November 2009
Words Tell
We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience. - Marcus Brauchli, executive editor, The Washington Post
via David Carr, Howard Kurtz
This Will Only Hasten The Fall
Johnston Press starts charging for online local news One of the UK’s biggest newspaper firms is to charge for access to online content from six of its titles.
via news.bbc.co.uk
They are all lining up, all the media barons. ‘Whoops! Lost our stranglehold! But no worries, we’ll just start charging.’
They should read Seth Godin:
You don’t charge the search...
Tumbling Is As Tumbling Does
Tumbling demonstrates what’s wrong with the convention of references: the idea that you have to refer to the original source of a comment, insight, or picture. We should just adopt the notion that — in a world where tools will link our references together in a network — we just have to refer to the instance we just discovered.
Dirk Kirchberg Interview From ConventionCamp,...
I was recently (Thanksgiving Day!) in Hannover for ConventionCamp where I gave a keynote. Dirk interviewed me right afterward, so I was still in that frame of mind.
Stowe Boyd from Dirk Kirchberg on Vimeo.
Space of flows - Manuel Castells
the space of flows … links up distant locales around shared functions and meanings on the basis of electronic circuits and fast transportation corridors, while isolating and subduing the logic of experience embodied in the space of places
via en.wikipedia.org
What Are Six Apart's Plans For Vox?
I saw an interesting give-and-take this morning about the future of Vox, by active (former) users.
First off, let me say it: yes, I am a tumbler. My other blog is /ambivalence.
I am also exploring ways to make this blog more of a tumble-ish experience, short of moving it (although I have considered that, too). Recently, Six Apart has made great strides with new social features built...
Wall Street Journal's Andrew Lavallee Looks At...
Brewster Kahle, John Borthwick, and I were interviewed last week for WSJ piece that was published this week:
[via Trying to Save the Web’s Shortcuts by Andrew Lavallee]
“If one of these organizations were to go away, then it’s like part of the whole Web going dark,” says Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that makes backups...
Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages - WSJ.com
Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year...
Employee Discontent Expected to Reach Crisis Level...
Do you plan to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010? – 60% – Yes, I intend to leave – 21% – Maybe, so I’m networking – 6% – Not likely, but I’ve updated my resume – 13% – No, I intend to stay
via workexposedblog.com
As the connection between worker and work become more and more tenuous, where it’s clear that the company has no regard for you, people will ...
links for 2009-11-23
The 800 Pound Gorilla Problem Brad Feld does a check sum on being the 800 lb gorilla in a market: what if you are a 12 lb gorrilla, instead? (tags: bradfeld)
4 tags
i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know,...
Interesting piece about a Lisbon-based online newspaper that is turning the design of papers upside down.
[via www.editorsweblog.org]
What i is doing differently
I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an...
My New Signature Block
Stowe Boyd
Front Man, Stowe Boyd and The /Messengers
stoweboyd@stoweboyd.com = (ok, but I’d rather use other tools) stoweboyd.com/message = operating manual for the social revolution ambivalence.tumblr.com = no tech, only flesh www.twitter.com/stoweboyd = my twitter stream (better) 703 966 9854 = text (better), talk (worst)
Gen-Y Women Are Webful
Trust in Internet, Online Reviews, Blogs
Gen-Y women are technologically savvy, and their perception of the world around them has been shaped by the Internet. They are more likely than their Gen-X counterparts to turn to online peers—reviewers, bloggers, or contributors—for information, even if they don’t have a personal relationship with those peers.
68% of Gen-Y women get most...
A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic...
Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.
First, it takes in material from...
Ulrike Reinhard Interview: The Web And The...
My friend Ulrike recently interviewed me for a documentary she’s working on. It runs an hour, and touches on the web from a variety of angles. I touch on ‘The Post-Everything Economy’, ‘What Is The Web Good For’, and some thoughts on the web in business.
Cell Phone Blocking
One group of companies assume that some people know they can’t help themselves, and therefore want a service to automatically disable their cellphone when it is in a moving car.
But other companies say the habit can be made safer with hands-free technology. Ford and Microsoft, for example, are selling systems that rely on voice commands to dial phones.
Hands-free devices are far more...
3 tags
More On Cross-Platform Tumbling: Following Is...
In two recent posts (Typepad Goes After Tumblr, A Call For Interoperable Tumbling: Tumbleback) I explored the idea of cross-platform tumbling.
In particular, I suggested a construct I called ‘tumblebacks’ as part of reblogging, based on an analogy with trackbacks. But I left out the issue of cross-platform following.
My sense is that cross-platform following can mostly be...
