The End Of An Age, Or The End Of The Beginning?

Jeremiah Owyang wants to declare the end of the golden age of tech blogging, or, even more portentously, he says

The tech blogosphere, as we know it, is over.

This could be interpreted in a number of ways, but at face value — and leaving aside for the moment the specifics of his argument — I agree. The ‘blogosphere’ — that mid ’00s concept of a community of bloggers writing for each others and cross-linking through trackbacks and threaded comments — that communitarian vision has been superseded by other ideas of what is, or should be, happening, online.

However, I don’t want to adopt the metaphor that is used by people that fear the future, and long for a halcyon past. I won’t go along with the ‘golden age’ rhetoric, which is generally employed by those arguing a fall from a better past into a less virtuous present. (The concept comes from ancient Greek mythology, with its Golden, Silver, Bronze, Iron ages, and then the present, debased age.)

I prefer Winston Churchill’s trope:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Winston Churchill by Yousef Karsh

Churchill was, of course, referring to a turning point in the struggle with Germany during World War II, while we are discussing the transition from a more primitive and less social phase in the web revolution, into something more complex and, ultimately, more rewarding.

The points that Jeremiah makes to support his argument are very tactical, not looking at the strategic changes going on technologically or societally. His ‘trends’ aren’t really trends, but narrow extrapolations from recent events masquerading as business advice. They are these, in brief:

Trend 1: Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation

Trend 2: Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover

Trend 3: The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social

Trend 4: As space matures, business models solidify – giving room for new disruptors

These observations are interesting as far as they go, but aside from the ‘faster, small, and social’ I don’t think these are major, in any sense.

I’d like to offer a few trends that may be implied by Jeremiah’s lists or by the comments of various bloggers that he cites, but aren’t really characterized very well in his post.

It’s obvious that Jeremiah is caught up in the issues confronting three groups of web denizens posting their contributions posting on technology platforms based on a now well-established model of web publishing, which we call blogging. This is unexamined in his piece, but the model of a website made up of chronologically ordered posts with comments in a thread on each piece, and a variety of navigation or advertising widgets in the margin may be getting tired, and may not gibe with other modern advances in online media dynamics. At any rate, Owyang’s concerns seem to be directed toward three constituencies:

  1. Independent authors or analysts, who may find it harder to operate in a changed media world, or to make a living from blogging, if indeed very many did so.
  2. Blog network companies — like Techcrunch, Mashable, and The Next Web — that are confronted with the invasion of major media companies, consolidation, and turnover.
  3. And last, the ‘audience’ — by which Owyang means everyone else. I will put to the side that social media was supposed to be about the end of the audience — Jay Rosen’s famous ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ — and simply state that Owyang and the others groups he appears to be concerned about have largely internalized a media-centric worldview, while mouthing mostly empty platitudes about the power of social media.

He doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the problems of major media companies, which continue to be deadly serious, nor does he refer to the notable advances that media companies like The Atlantic have accomplished. Nor does he spend much time talking about the technology companies — like Tumblr, Twitter, and Flipboard — that are involved in the tectonic changes going on today; changes that make the ebb and flow of small-potato business models surrounding tech blogging look like the scrambling of ants underneath the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yes, we are veering into a new era of web media; and it’s about goddamned time.

Here’s a few of the most powerful trends, in summary:

