Google Reader - Robert Scoble's shared items

Just Some Hope

via Geek And Poke by Oliver Widder on 10/30/08

Web 2.0 rose during the last crisis. Let's see what this crisis bears.

When people come up against the realtime experience, they have one of several fundamental reactions. The first, and most pervasive, is excitement, following almost immediately by mistrust. This is great, followed by How can I keep up with this? Next is bargaining: attempting to manage the flow through a combination of filtering and exclusion, reducing the noise but also in the process the surprise, the What you don’t know or don’t know you know.

Even in that first paragraph, all the elements exist: Realtime? So what. Mistrust - you betcha. Why am I being lectured to? Too many words without sufficient context. Why am I being dropped in the middle of this crap? All real reactions, a sort of gauntlet you’re forced to run to understand something you haven’t yet thought or want to think about. That’s realtime alright.

Before realtime we had the Web page, a nod to the cerebral. Here’s a document, with a title, author, corroborative links, supportive advertising or similar model, and attendant comments, linkbacks, and related archives. RSS came along and added a notification system to an organic information space that lived at the user’s discretion outside the boundaries of the originating sites.

RSS aggregators captured the contours of this refined information in one or more UIs, the river of news popularized by Dave Winer in his seminal Radio application and the 3-pane email views most recently dominated by NewsGator’s FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. When on-demand versions proliferated, Google Reader soon became the default container. It wasn’t until Twitter that the lead changed hands again.

Today, this minute, when information happens, Twitter or some micromessaging stream, delivers the nugget first. Links, which had lost some momentum as RSS spread, regain some of their power to maintain control of the flow from one object to the next. But conversational aggregation has also become a powerful container, from two competing directions.

The first, the Track function in Twitter, allowed realtime conversations to occur between discoverable points. That is, anyone on the Twitter network could monitor a thread of individual tweets, and then, by addressing someone with an @ reply, initiate a one to one conversation. Using Track at both ends on one of the participant’s names, the conversants could continue as long as they directly cited each other or used the mutual tracked name as a kind of conversation tag. Eventually, they could formalize the realtionship with mutual follows if necessary.

FriendFeed provided a more formalized alternative, first with threaded conversations and then with topics organized as rooms. Where Twitter conversations could be tracked in realtime via Track and delivered over XMPP in IM clients such as Gmail’s Gchat, FriendFeed was more leisurely delivered as an aggregation not just of Twitter but blogs, images, videos, and other services. As Twitter dropped both IM and Track, its value as a replacement for RSS readers grew along with its huge audience. In effect, Twitter became a universal controller for content, while FriendFeed captured more and more of the comment conversation around the content.

RSS aggregation had become a victim of its own success. Too much interesting content, not enough dynamic discovery of unexpected value, the growing competition from a threatened mainstream media, the quickening pace of the realtimesphere. Like the Web culture it absorbed before, RSS has spawned its conqueror. Realtime’s Darwinian efficiencies present both improvements in information processing and new problems to overcome.

Realtime harnesses social graph characteristics to improve prioritization. Faced with a limited amount of time to choose virtually unlimited resources, human filters outperform algorithms. I’d rather make decisions about how to invest my time based on a combination of what’s going on and what those important to me think important to them, than rely on filtering based on broader popularity, explicit voting, or link ranking.

A small number of Follows combined with Track produces a high degree of coverage on a daily basis. FriendFeed’s new realtime tools let you create imaginary friends to integrate Twitter follows who aren’t active in FriendFeed; Friends Lists let you mold realtime feeds into high value groups. Configuring FriendFeed to output comments to Twitter makes FriendFeed the input client. And we wait for Track, API access to creating imaginary friends, and other tools to filter in and out of FriendFeed’s aggregation services.

Let’s say we get all of these tools in place and Twitter returns Track as some kind of service for users if not competitors. How do we manage this volume of realtime data? With a new kind of media realignment.

