December 2007

[As a follow-up to the previous post about forecasts of media transformation - thi spost first published in January 2006]

In Thermo[SAT]’s first post my blogging colleague Michel Dumais set out one of the primary targets of media companies (the consumer’s living room) as it becomes more and more clear that what we understood as broadcast media is being “blown to bits” (in the vernacular) – fragmenting, unbundling and from what we can see from “early signals” reconstituting itself around an interactive two-way pull-and-push infrastructure driven increasingly by the consumers … who are also rapidly becoming *producers*

As people are becoming producers (and if not producing at least re-mixing what is broadcast to them using tools like TiVo, podcasting, blogging, aggregation of RSS feeds) it is becoming evident that there are significant implications in the areas of business logic and business models, intellectual and copyright law and governmental regulatory policy and implementation. While the basic thrust of the Internet’s impact on traditional media is understood by those who have been following the issues since the early days of the Internet, this awareness is now becoming more and more widespread as new capabilities and service offers keep coming on stream, such as Bittorrent, Rocketboom, Youtube or Brightcove. David Schatzky, a Jupiter Research media analyst, provides a short and succinct perspective on the ongoing fragmentation of the media we know: Regarding the US media industry (and by extrapolation the rest of the Western world, to some extent), he poses the question …

“this is a time of dramatic disruption and transformation that will remake the industry landscape and see formerly dominant companies whither into irrelevance and test the resilience of an industry that has led the world through all of the last century. Will it lead the world in the current century?”

He then offers a high-level elaboration to his point of view:

The driver of this disruption is the dynamic of fragmentation, which is playing out along three dimensions simultaneously. Audience fragmentation. As an expanding array of media and entertainment choices make claims on consumers’ time, the amount of time they spend with traditional media, from television to magazines, is declining. Mass audiences are shrinking. Personal fragmentation. Consumers are spreading their media time and dollars around, spending less time with TV, magazines and other traditional media in favor of newer media like the Internet and video games. Media fragmentation. Media itself is beginning to fragment in dramatic ways. Individual songs and episodes of TV series are available for sale via download. Digital “feeds” of newspaper and magazine content allow consumers to read parts of a publication out of context without ever seeing the rest. Cable companies may soon offer individual channels a la carte.

Consumers increasingly expect to be able to consume media when and where they want, on any platform or device, in any context. The technology and media industries are beginning to oblige them. Fragmentation is both a cause and effect, creating a cycle in which fragmented audiences lead to fragmented content, which allows audiences to fragment further, and so on. These changes will threaten established practices and entrenched interests in the media and advertising sectors, but consumers will benefit and ultimately, companies that can ride this wave will benefit as well. They have no choice.

His prescription ?

As fragmentation transforms the media landscape, media companies will need to adapt to remain relevant. They will have to:

- Support multiple platforms for their content, from public venues such as theaters to digital media hubs in the home, to portable devices on the go. Content not available across the spectrum of platforms used by consumers will become irrelevant to them.

- Enable disaggregated, a la carte models that offer singles, episodes, feeds, fragments, samples, and so on to consumers who increasingly expect to select and consume their media granularly.

- Integrate more closely with advertisers, looking beyond the thirty-second TV spots, for example, to a multitude of new formats, from much shorter 5- to 10-second units to branding experiences that are integral to the media they sponsor, such as product placement.

- Collaborate more with consumers who, in online discussions, blogs, and podcasts are increasingly creating their own media.”

Terry Heaton, another prominent media analyst, provides an ongoing watch on his PoMo blog over the re-structuring of the television industry, and offers a clear and substantial perspective on the major changes being experienced by the television industry in a recent short article.

So what happens to broadcasters? TV Networks and program producers can make more money off downloads of their programming than they can through advertising. That is the remarkable conclusion of a couple of noted researchers and reported today by Diane Mermigas in The Hollywood Reporter. The math is pretty amazing, and it validates what a few of us have been saying for years about the role of the local broadcaster — that the Internet destroys middlemen in the existing value chain of media.