  1. The rise of the web of flow, and the fall of the web of pages — Ubiquitous and highspeed connectivity and the emergence of a new breed of ‘genius’ mobile devices have led to a web in which information is perceived as and designed to be experienced in motion. The user experience has shifted from wandering around, searching for information, moving via URLs from page to page. Increasingly, information flows to us through the agency of solutions like Twitter, Tumblr, and Flipboard, mediated by social and algorithmic ‘engines of meaning’, as Bruce Sterling styled it. We are no longer experiencing the web as exploring a library, but more like a drinking from a fire hose.
  2. The social revolution and social tools — While a lot of the discussion about the rise of blogging talked about social media, the technology involved wasn’t particularly social. However, the emergence of network-based social tools — notably Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other niche offerings — have led to a dramatic and unprecedented change in information transmission: increasingly, people are getting their news and insight via social networks, channeled through other, known individuals. The simplest proof of this state change is that Twitter is now the emergency broadcast system, the canary in the coal mine, the first place that the most important information appears. These tools form the bloodstream and the nervous system for the connected world we now inhabit. And the blogs and other media tools that were principally about publishing pages in the previous era, are now primarily oriented toward pushing links and summaries into the social nervous system.
  3. Social learning, innovation, and curation — As the population online grows, piling into world-spanning social networks, there are a number of systemic changes. As Stalin is supposed to have said, quantity has a quality of its own. As the online population and social density online goes up, there are phase transitions involved, and I believe that somewhere in the past year or two, we passed through a threshold. As Mark Pagel argues, our level of social connection has grown to the point where new ideas can travel much more quickly and economically: this includes all ideas, not just those involved in tech blogging, but tech blogging too. The best ideas — and their originators — will rise to the top more quickly, and as a result, Pagel maintains that we have a lessened need for innovators, and at the same time we are learning more quickly than before. I believe that this is the complementary trend allied to the increased perceived need for good curators: the value of discernment — which ideas are more useful — has gone up, while the value of creating new ideas has gone down. And, of course, you can substitute ‘write yet another post about iPhone apps or the Zygna IPO’ wherever I wrote ‘idea’ or ‘innovation’.

Obviously, Owyang and those leaving comments on his post weren’t necessarily treating these trends. The post was ostensibly about the changes in the world of tech blogging, after all. But I don’t see how you can meaningfully explore that niche without the larger context.

Brian Solis sees the larger context as necessary as well:

I recently wrote about my thoughts on the state and future of blogs, which is of course far grander than the world of tech blogging. And as you can see, blogging is alive and clicking.

Yes, micromedia, video, and social transactions/actions are breaking through our digital levees and causing our social streams to flood. And, yes, Flipboard, Zite, and the like (get it?), are forcing our consumption patterns into rapid-fire actions and reactions. You have a choice. You are either a content creator, curator or consumer. You can be all of course. But, think about this beyond the mental equivalent of 140 characters. What do you stand for and what do you want to become known for? The answer is different for each of us. But, content, context, and continuity are all I need to learn, make decisions and in turn inspire others.

I don’t buy the consumer angle — after all, every person is curating for at least one person, themselves — so I consider it a cardinality distinction: curating for one is not appreciably different than curating for two or ten. All curators — of whatever degree of discernment — started by curating for themselves. But Solis clearly gets the big picture, and I agree totally that what is bubbling up today will make the web a place where we continue to come to learn, make decisions, and connect with — and perhaps inspire? — others to do the same.

This is the video of the recent keynote I presented at the Infopress Réseaux Sociaux (social networks) event in Montreal. The talk is called An Architecture For Cooperation, and is a much longer version of the TEDxMidAtlantic 2011 talk I gave last week, which should be available for viewing in a few weeks.

The slides for the Montreal talk can be viewed here. The slides are not shown in the video.

This topic will form the first chapter of the book I am writing, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not An Army. The most recent status update on that project is here, and if you’d like to be updated on the project, fill in your info, here.

Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture - NPR

Dan Clark via NPR

Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?

It’s a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.

Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet’s land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts for a third of all the emissions of greenhouse gases that humans release into the environment. (Those greenhouse emission come from clearing forests or grassland for crops, the emissions of methane from rice paddies, and the conversion of nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas.)

That’s bad enough, but Jonathan Foley from the University of Minnesota, who led this new analysis, says it’s likely to get worse. Demand for food is expected to double over the next forty years. Are we truly, to quote environmentalist Bill McKibben, facing the “end of nature”?

According to the new study, not necessarily. But avoiding mass deforestation and food scarcity is going to take some very big changes. Briefly: Big investments in food production in places (think Ukraine and Uganda) where current farm land isn’t producing as much food as it could; much more efficient use of water and fertilizer; less wasted food; and (controversy alert!) eating less meat. About 40 percent of the planet’s crops, according to this study, currently are fed to animals.