How heavy is the Internet?
reblogged from roomthily from Tumblr:
22,837,511,120 kg for 570,937,778 computers (assuming 40kg per computer including monitor)
1,754,809,310kg for 175,480,931 servers
87,000,000kg+ for cables (the tat-14 cable linking the u.s. to europe)
6,075,000kg for 42 million iphones
6,800,000kg for 50 million blackberries
and 287,524 viruses for 85 billion+ web pages.
via CNET UK
7 tags
The Coming Real Time Revolution
[originally posted on Get Real, January 19, 2005]
[These are the prepared notes for my introductory remarks for yesterday’s Get Real Show, largely derived form a report I wrote for Cutter a few years ago, called Time to Get Real: Growing the Real Time Enterprise (still seems fresh though).]
To imagine a zero latency organization – with near frictionless communication between ...
Moving Toward The Real-Time Enterprise
Time to Get Real: Moving Toward the Real-Time Enterprise
There is no shortage of reading material on the rise of the real-time enterprise. But it’s time to look beyond the verbiage so that organizations can decide what they must do to become “real time.” This Executive Report by Stowe Boyd inspects and dissects what’s being said about the real-time enterprise and...
links for 2009-11-19
Dash to D.C.! Tech Guru Will Head Gov’t Incubator, Digitize Democracy | The New York Observer Anil Dash is now director of Experts Lab, a new thinktank-ish organization started with MacArthur Foundation and the American Association for The Advancement of Science, intended to guide US policy.
Hungry Garden Mapping social media. (tags: Technology hungrygarden)
links for 2009-11-18
Meaning: The new measure of a brand or marketers success | Simon Mainwaring Simon Mainwearing takes the meme ‘meaning is the new search’ from my recent Defrag keynote and runs with it, taking it into the marketing PR domain. (tags: Technology simonmainwaring meaningisthenewsearch)
New York City is the Future of the Web - Anil Dash
New York City startups are as likely to be focused on the arts and crafts as on the bits and bites, to be influenced by our unparalleled culture as by the latest browser features, and informed by the dynamic interaction of different social groups and classes that’s unavoidable in our city, but uncommon in Silicon Valley. Best of all, the support for these efforts can come from ...
4 tags
A Call For Interoperable Tumbling: Tumbleback
In an earlier post today, regarding Typepad’s release of Micro, a new ‘micro blogging’ implementation on the Typepad platform, I called for interoperable tumbling between blog platforms:
[via www.stoweboyd.com]
Reblog is not built in to every blog, so even if I am an active Typepad Micro user, I can’t reblog every post of every Typepad blog. It requires the ...
5 tags
Typepad Goes After Tumblr
Six Apart has made an announcement of new capabilities for Typepad:
[via Announcing TypePad Micro]
As part of our ongoing rollout of the NEW TypePad we are pleased to announce new social blogging features and the launch of TypePad Micro: a completely free level of TypePad focused on easy sharing of text, photos, and videos.
A new form of blogging is emerging — somewhere between the status...
links for 2009-11-17
Apple and Bloomberg: Old Champions in the New Economy | Blog | design mind Apple and Bloomberg aren’t open: is that a problem? (tags: apple bloomberg)
6 tags
The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound. In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the industrial scheme of things — gears in...
Birth of Niche Authorship and Mass Amplification
Peter Rojas (gdgt.com), Adam Rugel (Trazzler)
Notes:
We’re in a time of wholesale and wrenching change for established media. The rise of social media has invalidated a lot of core premises for print. This is the so-called ‘democratization’ of media, which isn’t about democracy, but money and control.
And based on the indisputable whipsaw theory of economics, the...
links for 2009-11-16
Re-Writing the operating system for business Karl Long offers up a useful metaphor: we need to rewrite the operating system for business. (tags: Technology)
A Tale of Two E20 Cities - From San Francisco to Frankfurt Dachis Group Collaboratory | Social Business Design How does Lee Bryant manage to appear level-headed and visionary at the same time? (tags: Technology e20 socialbusiness...
links for 2009-11-14
Tumblr Shares Stats: 20 Million Uniques, 420 Million Impressions Per Month Very high stick rates, too (tags: Technology tumblr)
Twitpitch: That Failed Idea
[via email]
After talking with an entrepreneur who was having trouble articulating the vision for his start up, it occurred to me that it might be fun to host a twitter stream of 140-character elevator pitches. After thinking about it a bit I concluded that someone must have thought of it before, which led me to some googling and your proposal of “twitpitch”.
I think...
links for 2009-11-12
With Facebook as Alibi, Brooklyn Robbery Charge Is Dropped - NYTimes.com Man uses a facebook posting as an alibi, and gets off a robbery charge.
301Works teams up with Internet Archive to preserve shortened links | VentureBeat VentureBeat piece on 301works.org announcement. (tags: Technology 301works)
louisgray.com: Search: Less Useful Due to Massive Info Growth, the Flow? Louis channels...
Verizon's Top 10 Hot Tech Trends For Business
Social networks will spread further in the workplace, taking collaboration to a new level. As the lines between professional and personal communications become increasingly blurred, IT leaders will need to incorporate enterprise social networking into their overall unified communications and collaboration strategy. Enterprise-grade versions of Facebook, Twitter and Wikis in the workplace...
links for 2009-11-11
Google hopes to remake programming with Go | Deep Tech - CNET News Google corrals Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and others to whip up a new programming language called Go. (tags: Technology google go C)
Twitter Retweet Post Cascade
I love these cascades where a post leads to a mazillion tweets.