The mass-market acceptance of broadband in the U.S. has tipped the scales back to content producers and packagers, with the proliferation of distributors diluting the de facto gatekeeper strength of television stations, cable and satellite systems, cellular and video telephones, personal digital assistants, personal media players and Internet service providers. That should theoretically boost the economic fortunes of content players, though much will depend on the details of new business models and prevailing of old business models. So while the "economic fortunes of content players" are getting boosted, what about the old distribution system?

Heaton elaborates on how making money in the traditional media world is being “blown to bits” in another article titled “The Economy of Unbundled Advertising”, in which he explores possibilities that seem to be just around the corner.

Advertisers are projected to spend $292 billion in 2006, and like the content players they support, the industry is dealing with real threats due to the unbundling of media. The same energy that’s pulling apart the packaging of media also demands that merchants who sell goods and services do the same in their communication with the public. Who wants to sit through the pitch of a sales person at any kind of dealership? Just give me the price, man. This essay proposes a form of advertising that doesn’t currently exist but certainly could. Like the personal media revolution, the concept levels the playing field for anybody wishing to sell goods and services, so I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to predict that something like this will come about.

The trends are evident, and the fragmenting and unbundling of media (and the attendant online advertising) continues apace. These changes are important … so important that the changes will not unfold smoothly, or without pushback from the established power in television, cable, satellite and the telecommunications infrastructure that is (to date) enabling the disruption.

Doc Searls is a senior editor of the Linux Journal, and a widely-respected expert on the impacts of the Internet and interactivity on media business logic and business models. He is the author, with David Weinberger, of a manifesto titled “World of Ends” in which he sets forth some fundamental reasons why such a massive power shift … away from top-down broadcast models and towards fragmented, do-it-yourself content production … is occurring.

In a more recent article titled “Saving The Net: How To Keep The Carriers From Flushing The Net Down The Tubes", Searls outlines the pushback that has begun from the carriers of bits, who today are assertively stating that it is their pipes that are being used to carry out this revolution. They want regulatory policies to be changed in favour of their control over access and distribution of content. Many commenters who follow these issues, arguments and developments have noted that the eventual outcomes will define whether or not we get more traditional television-and-radio broadcast models applied to the Internet environment, or whether the regulators and telecommunications companies will have to be a party to what has been called “the democratization of information”.

I notice that Hugh Macleod has linked to an old post I wrote about the looming battle for your attention in your living room being waged by the digital entertainment giants Microsoft, Apple and Sony.

As a strategy consultant, about 2 1/2 years ago I researched and wrote a report on digital culture and networked markets for the Canadian government, followed by an update a year or so later (co-written with Michel Dumais).

The blog post Hugh links to is from research that formed the core of that update, wherein Michel and I discussed the early strategic moves with regard to the XBox 360, Windows Media Centre, Apple TV, the Mac Mini and so on.

I am posting this to note that just for the record I am not saying these ongoing developments are a good thing or a bad thing, they just are.

I think it is a foregone conclusion that our lives will be surrounded by thin screens and flickering moving sliding images, and that increasingly, whether we like it or not, we will almost always be "on" unless we consciously choose to be offline … and I think that eventually it will take considerable discipline to exercise that choice.

It will be good, for example, to be able to almost completely avoid the mainstream television networks.

Geert Lovink runs the Networked Cultures blog, the Institute of Network Cultures and Amsterdam Media Research Centre, and has written several books about the internet and networked culture(s).

I ran across these (though not for the first time) as I was following links about Sara Diamond, now the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design.  Sara invited me (and quite a few other artists, media activists, and collaboration theorists) to a Banff Centre / Banff New Media Institute Summit conference on Participate / Collaborate: Reciprocity, Design and Social Networks in the fall of 2004. 