Tech events adopt similar strategies, microcasting conferences, press Q&A’s, and product releases over chunk channels. Once sufficient industry support is realized, tech companies can provide microstreaming services to customers in their own verticals.

At least one of the record cartel announces a signing policy that offers new and existing artists realtime channels in return for a cut of performance and ancillary rights. Recordings are released first in realtime markets, with relaxed (free) release of concert, rehearsal, and private recordings bundled with the purchase of studio product.

As a condition of this new content distribution model, all microcast content must be made available to all microchannels, and microchannels who carry these materials must agree to support open standards that allow Track in realtime across all channels.

Realtime economics depend on the immutable fact that we don’t have the time for realtime. We need both speed and context, and only our social clouds can provide the self-knowledge necessary to process the flow efficiently. Many of the most valuable information streams are at crossroads where it may well be worth more to sign on to a realtime network with direct control of marketing, merchandising, and publishing. I’d suggest setting up imaginary friends, Friend Lists, and realtime streams from among the talent pool of these industries.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Three examples of great blogging

via Scripting News on 11/16/08

There's not enough great blogging, so when it happens, it's worth pointing out.

First what do I mean by great blogging?

1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).

2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.

3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.

Most blogging, like most journalism is pretty easy-going as you'll see in some of the responses to the three examples below. That makes it harder for people to do the right thing.

So here are the three examples.

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1. Allen Stern asks if others are uncomfortable that the President-elect is posting his videos to a commercial website, thereby favoring one company over another. (Most people answered no, some people put him down for asking the question. I said I support his concern.)

Update: Dan Farber addresses the issue head-on. As any reporter will tell you, the appearance of impropriety is every bit as bad as the impropriety. The incoming President can be forgiven (briefly) for favoring one company's product over another, but the dominance of that product is, imho, the opposite of an excuse. The President-elect should help create competition. I think competition is so important it should be written into the Constitution (it's not there unfortunately). The fact that the CEO of the company is on his board of economic advisers is a problem in its own right, and is compounded by Obama's favoring his product over competition. Yes, it matters. It really does.

2. Duncan Riley says, despite my kind words for Gabe Rivera, his algorithms are hidden and not clonable, and that there's a difference between sharing the feeds of the most-quoted sites and the sources he scans. He's absolutely right about that, and it's a question that should be dealt with, one way or the other. Either Rivera should disclose his algorithm and sources, and keep it current, or people should stop considering his sites anything other than his personal opinion about what's important. And even if it were just his personal opinion, its disrespectful of his readers to not say what his criteria are. People are scared to question Rivera because the algorithm is hidden, so they fear that if they're critical they'll stop getting pointers from TechMeme or Memeorandum, and because of his close relationship with Mike Arrington, whose site has always dominated TechMeme. These are things that would never be tolerated in the MSM, and shouldn't be in blogging. Riley has the courage to say so and that's appreciated.

3. Marc Canter expresses disappointment in the people who are being appointed to the Obama transition team related to tech policy. His points are all valid, I've had the same concerns. It makes it easier to express those concerns because Marc went first.

We owe these people more than the gratitude for having the courage to say what's obvious. So many others would rather look away from because powerful people don't want their secrets revealed and have ways of punishing people they don't like. Once one person sticks their neck out, it's easier for the second person to. To me, that's what blogging is about. Saying what needs to be said.

Update: Already getting pushback about the MSM line. I was thinking how most newspapers endorsed a Presidential candidate. They didn't just say "You should vote for Obama" -- they explained why they were saying that. This helps the reader understand the bias of the organization behind the newspaper, and their reasoning process. If the editorial board supports one candidate, it might be hard for them to tell you bad news about that person, or good news about his or her opponent. People have a right to know how you arrived at your decision, and if you're not saying why, that should also be explained. As far as I know, Rivera has never said one way or the other. Even so, I find value in his sites.

