Stowe Boyd

"The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:34:10 -0400

“The broad consensus is that Google is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return.”

- Cotton Delo, Google a Ghost Town as Brands Decamp for Pinterest via Advertising Age

Readlists via Arc90 Lab

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:26:30 -0400

Readlists via Arc90 Lab:

Arc90 — the people behind Readability — have launched a new service called Readlists. Users can create a collation of links — of whatever sort — and bundle into an e-book that can be read on a Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.

I created one using the links I pulled together yesterday on Social Operating Systems, here. They are featuring a number on the www.readlists.com landing page, too.

This is what it looks like on my iPad in iBooks:

Note that it doesn’t seem to handle the ‘related posts’ javascript, so dynamic pages might be problematic, but still: very cool.

A Model For Open Work Media

Tue, 22 May 2012 11:35:00 -0400

Over at Work Talk Reports, I’ve written a short introduction to a big idea that I call Open Work. I use the term ‘work media’ to refer to the enterprise social networking tools that are being rapidly adopted in business these days, but I think the basic premises for those tools are too limiting and limited.

Stowe Boyd, A Model For Open Work Media

I am deep into a number of writing projects, including a report on the state of work media tools (aka enterprise social networking), but a set of ideas keep coming forward in my thinking, so I decided to take a moment to capture them.

The short form of these ideas is this: the work media tools we are using today cover only a small part of the ambit of activities that make up our work.

The longer version? Work media tools are designed to handle a small set of use cases that are oriented toward collaborative activities, such as sharing documents, assigning tasks, and core business functions, like sales and customer support. These tools take a great deal for granted, and have built-in fundamental premises about the closed nature of today’s work, so that a broad range of activities that we are actually involved in every day are either managed only in part, or managed outside of these tools altogether.

A simple example has to do with project work. Today’s tools are geared toward managing a project once it has been defined, and once the various team members have been identified. A work context is defined, people are invited, and work commences. But these leaves aside all the work that preceded the project, such as cost estimates, negotiations with freelancers, proposals to the client, and so on.

Yes, it is true that these other activities could have been managed as independent and earlier projects themselves, and that is, in a sense, my point. But in general, much of that earlier coordinative effort — especially negotiation — is unmanaged, or managed via email or other interactions.

And the largest gap in the orientation of today’s work media tools is that they are almost completely closed: they are organized so that only people that are invited to participate in well-defined projects can gain access at all. With very few exceptions, nothing created or managed within these tools can be shared with the outside world, or even between other users of the various systems.

Go read the complete article at Work Talk Reports.

"Good design is innovative Good design makes a product useful Good design is aesthetic Good design..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:33:00 -0400

“

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is durable
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible

”

- Dieter Ram’s ten commandments of good design, via Brain Pickings

Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History? - Michael DeGusta via Technology Review

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:57:38 -0400

Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History? - Michael DeGusta via Technology Review:

Michael DeGusta via Technology Review

[…] smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.

Almost as fast as TV, which was artificially delayed by WWII.

"It’s unlikely that journalism will morph from digital roadkill to the next big thing in Silicon..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:55:04 -0400

“It’s unlikely that journalism will morph from digital roadkill to the next big thing in Silicon Valley, but it’s nice to know that a guy at the keyboard can dream.”

- David Carr, The Atavist Matures as a Publisher and a Platform via NYTimes.com

The Social Operating System: A Reader

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:57:00 -0400

For the sake of my pal Valdis Krebs, I am collating a list of posts I’ve made in recent years on the idea of a social operating system. The basic notion:

Stowe Boyd, Rockmelt: Why The Social Browser Won’t Matter

The next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.We won’t be fooling with files and folders. We will be connecting with others, reading streams from our friends, and tossing observations and hopes and insights into the wake we leave behind, spreading out to all that think we matter.

So here’s some links to pieces I’ve written mentioning the idea:

Please send along any references to other people writing on the subject.

"@jayrosen_nyu: Morning! New at my Tumblr: USA Today has a new boss. He thinks voicelessness is..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:14:10 -0400

“@jayrosen_nyu: Morning! New at my Tumblr: USA Today has a new boss. He thinks voicelessness is hurting the brand, and it has to end. http://t.co/dxvylbcW”

- May 21, 2012 at 06:00AM via http://bit.ly/JgDRnj

"Headphones are the new wall."

