TechnoWaffle

What new marketers need to know

2012-01-30T16:16:00.003Z

Following a request from a colleague, I thought I'd turn this into a post. Five questions (with my answers) aimed at newly graduated marketers:

How did you discover the world of Online Marketing?

I was an expert in music before finding gainful employment in the internet and was recruited as Director of Content & E-Commerce to a start-up selling CDs and other music-related products online. They needed someone who knew their ABBA from their Zappa and could segment music lovers from medieval madrigals through to garage and grime. My role naturally included all non-music related content and marketing too and expanded to include all areas of digital. The slow death of the music industry helped me decide to focus more on digital in the future than music.

What are 3 common mistakes that marketers make?

They forget who the competition is. Marketers often only focus on the brand competitors, and ignore the other things that compete for the customer’s attention and wallet.

They forget who the customer is and what they want. Marketers often focus on showing how great their brand is and how different and special it is compared to the rest – when in many cases the customer simply wants something reliable and to know they have made a sensible purchase. This all comes down, clearly, to buyer behaviours and psychographic segmentation.

They forget about the marketing mix (on a basic level, Product, Place, Promotion, Price) and focus only on the Promotion or advertising side. Zara is an example of a highly successful global brand that has had minimal advertising, but has been extremely effective using other elements of the mix, by paying a premium for core locations of their stores, competitive pricing and ensuring the client base know that their products are fashionable and also only available for a limited time before a new collection arrives.

What advice would you give to young marketers after they graduate?

Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Don’t set your sights too high at the beginning;
Get experience in as wide a variety of roles and jobs as you can; and
Only think about specialising after a few years.

The reason for this is that if you start work in an agency you might find it very hard after a few years to get work on the ‘client side’ where the demands are different (you might have to do a lot more stakeholder management inside the organisation).

Equally, if you are only ‘client side’ within an organisation, you might find it very hard to make the jump to agency. Equally, if your role is more offline or broadcast media, then you might find it difficult to convince a future (or existing) employer that you are also capable at the digital side, and vice versa.

The analytical side of SEO, PPC and so on can be less attractive to some than, for example, being on the creative side. But having those analytical skills is essential and will grow in importance as more data becomes available through the use of mobile devices by larger sections of the population.

Google has recently introduced a new social media platform, Google+. Do you think that one day it can take over Facebook and Twitter?

Can it? Yes. Could it? Yes. Will it? No idea. Remember that 5 years ago MySpace was the all dominant social network, and 5 years before that it was sites like ‘Friendster’ or ‘Friends Reunited’. It looks like Facebook has achieved now a global domination that makes it harder for others to overtake, but there are still more people not using the platform than are.

And many people choose not to have a social life on social networks and only use them for business connections or as productivity tools. So there is still scope for someone (it might be Google, it might not) to produce a platform that adequately deals with all those other uses. All the social networks are currently limited and, for me, frustrating. Twitter, equally, is a very limited tool and there is no reason why another tool cannot topple it.

Remember in the 90s Yahoo! was all-dominant, everyone had a Hotmail account and there were dozens of search engines available that people would use according nothing more than aesthetics (they all worked equally badly). Any firm that thinks it is unbeatable is setting itself up for a big fall.

Do you believe that Facebook’s $100B IPO is setting a precedent among all the social media competitors?

Is it setting a precedent where the social media competitors believe now that the market is ready to understand they have a future?

Yes.

Is it setting a precedent where good business models in the social media world can have successful IPOs?

Yes.

Is it suggesting that all social media organisations are worth tens of billions?

No.Like everything, it depends.

Some large organisations might get equally high billing, but it all comes down, unsurprisingly, to the business model. How do they make their money? If they rely on advertising (as Facebook does) is there enough revenue to sustain it? Is it profitable now? Is it likely to be profitable?

There are companies that have great ideas, as many did in the dot-com boom of the nineties, that haven’t properly thought about how to make a business out of the idea. Any organisation that successfully bridges that gap should feel confident about being able to have a successful IPO… but it is unlikely that they will get close to Facebook’s evaluation.

