Category: Uncategorized

Ever wonder why Flickr, Frappr, Soonr, Zooomr and a host of other companies are spelled the way they are? Link to the full interview here..

“After hitting it big during the dot-com boom of the 90’s, the tech world’s best-known letter comes out of seclusion for a rare conversation.

The flurry of activity in “Web 2.0” has unleashed a number of rising stars. Perhaps the best known is photo-sharing site Flickr, but others such as 37Signals and del.icio.us have also ascended to prominence over the past eighteen months. However, the darling of the dot-com bubble — the letter “e” — is conspicuously missing and has decided to take a wait and see attitude this time around.

In an exclusive e-mail exchange with our editors, the reclusive vowel talks about what he’s been doing since the year 2000, his investment strategy, and his thoughts on whether we’ve entered a new technology bubble. He joins us from his yacht just outside of Antibes on the French Riviera (recently purchased from legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins).”

Link to the full interview here.

Doc is stranded with the kid in Dulles.

His story triggered a memory a few years old. A while back, I took a trip with the male offspring, and we were traveling in the dead of winter from Whitefish, Montana back to the Bay Area. He was about 2 1/2 at the time, and we ended up stranded in the Missoula airport after a similar connection debacle. The whole trip, end-to-end, was about thirteen hours.

It was, for all intents and purposes*, effortless.

The big “a-ha” for me was that, from his perspective, he hadn’t yet formed the abstract concept of being “late.” Everything he was doing was in the moment…from running around the airport to looking at planes to playing games to staring at the mangy stuffed grizzly in the lobby. It was just another day of adventure, which they all are at that age.

Thanks again for that, little guy. You taught me a lot that day about perspective.

* – which is neither “intensive purposes” nor “intensive porpoises,” which I’ve also heard. gah.

(photo credit: johnny jet)

“I really believe that in our increasingly global economy, the more a business aspires to be a successful globally integrated enterprise, the more local and personal the customer relationships must be. Products and services might be commodities, but you never, ever want your customers to feel like they, too, are just commodities. A successful business will make each of its clients feel special by understanding and addressing their unique requirements, and quickly solving problems when they come up. This is really hard, which is why it may very well be most important way for a business to stand out from its competitors.” — Irving Wladawsky-Berger

(via Nellie Lide and Francois)

There are a huge number of parallels that are constantly being drawn between systems design and architecture. In particular, danah boyd goes down this path in “from architecture to urban planning: technology development in a networked age.” danah writes:

“I’m reminded of a book by Stewart Brand – How Building Learn. In it, Brand talks about how buildings evolve over time based on their use and the aging that takes place. A building is not just the end-result of the designer, but co-constructed by the designer, nature, and the inhabitant over time. When i started thinking about technology as architecture, i realized the significance of that book. We cannot think about technologies as finalized products, but as evolving architectures. This should affect the design process at the getgo, but it also highlights the differences between physical and digital architectures. What would it mean if 92 million people were living in the house simultaneously with different expectations for what colors the walls should be painted? What would it mean if the architect was living inside the house and fighting with the family about the intention of the mantel?

The networked nature of web technologies brings the architect into the living room of the house, but the question still remains: what is the responsibility of a live-in architect? Coming in as an authority on the house does no good – in that way, the architect should still be dead. But should the architect just be a glorified fixer-upper/plumber/electrician? Should the architect support the aging of the house to allow it to become eccentric?”

I think in a co-created world, the role of the tender-of-the-system is a bit different even from what danah alludes to in the last paragraph above. With millions of individuals interacting with a system, it would be impossible to “architect” where the system should go once the system begins to interact with its environment. And the tender-of-the-system certainly should not be locked into the role of the glorified fixer-upper/plumber/electrician. Not only is it not fulfilling, it also eventually dooms a system to stagnancy.

When there are millions of forces acting on a system, isn’t it necessary for that system to become more biological in nature, to absorb and react to the various forces acting on it? And if so, shouldn’t the role of the system’s steward be more like that of a gardener — watering over here, providing a trellis for support over there, and even pruning where it is required in order to ensure the vibrancy of the whole system, while still allowing it to grow and interact and exhibit emergent properties that could never have been forseen?

JP Rangaswami coins a great phrase, “the enterprise immune system,” over at the Confused of Calcutta blog. JP writes:

“As far as I can make out, enterprise immune systems tend to try and reject the implementation of social software on one or more of five grounds:

The McEnroe Defence. You cannot be serious. This isn’t work. It’s a waste of time. Just look at the terms used: blogs, wikis, chat, Really Simple Syndication. You’re paid to do hard work, do you think this is a holiday camp? Next you’ll be asking for massage parlours and pedicures and pool tables. Get real.