Some Thoughts on Walled Gardens and Social Operating Systems

via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life on 11/16/08

About a year ago I wrote up a definition of a social operating system in my post The Difference between a Social Network Site, a Social Graph Application and a Social OS which I think is worth revisiting today. In that post I defined a Social OS as

Social Operating System: These are a subset of social networking sites. In fact, the only application in this category today is Facebook. Before you use your computer, you have to boot your operating system and every interaction with your PC goes through the OS. However instead of interacting directly with the OS, most of the time you interact with applications written on top of the OS. Similarly a Social OS is the primary application you use for interacting with your social circles on the Web. All your social interactions whether they be hanging out, chatting, playing games, watching movies, listening to music, engaging in private gossip or public conversations occurs within this context. This flexibilty is enabled by the fact that the Social OS is a platform that enables one to build various social graph applications on top of it.

In retrospect, the fundamental flaw with this definition is that it encourages services that want to become social operating systems to aspire to become walled gardens. The problem with walled gardens on the Web is that they shortchange users. This is because the Web is about sharing and communicating with people from all over the world while walled gardens are about limiting you to interacting with people (and content) that are part of a particular online service or Web site. Thus walled gardens limit their users.

Jeremy Zawodny had a great post about this entitled There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS) where he wrote

Luckily, two of my coworkers caught on to what I was saying and managed to help put it into context a bit. First off was Matt McAlister (who runs YDN, the group I work in). In The Business of Network Effects he does a good job of explaining how businesses and services in a network are fundamentally different from those which are isolated islands.

Recalling a brief conversation we had a couple weeks ago, he says:

Jeremy Zawodny shed light on this concept for me using building construction analogies.

He noted that my building contractor doesn't exclusively buy Makita or DeWalt or Ryobi tools, though some tools make more sense in bundles. He buys the tool that is best for the job and what he needs.

My contractor doesn't employ plumbers, roofers and electricians himself. Rather he maintains a network of favorite providers who will serve different needs on different jobs.

He provides value to me as an experienced distribution and aggregation point, but I am not exclusively tied to using him for everything I want to do with my house, either.

Similarly, the Internet market is a network of services. The trick to understanding what the business model looks like is figuring out how to open and connect services in ways that add value to the business.

Bingo.

The web is a marketplace of services, just like the "real world" is. Everyone is free to choose from all the available services when building or doing whatever it is they do. The web just happens to be a far more efficient marketplace than the real world for many things. And it happens to run on computers that each need an operating system.

But nobody ever talks about a "Wall Street Operating System" or a "Small Business Operating System" do they? Why not?

Ian Kennedy followed up to Matt's post with The Web as a Loose Federation of Contractors in which he says:

I like Jeremy's illustration - an OS gives you the impression of an integrated stack which leads to strategies which favor things like user lock-in to guarantee performance and consistency of experience. If you think of the web as a loose collections of services that work together on discreet projects, then you start to think of value in other ways such as making your meta-data as portable and accessible as possible so it can be accessed over and over again in many different contexts.

Bingo again.

No matter how popular a particular website becomes it will not be the only service used by its customers. So it follows that no matter how popular a social networking site becomes, it will not be the only social networking service used by its customers or their friends. Thus a true Social Operating System shouldn't be about creating a prettier walled garden than your competitors but instead about making sure you can bring together all of a user's social experiences together regardless of whether they are on your site or on those of a competing service. If I use Twitter and my wife doesn't, I'd like her to know what I'm doing via the service even though she isn't a Twitter user. If my friends use Yelp to recommend restaurants in the area, I'd like to find out about the restaurants even though I'm not a Yelp user. And so on.

With the latest release of Windows Live, we're working towards bringing this vision one step closer to reality. You can read more about it in the official announcement and the accompanying blog post. I guess the statement "life without walls" also applies to Windows Live. Wink

Note Now Playing: T-Pain - Chopped N Skrewed (Feat. Ludacris) Note

I need a conference home

via Scripting News on 11/16/08

Stone, Camahort and Des Jardins have BlogHer.

Calacanis and Arrington have TechCrunch 50.