How to stop the endless stream

2012-01-12T17:03:00.000Z

'Information Overload'

Everyone complains of too much information these days. 'Information overload'. We are constantly bombarded by images, messages, advertising, emails, texts, Facebook status updates, tweets and good old-fashioned news. And let 's not start talking about the inanity of celebrity gossip.

To even find examples of information overload on the web, I 've wasted valuable time sifting through excess examples to find a small video with a nice graphic that suggests information overload:

So the irony of complaining about this and adding to the information overload is not lost on this writer. Everyone is a publisher today. Everyone is offering advice. Everyone has something to celebrate or share.

So to mark my 1000th Tweet, this post, where every word is linked to the first(ish) search result on Google for that word, will be the link from the Tweet:

"1000th Tweet on 12 January 2012"

How to understand online marketing in an instant

2011-12-28T10:50:00.001Z

Having several courses to teach next year on Digital Marketing, I'm in two minds as to whether or not I like the inforgraphic from unbounce.com as:

it makes my life so much easier... being able to give students the infographic and telling them to get on with it; whilst also
realising that this might make my role teaching digital marketing somewhat redundant.

However, seeing as everything in life is futile and we are all merely passing time until the next change, I share the infographic below...

BloMob: the future of digital publishing

2011-12-22T23:43:00.001Z

One of the most frequent excuses I hear from clients, students and colleagues when we are discussing blogging and the use of digital publishing tools to encourage sharing and collaboration, is "I don't have time to blog".

One of the reasons I think Twitter is so popular is because the format is so limited that people feel less pressure when posting and can publish ideas without expanding on them.

The problem is that Twitter is limiting as well as limited...and there are many ideas and comments that cannot legitimately nor legibly be reduced to 140 characters.

The growth of tablets like the iPad has probably helped people create content on the go....although it's not easy to type on most tablets while on the move.

Recording thoughts like a personal podcast is possible on a variety of platforms like AudioBoo, but the disadvantage of audio is not being able to skim-listen, unless you are partially sighted and used to absorbing audio information really really quickly.

So what is the future?

There are two sides:
a. It has to be mobile, clearly, to allow people to develop posts on the go. But that's not ideal as this post can attest....being written through an app on a train....creating links and embedding images is fiddly to say the least...
b. dictablog: being able to dictate thoughts into a mobile or other device and hoping it correctly transcribes the dictation into text. It would also need to become clever enough to insert links and images... and you have the downside of having to speak loudly and clearly into your mobile, possibly in public, definitely looking like a fool.

So what alternative is there?

Simple....keep your thoughts to yourself....

Automating value judgements

2011-12-14T23:59:00.003Z

In my role as a professor of marketing and technology, I fully expect to have to assess and grade students. That is part of the lot of a teacher of any kind, from kindergarten onwards (although, arguably, the assessment may take different forms over the years).

As a conscientious educator, I am keen to ensure all the hard work of the students is also fairly and fully assessed. There are possibly those, as rumour and legend would have it, who throw their papers down the stairs and then start grading those on the top step as 'A's, those on the 2nd step as 'B's and so on down to 'F's on the bottom step.

Tempting though it might be, I am determined to be as paperless as possible. So far I have saved at least 700 sheets of paper in just one course (assuming double-sided printing) through not printing the submitted assignments. And throwing a laptop or iPad down the stairs to achieve the same effect just wouldn't do. Think of the splinters.

However, grading 2000+ word assignments is time consuming. If you do it properly, it involves reading each assignment at least twice, possibly more. Comparing papers to ensure the comparative grades in the class are fair. Composing specific feedback (100 words minimum? 200 words optimal?) to help the student understand their grade and improve for the future.

Group work needs assessment and, by the nature of group work, involves fewer actual papers to read and assess. But it removes the individual assessment and is therefore subject to slacker students benefiting from the hard work of other team members.

There is no getting past it. Detailed, objective and rigorous individual assessment is essential. But how to do it efficiently?

My first thought was to build the most advanced AI computer in the world and get it to grade the computers. As soon as the patent comes through I'll let you know.

My second thought was back to throwing everything down the stairs.

My third thought was carrying on as I have been and grading at 2am until I get through them all.

