“The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

The main way we’re seeing this happen is through pay walls and locked down services, mostly in the form of apps and specialty devices that emphasize convenience over control. Most users aren’t savvy enough to dig into the nuts and bolts of technology—geeky techno-details be damned, they want what they want, immediately. Unfortunately, the consequence of this apathy towards technology is a future where a select few companies will control a significant portion of the content we consume. Apple would be the key culprit here with sleek must-have devices that, although tremendously well-designed (full disclosure: I own an iPad myself), lock users into a convenient, ‘black box’ mentality of computing.  Powered by iTunes, the App Store, and iDevices Apple controls the flow of content (the new TV network), monetizes the media you consume (the new record company and music store), has final say over which apps you can use on your devices (a new software monopoly), and controls the end user experience via extremely inflexible devices (recall Ma Bell owned all the actual telephones at one point as well).

Mobility is also a big factor. With more people creating and accessing data via mobile devices (e.g. smart phones, Kindles, and iPod Touches), we see more niche uses of the net that don’t include browsing and the open distribution of content. As the Wired article notes:

“Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.”

The emphasis on convenience over control has built other media empires as well, including services that use templated experiences to simplify the web (think web presences on Facebook or even Blogger, as opposed to sites created by individuals and designers). Author and web pioneer Jaron Lanier derides many such efforts as dehumanizing and anti-intellectual, and cautions us against lock-in to design principles that were conceived by those more interested in advertising and data aggregation than people and intellectual property. His recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget” serves a manifesto for those unhappy with the current direction of most web 2.0 initiatives. He notes,

“Lock-in removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.”

It’s nice to think that lock-in and disempowerment is happening to help consumers and create better experiences, but it is also happening because it’s profitable. The ‘ease of access’ versus ‘freedom’ argument is a false dichotomy; you can have both, it’s just more work and more costly. But, it can (and should) be done. However, for companies, it’s easier to cite reliability and security concerns and far more profitable to keep things locked down. Lock-in allows for monetization via proprietary formats, advertizing, and device replacement. In a poignant, yet fairly targeted jab at Google, Lanier goes on to say:

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

Herein lies the problem. Apple is creating its own walled garden, but has effectively created a way to monetize content and distribute money to artists and application creators. Google on the other hand has taken a much more open approach, but monetizes content via advertizing, which is not distributed to content creators. In both cases, the individual consumer feels cheated.

I wrote about much of this before in a Wikinomics post about Jonathan Zitrain’s book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The main issue: locked down appliances like the iPhone that could eliminate the PC, and with it the “test bed and distribution point of new, useful software from any corner of the globe,” and “the safety valve that keeps those information appliances honest.” The move towards appliances also dumbs-down the user experiences. When appliances break you don’t open them up yourself to fix them, you call the manufacturer. This is exactly how the Apple approach varies from the PC approach. The internet dystopia that Zittrain feared could be upon us, and most users (even tech savvy ones) don’t even perceive this as an issue. As one commenter to my Zittrain post mentioned:

“The death of the PC should not be an issue. It’s like caring about the death of the CD, who cares, something better has replaced it. There will probably always be PC’s for those who prefer optimal performance in certain hardware and want large visual displays. But the majority of the population makes a waste of all that good hardware just by only using a PC to go on Facebook or chat with friends. Let them have their mobile devices and gaming consoles.”

Ah, but PCs do matter and here’s why: Without PCs we lose control over how we experience media. Media that is streamed at us through apps and gamining consoles treats us as passive recipients in a similar way that TV or radio did; it hosts purely sanitized content, it is controlled by companies not individuals, and it’s infused with advertising. The reason we don’t notice (or don’t care) is that it is social and so gives us the perception of control and creation. But what we perceive as control is data entry into predefined fields and forms that limit our expression. We need PCs to truly create new content.

Social media has debased intellectual engagement and self representation by making it effort-free. The cognitive load required to type something on Facebook, comment on a blog post, or even post a video on YouTube is small because these sites are designed to mimic a stream of consciousness. Although little creative energy is expended to interact, time is still spent, and information is still created and consumed. Much of the content includes off-the-cuff remarks that would traditionally have dissolved the way idle chatter does; however, repurposed using social media they are often compared in the same light as actual article writing or high-quality productions. Most apps don’t encourage the thoughtful creation of content, whereas using a full blown desktop is all about creative freedom. In a fairly balanced response to the Wired piece, Shane Tilton from the Center for Society and Cyberstudies Journal says:

“Creation vs consumption: Most of the promoters of the death of the open web are looking at it from the viewpoint that we go online to get our information, check in with our friends and maybe post a picture or video. If this was the case, the closed web would have won years ago. However, we like the ability to do create works from time to time and love having a way to share it with a larger community. The app based system of uploading content is relatively simple, which is the good and the bad point about the system. You can share content as it is in the real world, however it is moderately hard to edit it and add a creative mark to the content. An open web system gives access to online editors and content creation tools. The close system, for the most part, lacks these qualities.”