She’s a very interesting person, and one of those blessed to have pathways to engage her creativity and capabilities in fun and interesting ways.

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The Dreamer
Introducing OCAD’s brilliantly loopy new president

Appointed last July, Diamond is the 21st president of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the country’s largest art school, alma mater to such names as Arthur Lismer, Michael Snow and Joanne Tod. It’s her good fortune to take over as the institution is shedding its reputation as the worthy but somewhat moribund dowager of McCaul Street.

Granted university status in 2002, and graced in September 2004 by architect Will Alsop’s spirit-lifting, coffee-table-on-chopsticks addition, the school seems poised for flight as well.

Diamond is committed to breaking through the age-old division between art and design (“I kicked off a cross-disciplinary task force the moment I landed”) and to making OCAD “a hub of diversity and excitement.” And though it would not be accurate to describe the 52-year-old Diamond as flighty (she has impeccable administrative and teaching cred, with some 14 years at the Banff Centre, a creative think-tank, and has taught in both Canada and the U.S.), she does have flash.

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At any rate, the OCAD and Sara is not what this post is about.

The post is about participation, reciprocity and making meaning.  I have written about these dynamics before here and there, and consider the essay The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create to be the exemplar (not of the subject, but of my limited reflection on the subject).

I found Geert Lovink’s blog post (Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse) from the spring of 2006 to be meaningful and to offer food for thought.

I wish I had looked up Geert Lovink each of the last several times I have been in Amsterdam.  I’ll have to remember to see if I can connect with him the next time I go there.

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Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

Blogs are successors of the 90s “homepage” and create mix of the private (online dairy) and the public (PR-management of the self). As there are tens of millions of blogs it is next to impossible to make general statements about their ‘nature’. I will nonetheless do this. It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture and social networking into account.

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasize its counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of a unfolding process of ‘massification’ of this, still, new medium. What the Internet after 2000 lost is the “illusion of change”. The created void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through automated software, named weblogs, or blogs.

After a general introduction into net culture I will present my specific work that centres around the often voiced criticism that blogs are cynical and nihilist, because they merely comment and dump on the establishment (be it leftist, liberal or conservative). Instead of trying to prove that blogs are, in essence, good, I have taken up the challenge to interprete blogs as nihilist vehicles. Nihilism is not a lifestyle or opinion but a condition in which (Western) societies find themselves.

In the Internet context it is not evil, as Rüdiger Safranski suggested, but triviality that forms the drama of media freedom.

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message.

That’s the nihilist moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before. Blog software assists users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value.

Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

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Tags: Geert Lovink, Sara Diamond, Insdtitute of Network Cultures, participation, blogging, nihilism, wirearchy

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Ken Milloy is a long-time friend of mine, and a highly-skilled consultant in the arena of internal / employee communications and corporate storytelling organizational change.

A blogger I know, Rob Paterson, recently started a blog about Blackwater titled Blackwater - Our Stories aimed, according to him, at bringing some balance to the relentless rage and misinformation directed at Blackwater’s (to be scrupulously fair, allegedly mercenary) security force in the media.

Tagged by Luis Suarez, reminded by Stuart Henshall’s response to Luis.

UPDATE:  Dave Snowden tagged me as well.  I had already created the responses outline below.  There are some perhaps additional interesting things about me almost all people do not know, but they will have to wait for a more meaningful game or be divulged in private or semi-private settings (though I will add one here because it is an area in which Dave and I share (I think) an intense interest:  Just as I was quitting my job with a major global organizational consulting firm, I was asked to head up a new practice for the firm, leading a small team of senior consultants in providing innovative work design methods and processes for some of the firm’s largest and most productive (revenue-wise) clients because said clients were pretty much fed up with the inability of the firm’s standard methodologies to deliver the flexibility and leverage needed for high-level non-routine knowledge-and-expertise based work).  Alas, I was already too fed up, though my ego appreciated the gambit to try to get me to stay on.