So my final thought seems the only viable option, other than me pulling an 'all nighter' or 7. If Amazon, and every e-commerce site worth its salt, can tap into the crowd to assess and vote on how good (or not) individual books are, surely that would work for individual assignments from students?

All one would need would be a simple website, such as Scribd, where the PDF documents of assignments could sit, visible to the world. The world at large could then read the assignments and grade them. Once a critical mass of assessment is reached (such as 500 votes), the average is taken as the final grade. Space for comments would provide the feedback.

This is, in fact, I am certain, genius. There are only two obstacles to overcome:

Getting that critical mass of people to read and vote on all the assignments in a short timespan; and
Ensuring the students and their families do not vote for them.

If, therefore, you ever see such a business model come into existence, remember you read it here first. Until then, it looks like I have an 'all-nighter' ahead of me....

Top image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Art of Innovation

2011-11-25T16:03:00.001Z

Guy Kawasaki's presentation on 'The Art of Innovation' is worth recommending not just for the anecdotes, insider view, venture capital experience and pithy rules to innovate, but also for showing how to present to a conference.

Humour. A good sense of humour is good. If you don't have it, don't try and fake it, but if you have it, flaunt it....

This keynote was from 2007 - but having only just discovered it 4 years later I thought it worth passing on...

The only way is up...unless you drill down...

2011-11-16T15:09:00.001Z

This post is a copy and paste from a brief summary of the state-of-the-nation I had to produce today, giving a summary of the global economic climate at the moment.

As 2011 draws to a close, three years after the start of the current financial crisis, there is no indication of the situation improving. The OECD says all economies it monitors suffered a downturn in September with the U.S., Japan and Russia returning to their long-term trend (with the U.S. achieving 2.5% growth) but the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Brazil, China, India and the Euro area falling below. It predicted the G7 countries would grow by just 0.2% while Germany, the world’s second largest exporter, falling by 1.4% in the Q4.

Within the Eurozone, the Greek economy contracted by 5.2% in Q3, an improvement on 8.3% in Q1 but still painful. Portugal, the previous danger area for bailouts, shrank by just 1.7%, Ireland and Italy were stagnant and Spain rose by 0.8%, compared with the UK’s 0.5% growth. Lithuania and Estonia, by contrast, rose by 7.8% and 7.9% respectively.

After days of speculation about Italy and Spain needing a bailout with Italian bond yields exceeding the 7% threshold beyond which it is believed they could not pay back the loans, and Spanish bond yields rising, both countries have seen the bonds bounce back after the European Central Bank has agreed to buy the country’s debts. However, confidence in Italy’s economy is still shaky as yields rose once again shortly afterwards. The focus on Italy remains high as it accounts for 16.8% of Eurozone GDP compared to Greece’s 2.3%.

The domestic problems in those two countries, however, have forced the resignation of Greece’s Prime Minister Papandreou and Italy’s Prime Minister Berlusconi have led to a new era of technocrats with academic economists Lucas Papademos, a former VP of the ECB in Frankfurt, and Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner, taking the reins respectively, providing a warning to politicians in charge of all failing economies that their successors could be civil servants, not fellow politicians.

UK inflation has fallen slightly to 5% from a ten-year high of 5.2% thanks mainly to current supermarket price wars, whilst clothing, electricity and gas prices continue to rise. By comparison, prices in the Eurozone held steady at 3%, whilst the US rate of inflation fell slightly to 3.5%.

To help boost the UK economy, the Bank of England announced it will resume quantitative easing in the near future, whilst the US had aimed to provide a $447 billion boost to the economy through tax cuts and an increase in government spending. This plan was, however, blocked by republicans, leading President Obama to seek new ways to pushing through changes to help housing, education and employment issues. Furthermore, Obama has sought to create a Pacific-region trade pact with a new Trans-Pacific Partnership rivaling the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Finally, Britain has helped the love-hate relationship between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy by giving it something to join together and fight against: David Cameron and a proposed Tobin Tax on financial transactions which the Tory leader is adamantly opposing.

All this, of course, is good news. Whilst the present outlook is bleak, it means that things can only get better.

