Year: 2008

• Josh Bernoff – "Are Your Customers Ready for Social Applications?
• Mark Glaser – "The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct ot the Public"
• Doc Searls – "Leveraging Free"
• Nancy White – "The Slow Community Movement"

Download this slide from SlideShare.

Data Credit: Forrester, Inc.
Image Credit: thivierr

Our customer BlogHer just launched
their new BlogHer Guide to Political Bloggers.  Neat stuff, built on top of Cerado Ventana.  (But i’m biased
:-)).

Check it out. From the BlogHer page:

"We’re excited to announce our latest project, BlogHer’s
Guide to Political Bloggers, brought to you by BlogHer’s politics team
and our friends at Cerado.
While we love the many blog-lists that abound of amazing political
blogging by women, we got tired of trying to guess which state bloggers
are from and/or which party they’re in or leaning toward. That’s why,
as a non-partisan guide to women who blog, BlogHer has developed a
widget that you can instantly categorize your blog in and find other
bloggers. You can:

• Search by state
• Search by blogger’s first or last name
• Search by political party using the color key:

Blue = Democrat
Green = Green
Gray = Undecided
Khaki = Libertarian
Orange = Independent
Purple = Other/Multiparty
Red = Republican

This guide is incredibly easy to use –both to list your blog and
then to post on your blog, too. We’ve pre-loaded it with a few bloggers
we know, but hey — we don’t want to make a mistake about where you live
and what you think! So rather than pour all 700-ish blogs from the
BlogHer Politics blogroll into the mix, we think it’s better if you add
your blog."

If you still have questions, use the Help button, let us know or see it in action. 

"If it happens twice it’s coincidence; if it happens three times, it’s a trend." – Anonymous

For the past few months, I’ve been dealing with one of those gut, right-brain feelings — not enough hard data to draw the graph, yet well-more than enough to get the spidey senses on alert.  That gut feeling tells me that business is about to get really weird.  Happily, I also have a feeling that ultimately said weirdness is going to manifest itself in a positive, transformative way.

The key driver behind this feeling has been the humanization of so many organizations that, heretofore, have been opaque and, well, corporate.   Dell.  GM.  Salesforce.  Wells Fargo.  Oracle.  In all of those cases, the organizations have started to make transformations from being purely represented in the marketplace by their sanitized, focus-grouped-to-death marketing departments into organizations where at least some identifiable number of their employees or representatives are having "real" identities online that integrate both their "corporate" and "human" sides.

As we discovered here, individuals from Big Companies self-identify online with a variety of sites online that they state as their "home base."  For many of us, our blogs are "home" — when someone asks us "where can I find you online," we give our blog URLs.  (This is the camp into which I fall.)  For many others, a Twitter stream, or even a Facebook or LinkedIn profile might be that touch point.  Some of us have separate homes, one for our "professional" self, and another for our "personal" self, perhaps even under a pseudonym.  I have a feeling (again, no hard data here) that the generation coming online now will more strongly identify with themselves and their peer networks, rather than any organizational home online, regardless of how benevolent that organization may be.

Here are three other posts that are poking on different side of this:

Umair Haque: "There’s only one real answer: rethinking strategy itself. A world of
cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the
edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and
what’s not."

Fred Wilson: "We are in the midst of a groundbreaking shift from a centralized
economy dominated by large "orthodox" companies to a "edge economy"
dominated by end users."

Jeff Jarvis: "Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things
less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite:
release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid."

What do you think?  Will organizations continue to fragment, and become more networked and organic, or is the current vogue of online individualism merely an outlier that will eventually return to a more traditional strategic state?

• 
  How Free Goes Viral – "In the beginning, no one will believe you. Stick with it long enough,
  experience breakthrough, and you’ll have more business than you know
  what to do with."
• Talent, Systems and Relationships – "[Organizational systems] don’t know how to deal with
  relationships, character, ethics and the multitude of tangents to those
  ideas. Why is this? Is this a personal issue?"
• And, just for fun, a cat playing a Theremin (via Make).