The multi-billion dollar question is, are locked-down devices, apps, and internet pay walls the future? Or, will it be open devices powered by the likes of Android and Symbian, and supplied with open content via web search and peer-to-peer networks? As long as the web is free and open and accessible to all, companies like Google can index it and derive value from it. And, with the launch of Google Instant, it seems that Google is trying to move people away from integrated search bars back to the home page (where it can better monetize its ads). Whether it’s Google’s web or Apple’s apps, one thing is clear, the next phase of the internet will be monetized by a few key players and far less free than it used to be.

I’ve held off writing about Apple to avoid being yet another one of those bloggers who’s doing so, but this latest Fake Steve post bumps the discussion up to a new level. Yes, Apple products run the exact same hardware as PCs, but cost more. Yes, they are aesthetically very well designed. Yes, they tie plastic bags and coffee cups as first-rate examples of planned obsolescence. And yes, I should have a second point in favor of Macs here, but I can’t think of one. What’s going on with the iPhone and iPad ecosystem simultaneously empowers consumers–by giving them access to some powerful and easy to use technology, thanks to some very nicely designed apps–and disempowers them–by casting computers as non-technological sealed-boxes that do only which actions are on a neatly manicured whitelist. People seem to like it: and the devices are selling with little sign of slowing down.

Using the example of the recent signal issues with the iPhone 4 as an example, Fake Steve’s post cuts right to the core of why Apple’s doing so well. People are confused, sell them an answer:

Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.

So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.

So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.

It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.

I own a MacBook but won’t ever buy another. Because I own one, and am seen as a tech-savvy guy, it offers legitimacy to this idea “macs are better/safer/faster/more stable/easier to use.” They aren’t. Even still, I’ve had people who admit to knowing absolutely nothing about computers tell me about how macs really are better, and that Microsoft has no idea what it’s doing (Windows 7 is a great OS, really it is). What it amounts to is that the whole computer space is one that’s confusing and overcomplicated to most consumers, and Apple is in the middle of the market with attractive devices that work decently well, saying “we’re better” with confidence and the appearance of authority. People are responding to the message, strongly.

I’m kind of surprised actually that this strategy isn’t found in more places. Fake Steve points out that religions have done a great job honing the strategy, but that discussion is outside the scope of this post. How would consumers react if Toyota or Ford simply stated “We’re better. Buy us.”? In fact, the only example at the front of my mind where there’s such a strong chorus preaching that “the new way is better” is with the Web 2.0 space. Yes, there’s a lot of value in collaborating, but not every 2.0 tech is as world-changing as it is confusing. Many an analyst has made quite a living saying “this is the next big deal, you need to learn it and you need my help.” The truth is that for many companies traditional communications (face to face, phone, email) are still functional and and will continue to be; sometimes older technologies will continue to work just fine. In cases where collaboration technology is desired or beneficial, the purchasing decision doesn’t have to be rocket science.

There’s a lot of money to be made off confusion, I just question how sustainable the approach is. Or maybe I’m just being profoundly naive, and this is the way it’s always been.

The uproar (if you want to call it that since it only seems to be happening among a relatively small cadre of people and organizations, NOT among the vast, vast majority of the 400+ million Facebook users) over privacy changes is dumb. The changes themselves are entirely Facebook self-centered and entirely beneficial only to Facebook, but let’s not forget: Facebook members do not own Facebook, Zuckerberg et al. do.

What, you say? You must have forgotten because it’s become such an integral if not important part of your life but you Facebook members are members, not owners; you are users, customers, etc. Are you important? Sure. Who touts Facebook’s growth more than Facebook? In the spirit of the collaborative web, Facebook should consult with you before doing drastic changes to default settings that let anyone from China to Russia to Trinidad & Tobago know you had a bad date last night or need a new laptop – and then make you fix them. But they did not and now they are going to feel your wrath as you leave en masse – to do what? Set up another, more private, more narrow network on a new site that ensures only those six people you really want to read your life get to do that?

My bet – no hedging either – is that this is another tempest in a laptop hard drive. I will be surprised if more than 100,000 people leave Facebook on May 31, Quit Facebook Day. Today, May 18, 2010, 5,335 people have committed to quitting Facebook on May 31. Folks, the people who use Facebook have gotten past this kind of mess before and will again.

Now, to get serious for a graph: Privacy is not a trivial matter. Most people do not yet begin to comprehend the risks and dangers in losing control of their personal digital identities; most probably have not even thought about having a personal digital identity. What’s more, stuff you put online is virtually permanent (barring an alien invasion that wipes out all stuff on the Net or something similar) and, with the Internet as we know it now having been around for awhile, I bet there is stuff out there I forgot I ever posted, searched for, or wrote.

If you don’t want to share stuff, don’t join Facebook. If you do, protect your privacy. Member caveo (that’s what the English-to-Latin online translator produced when I asked for “member beware”).

The much bigger questions are: What is your digital identity? Who has it? Who controls it?

For nearly three years at nGenera, I’ve been deeply involved in the description, promotion, or management of Enterprise 2.0, collaborative systems for very large organizations. And, the more time that passes, the more I’ve been convinced that there is an even more vexing collaboration paradox, which I’d categorize as a management or perhaps “relational” one.