Mon, 21 May 2012 07:10:02 -0400

“Headphones are the new wall.”

- Ray Udeshi cited by John Tierney in From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz via NYTimes.com, discussing how office workers deal with the increasing noise in open space offices.

"There is no winning formula or established convention for measuring long-term innovation bets."

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:45:26 -0400

“There is no winning formula or established convention for measuring long-term innovation bets.”

- Matt Kingdon, ‘Not Everything That Matters Can Be Measured’

"@lrainie: Cooperation via social software, not competition, is where real future growth emerges,..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:47:23 -0400

“@lrainie: Cooperation via social software, not competition, is where real future growth emerges, says @stoweboyd http://t.co/GeU5exvh”

- May 18, 2012 at 07:46AM via http://bit.ly/Lk3ysj

"@robhof: Old world, new world: HP lays off 30,000 people, Facebook goes public in $100 billion IPO."

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:39:10 -0400

“@robhof: Old world, new world: HP lays off 30,000 people, Facebook goes public in $100 billion IPO.”

- May 18, 2012 at 07:07AM via http://bit.ly/M111jr

"@jowyang: Fantastic presentation by @stoweboyd who has a lens of Sociology, innovation, over tech. ..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:37:00 -0400

“@jowyang: Fantastic presentation by @stoweboyd who has a lens of Sociology, innovation, over tech. #webcomMt http://t.co/238bRniF”

- May 16, 2012 at 02:53PM via http://bit.ly/LVUPZY

More On The New Aesthetic

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:17:00 -0400

Is Fashion Ready For A New Aesthetic?, Jay Owens via BOF

For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. Whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. In fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past. “There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,” Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. And indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

But over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. Known as “The New Aesthetic,” the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the “eruption of the digital into the physical world” and the idea of “seeing like a machine” in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. Subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

The movement really struck a chord and came to wider attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference where Mr Bridle led a panel called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” and futurist Bruce Sterling asked what the New Aesthetic meant for fashion in his highly-anticipated closing address. “Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look,” he challenged the tech-savvy audience in attendance. “They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year…come back in robotvision glitchcore!”

[…]

“We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,” wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored. “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about,” said Ms Lau.

As a term, “The New Aesthetic” may be short-lived. Surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. But if the “New Aesthetic” movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. Indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.

Hmmm. Is The New Aesthetic dead, or has it just gone underground?

"I suspect that Facebook will forever live within this dialectic, expanding the boundaries of social..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:46:07 -0400

“I suspect that Facebook will forever live within this dialectic, expanding the boundaries of social sharing and then reacting to pushback from users and critics when it goes too far. As long as it continues to listen to those critics, that pattern is probably the best outcome.”

- Steven Johnson on Can Anything Take Down the Facebook Juggernaut? | Epicenter | Wired.com

(via thisistheverge)

thenextweb: Web traffic from tablet computers is growing 10...

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:39:53 -0400

thenextweb:

Web traffic from tablet computers is growing 10 times faster than smartphone traffic (via Adobe: Web Traffic From Tablets Growing Faster Than Smartphones)

Google+ Is A Ghost Town

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:29:00 -0400

Google continues to say that others’ analysis of public use of Google+ is a distortion of actual use — since much of the use of G+ is supposedly private — but Google will not share the data:

Exclusive: New Google Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement - Austin Carr via Fast Company

This week, the data analytics firm [RJ Metrics] provided Fast Company with exclusive new insights on Google+. The findings paint a very poor picture of the search giant’s social network—a picture of waning interest, weak user engagement, and minimal social activity. Google calls the study flawed—we’ll explain why in a second—and has boasted that more than 170 million people have “upgraded” to the network. RJ Metrics’ report, on the other hand, is yet another indicator that Google+ might indeed just be a “virtual ghost town,” as some have argued.