A brief look at today's FTSE 100 index, showing the past 10 years, shows how things go up, and then they go down. Sometimes they go very down, but they tend to go up over time.

FTSE 100 Index

So here is hoping that the global economy is going to follow that trend....now just to cross those fingers and toes...

How to put out a Flash in the pan...

2011-11-09T14:10:00.002Z

Twitter has been loud this morning talking of Adobe killing off its fancy animation language 'Flash' for mobile devices. The news first came, it seems, on ZDNet whilst the Adobe website still talks about creating Flash for mobile devices, but then Adobe wouldn't be the first company that failed to tell its web team what it had told the rest of the world.

Some commentators have been remarking, probably rightly, that Steve Jobs has finally won, beyond the grave, in his war against Adobe. It was in April last year that the Apple anti-Flash venom started spitting. Mashable ran a series of emails between Steve Jobs and an Adobe developer that suggested Jobs' hatred of Flash was purely about the stability of the platform and the ability of Apple to be able to lock in both app developers and iPhone and iPad users by making it harder to create the same app for multiple platforms (Android, Windows, RIM etc.).

The 'Roughly Drafted Magazine' blog ran an article just after the Mashable one that gives a nice summary of the real background to the Apple-Adobe spat. In short, it has nothing to do with Flash. It has nothing to do with whether or not Flash is unstable or not. It clearly has nothing to do with delivering a great user experience, as most websites had some element of Flash when the iPad first appeared (not to mention the iPhone before it) which could not be viewed by Apple users.

So if Adobe won't support Flash for mobile devices, surely it cannot be long before Flash dies out? HTML 5 will take over completely once Internet Explorer adopts HTML 5 with version 9, (despite many users still on I.E. 6, such as corporate clients too frightened to update anything once they have locked it down enough to make it secure) and no website will be developed using Flash.

So what is the fall-out to this? Flash developers had better start retraining and fast. Flash trainers had better start teaching something else. Accessibility experts had better start charging for something else as they won't be able to spend hours pointing out how un-accessible Flash is.

And pages will load faster...(take note Burberry!)

And the world keeps turning...it just no longer uses Action Script...

How do you know you have failed?

2011-11-03T14:55:00.001Z

"99 percent of success is built on failure." - Charles Kettering

I have recently heard much talk about how all good entrepreneurs have lived through failure and that, in fact, an entrepreneur needs to fail on the road to success. The Guardian's Tech Weekly Podcast recently discussed this when talking about the new 'Silicon Roundabout' area of London rich in technology start-ups and why none have achieved comparable success with their 'Silicon Valley' counterparts.

Apparently the British don't tolerate failure the way those in the US do.

If one peruses the millions of words recently written about Steve Jobs, much is spoken about his products which failed, his personal failure in being sacked from Apple, and how he spoke in the (now famous) Stanford Commencement Speech about how he learned from those mistakes.

But no one seems to know how to answer one simple question:

How do you know you've failed?

There are hundreds, if not thousands of potential entrepreneurs worldwide who have great ideas. Many of them put the ideas into practice and develop those ideas into a functioning product or service or artistic endeavour (such as a composition, an artwork or a novel). Many of them are persistent in trying to get funding for their company or to get others to back their ideas both financially and morally.

Some are lucky. Through friends, family and serendipitous connections with investors and mentors, they are able to get their business off the ground. They might get a mention in the local press or even the national media. They might present at trade shows or speak at conferences.

But they do not achieve the critical mass necessary to make the business profitable. Some investors are patient and, as with Amazon, will wait up to seven years before seeing even a modest profit; but many investors are less patient and will stop funding a start-up after a few years of operation. Would Amazon have survived if it had taken two more years to move into the black? Bill Gates said "Microsoft is always two years away from failure".

When should creatives, in business or the arts, decide to cut their losses and try a different direction? Pulp, the Sheffield band, took sixteen years from forming to reaching national and international success. In 2009, The Economist wrote how entrepreneurship was finally 'cool'.

So all the angel investors, VC funding, government grants and deregulation of start-up bureaucracy is great, but perhaps what is really needed is some objective guidance and advice for when someone should persist with their idea because their time will indeed come; and when they should just pack it in and try something different. We could call them "Reality Checkers".