Unfortunately, the paper does not really explain how this will happen. There’s no global dictator who can, for instance, abolish feedlots where corn is fed to cattle.

The issues with terrestrial meat can’t be waved away by suggesting it will be banished. Like the other issues — water use, etc. — smarter approaches need to be undertaken.

Polyface farm style grassfed beef raising is probably the greatest return on sunlight turned into protein. And we will see the adoption of techniques (and others) that rely on raising meat animals on land that is unsuited to agriculture: like raising beef cattle and fowl on dryer grasslands and pigs in oak forests, and without feeding them grain.

The economics of food are already changing, since we are headed for an era of increased urbanism, and at the same time, a planet where connectedness is both a tool and a danger. The global food system — where apples come from China and tomatoes are shipped from Mexico to New York City, both of which are over 90% water — is inherently unsustainable, and is based on the low cost of oil, and our willingness to burn it without consideration for ‘externalities’ like climate change.

There are real dangers ahead, since the confluence of these trends — increasing demand for food, decreasing water resources, and increased cost for oil — suggests that sustainable agriculture is perhaps the greatest single challenge we face.

I believe that new web-based social tools — food tech — is of critical importance for the world, and I have a hard time imaging why world governments are not allocating serious money on these problems.

Are Social Tools Pushing Us Past β Superlinearity?

Tim De Chant comments on a 2009 research paper by Marcus Hamilton and colleagues which explores the mathematics of population density when humans first started moving out of Africa, around 50,000 years ago.

Tim De Chant, Density solidified early human domination

Our predisposition to living densely, they suppose, may have contributed to our stunning success beyond the savannas of Africa.

A sublinear relationship between population size and home range size—meaning that larger groups live at higher densities—imparts special advantages for species that can deal with the twin burdens of density, overshoot and social conflict. Overshoot describes a population that overwhelms its habitat, devouring all available food and otherwise making a mess of the place. Social conflict is as it sounds, where tight proximities provoke fights between individuals. Together, those snags can bring a once booming population to it’s knees.

But social animals are uniquely adapted to cope with those problems. For one, social behavior soothes tensions when they do rise. And when it comes to the necessities of life, density conveys a distinct advantage for social species—resources, chiefly food, become easier to find. Larger, denser populations squeeze more out of a plot of land than an individual could on his or her own.

Density itself wasn’t directly responsible for the first forays out of Africa. Those groups were were too small and dispersed to receive a substantial boost from density. They faced the worst the natural world had to offer, and many probably couldn’t hack it.

Where population density conferred its advantages was when subsequent waves of colonizers followed. Density allowed those people to thrive. They joined the initial groups, growing more populous and drawing more resources from the land. This made groups more stable both physically and socially—full bellies lead to happier and healthier people. As each group’s numbers grew larger, their social bonds grew stronger and their chances of regional extinction plummeted. In other words, once people worked together to establish themselves, they were likely there to stay.

It’s a heartwarming story the scientific paper tells in the unsentimental language of mathematics. It implies that the essential success of our species can be boiled down to one variable, β, and one value of that variable, ¾. The variable β is an exponent that describes how populations scale numerically and geographically. Its value of ¾ is significant. When β equals one or greater, each additional person requires the same amount of land or more—the group misses out on density’s advantages. But when β is less than one—as it is in our case—then a population becomes denser as it grows larger.

The degree of our sociality has allowed us to bend the curve of population density in our favor. If early humans had been an entirely selfish species—each individual requiring as much or more land than the previous—β would be equal to one or greater. We wouldn’t have lived at higher densities as our populations grew, and early forays beyond the savanna might have petered out. Instead of conquering the globe, we’d have been a footnote of evolution.

And here is where we can consider how this affects our modern lives. Population density may have aided our sojourn out of Africa, but it’s clear there are limits. Hunter-gatherer populations appear to be limited to around 1,000 people, depending on the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Technology has raised carrying capacities beyond that number—as evinced by the last few millennia of human history—but we don’t know it’s limits. A scaling exponent equal to ¾ may have helped our rise to dominance, but it also could hasten our downfall. Technology may be able to smooth the path to beyond 7 billion, but what if it can’t? What if ¾ is an unbreakable rule? What happens if we reach a point where density can no longer save us from ourselves?