Let’s start with the findings. For its study, RJ Metrics (RJM) selected a sample of 40,000 random Google+ users. RJM then downloaded and analyzed every sample users’ public timeline, which contains all publicly available activity. One important caveat: RJM was only able to look at public data, which as it points out, “is not necessarily reflective of the entire population of users,” since some users are private or at least have private activity. That said, the stats are eye-opening:

According to RJM’s report, the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share

Roughly 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one

Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again

Among users who make publicly viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post

After a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily, a trend that is not improving

[…]
Part of the reason there have been so many reports on the so-called Google+ “ghost town” is because Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network’s active user base. The company has said there are 170 million people who have “upgraded” to Google+, which is just a confusing way to say that 170 million people have signed up for the service (which takes about a click or two if you are already a Gmail user).

The company has been asked repeatedly for monthly active users, and it’s repeatedly denied such requests, essentially calling them irrelevant. The closest we’ve seen of active usership was when the company explained how many Google+ users were engaging with Google Plus-enhanced or -related products. The problem is that Google Plus-enhanced products include YouTube and Google.com, meaning if you are engaging with basically any Google property (there are 120 Google+ integrations thus far) while signed up with Google+, Google is basically counting this as engagement with Google+, which is incredibly misleading, as some have argued.

Google has continuously fudged its numbers and dodged specifics around Google+, as search guru Danny Sullivan has recorded in his brilliant rundown of Google’s lack of transparency on the subject. To confuse things all the more, Larry Page recently said in an earnings call that “there are 2 parts to the Google+ experience: the part that is the social spine, and the other part that’s the social destination part of Google+ exclusively. Both of these are growing fast, but the social destination part of Google+ is growing as a new product with very healthy growth.”

There’s a simple way to solve this problem: Just provide the number of active monthly users on Google+ (proper). Facebook does it. Google even does it with YouTube, which, as Larry Page boasted recently, has 800 million monthly users. But when I made a request for such figures, Google did not provide them.

They won’t provide them. It’s a Ponzi scheme: Google is hoping that somehow, someway Google+ will catch on and that they can use that success to render the horrible reality of today irrelevant. However, it is likely to fall to pieces.

Is Page concerned that this latest gamble in the social marketplace might be his last? After Wave, is Google+ his last chance?

"@gapingvoid: Why is it called Google+? Because it came 5+ years too late ;-)"

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:07:19 -0400

“@gapingvoid: Why is it called Google+? Because it came 5+ years too late ;-)”

- May 17, 2012 at 02:53AM via http://bit.ly/KgOiqM

"@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:11:41 -0400

“@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt Big Data Analytics; Lack of E… http://t.co/Re5gbo27”

- May 15, 2012 at 08:55AM via http://twitter.com/ckenton/status/202426882032021505

The Walking Dead?

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:00:09 -0400

The Walking Dead?:

TV advertising is up, but it’s a Ponzi scheme, like the increased revenue in movie theaters: in both cases, they are losing viewers but charging more.

David Carr via NYTimes.com

According to estimates reported by Reuters, in the coming week the big four broadcast networks and the CW will book some $9 billion in advertising revenue, with the big four up 2 to 4 percent from last year. And cable networks, which surpassed broadcasters for the first time last year in total advertising booked during the upfronts, are expecting a payday of more than $9.6 billion, an increase of 4 to 6 percent.

Part of what keeps legacy television in the game is that it is the last refuge of mass and reach. For retailers who want to flag a sale or an entertainment company with a weekend movie opening, a commercial on a broadcast network or a highly rated cable station can still hammer a message into a lot of noggins. In this targeted age, it’s breathtakingly inefficient — you pay to reach everyone, even the millions not in the desired age group — but making a big television buy is a kind of comfort food, easy and familiar.

Yet by losing audience, networks and cable stations have been able to force advertisers to buy more commercials to reach the number of viewers that they want.

“They have an interesting business model predicated on losing viewers,” observed Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. “It can’t last forever.”

At some point, the laws of both gravity and economics will begin to pull down the upfronts, and with them, the fundamentals of the television business. Jeff Gaspin, who used to head entertainment at NBC, told Bill Carter that he and his son recently decided to catch up on a particular series and so assembled episodes from a variety of sources — iTunes, Netflix and the DVR. They saw all the past episodes in time to watch the final one live on AMC but found that commercials interrupted their experience.

So what show demonstrated to the former television executive that the old way of watching television was losing relevance?

“The Walking Dead.”