Steve Gillmor has The Gillmor Gang.

Loic has Le Web.

Klaus Schwab has Davos.

Tim O'Reilly has FOO Camp.

Tom Rielly has TED.

Etc etc.

There are a hundred tech, political and entertainment conferences each year, and people who speak every year at one or two of them (or more). It's good because you can hear what's on a person's mind, in their own words, with a chance to interact, once a year, like clockwork. Do that for five or ten years and you get somewhere, you hope.

These days I don't get many invites to speak. (Actually come to think of it I've never gotten a lot of invites to speak, I usually have to work at it. Basically I stopped working at it.) When I go to conferences I go as press, and I listen. I don't like talking from the audience. It may work for others, but it doesn't work for me. What works even better is watching on video, where the temptation to speak out loud is diminished (and harmless, expressing my opinion at a computer screen is like a tree falling in the woods with no one there).

I think I could do my part to draw people to a conference. But I wouldn't want to take on the responsibility for the whole show. I know what that entails, I've done it four times. When you take it on, it consumes most of your time for a quarter of a year. I just don't think that's a good use of my time, though it might be for others.

What I'm looking for is seven or eight people who have a blog or podcast following, who might want to partner on such an event. It would be an annual thing. There would be seven or eight slots, and they would be the same every year. We might recruit journalists or bloggers to lead the discussions, but the topics for each session would be driven by the seven or eight people. You could bring other people on stage with you. Demos. Videos. It's up to each person. The audience would be encouraged to participate, something like a BloggerCon, but not exactly. Each session would very much be driven and designed by the person whose name is on the session.

Berkman does something like this -- almost every conference has a group of repeat speakers. If you want to get an update on what they're thinking about, sign up for the conference. They're good speakers, intelligent thoughtful people. Teachers mostly, so they're good at presenting their ideas verbally. It works. I'd like to do the same thing, but with people from technology, politics and entertainment. I think there's going to be enough happening at the intersection of those areas over the next decade to make a series of annual events interesting. Of course there would be ample opportunity for schmoozing, which is why people really come to conferences, as we all know.

I'm not interested in doing this to make a lot of money, rather as a way to start a thread into the future, and to partner with people whose ideas I find interesting.

4 Great Papercraft Websites To Waste Time

via MakeUseOf.com by Simon Slangen on 11/16/08

Whether you’re bored at work, like to stimulate the nostalgia, or just love to craft, paper modelling is a real fun way for you or your kids to waste time.

Though it might seem like a somewhat childish hobby, there are really many kinds of papercraft, varying in theme and difficulty.

A lot of different guides and how-to’s are available on the net. Most of these services offer pre-printed lay-outs. This means you’ll just have to cut and paste to create a unique and original looking model or toy.

We’ll be discussing the more authentic forms of papercraft, like origami, but you’ll also learn how to fold block-headed celebrities from popular movie and game franchises.

Popular Origami

Origami is the Japanese branch of papercraft. It has been around for hundreds of years and is not planning to go away. Origami uses one or several square pieces of paper, each side in a different color. Only folding is allowed (those gluesticks and scissors won’t be needed), but the possibilities are endless.

Michael LaFosse started a website with fourteen simple and advanced origami types. Each how-to is accompanied by a video, which explains and shows you the process, step by step.

This accessible Popular Origami website is great to get a basic taste of the origami art.

Cubeecraft

Remember those block-headed famous figures I showed in the intro? Say hello to Cubeecraft.

Cubeecraft hosts tons of easy-to-make blocky figures, ranging from Usagi Yojimbo to The Joker. You just have to print the stencils, cut them out and fold them. That’s right, no glue needed either!

From time to time, more Cubees are added. Besides the normal stencils, Cubeecraft also publishes temporal Limited Edition themes, only for those who are quick enough.

Readymech

Other cube figures can be found on Readymech, a side-project of the Fwis graphical design firm.

These papercraft models do not resemble any popular franchise characters, but are all of very unique and original designs. To make these models you will need a pair of scissors, glue or double-sided tape and a printer.