I am betting that social tools — based on liquid media — and new levels of urban living will enable us to push β past 3/4. My prediction is that we will pass over a new threshold when 90% of the world’s population is living in urban settings, and 90% of the world is cooperating and collaborating through online social tools. In effect, we will change the equation by allowing higher degrees of social density while managing contention for resources through lower cost cooperative techniques.

The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state. It would appear that although high levels of publicity were able to draw new traffic to Google , few of them saw reason to stay. (via Failure to Launch: Google Growth Spurt Short Lived | Chitika Insights) Google+ is turning out to be might be just-another-failed-social-experiment for Google. I wonder why I can’t convince them to socialize Google’s core tools: Gmail and Google Calendar? Anyone listening? Update 11:56am: Others have analyzed the math better than I did: Tim Worstall via Forbes Note that the traffic jumped before it fell back again: so what’s the result of the interaction of those numbers? Well, if traffic was 100 when Google plus was invite only, then opening it up to all comers led to a 1,200 percent raise in traffic, then we’ve got traffic of 1,200. A 60% decline from 1,200 leaves us with traffic of 480 (doesn’t matter whether this is users, page views, visits or whatever, the math is the same). So, what the report is actually saying is that in less than a month traffic has risen 480%, or 4.8 times. Which isn’t, really, all that much of a failure. It has been pointed out to me that Chitika is a competitor of Google, as well, and may have an agenda here. I will revisit this as others come forward with other numbers, but the graph appears to support the idea that the surge of interest has tapered off, even if use is higher than before the opening of the beta. related Google+ Traffic Falls 60% After Public Launch [REPORT] (mashable.com) Google Plus Traffic Drops, 1269% Gains Erased (readwriteweb.com) Google+ Traffic Drop of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at) Google+ traffic drops 60% after public launch (digitaltrends.com) Google+ traffic drops 60 percent? (technolog.msnbc.msn.com) Why the talk about a 60% traffic loss to Google+ is (probably) alarmist nonsense (royal.pingdom.com)
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The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state. It would appear that although high levels of publicity were able to draw new traffic to Google , few of them saw reason to stay.

(via Failure to Launch: Google Growth Spurt Short Lived | Chitika Insights)

Google+ is turning out to be might be just-another-failed-social-experiment for Google.

I wonder why I can’t convince them to socialize Google’s core tools: Gmail and Google Calendar? Anyone listening?

Update 11:56am: Others have analyzed the math better than I did:

Tim Worstall via Forbes

Note that the traffic jumped before it fell back again: so what’s the result of the interaction of those numbers?

Well, if traffic was 100 when Google plus was invite only, then opening it up to all comers led to a 1,200 percent raise in traffic, then we’ve got traffic of 1,200. A 60% decline from 1,200 leaves us with traffic of 480 (doesn’t matter whether this is users, page views, visits or whatever, the math is the same).

So, what the report is actually saying is that in less than a month traffic has risen 480%, or 4.8 times.

Which isn’t, really, all that much of a failure.

It has been pointed out to me that Chitika is a competitor of Google, as well, and may have an agenda here.

I will revisit this as others come forward with other numbers, but the graph appears to support the idea that the surge of interest has tapered off, even if use is higher than before the opening of the beta.

related

Creators Shaped By The Crowd That Shares In The Creation: Kickstarter

I dabbled in Kickstarter, once, but didn’t get very far. I wrote a proposal for an art project called Eighth Continent, and it was accepted by Kickstarter’s team:

The social web is now central to modern human identity and social cohesion. Many consider it a place: a region we inhabit. Online, we share time, not space: but time is the new space.

The web is an ‘imagined community’ as defined by Benedict Anderson, with its own implied sovereignty. This means the members of this imagined community — The Eighth Continent — believe that other nations should claim no authority over it.

I propose to design and manufacture Eighth Continent passports, and to distribute them to all who believe themselves to be part of this imagined community. This is an act of political and artistic solidarity and a rejection of the premises that underlie the current world order, that acts to divide us and illegitimize us.