For the eight-things-you-don’t-know game, you’re supposed to follow these rules:

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1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged

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OK.

1.  I was born in the USA (Syracuse, NY) and almost immediately was registered by my parents as a Canadian Born Abroad (thanks, folks).  My parents were both peripatetic academics at the time (though of course in those days almost all women moved when the man / the husband decided to.  My mother was no exception, though she got much more assertive as the years went on.

2.   I have lived in cities most of my adult life, but spent almost all of my life up to the age of 17 in bucolic semi-rural areas, often with woods and fields and nothing-but-country for miles and miles behind our backyards.

3.  I learned how to read just shortly after my 3rd birthday, and was the proverbial flashlight-under-the-covers kind of kid.

4. My first job after graduating from university was as a prison guard (7 whole months .. why I did that more than one day is a mystery to me).  My second job was as a bank management trainee.  seven years later I was a young middle manager in a very large national and international bank.

5.  I am fluent in the French language, both spoken and written, though writing well in French is quite a different challenge than speaking French well.  My spoken French is better than my written French, but I can write an intelligible letter or brief report if I have to.

6. Like Stuart Henshall, swimming is my keep-fit sport.  I swam in the 1972 Olympic Trials, once even in the same pool as Mark Spitz.  Needless to say, I couldn’t see his heels.  I still swim quite regularly, but have gotten spoiled by the fantabulous outdoor swimming pool we have in Vancouver (137.5 metres long, 12 lengths to a mile), so I tend to get lazy once that pool closes in mid-September.  My New Years’ resolution for 2008 is to get up and go for an early morning swim workout 5 out of 7 days per week.

7.  I have never been married and do not have children.  I always thought I would marry reasonably young, and well.  I have been privileged to have great female partners in my life, but the first and second long-term partners I lived with, it just didn’t work out.  Much pain, much sadness, many regrets, long stories that you do not want to know anything about (nothing sordid or nasty, more just sad).

I recognize that I miss deeply the experience of being a parent.  I was a step-father to one young woman, and she remains very close to me and me to her.  I have often been told I would be a good father, and I believe I would be so.  I work at listening to and respecting kids, whilst also being playful and light-hearted.  Many of the kids I know find me to be funny (in a good way).

8.  I have wanted a dog for a very long time.  It would be uncomfortable, if not cruel, for me and Raman to have a dog in the (very) small space we currently inhabit.

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I don’t yet know who I am going to tag with respect to this "game".  Hopefully I won’t over-annoy those whom I choose to tag. 

They may elect not to play, which is fine by me.

Brian Moffatt

Mike Golby

Phil Wolff

Ken Milloy

Jeneane Sessum

Matt Mower

Dina Mehta

Phil Cubeta

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I’m going through and cleaning out old files in preparation for a renovation of this blog.

From old archives (November 2001)

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What do you do as a leader – a CEO, a Vice-President, a senior manager – in the Knowledge Age when the traditions of gaining rungs on the professional ladder – and thus power and authority - by being the smartest, the most decisive, the clearest, and the strongest are less effective? When much of your power and clout came from your position, and from having more information than most of the others? What do you do when suddenly, many people in your organization, and many of your customers and competitors are loaded with that same information, and you no longer have privileged access to anything? How do you “unlearn” your old mental models? How do you need to communicate and behave in order to establish credibility in the Knowledge Age?

The World Wide Web burst into mass human consciousness only ten fifteen years ago, and its reach has multiplied exponentially since then. And yet, this dominant defining factor of a new era is only in its infancy. The accessibility and interconnectivity that it provides already responds to almost any need or desire, and much more capability is sure to emerge in the next few years

Meanwhile, web-enabled tools are transforming work processes in more and more important and pervasive ways. Interconnected business process applications are proliferating, websites like Ninthhouse.com, Smartforce.com and Learn2.com deliver the first wave of on-line learning in easy-to-use formats, and most Fortune 500 companies already have or are planning intranets. It’s predicted that RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a means of automatically streaming newly-generated information, will penetrate many organizations in 2004 and 2005.