For me, the classic reference article for this collaboration paradox is “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” written by Tammy Erickson and Lynda Gratton, published in the Harvard Business Review in November 2007. Here is a key passage early in the article that perfectly captures the paradox:

Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. (NOTE: bolding added for emphasis)

Members of complex teams are less likely—absent other influences—to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to collaborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.

The authors go on to describe specific methods of improving the potential for successful collaboration, which Tammy’ research since then has expanded to a list of what she refers to as ten (10) “enablers of collaborative capacity.” Among these enablers are things such as “important and challenging tasks,” “existence of trust-based relationships,” and “executives who role model collaboration.”

Want to know why your collaborative effort is struggling, even if the intent of the effort is well-defined and the expected outcomes well understood? Then, ask yourself if these enablers are being amply employed in your organization. Chances are that an authentic improvement (and I stress, authentic) in those enablers will improve the collaborative effort.

For more on this subject from Tammy herself, you can catch her keynote address for the Enterprise 2.0 conference last November, on demand from the nGenera website.

With that, I’ll make this post short-and-sweet and, on a personal note, wish a fond farewell to those of you who may followed my writing on the Wikinomics blog over the past year, as this is my final post on it.

You can still follow my thoughts on the industry at my personal blog (http://www.guengerich.com) as well as my daily musings on Twitter (@sguengerich). Thanks to everyone who has read or commented on the blog and a great thanks to my many nGenera friends and colleagues!

The first clue that something is off comes from the chart they provided. True, when asked whom do you trust as a credible source of information about a company, friends / peers dropped from 45% to 25% (from 2008 to 2010). However, trust in other sources – TV news, radio news, and newspapers – dropped by almost the exact same proportion, from almost the exact same base (i.e. newspapers appear to have dropped from 46% to 26%, for example). The article gets around to mentioning this, but not until the main message they are trying to send has been established.

This indicates two things to me. One, the article deliberately chose to focus on the one part of the story that seemed most provocative – always suspicious. Two, that the question being used does not appear particularly good at distinguishing trust levels between different channels, in terms of marketing. Setting the 2010 data to the side, there is a lot of data out there indicating that tells a very different story than the 2008 baseline (and interpretation) presented. Commenter Kevin pointed towards one such study, from Nielsen, that showed 90% of online customers either completely or somewhat trusted recommendations from people they know. The importance of “recommend to a friend” has been well established, and validated, for many years. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

A second clue was the interpretation of the quote provided by Richard Edelman himself – that “the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.” That type of message could be viewed as great news for people in the advertising business, who can tell clients they need to spend money everywhere to get a message through (cha-ching!). I don’t buy it. My main interpretation of the chart is that it’s very, very likely that many, many customers indicated they didn’t trust any source, in relation to the given question. Hitting these people with messages from many sources they deem uncredible, and expecting that to turn into a message that they trust, is a bit of a stretch.

A third clue is that the chart provided is primarily focused on news sources (i.e. it’s “radio news”, not “radio”), while the discussion is primarily marketing focused. I think there’s a major disconnect there, which ties into some of the discussion above.

I then thought a bit about how I would respond to the given question – and I realized I’d probably fall in the “not trusting any source” camp. But it’s not because I don’t trust opinions and recommendations from friends and peers – it’s because the question is too generic, and notably I don’t really associate it with marketing and purchasing decisions. The reason is simple – while I may know a fair number of people, most of them are fairly busy. If I want “information on a company”  – a very generic request – that I pick out of thin air, I can’t exactly expect them to have it. It’s also likely that what they know, or could find, would come from the company itself (directly or indirectly). In my opinion, the link between this question, and what marketers should be thinking about, is relatively weak.

This led me to a couple more thoughts that I think need to be taken into account here – from a marketing perspective.

First, let’s start from a different question – Who knows you the best? - and provide the same list of options. I would bet my retirement fund on friends / peers winning this contest, and that if someone chose “radio” it’s unlikely you’d let them in your house. I’d also be willing to assert, with a high degree of confidence, that there are many situations where people trust messages, and recommendations, from this group of people over ads on TV, radio, and newspapers – even though this article would have you think differently. I know that seems like a very simple and obvious point, but it seems like it needs to be made here.

Second, take a context specific approach – and think about a question that more closely ties to influence in relation to marketing, or a specific purchasing decision. For example, “who do you trust to help pick a movie?”, or “who do you trust to help you find new fashions?”. It’s very likely that for any question that ties to personal taste, style, etc., the influence of peer recommendations is important. In other words, I many not trust them as a source of information “on a company” , but I will trust them as a source of information for a specific product or service, in a specific context, in relation to me.

Third, such questions need to account for different platforms that are emerging to influence purchasing decisions – particularly the ones that consolidate numerous different opinions (think Flikster, Yelp, etc.). I might not trust any single individual on there (and thus claim not to trust them in response to a generic question), but I may trust their collective opinion if the sample size is large enough, or even a specific individual’s opinion if (say) their reputation score is high enough. Very hard to tease out of a survey – but very important.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Overall, I think there are quite a few issues with what this article presents, and how it is interpreted. Did I miss any big ones – or do you think I’m wrong?

