Clever little ditty, found on Firedoglake …
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Nod to Fred Fabro for passing along this Wall Street Journal article (excerpt below).
In addition to the examples cited in the article, many of you may know that there has already been a significant degree of interest and exploration of how a platform like Facebook (or Facebook-like derivatives, which you could argue are the examples cited) can be used by professional groups and enterprises (for example, to replace their inside-the-firewall company con tact and knowledge-resource directories).
Roles, responsibilities, deliverables (aka results) and accountability will be negotiated between the participants in initiatives growing out of the connections in these professional networks, thereby putting flesh on the bones of …
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and
a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
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Social Networking Goes Professional
Doctors, Salesmen, Executives Turn to New Sites to Consult,
Commiserate With Peers; Weeding Out Impostors
By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
August 28,When radiation oncologist Michael Tomblyn recently saw a 21-year-old patient whose eye was protruding from its socket, he turned to his fellow physicians for help. Dozens of doctors offered suggestions, including fungal infection, HIV-associated lymphoma or a cocaine-associated sinus problem, eventually steering him toward the correct answer: rhabdomyosarcoma, a fast-growing cancer most often observed in young children.
The diagnosis didn’t take place in a doctor’s lounge. It happened on Sermo.com, a social-networking site for licensed physicians, which Dr. Tomblyn and 25,000 doctors like him visit regularly to consult with colleagues specializing in areas from dermatology to psychiatry.
"It is a way for us to commiserate and know we are still talking to others like us," says 36-year-old Dr. Tomblyn, who works for the University of Minnesota Medical Center.
Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.
Millions of professionals already turn to broad-based networking sites like LinkedIn to swap job details and contact information, often for recruiting purposes. Business executives also have turned to online forums, email lists and message boards to sound off on information related to their industries.
Now, online services are trying to promote a more personal type of business networking
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Tags: wirearchy, professional social networks, Facebook
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This guy has been blogging for quite a while, and I suspect that he has a pretty deep understanding of the dynamics of the digital infrastructure we call the Internet.
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Sun chief: Consumers, not IT, driving markets
Sun is holding an Emerging Markets Summit on its Menlo Park, CA campus. CEO Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the event with this statement: "The Internet is the most powerful social utility the world has ever seen."“A gravitational shift in influence is underway, from enterprises to consumers,” he explained. “It is an epoch shift that we are trying to amplify and leverage in our business.” It’s also a shift to emerging markets, which over the next few decades will be larger than the existing established market
Sun’s goal is to provide the “technology utility” solutions to deliver the consuming public services across the Internet.
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The focus of that conference is emerging markets, so of course the statement carries that context. I think we can safely assume that aside from consuming, there will be people who use it to educate and grow awareness amongst themselves and the groups they create and populate regarding all manner of issues and subjects.
I often argue that the major changes are yet to come, and am on record as stating I believe that for the last thirty years the focus (in IT and latterly the Web) has been on the technology, but that for the next thirty it’s likely that the focus will increasingly be on sociology (with respect to consumption and commerce, education, political awareness and activism, etc.). Other people have said variations of the same thing, so I am not claiming any originality here.
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Update: I read the whole article, and I keep thinking about this bit excerpted from the article’s conclusion. It’s unusual to see a CEO-level person who is consistent about thinking long-term.
Sun is building up its relationships with governments that favor open source. “When we have dialogs with governments, all of the sudden we are talking the same language. Governments have figured out that technology has become a social utility. You don’t want to be locked into proprietary technology and they want to have the next Google come out of their nations,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz is taking the long view at a time when speed and volume of growth are what get rewarded. “At the end of the day, we are attempting to focus in the next wave of developers, students, research and economic development so we can best position Sun for growth in next decade, not in next quarter or few weeks,” Schwartz said.
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Frank Paynter, in an exchange on Listics, reminded me of this classic video (second one below), which is a spoof of another more famous classic.
I’ll put up the latter first … it caused a sensation when it first came out.
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I Am Canadian
IMO one of the better assessments of the issues contained in Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, by Howard Owens.