For those who do wish to persist, I recommend reading the quotes on innovation on ideachampions.com.

Perhaps the best quote for me, however, is by Douglas Adams:

"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'"

An atheist's view of Steve Jobs

2011-10-19T11:43:00.000+01:00

It was two weeks ago today that the world started an outpouring of comment on Steve Jobs and his sad death. As it is sad whenever anyone dies... a bit of a tautology that is repeated by every media outlet whenever anyone famous dies of any cause at any time in their life.

Apple's website is still, two weeks after his death, showing the memorial photo any time you visit the website. A day of memorial one would expect. A week might be appropriate for the founder and CEO of your company. But how long will it now stay up? Will it be dropped, unceremoniously, without notification, after three weeks? Or a month? Or will they keep it there for a year? What is the appropriate amount of time to grieve for someone you didn't know at all, except through the vicarious the spotlight of celebrity?

Candles outside the Apple Store, London

The outpouring of emotion, such as flowers and candles laid outside the Apple store in London, echoed the sudden quivering of the traditionally British stiff upper lip and ultimate breakdown of the previously stoic public into a collective, sobbing, emotional wreck, when Princess Diana (or Mrs Diana Windsor, as some might prefer it) sadly died (see the flowers below).

Flowers outside Kensington Palace

Then, as now, I find myself wondering why people care so much. Surely, it is because the person (Jobs, Diana) was famous? That people felt that they knew them? Or was it that they found the death of a celebrity a useful catharsis for them to release pent-up emotion for some other, more private, loss?

I am not a psychologist and shall not attempt to understand it, suffice to say that I don't.

However, another phenomenon seems to have occurred around the death of Jobs. Stories of him being a bully and a tyrant have finally seen more widespread coverage since his death, which allows one to reasonably address the fact that far from being the best CEO in the world, his is a case study that should be used in business schools to show how a great leader should not behave.

An apparently obsessive care for the detail of products makes a great product designer, not a great boss. A culture at an organisation where people fear the CEO does not make for the best working environment.

When Jim Collins studied exceptional leaders and came up with the concept of a 'Level 5' leader who enabled great change at an organisation that survived a change of leadership and continued to make the organisation highly successful, he described parable of the fox (which knows many small things) and the hedgehog (which knows one big thing). Jobs was probably a hedgehog - he knew how to make great products and charge customers a premium for them.

Ansoff's Growth Matrix

When discussing technology innovation on the masters courses, Apple is frequently cited as an example of an organisation with a great growth strategy - for product development and diversification - creating new products for existing markets and creating new markets (as per Ansoff's Matrix shown here).

Through the use of iTunes, Apple have also managed to ensure casual customers become loyal customers (achieving market penetration).

It is also worth remembering how much Apple's stock has risen recently, from an average of $7 to $10 for most of its life to 2004, to a current $420 - showing how much the iPhone and iPads have radically changed Apple's revenue structure.

Apple stock from 2000 to 2011 from Yahoo! Finance

So it can be safely stated that Steve Jobs was a great CEO in delivering value to the shareholders and creating products that became market leaders for several years after launch.

Image by Edward Eustace

But that is it. The deification of Steve Jobs is somewhat unnecessary. I realise that posting a blog about him is perpetuating the impression that he is the only person of worth who has died. His inventions certainly changed the technological landscape by influencing how Microsoft developed Windows (the OS that most people still use) and how mobile technology can become ubiquitous. Interesting to note, by the by, how Microsoft make no mention of Apple's use of the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointing device) in their own potted history of Windows.

The BBC documentary in May 2011 showed through MRI scans how "Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith". The theory (by Dean Hamer) that there is a gene which predisposes people to being religious or having 'spiritual experiences' helps explain my own perplexed view of the Apple faithful (or iCult as it has been dubbed).

So if Hamer is right, I am genetically predisposed to treat all evangelicalism with suspicion...be it for Apple, football, or one of the many gods.

The Church of Apple has many devotees - and a higher than average percentage of them work in the media - helping fuel the constant messages of Apple omnipresence.