Advanced Papercraft on Creative Closeup

This is not a site which hosts guides and/or stencils, but nevertheless one that just had to be mentioned.

Creative Closeup composed a list of “100 Exceptional Free Paper Models and Toys”. These include some of the most advanced pieces of papercraft I’ve ever seen.

Instead of just folding five or six lines, you’ll create immensely detailed papercraft models. These include a motorcycle (released by Yamaha), where you need to separately manufacture the tank, the frame and even the exhaust pipe!

If you’re tired with the cube figures and up for a (serious) challenge, this is a must-try!

So what do you think? Are you for the traditional, popular or insane approach? Maybe you have some nostalgic memories about paper crafting, or you might know other (maybe even better) sites. Let other people know by leaving a comment below.

(By) Simon is a student from Belgium who wastes his time relaxing, gaming and surfing the net. He would tell you to check out his blog, only he doesn't have one (yet)!

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Tags:modelling, models, origami, papercraft, stencils

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What Is Wisdom?

via steve clayton: geek in disguise by stevecla01 on 11/16/08

From people who really ought to know.

I’d sort of decided I wasn’t going to buy this book but then Charlotte sent me a link to the video and right after Robert Redford I changed my mind.

It’s now on my Christmas list as we’re officially in the blackout zone where I’m not allowed to buy anything for myself.

The Company as Wiki: A Conversation with Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson

via Peter Hirshberg's weblog on disruptive culture and technology on 11/16/08

At the Google Zeitgeist conference this September I interviewed Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson about his efforts to accelerate the company’s growth strategies through the use of social media. We often think of social networks, wikis and the like as impacting only marketing or the media, but Best Buy is a great example of how they can fundamentally transform the enterprise and the art of management. And in so doing unleash new productivity, creativity and a smarter customer experience. I think Best Buy is a leading indicator what businesses will start to look like in the near future, which is why I found Anderson's insights so relevant.

I’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat to many of these developments: our company, The Conversation Group, has worked closely with Best Buy’s VP of Internet Strategy Michele Azar over the last year on implementing some of these changes and fostering an open, collaborative approach to partners, employees, customers and developers. The talk with Brad opened with a short video highlighting much of what Best Buy has been up to: click on the player below to view my entire conversation with Brad Anderson, starting with “the company as Wiki.”

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson in conversation with Peter Hirshberg at Google Zeitgeist from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

I first asked Anderson how a company that grew up in the distribution and product availability world came to adopt social networks, predictive markets, and an open approach to innovation and cooperation. Traditionally, we associate companies like this with classic top-down management approaches. Brad points out that as their business challenge shifted from simply distributing product to insuring customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the wisdom of everybody made sense.

click here to view

Flips The Role Of Leadership

Next we discussed the impact all this had on traditional management and managers. Brad told me that it “absolutely flips the role leadership” since great ideas often come from the edge, not the brass. And, all this “ can be murder on middle management”

click here for Brad's comments

The Perfect Storm

One reason Best Buy provides insight into management to come is the perfect storm of a workforce and business challenge faced by Best Buy. The company has 170,000 employees, most of them of the under 30 net-generation that grew up with collaborative technology. They go to work every day solving technology problems for customers, where they are all potential experts. In retail, Brad told me, “You are exactly as motivated to deliver service as you feel like you are engaged in the work… so if you can create your job, you’re a lot better off!”

click here for Brad's comments

Marketplaces

Next we discussed some specific projects: the “Loop Marketplace” which replaces the suggestion box with a market where employees can submit and share ideas…and often get them funded. And a prediction market (like a stock market simulation) that was dead-on in predicating Christmas sales because, “It reveals insights in the system that aren’t captured by the hierarchy.”

click here for this part of the conversation

Blue Shirt Nation: The Best Buy Social Network

Here we discuss Blue Shirt Nation…the employee social network which was build by Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling in the advertising department to garner customer insight from employees. But from the moment it was turned on it was clear that employees would call the shots on this system and define how it would be used.