"Networks don’t have people.  People have networks." – Demian Entrekin

Was having dinner with Demian earlier this week, and the quote above was a pure moment of clarity.  He is absolutely, 100% right.  And, in those seven words, I think he summed up the next five years of our industry. 

Other data points:

Doc writes: "We have many relationships online. All of them, however, are defined and controlled (sometimes from both sides) within each company’s silo. What we don’t have are personally controlled global approaches to relationship, including privacy variables."

Dave McClure writes: "’Web 3.0′ is the condition which exists when someone is always ‘logged in’ on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password."

And Kevin Werbach brings it home: "One of the key questions for the Network Age is the interplay of aggregation and fragmentation…should we own our own identity though some user-centric ID model? Will change happen top-down, or bottom-up?"

The points above seem to point in a clear direction.  We’re heading to an inflection point that is as significant as the move from mainframe to PC.

Having my information (social network connections, preferences, purchase history, etc.) stored in someone else’s silo makes no sense.  Having my information stored in (literally) dozens of silos makes even less sense.  (Yes, dozens.  Think about it.  Your information is in Facebook, and LinkedIn, and innumerable CRM systems like Salesforce — one for each vendor you deal with — and in Visa’s systems, and in…you get the point.)

The right point of integration is around the individual.  Each of us is the center of our own universe.

(image credit goes to the inimitable david armano.  cross-posted to the conversation hub.)

• Doc Searls: Who Is In Charge Of My Privacy? –  Great conversation going on in the comments

• Blogher: How Social Media Is Really Being Used – Survey results of a study covering over 5000 respondents (PDF)

• Guy Kawasaki: Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook – Some good tips in here

Spatially Relevant: "Without common tribal understanding, you get inconsistent execution."

A must read from Mike Arrington, The Centralized Me.

Running out the door now, more soon.

Related: VRM Scenarios (the "Centralized Me" concept is relevant to the "Me-Ville" (top left) and "Global Village" (top right) scenarios)

This week is Net Neutrality week on the SuperNova ConversationHub.  What is "Net Neutrality?"  Here are a few resources and links that can provide the basics.

A Definition of Network Neutrality

"Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days. Indeed, it is this neutrality that has allowed many companies, including Google, to launch, grow, and innovate. Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want Congress’s permission to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the Internet.”

Source: Students for Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality – An Overview Video from Public Knowledge

(Permanent link to the Publc Knowledge Net Neutrality video)

Now, that said, there are cogent counter-arguments as well, mostly from a "let's keep the government out of as many things as possible" view.  One point of view, from Will Richmond in the comments here.  Richmond:

"I'd remind everyone of three critical things.

First, there is no substantive evidence of broadband ISP bias today, so while it's tempting to reach for net neutrality as a preventive medicine, suspicion of nefarious intentions is not a sufficient basis for government intervention. Start down this preemptive road and you’re quickly on the slippery slope of unchecked government intrusion into our daily lives.

Second, for those who don't think it's appropriate to give big broadband ISPs the benefit of the doubt, let's not forget that they privately financed the multi-billion dollar investments required to bring broadband Internet access to virtually all American homes. There’s been no government funding of this massive infrastructure build-out. It’s all a result of the free market system at work. And the record speaks for itself, there’s no evidence that ISPs have bias against anyone to improve their economic return.

Third, let’s not lose sight of the fact that multi-billion dollar content and technology companies are behind this net neutrality push. How ironic is it that this community of ardent free marketers should now be looking to the government to preemptively impose regulation? Would they want to be pre-judged as bad actors, requiring preemptive government intervention in their industries? No chance. They want the government as far away from their operations as possible.

I’m far from an apologist for big cable operators and telcos. I know their warts as well as anyone. And I’m not against regulation when it’s appropriate. But I am opposed to it when there’s no evidence to warrant it. Such is the current situation with net neutrality."

(N.B. And, for a more humorous view, here's an Ask A Ninja video on Net Neutrality.  And, for the record, I too would like some backup singers.)