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    Scott Berkun: The Art of Project Management

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    Richard Lanham: The Economics of Attention

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    Richard Lanham: Revising Business Prose

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Zefrank’s Ugly MySpace Contest and Long Tail Aesthetics

“Ugly when compared to preexisting notions of taste is a bummer, but ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool” zefrank

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the do-it-yourself page design of eBay sellers, so I was really intrigued when Bryan Zug mentioned zefrank’s ugly MySpace contest. If you are looking for a good concrete example to illustrate the ideas about cultural production that Benkler is putting forth in Wealth of Networks, watch this video.   

Ze responds to a comment that he is mocking people with no artistic training or education, and he gives a very clear explanation about why untrained design is important at this point in time. Up until recently the capital required to produce artistic work was so prohibitive that rigorous and narrow rules developed regarding what was good taste or bad taste, and access to the apparatus of production was denied to all but a few. (He gives the example of the cost of $600K in the 60’s to design and cut a font family). He goes on to explain, people who trick out their myspace pages aren’t being influenced by the criteria of the design world, but they aren’t naive either. The accessibility of cheap and easy to use tools like iMovie and Movie Maker have created a formal awareness of meticulous artistic processes like movie editing. As easy to use authoring tools become more widely available and used, entirely new aesthetic criteria will emerge and things won’t look the way that today’s design elite would want. And that’s a very good thing.

To quote Chris Anderson’s original Long Tail article “And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”

Here’s an analogy from my own experience about how things are playing out: I used to listen to National Lampoon albums like That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick over and over again because there just weren’t that many places to find that kind of humor. Today, I get almost daily podcasts from The Onion that are every bit as funny. And in the podcast world, The Onion is in the same category as traditional, overproduced media with a corporate smell, so we’re only at the very beginning.

BTW –here’s the winner of zefrank’s contest.  And I gotta admit, it’s exciting design.

July 20, 2006 in Books, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

John Hagel’s vision makes a good subject for Vaill’s methods

Although Vaill’s book was published a decade ago, it’s still quite relevant and seems particularly to resonate with issues that arise around web services. In his book Out of the Box, John Hagel describes web services in the context of trends that should scare any manager not comfortable leading through white water. He also has ideas about learning that mesh nicely with Vaill’s approach to managing process in complex systems. To get an overview of these ideas listen to this podcast about the new book Hagel coauthored with John Seely Brown, The Only Sustainable Edge.

One aspect of that title’s meaning is the idea that key learning takes place at the organizational edges where enterprises collaborate. Managing that learning is the key to strategic advantage. As companies shed business types in order to focus where they have world class capabilities, they will need to collaborate effectively with organizations that can deliver the business functions that get outsourced. (A simple example would be a firm that specializes in product innovation and commercialization using a vendor for customer relationship management.) It’s a web services world because such arrangements require flexible and low cost connections to integrate partners into a smoothly functioning system. As multiple companies with complementary business specialties come together, each member is driven to accelerate their own performance and deepen their particular expertise in order to deliver business value.

Within an interconnected business ecosystem, leadership becomes a function of directing your organization’s learning to develop the increased specialization that will drive business value across the system. But when you are asking managers to bet their success on a system that extends beyond the enterprise itself, you are asking them to jump into a continual white water situation, and here Vaill’s ideas can be usefully brought into play.

Vaill identifies three special learning challenges that apply where people are grappling with the inter-subjectivities of a continual learning situation. When managers are balking and feeling a loss of control, these are key points to bear in mind about their anxiety:

  1. You can never know everything there is to know about a system, so be aware that you are asking your audience to abandon the comfort of their autonomous boundaries “because a system is open to its environment . . . and because all its internal elements influence each other and the whole in complex and often unpredictable ways” (109)
  2. Managerial leaders are deeply involved members of the organizations they are trying to understand as systems, so remember that the observation affects the observer, “inquiry into a social system alters its dynamics and has an impact back on the inquirer” (110).
  3. “Systems thinking is content-free in its essentials” so remember that people don’t like to think in abstractions, and you if you force them to, then in a literal sense they “may feel they do not know what they are talking about” (110) Give them something concrete to hang onto.

Later in his book, Vaill presents Keen’s approach to filtering out subjective noise like the challenges above. There are three sequential elements: phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation, and the interpretation. Moving through these modes creates content that can usefully flesh out amorphous abstractions.

  1. Phenomenological reduction is “a decision to try to let the thing we encounter be what it is, separate from our perception of it” (161). This step helps you remove yourself from the equation and look at the thing qua thing. Vaill uses the example of visitors from one culture traveling to meet with business partners from another. If you want to figure out the right way to structure the visit don’t start by focusing on your role, but by mapping out what it is that makes up a “visit” so you understand all the components of the dynamic before assigning roles.
  2. “Imaginative variation is the almost playful combining and recombining of the various modes of the situation’s being” (161-162) This type of brainstorming starts to put us back in control as we rearrange the composite elements of a situation or project.
  3. Imaginative play then frees us by introducing new possibilities that lead to actionable interpretations. “The act of imaginative variation actively releases the phenomenon from the control of our values and perceptual categories. We begin to see what a profusion any situation actually is. Out of this process, we could begin to form interpretations of the likelihood and the desirability of the various scenarios.” (162)

As a tool in your bag of tricks, Learning as a Way of Being offers a way to approach the types of knowledge problems generated by information solutions. In the case of business strategy for a networked economy, it even offers some practical advice which could be extended out much more rigorously than I have with the simple juxtaposition above. If you take Hagel's ideas seriously, then Vaill offers a very important approach to managing learning.