(Most of the sites mentioned no longer exist, and RSS is old hat … notice that in the paragraph below I am hinting that blogging will make its way into the workplace eventually.  I still think that, and believe we will see a lot of of activity in that regard during 2008 - 2010.)

As we learn more about how to integrate all this potential capability into our daily work lives, we will see various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. Next … blogging ?

Organizations’ IT infrastructures, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

Information technology, business process re-engineering and upheavals to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet are exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down, command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions. The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other - are changing “Wirearchy” –a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations – is emerging as a social dynamic in both business and society.

Wirearchy suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes. It represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic. Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have “line-of-sight” responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results –when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective?

When interconnected software and citizens access and distribute information, opinion and facts about the policies and tactics of our governments, new standards for accountability begin to take shape. Will governments seek greater control and secrecy, or will they adapt and focus on governing by principles rather than tactics ?

Wirearchy is a structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.

The concept of Wirearchy can help to develop a strategy for creating, implementing and deploying this new interconnected dynamic in ways that respond effectively to continuously changing conditions. The core components of Wirearchy are:

- a crystal clear vision and values developed in an inclusive (democratic) using facts
- a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
- comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
- pertinent objectives and focused measurement created by those doing the work
- characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
- leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and above all, shared

Perhaps the shift to Wirearchy is a result of the conflict and dissonance generated by dated structures, mindsets and dynamics clashing with the irrevocable new forces created by the open access to information and knowledge. A cogent (and early) scenario describing this change is found in The Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) – it consists of 95 statements of how fundamental shifts in values and attitudes due to connections, openness and cynicism demand openness, transparency and authenticity from the prevailing power structures in our corporate-led society.

People won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the- keys still cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. “Organigraphics”, or pictures of the way(s) organizations flow and operate, and are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful these days, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.

How does today’s senior manager or government leader respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: the use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals. Wirearchy is significantly different in that it focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. It begins not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy controlled the creation of focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, Wirearchy implies that it be used appropriately and respectfully.

It will take time and experience in this new era to know what “success” and “effectiveness” mean and look like. In a wired and wirearchical world, where there is literal meaning in the phrase, “everything is connected to everything else”, we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that lead to ongoing growth in human development.

Many others have and are studying and describing the massive changes we are beginning to experience more and more regularly - in journalism, politics, organizational dynamics, social networks and business models.

I believe that this organizing principle I call Wirearchy will evolve to impact business, governments and societies in ways that we have never before encountered in human history. We are together growing an interconnected shared mind, something which was never physically possible prior to the development of the Web.

What we do or don’t do with it is up to us.

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I think this (the story at the link, excerpted below) is correct.  There are so many signs that America (and thus by definition the rest of the world) may be poised to reach another milestone or plateau on its long slow grind to quasi-police state.  That it pretends to be a democracy was made ridiculous long ago.

I also think the emergency is wrapped up in a larger, more critical growing emergency for the human soul, as how we live and relate to teach other cannot be separated from the conditions we create in which to act out human life.

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Sunday Late Nite: Emergency

The thought of Keith Olbermann agreeing with President Bush about anything, especially that we are in an emergency, struck me as particularly elegant. Because of that symmetry, I also realized that all of BushCheneyCo’s hollering about emergency needs for emergency powers to combat a newly emerging enemy is simply another example of Rovian projection.

They aren’t responding to an emergency; they were all on vacation during the real emergency, in the summer of 2001 when Richard Clarke and even George Tenet were trying to get their attention, finally flying someone to Crawford only to be told "All right. You’ve covered your ass now."

