s website, was formerly known as the $100 laptop.
Read More »
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April 3rd, 2008, 04:12pm
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According to a survey of 5,000 adults and 3,000 children in the UK released by OfCom (Office of Communications) yesterday, 49% of children between the ages of 8 – 17 are on some form of social networking site.
It’s amazing the difference a few years makes in the daily lives of young people. When I was young (and I’d like to think I’m still relatively young), at elementary school, the only way to keep in touch with classmates was through snail mail (at that age I wasn’t allowed to, nor was I interested in, using the phone) – and snail mail definitely isn’t the best way to communicate with anyone. But even as I got older, I never got to use technologies such as IM to keep in touch with my friends at school during the summer time or to discuss questions about homework. (I remember when I first started using IM at the end of high school, probably around OAC, my friends thought I was really geeky and nerdy – my IM use really took off when I got to university though). I look at how my sisters study and do work now in high school and it seems like light-years have passed from the archaic idea of dictionaries, encyclopedias and even libraries – who uses books these days anyways? When you have Wikipedia! Why do you need to consult any of those ‘old-school’ resources when everything can be found online?
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April 2nd, 2008, 09:29am
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What happens when you decide to remove traffic signs, signal lights, and parking meters and merely ask drivers to be responsible? Sounds like a recipe for chaos… yet in the Dutch town of Drachten that’s exactly what they’ve done. Instead of chaos, they’ve found that personal responsibility and common sense go a long way toward reducing accidents and improving traffic flow. Said one citizen, “You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker.”
The experiment is based on a the philosophy of what is called a “shared space”, here’s how wikipedia describes the concept:
Safety, congestion, economic vitality and community severance can be effectively tackled in streets and other public spaces if they are designed and managed to allow traffic to be fully integrated with other human activity, not separated from it. A major characteristic of a street designed to this philosophy is the absence of traditional road markings, signs, traffic signals and the distinction between “road” and “pavement”. User behaviour becomes influenced and controlled by natural human interactions rather than by artificial regulation.
Paradoxically, relying on heavily scripted traffic regulations to improve our own safety leads to a decreased sense of personal responsibility. We rely on the rules of the road instead of our own good judgment. But by removing those rules, we actually start to feel less safe, forcing good judgment and personal responsibility to flow back into the system. It’s a great model for how pushing out central authority and decisonmaking to end users can result in more optimal behavior. If it works under these circumstances, imagine how well it’d work with additional community support like we have on the web - for example, a ratings system for other drivers.
What are the implications for more distributed approaches to guiding or regulating employee behavior within firms?
Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain for bringing this example to our attention.
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March 31st, 2008, 07:10am
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A few readers might have seen these quotes in last week’s press release, but I wanted to post them here as well:
“The old-school way of doing business hides problems and creates inefficiencies. Radical collaboration solves those problems. It brings the best minds together, exposes hidden risks, and accelerates innovation and growth. We’ve seen how it transforms industries, such as music and entertainment. But now it’s time to take the same approach to the most serious problems – problems with the gravest consequences for the economy and society. Leaders need to change their habits and open the curtain.”
“The subprime mess happened because big financial players hid the risks – they weren’t found until it was too late. If the same players had taken the radical step of sharing information about the bets they were structuring, the best minds – including economic policymakers – could have seen what was happening and taken steps to avert it.”
Does anyone have any thoughts on this argument that they’d like to share?
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March 29th, 2008, 09:59am
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Earlier in the week I posted Chris Rasmussen’s wonderful depiction of the merits of wiki collaboration. I noted then how a participant at a recent talk I gave at Nokia had pointed out that the happy faces on the left of Chris’s diagram probably ought to be frowning. Chris then alerted me to an updated version of the diagram that reflects the personal and organizational pain that email so often inflicts (click on the thumbnail!)
True to form, the post generated an interesting debate about whether the emailers on the left side of Chris’s diagram should be frowning, or whether they are, in reality, quite content with the status quo:
Read More »
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March 28th, 2008, 12:07pm
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It seems that Canada may have finally woken up to the Net Neutrality issue that’s recieved far, far more press in the U.S. - though I’d still argue not enough. (If you want a really good detail on all the history behind Net Neutrality, the wikipedia page on this topic is amazing, right down to the 66 references and footnotes that could keep you reading for days.)
In short, my feelings are that a lack of Net Neutrality is something that damages the Internet experience for everyone, and by extension threatens many of the amazing innovations and collaborative tools that are trying to emerge. Thankfully, we might be reaching a point where this issue gets dealt with once and for all.
David Reed’s opening statement to the FCC Commissioners on Net Neutrality (with particular reference to what Comcast has been up to) is pointed in the right direction. To quote his three main points:
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March 21st, 2008, 01:00pm
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How much of a premium would you pay for unlimited legal music downloads?
Alright, so the title is an obvious exaggeration, but it raises an interesting question - How much would you pay for an iPod or iPhone with unlimited access to the entire iTunes catalogue? That seems to be one of the questions being kicked around by our Cupertino, CA friends these days. In an effort to beat (or at least match) Nokia’s launch of their “comes with music” line of mobile devices, Apple appears to be in negotiations to deliver a line of premium iPod and/or iPhones that would be bundled with unlimited access to all available iTunes music.
Read More »
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March 20th, 2008, 04:51pm
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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 »
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March 18th, 2008, 07:22am
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A picture is worth a thousand words… and I think that a few well-chosen graphs from Alexa.com can be worth even more than that. The following three are among my favorites to help tell the story of what’s been happening over the past few years:
Read More »
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March 17th, 2008, 10:19am
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I keep meaning to write a post about the absurdity of what the Federal Reserve is doing right now, while relating it to some the wikinomics themes. Maybe something about how the Federal Reserve, with it’s top-down, centrally controlled structure, seems to keep thinking it can outsmart the mass collaboration of the open market… and how time will almost certainly prove them disastorously wrong… again… as time over, and over, and over has proven central banks disastorously wrong when they actively intervene to distort markets in ridiculous ways. Read More »
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