5 tags
Chris Messina's New Microsyntax
Chris Messina, well known for creating the hashtag (see Chris Messina on Twitter Tags) has some more ideas up his sleeve. Recall that when Chris suggested the hashtag, back in 2007, he intended to be used in a somewhat different way than it has evolved to: these things rapidly grown out of our hands, once they start to grow in the wild.
Chris suggests using the slash character,...
links for 2009-11-10
Your Social Network is Limited to 150 Businesscard2.com Weblog No, it’s not. Another person builds on a mistaken understanding of Dunbar’s Number.
BookBlog Blog Archive In praise of semipermeable social boundaries - Adina Levin’s weblog. For conversation about books I’ve been reading, social software, and other stuff too. Adina does it again: “The Facebook...
links for 2009-11-09
BookBlog Blog Archive Are Twitter lists the new blogrolls? - Adina Levin’s weblog. For conversation about books I’ve been reading, social software, and other stuff too.(tags: twitter lists)
Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals - Boing Boing Cory Doctorow skewers Murdoch for his...
Twitter's New Retweet
My initial reaction to the announcement that Twitter was going to implement the retweet (RT) microsyntax as a basic function of the platform was shock (see Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes Infrastructure). Retweets are created in a variety of ways — most importantly in a vague and imprecise way, with comments added — that I thought that nearly any attempt to pin the...
A First Look At Twitter Lists
I am an early adopter, usually, but I was late to the party on Twitter lists. And then, once I gained access to the new feature the value it offered seemed so oblique — since I had not been using lists in a Twitter client, formerly — that I didn’t immediately grasp how lists would fit into my use of Twitter.
First off, lists appear under each user’s account (or will)...
links for 2009-11-08
“Horrible Things” Slink Back Into Zynga Arrington learns that mobile ads were selectively blocked for his login, although they are still in place on Zygna’s Facebook games. These come along with a spammy monthly fee. (tags: Technology)
links for 2009-11-07
iPhone:Android::Mac:PC iPhone:Android::Mac:PC
Caterpillar Cowboy
Latin American Leaders Seek to Rein in Media, Press Group Says - NYTimes.com Kirchner tightening government controls of newspaper and TV
Twitter Filters and Fonters: Static Lists and...
I have only fooled with Twitter’s list a bit, but I am starting to get an insight to how they could allow me to fine tune the early warning system and social hot tub that Twitter principally is for me.
Yes, I have created a handful of lists, but mostly they have only a cursory few names in them. But then, I realized that there is a subset of Twitter accounts that make sense to relegate...
11 tags
The Sum Of All Fears: The Social Business...
My old friend Dennis Howlett revels in the role of doubting Thomas, perhaps more than anyone I know. His most recent screed has been attacking the Enterprise 2.0 meme, and by implication, those that are espousing it. His initial foray was entitled Enterprise 2.0: what a crock, and he basically attacked the notion that E 2.0 has anything going for it.
Personally, I find Howlett’s argument...
Bettween: I Like The Idea, But...
First time I tried the app, tracking chatter with my pay, @euan, and he and I have have had just too many tweets since we started. I hazard this will be unusable for anyone with a long history, since the tool has to hit the Twitter server to get at the data.
3 tags
The Future Of Money: Conclusions
At the end of a series of interviews and an equally wide exploration of new thinking on the future of money, I find my thoughts line up pretty closely with those of author Neal Stephenson in a 2005 Slashdot interview:
[via interviews.slashdot.org]
7) Money - by querencia
[…] You’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is there anything going on in the...
The Future Of Money: Santiago Siri and WhuffieBank
I heard Santiago Siri present at the Techcrunch 50 event a month or so ago, and I thought that his WhuffieBank project would be a good fit with the Future Of Money series.
The project is an ambitious one: it seeks to quantify connection and to derive a monetary value from it. Or as it says at the website:
The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency...
links for 2009-11-04
Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
The Death Of The Embargo: We Won't Care
Brian Solis dedicates far too much text to the topic of news embargoes, while coming to a status quo ante result on their future:
[via www.briansolis.com]
The reality is that embargoes are an important and fundamental part of the news ecosystem. They mustn’t lose their stature. As such, it is the responsibility of PR to use them only when warranted and not relegate them merely as part of a...
Open Mobile Health Exchange: A Microsyntax.org...
I am happy to announce that Alan Viars will be heading up a new project for Microsyntax.org, called Open Mobile Health Exchange:
via www.microsyntax.org
OMHE (Open Mobile Health Exchange), pronounced “ooommm” is an open-source microsyntax for medical devices, and other “short text capable” systems. OMHE is used for sending blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, step-per-day, pain levels,...