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Part III: Andrew Keen and the Cult of the Amateur
My plea to professional journalists: Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, calls his blog “The Great Seduction,” but the real seduction here is the idea that UGC, amateur content, can and should be resisted, that somehow, if only professional news organizations would fight back — not use UGC, charge for content, create walled gardens, not go online — do something, anything that doesn’t involving soiling our mastheads with UGC — we can somehow beat back the hordes of Visigoths pounding on our gates.
That’s magical thinking.
I know there are editors and reporters out there who fear the changes in their midst and think if only we would hold a stronger line, we would could save newspapers.
But if you’re like me, and you believe that the reason you got into journalism in the first place was to help make society better, to help shine a light on truth, to serve communities and the afflicted, then I hope you’ll recognize that intransigence does nothing to help the cause.
As I argued in my first post, amateur content has always had its place in the world, and in my second post I asserted that we are part of evolving ecosystem that will get better for content producers and consumers over time.
In this post, my metaphor is a fast moving train, at full steam, with no brakes. We’re on it, baby, ain’t there ain’t no getting off. Jumping off is suicide, so we might as well figure out how to get along with all of the other passengers, some of whom we’re guaranteed not to like.
It’s adapt or die.
And by adapt, I mean, figure out how to play within the new rules, not by insisting the rest of riders follow our old rules – such as demanding that readers pay for our content or that we can be the only authoritative voice.
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The full post is here …
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I’m a bit fixated the last couple of days, on this amateurs-killing-culture stuff … the pot which Andrew Keen set out on the stoop and keeps stirring.
The man has clearly touched a nerve, and like most controversial perspectives which take root and grow, there are some good reasons for that.
I think most people (at least in the Western world, where there is ready access and growing use of the Web) would agree that there’s lots of crap self-published, and that much blogging is explicit or camouflaged narcissism, and so on.
I just got out of bed at 1h50 a.m. to write this post.
I have spent more time today than I should have reading some of the more recent toings-and-froings of Andrew Keen, celebrated author of The Cult of the Amateur. Here, for example, is the full transcript of a debate between Keen and Emily Bell of The Guardian. I took the time to read it carefully.
Keen keeps focusing on the roles of gatekeepers and experts, and returns time and again to the screening for quality, with results in the commercialization of approved cultural content.
I found this brief blog post tonight, which while not focused on cultural content, gives a vivid example of how blogs, links and the infrastructure that supports them offer useful expertise that the blogger discovered and decided to use in addressing her thorny problem. According to Keen, this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen online, or if it does, infrequently at best. I suspect that it happens very regularly.
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John J. Renton — The Nature of Earth
I have been developing a methodology for Solari to determine the total economic return (impact on both investor and living ecosystem) of a mining operation. I have been inching along as my understanding of geology is limited to dim recollections of high school science.
I just decided to put the effort on hold and watch The Teaching Company’s course in Geology: The Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology taught by John J. Renton of West Virginia University. It is unbelievably helpful. These things are the opposite of Hollywood - a professor who is authentic and grounded, loves to learn and teach and really cares.When I was in college or business school, you were lucky to have 1 or 2 of such teachers a year. Now it appears you can have them every time for whatever topic you want to learn about. This may be better than Netflix documentaries.
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My point is that amongst the hundreds of millions of people using the Web, there will be many examples, daily, of people offering or sharing information, knowledge and expertise … person-to-person, link by link, when needed or discovered (please take note of the layered filtering described below by Chris Anderson. I suspect many of us have experienced it.). No official gatekeepers needed.
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Bonus: Concluding comments from a debate between Chris Anderson (Wired, The Long Tail) and Keen
Anderson: Fantastic. When you say I can filter a million voices myself, I am filtering a million voices, but not doing it myself. What I have is layers of filters.
There are people out there who have more time than me, have more expertise than me or just find things that I haven’t found. I have maybe 200 voices out there that I listen to, but collectively I’m filtering a million voices through all those layers.
As a result, I get a richer, higher-quality diet of information better suited to me to pull from a wider pool and wider variety of sources. It’s not that much trouble. It’s much easier than it’s ever been before.
[ Snip ... ]
Keen: I think we are seeing more fragmentation. I think we are seeing more anger. I think we are seeing this radicalization of culture and life. I think that technology seems to be almost coincidental and has exploded around this at the same time that Americans are very angry about many different things.