The emergency, as Keith Olbermann quite rightly pointed out to Bill Moyers, is "the question of the future of our nation." With an idiot-tyrant who lied America into war continuing his Oedipal sandbox exercise so costly in blood and treasure; a war-profiteer Vice-President operating secretly in the shadows, pulling unknown levers of government to benefit his fellow oligarchs and spying on all his fellow Americans; and a Congress almost entirely in the thrall of The Corporations that write huge checks to ensure its continued incumbency — "It’s one of those pivotal times in our history."

I ask you — could an external enemy have done the damage we have suffered the last seven years? Would Americans have permitted the destruction of their Constitution from without, the shredding of habeas corpus by an invader, the surveillance of all of us by an outside force?

Why, then, have we allowed BushCheneyCo to murder children, to steal our freedoms, to poison our air and water, to borrow from our children’s and grandchildren’s future, and to sully our good name among the people of our planet?

And now, finally, a horrible, un-American indignity: without even knowing, without even inquiring, without even understanding the scope, frequency, targets, purpose, duration, timing, or methods, without testimony from the affected companies or explanations to the American people — the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (with a Democratic majority!) is poised to immunize some of the largest of The Corporations for illegal acts committed because BushCheneyCo asked them politely, but without the requisite warrant, long before America was attacked, to SPY on Americans.

Such action will, of course, shut down the only arena of inquiry currently underway — in the courts, where judges, regardless of their appointive President or putative party, have ruled against the telecoms again and again. And, with no courtroom leverage against the well-paid executives atop the telecoms, Americans will never know by whom, how, where, when, and why spying on them was ordered.

We will never know.

Many years from now, a young person may have occasion to inquire of you, "What did you do during The Emergency?"

This is that Emergency — this week, tomorrow, NOW. The Emergency that Keith Olbermann, Chris Dodd, and Russ Feingold have warned us about may be stoppable tomorrow.

But this may be our last chance.

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UPDATE:  A comment I found in the comments thread following the FDL blog post to which I linked.

"I have a sinking feeling that this may be our last chance, folks. I can’t see the rule of law flourishing in an environment where huge Corporations are given amnesty for past bad acts. Can you?"

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.. but back home after a 36 hour or so blur of trains, tube cars (London), trying to catch a couple of hours sleep on the cold floor in a noisy Heath Row Terminal 3, 11 or 12 hours of planes punctuated by missed connections …

It’s hard to describe the combination of numb boredom and huge anticipation one feels during the last hour and a half to two hours of a long trip (after you’ve already been flying anywhere from 4 to 10 hours).

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Two hours out

Genial (pronounced jzhen-ee-yal) !!

.. is now on stage, making the obvious point that the younger people who do a lot of gaming will expect that the workplace applications they come to use at adult work will increasingly resemble what they see in today’s video games.

He’s now giving us examples of how WoW (World of Warcraft) is (just) beginning to cross over into more mainstream offerings (such as the Toyota advert he just shared with the audience).

My regular readers may remember that I claim to have been talking / writing about the use of the gaming idiom in workplace applications since … well, before now.

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Long day .. up at 04h45 to catch a 6h00 am train to Paris, arrived at LeWeb 3 and I have bumped into a few people I have wanted to meet for some time, notably Doc Searls and Joi Ito.

Some days ….

Makes you stop and wonder for a moment, doesn’t it …

"our lives, our way of thinking, (be) changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that

even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free"

This is from today’s Guardian, reprinting Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech from the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Doris Lessing makes a fine point, and a similar one to Andrew Keen, but she starts from a very different point and follows a different path of logic than does Keen.

I GUARANTEE that no computer store that sells Microsoft Windows computers or products has a buzz, or as crowded a foyer, as this Apple store in central London.

Great setup, scores of computers hanging about all hooked up to the Web, helpful friendly people milling about .. a great Mac / Apple experience.

Full disclosure: we recently added a new baby iMac to our family

I have just finished a quick read of Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management.