The reality, I think, is pretty far from the mark: people don’t want high quality, (and in the case of media, accurate) content; they just want to be entertained. What’s more, the threshold for entertainment is frighteningly low. Even before the YouTube revolution, “Reality TV” was gaining ground and prime-time space with each new season, and Fox News/CNN were reporting on trivialities (on good days) — exactly the problem that crowdsourced media was supposed to remedy.

Unfortunately, look at the content that does really well online: stoned children, rude celebrities, general failure, and of course, cats — none of which requires any editorial effort, and generally reflects poorly on our collective taste. If we have network neutrality, and this is the content that really thrives, where then is the drive for media companies (or individuals) to make high-quality content when they can just as easily monetize the equivalent of the Springfield film festival winner? Instead, media becomes a race to the bottom with media companies competing with Joe-Sixpack to see who can first discover the one true lowest common denominator.

This mirrors the old saying about democracy: “it’s the form of government where the people get what they deserve” — we’ve now got democratic media, and people are going to get what they deserve there too. It seems to me that if we’re going to collectively demand network neutrality, and the power and responsibility that comes with it, we’re going to have to raise the bar in terms of what we expect and demand in terms of quality content — and “Twitter journalism” (and the like) shouldn’t make the cut.

Even if there isn’t a collective intellectual awakening, there will always be people online who want premium, high quality content. However, under this new model, in order to make the delivery of that content sustainable (let alone profitable), we’re going to have to pay for it, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

The first piece that planted a seed of doubt about the universality of social media was “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” written by Sean Silverthorne in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Silverthorne discussed research by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski on how men and women use social networks differently and how Twitter use is different from either Facebook or MySpace use. What really stuck with me was his analysis of the differences in the populations of Facebook and MySpace, specifically their geographic bases. Pikorski’s analysis of a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users shows that they live mostly in smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country, including “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida. . . not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas.” It still boasts some 70 million members, so my conclusion is that claims that MySpace is “dead,” it seems, may be coming mostly from the media hubs where Facebook rules.

In the second piece, “a rough, unedited crib” of danah boyd‘s talk to the Personal Democracy Forum on June 30, 2009, titled “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” Boyd asks her audience to do her a favor during her presentation: “I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative.”

boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discusses some results of her research into differences between teenage Facebook and MySpace users and some of the reasons teens use one or the other. Boyd comments, “Choice isn’t about features of functionality. It’s about the social categories in which we live. It’s about choosing sites online that reflect ‘people like me.’ And it’s about seeing the ‘other’ site as the place where the ‘other’ people go.” She also notes the “condescending” attitude of teens who use Facebook towards teens who use MySpace: “Teens who use MySpace may lament teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-up’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.”

boyd discusses some explanations for the “divide” between the two groups as well, which I won’t do justice to in this short post, but strongly recommend that you read the entire piece for those. (Note the explanatory material at the top, clarifying the audience for this talk, and keep it in mind when reading it.) Summing up some takeaways, Boyd says: “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.”

Finally, a conversation with my friend, who’s deep into and fluent in social media and Enterprise 2.0, got into who’s left out of social media and Enterprise 2.0 – actually, I guess I am talking about Life 2.0. Do the most interested parties, who know the most about and are most invested in Life 2.0 include a broad social strata of the U.S.? My sense – I lack any data so this entire post may be dismissed – is no, they do not. (Developing such data might be an interesting research project, IMO; if anyone knows of such research, please point me to it.) My belief is that they should.

And for me, the key to getting people involved in the power and potential of Life 2.0 lies in education. The more exposure young people have to life outside their social groups and their environment, the better for them and for us. If we believe in collaboration as a good way to tap into the best of everyone, it won’t do if “everyone” is just “people like us.”

An excellent study conducted recently by the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit identified some interesting facts including that only 13% of the respondents were female Wikipedia contributors (meaning that they actually posted content). Speculation on the implications of this fact appeared throughout the blogosphere including this article by Ryan Tate which includes this passage:

MIT instructor and alumni Philip Greenspun has floated a theory as to why women are underrepresented in high-end scientific professions: Science is generally a terrible career choice, but it contains a dysfunctional status hierarchy that tends to appeal the male egos.

“A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Child Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job? …Young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group. [Yet] men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”…

So it is with Wikipedia. Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you’re a man, for the honor of being near the “top” of something, no matter how fruitless.

To Greenspun’s point, there is a lot of work involved in contributing to Wikipedia. Not so much in actually making the edits, but in defending the changes against people with generally a lot more time to engage in an edit war. In essence, being right isn’t enough if you don’t want to put a lot of effort into convincing people that you are right.