Click here for brad's comments

Self Organizing Work

One of the most dramatic examples of using a social network like Blue Shirt Nation to surface employee talents and enthusiasm is the case of The Employee Tooklit. When the IT system that employees used in store was getting tired and old, six employees (who turned out to be very talented computer geeks and coders) came to corporate and rewrote the system themselves in six week for a couple hundred thousand dollars (spent on pizza, coke, and hotel rooms.) All to the astonishment of the company’s IT consultant who said the project should cost $6,000,000 and take the better part of a year. Talk about unearthing hidden talent and creating new career paths for your employees!

Chick here as Brad discusses the Employee Toolkit

Brad talks about the fact that when you start using social technology to connect employees, everyone become a lot more aware of each individuals talents and stories. And this can lead to a lot more productivity and creativity. This has become something of a mantra at the company, under the mantle of I Am Best Buy. This thinking is beginning to affect strategy company wide. For example, this year's Holiday TV campaign is all about the highlighting the individual stories of Best Buy employees. It was shot by documentary film maker Errol Morris and blogged about here by Best Buy CMO Barry Judge. This is a direct example of how the "Company as Wiki" thinking is impacting the company's brand. By making the brand a lot more about people, it opens up up avenues for more social marketing in the future.

This theme of using the social network to tap unexpected employee talents shows up repeatedly. When employee participation in the company’s 401k plan was sub par, it was the employees themselves who took on the problem in a way that an HR department never could.

Click here for the the Case of The 410k Program

This has all lead to half the employee turnover Best Buy used to experience, and its also highlighted the importance of culture and values in management. In the days of top-down command and control, you could get away with telling employees what to do via procedures. When so many employees are collaborating, creating content, and inventing things only a shared culture to can deliver aligned behavior. Now, corporate values serve as boundaries and management tools the way process used to.

Brad's observations here

Mobile and The Customer Experience

The same activities that are being used internally, are now driving external customer experience, growth, and revenue generating activities. Best Buy employee Ben Hedrington articulates how the company's mobile strategy might evolve, and Brad comments on why Best Buy is increasingly in the customer experience business.

View the conversation here

Brad observed that while Best Buy is just at the beginning of deploying systems that tap the networked wisdom of its people, this is clearly one of the most powerful growth strategies he's ever encountered. The collective knowledge of customers, suppliers, and employees can lead to both a more informed customer support and relationship experience, as well as a better retail experience. The company initially grew by opening several thousand stores. Now there is the opportunity to open thousands of virtual stores, tapping the experiences, networks, and insights of its many people.

My question to Brad here

As we wrapped up, I showed brad a clip an employee at the Best Buy call center as she used Twitter to monitor the lousy experience a customer was having at a competitor, and how Best Buy intervened. Brad talks about the future and about how much more fun and productive enterprises will become as they move from top down, command and control to actually tapping the capabilities and networks of employees and customers.

Watch here

In spending time with Best Buy over the last year, its been interesting to watch how consciously they've been wrestling with the meaning and impact of collaborative technologies. They've realized that the best ideas bubble up, emergently.So management doesn't dictate what's gonna work, it has to listen for it. And then nurture it. There is also a darwinian aspect to all this: Best Buy has allowed for a large number of experiments to happen and then resources the ones that work. Not quite ever having enough resources forces collaboration between the various teams working on projects as they need to come together in a broader strategy. And the CEO himself has been recognizing and highlighting this success, which creates a culture if innovation even in a company facing the incredible challenges of today's retail environment.

Yelling vs. Whispering. Introvert or Extrovert.

via gary vaynerchuk by garyv@winelibrary.com (Gary Vaynerchuk) on 11/11/08

Embracing who you are and pumping out great content is the key to building a business! Whether you are an introvert extrovert it really doesn’t matter it comes down to what you bring to the table. Do you have the chops?

Robert Scoble's shared items