It has nothing to do with blogs or technology, but all these things are coming together in a way that concerns me and I think that if our traditional institutions of politics or culture or economics continue to be undermined by this personalization and radical individualization of things, then I think we will be in trouble.
I think that if the Internet becomes more and more of a soapbox to trash elected politicians and mainstream media figures and to conduct these witch hunts on anyone who ever makes a mistake, then I think that eventually we are going to find ourselves in a world where we’re just going to be staring at a mirror.
It’s going to result in what I call cultural and economic anarchy, and I don’t think that is a good thing. I think it will result in less community, which is ironic given the fact that this thing is supposed to be about community.
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As always, I am reminded of the plot and dynamics of the film Pleasantville.
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Tags: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur, Solari, Catherine Austin Fitts, Chris Anderson, Long Tail
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I think we all get tired of repeating how much change is coming from connecting, opining, pointing to references and sources, and yelling at ourselves to have a voice.
It stuns us (me, at least) that there is so much information out there that counters or contradicts the official versions of things, and yet the power structures of our societies roll along seemingly unimpeded by networks of people with hyperlinks under their thumbs. Of course we read about, and make mental notes, of business models disrupted, and changing behaviour and consumption patterns, and wish we understood whether continuous partial attention is good or bad, but hey … things still roll along more or less the way they have. The masters still matter, and the muttering classes still chatter. Cue Andrew Keen, stage left.
That significant change is happening is, in my opinion, not in question .. and that blogging (whether expert, or activist, or serious / scholarly, or pop fluff, or as other purposeful group activity) is an important component if not the primary example is also not in question.
Via Adriana Lukacs’ blog Media Influencer …
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Hugh is taking the heat off his posting Why We’re all Blogging Less?:
Blogging isn’t dead. Far from it. It’s just a subset of something much larger and more important.Indeed. So 2004 and we are still repeating it.
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What is "something much larger and more important" ?
I think it is both the real opportunity (and the real danger contained therein) of the connected voices and hyperlinks making democracy more real .. and more messy for the powers that be. When I say " … the real danger contained therein …", I mean that governments and media corporations are learning (pretty quickly) how to use networks, electronics and language to subsume citizen voice. They are learning quickly in an environment that is currently conducive to coopting and eviscerating democratic principles, rights and practices.
Here’s what we’re up against … the emergence of The Rebel Well, hot on the heels of The Rebel Sell.
The following is excerpted from the beginning of today’s opinion column in the Guardian by Naomi Klein. It is useful to read.
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Democracy’s new dawn is on CCTV: the security state as infotainment
So keen are America’s leaders to hear dissent they’re videotaping the dissenters. Welcome to a world of total surveillance
Naomi Klein
Friday August 24, 2007
The GuardianAs protesters gathered recently outside the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, Quebec, to confront George Bush, Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, and Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Associated Press reported this surreal detail: "Leaders were not able to see the protesters in person, but they could watch the protesters on TV monitors inside the hotel … Cameramen hired to ensure that demonstrators would be able to pass along their messages to the three leaders sat idly in a tent full of audio and video equipment … A sign on the outside of the tent said, ‘Our cameras are here today providing your right to be seen and heard. Please let us help you get your message out. Thank You.’"
Yes, it’s true: like contestants on a reality TV show, protesters at the SPP meeting were invited to vent into video cameras, their rants to be beamed to "protest-trons" inside the summit enclave. It was security state as infotainment - Big Brother meets, well, Big Brother.
The spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper explained that although protesters were herded into empty fields, the video link meant that their right to political speech was protected. "Under the law, they need to be seen and heard, and they will be."
It is an argument with sweeping implications. If videotaping activists meets the legal requirement that dissenting citizens have the right to be seen and heard, what else might fit the bill? How about all the other security cameras that patrolled the summit - the ones filming demonstrators as they got on and off buses and peacefully walked down the street? What about the mobile phone calls that were intercepted, the meetings that were infiltrated, the emails that were read?
According to the new rules set out in Montebello, all these actions may soon be recast not as infringements on civil liberties but the opposite: proof of our leaders’ commitment to direct, unmediated consultation.
[ Snark on the part of Klein, do you think ? ]
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Why oh why do we in the West put our comfort and our ’security’ ahead of our humanity ?