I decided not to go ahead with the project after a friend pointed me to the work of NSK, a European art collective that created passports as part of a not dissimilar conceptual purpose, indicating solidarity of the members.

But I am going forward with a new Kickstarter project in the next week, one I have been working up to for some time: a Kickstarter project to underwrite the work on a new book about the present and future of social tools and their impact on media, business, and society, provisionally entitled ‘A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine’. About that I will be writing more this week, and starting the Kickstarter side of things, too.

Because of that situation — both my earlier experimentation with Kickstarter, and my plans for the book project — I have been more attentive to information floating past about Kickstarter, so a piece today in the NY Times caught my eye. It is written by Rob Walker, who has raised funds through Kickstarter, and his experience led him to become curious as to how the company does what it does.

I was particularly struck by his description of the necessary but somewhat unobvious match between creators’ visions and the form factor and aesthetics of the service, embodied in the way that projects have to provide tangible value back to the donors in order to be funded, and the way that creators make their case:

Rob Walker, The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter

Most project creators I spoke to were interested in how to get the attention of potential donors and were especially curious about how the company makes certain decisions. For example, Kickstarter highlights projects on its blog and names three “Projects We Love” in a weekly e-mail newsletter. Those projects seem to quickly rack up pledges. The crowd may be voting with its dollars, but Kickstarter’s endorsement does seem to matter, just like any other gatekeeper’s.

I sat in on a meeting where the newsletter picks were made. During the half-hour or so Strickler and the team discussed the choices, I was struck by how often they talked not about the projects but about the pitches. “His video is so boring.” “What are the rewards?” “Why is this cool?” They were focused on the project ideas through the filter of “the Kickstarter project” as a form. “We have values,” Chen told me, and they boil down to prizing creators who respect its proc­ess. They favor creators who think through the rewards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience. In other words, the process doesn’t shape the aesthetic. It is the aesthetic.

Strickler sees this in a larger framework. Commerce, he says, shapes cultural output in subtle ways; he sees Kickstarter’s approach as a new alternative. “Money demands answers,” he told me. “People want to put money into things that they think will be successful, and to be successful you have to participate in the market, and the market has very specific rules.” That traditional set of rules, he continues, “dictates what people make” — like paparazzi photos, let’s say. A Kickstarter project, as a form, “really does open up what forms art can take,” Strickler muses.

That’s a great pitch. And the fact that Chen and Strickler have a genuine point of view about the forms creativity can take, and how to expand them, is the reason that Kickstarter is the breakout star of the crowd-funding notion. They embrace the crowd but don’t allow a free-for-all. They champion the underdog — but in particular the underdog who self-markets with aplomb. But if they hadn’t cared what “a Kickstarter project” would mean, then it would not have meant anything at all.

So, the background story is that Kickstarter is not some passive disposable launchpad for conventional creative projects, like a truck that carries paintings to a gallery. Kickstarter is the gallery, and like a gallery owner, Kickstarter’s part in the presentation and socialization of the artistic work being created and distributed is significant, at least in those cases that best typify the company’s arc. They are actively involved in the work, and its promotion and reception.

As I approach the second experiment in Kickstarter, I am going big, and embracing the deeper premise: there is a community of people — starting with the Kickstarter team, and then the larger community of donors — that I will be working with, hopefully, to create something really worthwhile.Worthwhile for me to invest the time and thinking in the work, but worthwhile for the donors, in terms of the investments of time and attention they give, and the value that they will get back.

And instead of just amassing a fat pile of paper in a box at the end of the 10 months I plan to dedicate to writing the first pass of the book, my writing will be shaped by the participation of the community of donors.

Part of that is based on the core Kickstarter credo: Money Demands Answers. People pledge cash to things that matter, that can make a difference in their own lives, that are about something other than the creation itself.

I already feel like the work I am undertaking will be more worthwhile, since I am already being shaped by the as yet imaginary crowd that will share in that creation.

And so I plan to involve participants in the development of the book, on a chapter by chapter, month by month basis, and to hold monthly webinars with the donors, including one-on-one conversations with the highest level patrons of the work.