July 19, 2006 in Books, Productivity, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Good Overview of the State of Identity

This interview with Kaliya Hamlin gives a good summary of the progress that is being made on the Open ID project. It's a quick read and worthwhile to get a sense of how people are working towards a flexible identity system that won't be controled by any one vendor locking you into their network.

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July 19, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Edwards Doesn't (Yet?) Know What To Do About A Political Reality That Isn't Geographic

The best thing about John Edwards is that he has a sense of humor. It was a real pleasure at Gnomedex to watch him deal with a situation unlike any press event he’d been trained for. I hope he keeps working on his authenticity skills.

Of course the most interesting question was one he didn’t even try to answer. When first asked how he thinks about dealing with an internet reality that isn’t geographically dependent, he offered an easy answer about rallying people to push out from their online communities into their geographic communities. And that’s part of the answer, but it’s a top down patronizing kind of answer.

He responded with a much more sincere “I don’t have an answer” when he was asked about the fact that online communities don’t constitute a single voting block. If substantial numbers of people feel strongly about an issue, but are disenfranchised because they can’t flex their muscles as well as their voices, then that’s a big constitutional issue.

Since my congressman’s got a safe seat, rather than donate to the party this year I think I’ll take the money over to AdBrite and see what I can buy to target Brownback’s constituency in Kansas.

technorati tags:gnomedex, gnomedexdiscussion, Edwards

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July 05, 2006 in Current Affairs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Early Morning Off the Wall Thoughts from Gnomedex Day 1

I'm digging into my notes from day one of Gnomedex 2006 and have one idea kicking around my head that I keep coming back to. I haven't dug into the details of either yet, but both the Attention Operating System and People Aggregator have me thinking about how social networks could package themselves as targeted audiences. Why leave it to agencies doing media buys to try to figure out what ads to present me alongside content that grabs my attention? Why not form attention cooperatives that publish out their attention information and offer their attention to the highest bidders?

If a company looked at a network of friends, colleagues, competitors, etc, and said, "Hey, I REALLY need to talk to this group" then give the company the opportunity to present their offering in exchange for paying the members of the network directly to take a look.

I'll let you know in a deep and rich way what grabs my attention, and if you think you've got something I'd be interested in, then pay me to take a look instead of cluttering up a sidebar next to an intriguing article.

 
 

technorati tags:gnomedexdiscussion, attention, reputation, social+commerce, network+economy

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July 01, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Benkler's Opening Gambit

Thinking about Wealth of Networks, I keep coming back to Benkler’s argument about the importance of nonmarket and nonproprietary production of knowledge happening at the core rather than the periphery of our economy. In an economy with the production and distribution of information and culture at its center, that’s a big deal.

Benkler chose the John Stuart Mill quotes on page 6 well. The first one provides a good metaphor to bear in mind while reading his book: “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

Makes me look forward to hearing Senator Edwards at Gnomedex to find out what kind of arborist he is.

technorati tags:Benkler, Edwards, Gnomedex

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June 29, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

RCA Adapters and Web Services

Here’s a way to explain web services to my baby boomer friends. In Loosely Coupled, Doug Kaye mentions a great metaphor from The Stencil Group talking about interfaces and components in terms of RCA adapters. The introduction of this easy to use interface drove the transition from stereos that looked like self-contained pieces of furniture into stereos that were stacks of metal boxes. (If you are too young to remember, check out this antique stereo to see an example featured in a KEXP fund drive.) Once there was an interface that could be used to connect any component from any vendor, you could build out a modular system. Even components which weren't invented until after the interface (like DVD players) could easily be added without altering any of the other components.

June 28, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Posting with Flock

Just installed Flock and was pleased with how straightforward the set up wizard was. Got set up with my Flickr account and the process seemed very friendly given that I had to go from the wizard to the Flickr sign in page (which presents 2 options) and then back to the wizard. The del.icio.us sign in process was more seamless, but I'll leave it to the usability folks to debate the benefits of jumping from one branded look to another and back when manually linking services.

Also, since I'm spontaneously posting using the fun new toy, this post clearly breaks my rule about "every post must pass through the 2nd rewrite filter"

Now let's see how the drag and drop photo publishing feature works . . .

technorati tags:Flock, Usability

Blogged with Flock

June 24, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

User Generated Content at Where 2.0

Interesting observation from Tim O’Reilly at Where 2.0

“What's particularly interesting is how much activity there is in adding user-generated data. Especially interesting is the way that Google is trying to get users to build 3D models of buildings with sketchup. Brad Schell gave a great demo of how to visualize a building and place it in Google Earth. Particularly impressive was the ability to search for real-world architectural elements and add them to a building you're drawing. (AutoDesk, watch out....) Lovely.”

It would be useful to create and share a model that shows how you have to come around the side of my building and down the stairs to get to my front door. Very interesting to think of all the additional richness that could be added to Google Earth if lots of people start playing with it. (The product web site could do a better job communicating the scenario. An interesting point of contrast is the Flock product site which communicates well using the product UI as well as creating community.)

I love it when O’Reilly says things like “It becomes clear that Google Earth is not just a data visualization platform. It's a framework on which hundreds of different data layers can be anchored.”

June 20, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chuck D and Wendy C

In chapter 3, of Control and Freedom, “Scenes of Empowerment,” when Wendy Chun writes about digital sweatshops I think of the Public Enemy lyrics “Have you forgotten, the other side of rotten, / Picking electronic cotton diggin digital ditches” As counterpoint (in the polyphonic, musical sense) to Chun’s deconstruction of race in turn of the millennium television ads about Internet utopia, take a look at this 2000 essay by Chuck D, DEATH OF A NATION- WHERE IGNORANCE IS REWARDED FOR A NEW RACE CREATION; THE NIGGRO...

June 14, 2006 in Music, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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