From my personal example (the fact that the topic seems to be banal proves the point), I made an edit on the Frasier page a couple of years ago. It was in regards to a reference that John Mahoney who plays Martin Crane, like many of his colleagues previously appeared on Cheers. No surprise here, of course, the former was a spinoff of the latter and they shared not only the title character but also the same producers. Mahoney’s role on Cheers was a washed-up ad man hired by Rebecca Howe (who had a budget of $50) to write a jingle for the bar. He ended up playing the piano while he sang the jingle “Beer and Pretzels that’s our game…” Because of this someone had described him the character as a pianist. I changed the entry to describe him as an “ad man” because while pianist was correct, it wasn’t completely accurate (the post could have said he played a vertebrate which was equally true). In any case, an edit war occurred and I eventually lost interest. By the way, I checked before I wrote this post and (no thanks to me) the entry now reads the way it should…

Some cast members of Frasier appeared previously in minor roles on Cheers. John Mahoney, who played Martin Crane, appeared in an episode of Cheers, as Si Phlembeck, an over-the-hill advertising executive hired by Rebecca to write a jingle for the bar. In it, Grammer and Mahoney exchanged a few lines.

That episode ended up being incredibly valuable for Mahoney as it certainly led to his casting on Frasier and the ensuing vast riches. There is an interesting story behind how he got the role described here by the writer of the episode. I’d edit the Wikipedia entry to reflect the cool info, but once bitten, twice shy my friend.

Today people are expensive and technology is cheap so only the privileged few have EAs.  Their role has changed considerably, but at the core they still help manage information. For those without EAs, we now have more technology to help us– computer file systems, pre-programmed phone directories, Outlook, instant messaging, corporate intranets, iPhones, and wikis – and yet a large portion of my week is still spent manually organizing, finding, and sharing information.

Where am I going with all this?  I’m not convinced we’re better off.  This isn’t just because Mad Men does a great job at selling nostalgia, but rather because I don’t think our information management technology has been able to keep up with the rate at which information is growing. The point can be made that since we now have a reasonable degree of competence with the technology it makes sense to interact with information directly, rather than have it mediated by another party.  I would argue that maybe competence has become a burden.

Although it seems strange to even think what life with an EA might be like for an average 21st Century knowledge worker, I can certainly think of many modern tasks that many of my colleagues would be only too happy to divest, such as uploading and downloading content to/from shared sites, searching Google for specific tidbits of information, and generally separating signal from noise across all the various channels through which we are bombarded with information.

If mid-level knowledge workers still had EAs, would productivity improve? A lot of tasks have been automated, but a lot of new manual tasks have been created – these are the daily irritants that often prevent knowledge workers from sustained activity in core areas that create value for the enterprise. It’s real work, but it’s rarely accounted for or even acknowledged – it just becomes collaborative overhead.  I’m not suggesting we go back to the Mad Men days of “a girl” at every desk, but I think a shared resource for many collaborative and administrative tasks would be useful. Is it just me or does anyone else feel like knowledge workers could use some support resources?

I leave you with a politically incorrect clip of Peggy and Joan; a view of EAs from the past, as seen through the eyes of the Mad Men writers:

(Embed disabled – click to play video at YouTube.com)

As I’ve come to learn with age, you are certainly as young as you feel, act, and – I would add – as you think. Invariably, with age comes experience and with experience comes the tendency to recognize patterns – or what one interprets as patterns.

This can be a good thing when it comes to mitigating risks and maximizing returns. However, it can be a bad thing when it stifles innovation. At the half century mark, I’ve seen the upside and downside of this dynamic tension between innovation risk and return.

A couple of recent articles reminded me of how this drama plays out every day in the tech industry, often outside of the typical consumer’s eyesight. For example, with respect to iPhone adoption in large corporations, ZDNet recently published the results of one of their CIO Jury surveys announcing “The iPhone has no place in business.”

The essence of the article is that it costs too much to support the iPhone, relative to other smartphones, like the latest Blackberry. No doubt, many of the chief information officers are relying on their years of experience summed up in the adage: avoid buying version 1.0 of any new product.

However, what avoiding the iPhone also means is missing the upside of applying an innovative free market of mobile applications. In some cases, these apps have the potential to be game-changing in the promotion of a company’s brand or potentially opening up an additional channel of revenue.

In another article, entitled “Doctors try to stifle online patient reviews,” CNET blogger Chris Matyszczyk describes an effort by a physicians advocacy enterprise to promote the signing of a “Mutual Privacy Agreement” between doctors and their patients which prevents the latter from reviewing the former online.

As one commentator to the article noted: “Good luck stifling the internet. These doctors are showing their age or ignorance. It’s only a matter of time before younger more open minded doctors embrace services like HealthcareReviews.com and start referring patients there, or even offer a computer in the lobby while they wait!”

He concludes: “Once they start encouraging reviews they will get the positive endorsement they probably deserve, otherwise the results will be skewed by a few cranky patients. These sites work both ways, they can be a positive marketing and advertising tool for the doctor as well as a negative one.”

By taking these conservative stands, the CIOs and physicians in these examples are sending a message that “information is bad for you” even though they might argue that’s not the case and that they have very sound reasons for their approach. Nonetheless, it’s a good reminder to keep a youthful attitude of experimentation towards new technologies, so you are ready to catch the next wave when it comes.

For each of these superhits (JK has over 18 million hits) there are, of course, thousands of brilliant (or at least enormously time-consuming) efforts that warrant a happy face sticker from the Wikinomics team.