He sets out clearly that whilst many areas of human activities have undergone a fair bit of transformation and subsequent adaptation, organizations today are still working with yesteryear’s tools … rigid job descriptions, performance measures derived from assumptions of sequential work tasks, the cascading down through the organization of objectives, a plethora of controls and policies derived from industrial-era work design and so on.

He then goes on to refer to Web 2.0, blogs, employee voice, toleration if not encouragement of meaningful dissent, aggregation of knowledge, increased need for aspects of democracy in organizations and suggests that the Web and interconnected collaboration may eventually offer the most powerful tools yet for the management of ongoing innovation and responsiveness

I believe that much of this is what I have been writing about with respect to wirearchy.

… to become more of what it used to be.

Social Networking has been with us for a long time.

I remember … the rush to Friendster, the rush to Orkut, the rush to Ecademy, the rush to LinkedIn (and it’s still limited value) .. and I particularly remember reading the last couple of chapters of the 1956 book The Organization Man by William F. Whyte (then publisher of Fortune magazine) in which he described the very active social networking in company towns as a fundamental aspect of corporate and community life in the 50’s.

The above represent a few of the reference points in my memory along the path to Facebook’s supposed $15 billion valuation (each time I hear that, I have an image come to mind of a PR team at Google just waiting, perhaps holding an internal pool as to when Microsoft would announce it’s Facebook investment, and then when it happened rubbing their hands in collective glee and saying to each other "OK, let’s go …").

I don’t think there’s any mystery here, really.  Google’s mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".  Many of their basic products they offer for free, and along the way they have wallpapered, (in a sense) the background with relatively unobtrusive advertising (there’s so many wee text ads that we sort-of don’t notice them or almost expect them to be there while using an application regardless of their presence, Gmail being a good example).

Google OpenSocial will, I predict, come to be used for all sorts of VPNs (virtual private networks) for one or another purpose. 

The key to social networks and social networking in the future is purpose.  This was evident in foresight, and glaringly so in hindsight.  The first few sorry attempts were all about using the new toy we call the Internet, and the first major wave was about meeting and mating (all the online dating and match-ups) and the next all about finding opportunities and jobs.

I think it is a smart tack on the part of Google to provide the platform and to a large extent let it go … this is by and large what they do with most of their work.  they let it go whilst they go about organizing and making accessible and useful the world’s information whilst also providing the means for bringing other information to peoples’ attention through text advertising. 

This will also let users decide and in-form the ways a social networking platform can work for the purpose they have in mind, and it won’t depend so much on having 20 million members as opposed to 2,000 members, because it won’t be about monetizing them eyeballs … at least not in the same way.

And that, over time, may lead to honestly new types of business logic with which to inform new business models built on the decks of the social networking platforms of the interconnected age.

Via the Toronto Globe and Mail …

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Google Opens Up

[ Snip ... ]

The first is called OpenSocial, and it’s an attempt by the Web giant to create a kind of platform for social networking – one that would allow users of different networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn to move their data from one to the other, and to use applications or services that could draw from all of them.

More than one critic has compared Facebook with a “walled garden” – a social network that wants to keep its users inside the boundaries of its service, in order to control what they can do (and in order to sell advertising aimed at them). This is what you might call the America Online model.

Google’s model, however, is closer to the vision expressed by the World Wide Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, in a recent blog post. In his commentary, Sir Tim describes his sense of where the Web is going and concludes that it is becoming more social.

In the beginning, he says, the Internet allowed computers to talk together without having to worry about cables or even location. The next revolution was the Web, which allowed documents to be shared without any complicated technology.

The next move, Sir Tim says, is to allow social data to move around and be integrated without any special software, something he says will allow a truly social Web to emerge.

Although Google wants to be the one to bring together companies to create the OpenSocial standard, the Web company isn’t interested in controlling the new platform, which is unusual for a large technology company.

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Tags: William F. Whyte, The Organization Man, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, OpenSocial, Matthew Ingram, Jon Husband, wirearchy

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