More about the book project will be forthcoming — presuming that Kickstarter will approve my project — but I have delayed the launch several months, in part because I have been thinking about the basics of Kickstarter. I now see this as the direct echo of the themes in the book — the power of social tools to connect and change us, and through us, everything else — so it is especially pertinent to me, but it holds true across all those who take the Kickstarter path to crowdsource creative work.

AskObama Is a Meaningless Marketing Stunt - Umair Haque

Umair points out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes:

Umair Haque via

The promise of social technologies is to fundamentally reimagine and reboot yesterday’s crumbling institutions (and disempower the bumbling beancounters who run them). In political terms? They should be used — right now, right here, right this very second — to build a deeper democracy, one where via deliberation, citizens have a bottom-up impact on policy-making, which as it stands today is totally disconnected from and unresponsive to the general populace and unable to do much of anything about anything. They should be used to help ignite an authentic prosperity, by redrawing the boundaries of political freedom for the underprivileged and the powerless — and to blow apart a polity that protects and props up the privileged and the powerful.

What we don’t need is more of this: “People tuning out? Great — instead of actually improving stuff, hit ‘em with some marketing!!”

Sorry, Mr President: you’ve got the pundits, talking heads, and powers that be right where you want them (judging from the response you’ve gotten so far), but little old me? I’m not buying into your latest “campaign.” I’m not a “target.” I’m a citizen of a generation whose future is going up in smoke faster than you can say “credit default swaps.” And what you’re really telling me is this: in some parts of the world, social tools can fuel the revolutions that topple dictators. Here, in the nation that invented them? They’re used for marketing stunts.

Me? I’m not investing my time asking “questions” of a president who wants my “engagement” (Free today only! Get yours now!) yet seems totally, utterly disengaged with anyone not sartorially and financially gifted enough to wear a $7000 suit — “questions” that you know, I know, and my pet hamster knows will probably never have a hope in Hades of having an impact on anything except clogging up the cutting room floor.

There’s no possible way that President Obama is going to embrace a 21st century notion of ‘deeper democracy’. He’s a 20th century man, a moderate Republican leading the conservative wing of the Democratic party, and no firebrand techno-anarchist.

We’ll have to wait for some mutant to spring up, coming from outside the parties — and I don’t mean the Governor of some forgotten state out west — but a real populist, intent on a wholesale reconfiguration of the political system.

(h/t brycevc)

Generation Facebook - NYTimes.com

Katrin Bennhold via NY Times

Privacy concerns divide the generations almost as much as technology. “They have a very casual attitude to privacy,” says Wehleit. But that’s just it: The flipside of this attitude is that teens like Eva, Johannes, Leo and Arne are much less selfish with their knowledge than we were. They share their study notes not just among friends or in their class, but across the country: Abiunity.de is a goldmine of shared files on every exam subject on the German syllabus. Unlike us, many of them study regularly in groups and seem to be much better at it.

“They are much less hierarchical than you guys were,” observes my former biology teacher, Gerd Schiefelbein.

[…]

Today they use social networking to rally around the coolest band of the day and organize ad hoc parties with amazing turnout. As adults they will have the tools to rally large communities around the causes they care about at unprecedented speed. They don’t mind small tailored ads, but abhor big intrusive ones. They trust one another more than politicians and big companies. My bet is that they will be demanding customers and demanding voters.

At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching and learning should take place in the age of social networking.

“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.”

“We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class,” he adds. “Maybe they should ask us for some advice.”

One of the fundamental issues hasn’t changed since my day: they like to say the word ‘learning’, but mostly they mean ‘schooling’. Do what the teachers want you to do is mostly not about learning, its about conformity.

But the world of young people has dramatically changed — the social revolution — and schools have not kept pace. For example, there is no mention in this piece about trying to integrate social tools into the curriculum, only tales about the educators trying to keep it out.

I would like to find a school that has attempted to recast itself around social tools and their application to education: a social education case study.