As I brought up in a blog post a couple of years ago, a classic Weird Al video has found not just new life on Youtube, but has spawned some competitors including the all-Lego version below. Watch it and consider how much time it took and how much attention to detail. I’m not saying that it helped jrdmovimkr meet some ladies, but it got him some page views.

Another example I find fascinating is Monty Python’s Camelot song. Watch the original here, another Lego version here, and a Star Trek mashup below.

Speaking of Star Trek, fan fiction (Editor’s note: probably best not to provide a link) has provided a fertile platform for some web hi-jinks. Fans of Hogwarts should check out the Potter Puppet Pals.

This video has been viewed 66 million times – how do you like them apples, Jill and Kevin?

I’m no fan, but the mainstream appeal is clear: the video has almost 13,000,000 views. I’ll allow Wired.com to explain what happened next:

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube's content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

And the kicker:

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.

This is very frustrating. Worse still is YouTube’s prideful gloating about finally monetizing a video.

Sony’s implicit logic is that because that they own the rights to the music they could have the video removed. Since it remains online by their good graces alone, they are entitled to all click-through revenue that the video generates.

This makes sense legally (it shouldn’t) and is exactly the kind of arrogance I expect from Sony. It’s also a terrible way to engender consumer loyalty. The increased Chris Brown sales would not exist were it not for the video. Taking advantage of content creators and then leaving them out in the cold is not a viable long-term strategy. If users feel that their work is going to be leveraged by others to great effect, they’ll stop sharing it.

An even more egregious example of the one-way flow of content control was South Park’s Internet Meme episode. Viacom felt entirely within its rights to take the likeness of iconic Internet/YouTube celebrities and use them in the episode to generate ad revenue. If those same Internet celebrities uploaded clips of the episodes that featured their claims to fame to their own YouTube channels they would receive takedown notices. This is completely unfair.

Both of these are examples of a larger issue at play which is tightly knit with copyright law. The use and compensation surrounding content between individuals and media companies is not bidirectional. YouTube is not only complacent, but jubilant at the prospect of allowing its users to be exploited. And worst of all, I had to listen to a Chris Brown song to write this post.

Something has to change.

A lot of people run into these etiquette errors as they are getting used to a new social network. I have a presentation that I’ve delivered several times (often for fifty bucks and bus fare) where I describe LinkedIn as a Grey Flannel Suit and Facebook as a Hawaiian Shirt. It’s good to have both in your wardrobe, but if you show up at a board meeting in a Hawaiian Shirt you look like a goof and if you show up on a boathouse roof in a Grey Flannel Suit you look like an ass.

How one uses the status update is important here. Since LinkedIn should be your grey suit, unless for some reason you want a nutty online professional persona, it should only refer to a new accomplishment, position, or company or a request for work-related information or a decision. A lot of young people, consider status updates on Facebook to be lame, but those old people that showed up late on the scene to ruin it (like me and many of my friends) use it as an opportunity to be provocative or to try and show off their (Editor’s Note: should we qualify this?) sense of humour. The whole point of Twitter is frequent updates, but as Mark suggests, if you are reviewing your cat’s moods too often, most people will quickly vote with their feet (and unfollow button). Like most people, I ignore Plaxo’s plaintive and earnest pleas for an update. And Bebo? To paraphrase favorite philosophers, “what the fruck is Bebo.”

There are a lot of services that enable immediate updates across multiple platforms. I wouldn’t recommend any of them though since they can’t automatically determine whether a message is appropriate for a medium. In fact, it probably can’t even use contractions. What annoys you the most about status updates?

I’m not sure, but I think the answer is contigent on whether facebook profiles are public or private spaces — the problem is that there seem to be a lot of ways to define if it is. Facebook is public if you don’t know how to set your privacy settings (or if you don’t care to). It’s also public in that everything said is part of a record over which you don’t have much control (people can easily screenshot, quote, save or remember anything said or done).

At the same time, privacy settings do exist for a reason, so maybe calling a profile “public” is too strong in some regards — these settings exist so that only friends (or at least people you never talked to in highschool) can see what you’re up to and interact with you. At best, facebook is a semi-public (does that equate with semi-private?) space, so how do we decide how we behave in this new space?

In real life (or meatspace, as the kids today call it), the division between public and private space is pretty well defined, something is public if you’re broadcasting it outwardly in a public space. Canadian free speech/hate speech laws are a good example, you can say any number of distateful and hateful things to your friends sitting around a table in a bar, but if you stand up on the table and say those same things a little more loudly, you’re no longer in your own private world, and there very well could be some consequences for ”sharing your views.”

How does this situation play out on facebook (or other social networks)? Where’s the line between public and private with regards to what constitutes a public statement? It seems that just to be safe, you have to regard everything as public. But how does this apply to etiquette?

If someone posts something, is it considered fair game for debate or disagreement? Or are the rules the same as at a nice dinner party, where you bite your tongue in favor of social graces? If the space is shared, have you got an obligation to make your dissenting opinion known when someone says something objectionable? What are some possible best practices if you decide to do so?

What do you think?

The Wikinomics team has many posts discussing the real potential of Twitter for business value. This is how I predominantly use the tool: As an efficient way to find new stories relevant to my research, as well as discover interesting or amusing content, and occasionally peek into the personal lives of interesting people. A good signal-to-noise ratio is critical for this type of usage.