But in the end, us atheists must pray, with ironic tongue firmly in cheek, that sense will see the day, reason will out, the blind shall have their veils lifted and that everyone shall see that there is no god. There is only:

5 ways to gamify trade fairs and expos

2011-09-22T13:37:00.000+01:00

Attending the Ad:Tech exhibition at Olympia in London yesterday and today, I am struck by how untechnical it is. No suggestion of participating online. No suggestion of accessing information online as one moves about (an ideal Layar layer would surely be information on the stands and products on your smartphone as you move about the show floor). No suggestion of moving towards a virtual fair...which is surely the future...but when? I am also struck that between seminars, which can be divided into two groups: those that make an effort to tell you something new and those that don't attempt to hide the fact that they are here to sell their products and services, the show floor can be a little boring if you are not specifically looking for a new supplier of universal analytics or mobile widgets.

So here are some ways to gamify your trade fair experience:

1. At a fair like Ad:Tech, which combines marketing and technical elements, there is a fun game of "spot the techie". The techies who go to this fair are more socially aware than many of their backroom cousins, but still tend to dress differently from your core advertising people. That's not a bad thing. The world needs people who keep servers running and set up websites and provide analytics software. But you can, if you wish, divide your targets along a spectrum from 'Too cool for school' through to 'Übergeek and borderline Asbergers'.

2. Related to this, is spot the brands who do not realise this is the 21st century and there is no place for sexism. They are easy to spot. They have young women dressed in skimpy clothing with the company brand on their chest giving out leaflets and other freebies. If they had men in skimpy clothing that would not improve the issue....we're at a business trade fair, not a disco.

3. Freebies. This is fun. Go around the fair to pick up the best freebies you can. So far I have an aluminium water bottle, a book, a beach ball, a squishy Einstein and a desk-basketball set. No need to buy Christmas presents this year!

4. If you are not trying to watch your weight as I am (well, watch it not changing and wishing it would go away), see if you can get a free lunch from the diffent sandwiches and canapés on offer at the different stands. You could try and get drunk too....there are occasional offers of cheap champagne and wine.

5. Create your own version of X Factor. At the seminars, score the presenters on their performance. You could have different criteria, such as appearance, vocal style, PowerPoint slide quality, audience interaction.... You could even give em feedback, such as "Enthusiastic delivery John but you are in danger of sounding like you are hectoring the audience and borderline irritating" or "Great content Jane but think about how you can use your voice to keep the audience awake".

In fact, this suggests to me a great new idea for a start-up. We will create an app for all mobile platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, Windows) that for any given trade show will provide a list of seminar speakers and exhibitors. The exhibition organiser could use the app to share schedules with attendees, but the game part will be to have easy one-touch buttons to score speakers on different criteria, a sliding scale from übercool to übergeek which you can use to rate speakers and attendees, a 'name and shame' feature to spot shameless sexism by different exhibitors. You could even award badges such as "Runner-up best speaker" or "Too cool for school" to individuals. You could earn points too according to freebies and food consumed.

We could showcase the app at next year's Ad:Tech. We just need to get the chocolate teapots to give away, branded miniskirts, sock-and-sandal combinations for sales staff, and we'll need to take a course on presentation skills. If anyone wants in, just let me know. This time next year we'll be millionaires....

HTC Sucks - and not in a good way

2011-09-20T11:37:00.000+01:00

Having been a fan of Android phones in principle since they came out (the open nature of Android, the viable alternative to iOS and the Apple fanfest, the particular liking of Google's way of doing things as opposed to how Apple or MicroSoft do things) I have been traumatised by my experiences with my first Android phone.

Money being an object for most people like me, I could not go and buy the Google Nexus S (a Samsung phone) but haggled with my mobile company (Three) to get a £10 per month SIM card with all-you-can-eat data, 750 minutes of talking, 150 texts and a few other things. I then bought a mobile separately working out that over 2 years I would save almost £200, as opposed to paying a monthly contract of £25 or more. I bought the HTC Desire (the precursor to the HTC Desire S and HD versions) as a friend had one and had had no problems with it and I saw good reviews on the internet.

The friend in question doesn't use apps.