The Changing World Of Analyst Firms

It’s interesting to read analysts writing about the changing world of analysts firms, especially the ones with apocalyptic pronouncements. As a soloist focused on a relatively narrow and young niche — social tools — I really don’t come into contact with large companies interested in conventional analysis like Gartner and Forrester provide.

HFS, Will the industry analyst business be dead in five years?

Short-term attention-span theater has taken over, and some analyst firms are oblivious. Very few people have the patience, or inclination, to read detailed reports any more.  Even just five years’ ago, many people only checked email two or three times a day, allowing them to focus on tasks that required a lot of deep-thinking, reading and writing.  Nowadays, most people are checking email constantly, scanning tweets, Facebook status updates, LinkedIn invitations and contributing to whatever social group or network with which they like to spend time. Research needs to be served up in bite-sized chunks to stand any chance of being read.  The analyst firms are slowly becoming aware that few people read their stuff anymore, but persist in “checking the boxes”, forcing their analysts to meet their report quotas each year.  Their problem is that their product and revenue model is based on numbers of reports and hours of enquiry time – they are serving up expensive macro services, where their clients now want the micro.

There’s too much “research” being produced that’s not telling us anything new. I am actually hearing major IT/BPO providers and C-suite buyside executives declaring that today’s “traditional” research “isn’t relevant to them anymore”.  They just don’t see the point in a lot of it.  They’ve figured out how to sell/buy their products and services, and dont need some primadonna in their ivory towers telling them what they already know, using big words such as “ecosystem” and “agility”.  They view analysts as useful sounding boards and occasionally get some competitive intel out of them, but that’s really all the value they currently get, beyond favorable positions in scatterplot charts and after-dinner awards.

[…]

Buyers don’t read research.  Fact. I can tell you from years of experience that buyers will only read a research report if their job depended on it and it’s forced down their throats.  However, buyers love learning things that help them do their job better – they like listening to real experts and learning from each other.  Analysts need to spend as much time as they can talking with buyers and becoming a focal point for idea-sharing, knowledge, data and validation of their strategies.  While some analyst firms know this, many of their analysts rarely have more than two or three buyers in their Rolodex.

The large analyst firms lack rock-star visionaries. In years gone by, there were countless big personalities emanating from the Gartners, IDCs, Forresters at al.  Sadly, that number has dwindled as these firms felt the need to control and scale their corporate brands and keep their payroll under control. Moreover, the last thing they want are clients calling up demanding to talk with Bill, not Ben.  Innovation is bred from people with vision and personality – and the more analysts are “standardized”, the more the personality is drained from the product.  Analyst firms need to create new visionaries for clients – and maybe even dust off a few of the old ones knocking around somewhere in the blogosphere.  Hell – the retirement age is 70 now, so let’s bring some of the old egos back!

I agree that analyst firms have a morbid fascination with writing fat reports, perhaps because they have contrived a great deal of their operations around their production.

To the extent that conventional analysis firms persist in the near future, they will have to shift gears, or better yet, shift their gearing: they will have to adopt social media tempo and form factors, and craft interactive relationships with their clients based on a dramatically more open research approach than they have traditionally employed.

I also agree about the rock stars comment, in part. The very best minds with most distinctive voices are unlikely to accept being homogenized by a corporate machine, or being forced to paint neatly within the lines.

48% Of British Companies Have Banned Twitter At Work - Shea Bennett

Survey shows the fear of British employers when confronted with an epochal upheaval in media:

A new survey of 2,500 British employers has revealed the impact the social media channels have made on businesses in the UK, although possibly not in the productive way you might think.

The research, conducted by PR firm Lewis Communications and IT firm HCL Technologies discovered that almost half of all British employers have banned Twitter and Facebook from the workplace, which perhaps suggests a continuing naivety of the benefits of social media for all businesses, and also raises questions about employee rights.

The study showed that 48 per cent of the UK companies polled have stopped employees sending tweets and status updates in the past 12 months, with 45 per cent of those surveyed doing so because they feared their business reputation was at stake.

Maybe this is an opportunity go build the right Twitter appliance: one that allows companies to listen well, analyze trends that could have an impact on their business, and carefully manage and monitor how employees interact with the outside world.

Could ultimately be a win-win.