Ostrich-Head-Meets-Sand. I have enough trouble trying to manage my e-mail and voicemail, now you want me to look in more places for more things and spend more time doing that. What are you, some kind of sadist? Just make my e-mail work, will you? And leave me alone.

It’s All Rubbish Anyway. Just look at the crap that gets published and circulated. What’s the matter, suddenly you think everyone’s an expert? if you really think so, we don’t need you, do we? So go fire yourself and leave us real experts to get on with our jobs.

Say It Ain’t So, Clayton. Look, I just want what I already have to work faster, cheaper, better. What do you mean, Innovator’s Dilemma? I’ll give you Dilemma. Some of us have real jobs and don’t have time to read.

Where’s The Beef? So show me the ROI, get the business heads to sign up and commit, get the finance guys to vet independently, then do it. No tickee no payee.”

In the post, JP paricularly addresses the “It’s All Rubbish, Anyway” objection, and nails it. (Go read the whole thing, including the comments.)

Although the original context is around social software, I think the objections above (especially numbers 2, 4 and 5) are endemic, and are roadblocks in the face of many (most?) kinds of organizational change.

In overcoming these objections, Ross Mayfield and Suw Charman have put together a great article entitled “An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise.” Buried in the article is the nugget that I think is the most relevant, lead by example. The best thing about this approach is that anyone can do it. If it’s the right approach, others will follow (although it may take a while). That’s where the core of real, sustainable change comes from…not from top-down mandates or arbitrary process change.

I’m interested in your thoughts. In general (i.e. doesn’t need to be related to social software), does anyone have any good stories of how they effected change and addressed one of the objections noted above?

Sen. Ted Stevens: It’s A Series of Tubes (dance remix), from here.

Back story on Sen. Ted Stevens/The Internet Is A Series Of Tubes here. And Jon Stewart’s take.

(image credit: boldheaded)

In his post, “The Next Web Is The Human Web,” Scoble writes:

“Quick, do a little project with me. Visit the home pages of Nestle and Quixtar.

Without clicking anywhere find me a real human being. Not one made out of a stock photo agency.

You don’t need to look. There aren’t any. Not to mention that you can’t talk to a real human being. And I don’t see anything on those two pages that I’d like to link to. Which means they won’t get high search engine rankings no matter how many SEO firms they pay.

Which is like throwing money down the toilet. If you met THE PEOPLE behind these companies I think you’d be far more likely to listen to what they have to say. Or sell. And they ARE experts on their business. It’s a damn shame that they aren’t allowed to talk with us on their Web sites.” (emphasis added)

Bingo. This is why Haystack networking is going to be a huge business.

Bonus link: Ross Mayfield
And one more: ThinkGeek

A few weeks back, Dave Gray reframed the way I thought about the word create-ive. Now, Doc has reframed the way I think about blogging. Doc states:

“I don’t deny that I am sometimes on stage and sometimes an audience member (the latter more often than the former). But I’m uncomfortable with the theater metaphor (Shakespeare withstanding), at least in respect to blogging. I think bloggers have readers, not audiences. And I think the distinction is important, if not essential…'[Blogging] is Theater’ is an example of what cognitive linguists call a conceptual metaphor, or a frame. It’s something we think and talk in terms of. Meaning, we borrow a concept (a frame) and and its vocabulary to understand and talk about a subject. There are entailments to the theater metaphor. One is the old top-down media that really were comprised of performers and audiences. Because peer practices like blogging and podcasting don’t require the same asymmetries, why continue to use an asymmetrical frame when symmetrical one will do?“

Spot. On.

Put another way, here’s a hypothetical situation. You go to the grocery store, and run into an old friend in the bakery aisle and start getting caught up. Pop quiz: Which one of you is the audience?

Exactly.

There is no hierarchy. There is no power gradient. Neither one of you is the “audience.” Sure, the roles change back and forth as the conversation flows, but, ultimately, it’s a partnership and a collaborative effort and exchange. Sometimes one party may be speaking more, sometimes the other, but at the end of the interaction, the experience that has been shared has been a jointly created one.

Chris Brogan’s recent post, Connect, Connect, Connect, is spot-on.

One thing I’d add…like Surowiecki’s admonition in Wisdom of Crowds for “cognitive diversity”, connections for me are the most enlightening when they span many different groups. Geeks. Artists. Business people. Supporters. Skeptics.

The most interesting things happen where the edges meet.

Get outside your comfort zone. There are a lot of neat things to learn out there, if you make the effort to meet the people who know them.

Update: This is what happens without a diverse network.

I’ve been on hold with “The New AT&T!” for about ten minutes now. The hold music? An enless loop of a horrible cover of the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute By Minute.”

Yes, as I sit here on hold, I hear a loop of

Minute by minute by minute by minute
I keep holding on…

That’s the only part of the song that’s playing. On a loop. Indefinitely.