I use Tweet Deck to help filter my updates, but it still becomes a challenge because filtering is by individual, not content. That means if I add someone to my “Main Feed,” I have to somewhat trust that they will act responsibly. What do I mean by responsible? The other day I opened Twitter and notice 39 tweets in a row from the same person, most of which were links. Literally 39! That’s irresponsible. It’s also not a way to get noticed on Twitter, but rather ignored.

Responsible Twitter users abide by four simple rules:

1. You learn something new everyday
2. Twitter is not chat
3. Don’t be a needy jerk
4. Ignore rules 1 to 3 if you are in marketing

RULE #1: You learn something new every day
There are two key parts of this rule: 1) “Learn” – Share a new discovery, something novel or interesting you learned today. There are a lot of people I’d like to hear from more often, but who rarely post (I’m somewhat guilty of this myself). Everyone has something they can contribute to Twitter. At the same time, it sets the bar slightly higher than posting a stream of consciousness. 2) “Something” – not everything. How much is too much? Think top-10, max. I gave Denis a hard time about this a couple of weeks ago.

In truth, Denis was actually at a conference tweeting insights from various presentations. It’s an exception to the rule that I haven’t figured out how to deal with yet, so I took him back. He hasn’t betrayed my trust since ; )

RULE #2: Twitter is NOT chat
There is a reason that the inventors of Twitter had the good sense to include a Direct Message function. No one wants their feed spammed with out-of-context snippets of conversation like, “Sorry I missed you @mybuddy, next time for sure.” This is a very simple, yet often forgotten rule.

RULE #3: Don’t be a “needy jerk”
If you missed it, Vanessa Grigoriadis has a fantastic article in New York Magazine about Facebook. In it, she talks about the declining usefulness of Facebook updates:

“This was the beginning of the end. Suddenly, Facebook began to irk me—the way friends always posted about procrastinating, being stuck in traffic, needing a nap or a vacation, or seemed to formulate their updates in declarative yet vague form, like ‘Michelle is upset’ or ‘Roya is pouting,’ thus coming off like a needy jerk and making us take time out of our day to plead with them to answer the burning question: ‘Why are you pouting?’”

I couldn’t have put it better. There is a lot of this on Twitter and it’s exceedingly unproductive. Worse; it’s noise that obfuscates the valuable signals we’re all trying to get at.

RULE #4: Ignore rules 1-3 if you are in marketing
The future of Twitter – especially in marketing – may well be bigger than my “rules.” I talked to a company Crimson Hexagon this week that makes a business out of mining user opinions online (including from Twitter) for market research. In fact, marketers love the stream of consciousness because to them it’s data, and valuable data at that: “Post all you want about what you had for lunch, just be sure to mention the brand of mustard you used and how it made you feel…” (Note; Rule #4 should have excused Denis from his misstep on Rule #1, since he is our program manager for our Marketing 2.0 program.)

Marketers also don’t want to use Direct Message. If you answer a customer question publicly, it not only makes you look good in terms of being responsive, it also potentially saves you from having to answer the same question multiple times, as well as helps boost brand mentions. For more on how to think about your brand on Twitter, see: A potential framework for how different brands are using Twitter.

As an example, a recent study by Skidmore economist Sandy Baum and the College Board, approximates the real lifetime value of a college degree at about $300,000. This estimate is based on the assumption that those with college degrees earn an average of $20,000 more per year than non-graduates, and takes into account the average cost of tuition and books, as well as annual inflation over a forty-year career. This estimate is down from previous calculations of an approximately $1 million payback. Mind you, this is for undergraduate degrees. It begs the question: What about more specialized and more expensive graduate degrees (expensive both in terms of tuition and opportunity costs)?

MBA degrees are a specific point of contention. While conventional wisdom will have people flooding into MBA schools, there is also a sense that maybe professionals should seek to upgrade through less conventional, more productive means. Indeed, the sheen associated with an MBA is tarnished by the fact that many of the financial decision makers that perpetrated the economic downturn were themselves alumni of some of the most respected business schools.

Some recent interviews I’ve done seem to corroborate these findings. Fast Company staff writer and author of Generation Debt, Anya Kamenetz says:

“I’ve never been an advocate of people going back to school and incurring large amounts of educational debt just to have a degree. [...] I’m very interested in what the long term developments are going to be because I think that higher education has been resistant to really fundamental types of innovation and change for far too long. We’ve seen information technology sweep every other industry and raise productivity and raise the potential of what you can accomplish. I think that in higher ed, they’re still working off a 14th century model. It’s lecture classes and it’s seminars and it’s educational requirements that don’t necessarily match where the jobs are these days. So, I think that you’re going to see a lot more students and families re-evaluating the other options out there; whether that be online education, vocational programming, certification programs, or programs that are run by employers. I think it’s actually going to be a fantastic area of growth for the next decade and a half or so.”

Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist is more colorful in her analysis of the value of graduate programs:

“People are going to grad school for stuff that has no bearing on the workplace. It’s not like we have more critical thinking because somebody knows the history of the little War of the Roses, right? And so, who cares? I don’t see any corporation placing a premium on any kind of graduate degree, except a top 25 business school degree. I mean most MBAs are from shitty schools so they don’t place a premium on that. Most law schools are shitty and people have to go into some other profession besides law because their degree is so bad. If you get a Masters in French and then try to get a marketing position, you’re penalized. You’re actually penalized because you look like you don’t have a clue about how to manage your life because you just spent four years learning French and you’re not using it. To me that just screams obsessive with details, scared to go out into the job market, and purposeless. I mean, I just don’t think anyone is placing a premium on graduate degrees.”

From what I’m hearing, it seems as though college age students are making important decisions about where they’re going to invest education dollars. Some of them are backing into junior colleges or community colleges; others are choosing to forgo higher education because of their financial situations. This would be especially true if their Boomer parents are now struggling with layoffs or delayed retirement. On the demand side of the equation, numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that overall, the United States will need 18 million new college degree holders by 2012 to cover job growth and replace retirees but at current graduation rates, the country will be six million short. Will this trend towards delaying or abstaining from higher education reinforce the impending knowledge gap among entry-level workers? Some interesting food for thought…

It makes sense intuitively; the higher the population density and the tighter the living quarters, the more likely you are to spend time away from home or in “third spaces.” Similarly, if you have a large comfortable home and long distances make travel more infrequent, you will be less likely to need “on-the-go” technology, and more likely to invest in desktop computers and broadband in the home. The proposition that one’s propensity to use mobile tech is directly related to population density is an intriguing one, so I thought I’d do some further investigation. Using population density figures from Wikipedia along with mobile penetration stats from the OECD and wireless penetration rates from RCR Wireless, I compiled a chart showing data from 20 countries.

The trend line isn’t entirely obvious, but mind you, this is very “back-of-the-napkin” type analysis; and of course, other factors such as a population’s affluence, infrastructure availability, domestic cost of technology, and cultural tendencies all factor into adoption rates as well. Still, I think it’s a neat macro way to think about the decision to invest in mobile.

Some clear outliers on the chart are Finland, New Zealand, and Australia, which have low population density, but high mobile adoption rates, as well as Japan and South Korea, which have high population density, but below 80% mobile adoption. Hong Kong and Singapore were purposely left off the chart since their density figures (in the 6,400/square km range) skew the vertical axis, but both have adoption rates close to 100%. Note: All the data used in the chart is from 2005.

Update:

Based on Aaron’s comment below, I thought I’d share this additional graph, from an amazing site www.nationmaster.com (for the curious statistician).  It plots size of house (based on % of homes with five or more rooms) versus mobile phone adoption (per 100 people).  Data is from 2002.

I bring up this little anecdote because it is relevant to some research I’m contemplating about Asian business revolutionaries and, in particular, the mobile industry. The issue is that, despite our global business environment, the disparity between North American and Asian product innovation and consumer expectations of innovation is, honestly, quite shocking. The electronics industry in this continent is a great example of the “culture of legacy” that we North Americans complaisantly support.

Our diminished expectations extend to the technology we accept from service providers like cable and cell phone companies (anyone use on-demand cable lately – the interface is circa 1985), from our governments (still waiting on that electronic ballot, e-polling, and efficient online service delivery), and from our corporate work environments (still operating on the assumption that 3- to 5-year lifecycles for employee workstations are acceptable and that iPhones aren’t “enterprise technology”). We do not demand better technology, and so we do not get it. It’s simple supply-and-demand; Economics 101.

Three-year contracts for cell phones are standard – the assumption being that our current technology is ‘good enough’ for at least that long. Flat panel TV’s are “all the rage” right now, but if I were to poll my own group of friends, fewer than half of them have made the investment. In fact, we in Canada are, to a certain extent, proud of being luddites. We exalt our “retro” technologies and some even pine for the ‘good old days’ before the hum-drum of always-on BlackBerries, satellite TVs, laptops, and instant messaging.

When two of my colleagues decided to wait in line overnight to get the latest iPhone, the response was a mix of jealousy and incredulity – that anyone would want to pay a premium for the latest and greatest technology, and to demand it so early is still seen as somewhat geeky and eccentric.

The culture of legacy extends far beyond consumer electronics. It’s a deeply-routed cultural problem we as North Americans have. Our business assumptions are based on it. Take for example the Hype Cycle – now an industry standard technology lifecycle model. Nothing is more damaging to the psyche of the corporate technophile than Gartner’s Hype Cycle which makes it not only okay to be a technology laggard, but in certain circumstances, actually preferable. Gartner has made a business around mitigating the perceived risk of being on the leading edge of technology adoption.

But, it all starts at home. My TV is seven years old (and I still don’t have a PVR), my home computer is getting on four years old, the three-year contract on my cell phone is almost up but I probably won’t renew anytime soon, my CD player is a relic of the 90’s, and the newest electronic device I’ve purchased is an iPod. We perpetuate our own culture of legacy by refusing to update. We generally feel that, even if our technology is behind the rest of the world, it’s still good enough for now. In the end, whose fault is it that our technology in North America sucks? Clearly, it’s our own.