I suspect that organizations coming to terms with "social software" will take quite some time … not unlike the unfolding of perceptions and practice that have accompanied the growth and development of blogging and wiki-ing over the past half-decade and more.
I was reminded of this earlier today whilst helping a friend with a presentation for the Interactive Screen ‘07 Summit at the Banff New Media Institute … one of the slides we are considering including holds the following quote:
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“ The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organised lags far behind ”
The new organisation - The economist, Jan 19th 2006
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About a half-hour later, whilst browsing I came across this ZDNet article:
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Couldn’t enterprises outsource their internal white pages to FaceBook?
[ Snip ... ]
Although I’m far from the first one to notice this, I’m far more impressed with the way the FaceBook’s user interface works than the way LinkedIn’s does and here’s why. Many companies these days have an internal Web-based directory of their employees. My employer CNET Network has one of these and I use it all the time to look up things like the cell phone numbers, alternate e-mail addresses, and IM IDs of my colleagues.
One of the first things I noticed in FaceBook was how easy it would be for CNET Networks to actually shut down this internal directory that it runs and outsource it to FaceBook. That’s simply not so with LinkedIn, or at least that application for it never occurred to me (and maybe it’s a good test for LinkedIn and others to think about for their next revs).
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Makes sense to me … but then I am someone who thinks that using social software … blogs, wikis, IM and derivatives / mashups thereof … is really just an online way of doing what humans do at work anyway, bypassing much of the para-military lines and chains of command to get something done (which, incidentally many higher-ups go to great lengths to disclaim .. all one need do is watch and listen to the Bushes, Rumsfelds, Gonzales, Cheneys et al repeat and repeat "I do not recall" or "I have no recollection of that" to realize the artifice).
I suspect that we will find many more examples of how social software fits and is useful / practical when it comes to working together .. not to mention the oft-mentioned fact that tomorrow’s workers will have grown up using these applications and their capabilities.
It will seem natural to them to use the tools they are now using to connect and communicate.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, digital natives
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I don’t doubt for a moment that many financial institutions and hedge funds around the world have an exposure to portfolios populated with sub-prime mortgages they have acquired in order to practice their financial engineering skills.
Here’s where it gets tricky … where you need governments, regulations, taxes to pay for the institutions that regulate, etc.
I’m assuming from this announcement (below) that the Bank of Canada is betting that BNP’s halting of three hedge funds that they seem to be deeming "over-exposed" will not be the only problem uncovered.
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OTTAWA – In light of current market conditions, the Bank of Canada would like to assure financial market participants and the public that it will provide liquidity to support the stability of the Canadian financial system and the continued functioning of financial markets.
These activities are part of the Bank’s normal operational duties relating to the stability and efficient function of Canada’s financial system. The Bank is closely monitoring developments, and will deal with issues as they arise.
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I remember this man saying that anyone in his administration who was involved in outing Plame would be fired.
This man has no character and no integrity.
Is there still a place for plain and simple shame ?
I wanted so much to like the latest of Dave Pollard’s blog post (and I am going to re-read it carefully).
… Dean was the keynote yesterday at the annual YearlyKos conference.
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But he was not just asking for our help or our money, but instead acknowledging that democracy in American is now a two way conversation. Not just politicians speaking to voters and asking for their votes, but citizens using the internet to talk to politicians, directly, personally, with an immediacy and impact that is changing the whole democratic process.
We are citizens talking to their officials and candidates and expecting them to engage us in that conversation, and not just at election time, but every day in a continuing dialogue that is breathing new life and new ideas and new energy into our battered republic. Yeah, the man gets it.
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Yes, I clearly understand that the Web has the potential to make great change, and that some people are beginning to figure out how to use it to educate and organize once the connections have been made.
What I can’t figure out is … the above quote from Firedoglake notes that "democracy in America is now a two-way conversation", whereas more often than not commenters on the FDL blog seem to agree that democracy in America is either broken or dead.
Yes, I am being a bit cute … and yes, there is a real problem with the amount of real and structural damage that has been done to what may have been a functioning representative democracy a decade ago.
It seems clear that today it is not … and it also seems clear that some determined people (I’d call Howard Dean one of those) have been working away behind the scenes to salvage what they can.
I don’t think it will really matter in the long run.