I've uninstalled all apps except for Google's own apps and a couple more, and yet am still in danger of running out of internal phone storage space. Again. After 8 factory resets trying to remedy the matter.

Yesterday, three apps (Goggles, Maps and Evernote) automatically updated themselves and the remaining internal memory went down from 44MB to 22MB in an instant and then trickled down to 15MB with me doing nothing on the machine!

HTC only made 150MB of internal memory available for apps. So even though I move all my apps to the external storage (the SD card), they still leave residual memory on the internal storage that eats away until there is nothing left.

When the memory slips below 15MB, Gmail and Exchange stop updating.

HTC have, eventually, offered to repair the mobile, and I might ask them to just to make sure there is no fault with the hardware. But I fear the fault is with the design.

For the first time ever I'm jealous of iPhone users who have no issues with app space running out.

What this has taught me is two things:

a. avoid HTC like the plague: there is a reason their handsets are cheaper...although TechRadar does list 3 of them in the top 10 Android phones, and 3 in the top 5... irritatingly...
b. look for internal storage for apps when buying a smartphone. I have never, however, seen this listed on the product specifications online or instore. You have to dig deep to find it...but it is worth digging.
c. if you want a recommendation for any hardware from a friend, make sure the friend is a similar user to you. If they are a light user, then it won't help a heavy user judge performance.

Yes...that is 3 things...but anyway...

All of this is, of course, obvious. But the obvious only presents itself sometimes too late...

When do real books beat e-books?

2011-08-30T17:09:00.000+01:00

Of late I have become a fan of e-books, being able to read a few pages on my mobile phone while waiting in a queue or travelling on the tube without needing to carry the whole book with x-hundred pages of type.

The advantages for learning are obvious too - instant search to find the paragraph needed for that essential quote being the most important, though not having to carry several kilos of books to class is also important.

Where e-books fail, however, is in the 'feel'. With services like Amazon's 'Look inside' feature and 'Search inside' one can get a good feel for what the content of a book is, how it is laid out and so on. But it still is not the same as actually going to a bookshop, picking up the x-hundred pages of type and flicking through it. Does it have (in the case of text books) the right kind of pictures, headings and sub-headings? Are there summaries at the end of a chapter? Are there footnotes, chapternotes or other aids for further reading?

Of course one can find all these things through Amazon's service (and others) but, maybe this is a generational thing, I still feel the need to physically hold the book and, in the case of text books, physically own it.

This is paradoxical as it is precisely text books where e-books are able to truly innovate, showing videos, dynamic interactive charts and have lots of links between sections throughout the book in question. Many of the big textbook publishers have all manner of online tools for students to test their comprehension after a given chapter.

In short, e-books are best. But choosing a book to recommend as an e-book? I need paper. Hence needing to make a special trip to the largest academic bookstore in Europe (apparently) and make a final decision on the books I'll be recommending on the Masters in Digital Marketing programme I will soon be teaching on.

The students will have iPads and will be encouraged to use e-books...so my task is two-fold. Find paper-format books that I'm happy with that have e-book equivalents for the students.

Yes...I can smell the irony too...

How does a social network get social?

2011-08-18T07:35:00.001+01:00

As with many people around the world, I was looking forward to Google getting on the social networking bandwagon to see if it could cast off the mistake of Orkut and create something compelling that would steal some of Facebook's thunder and, indeed, crown.

However, perhaps it is to be expected that only those quite deeply entrenched in geekdom have so far obtained the full benefits of Google +. The problem, as affects all social networks, is that of critical mass.

People will not engage until there is critical mass. Without engagement, there will be no critical mass.

The geek world, as shown by those blogging and Tweeting about Google +, has shown that within their circle, critical mass was achieved weeks ago.

For the general public, however, in which I largely include myself as most of my direct contacts and friends are not what one could call 'geeks' (I'm the token geek in their world) have hardly heard of it.

As a result, I have a large number of circles on Google + but only one or two people in those circles are actually on Google + themselves. So there's no point broadcasting and sharing with them when I can do it through Twitter and Facebook, right?

But, I remind myself, Twitter was a geekfest for a few years before really hitting the public consciousness last year...by which I mean those who are still wary of the internet for it might steal their soul have also heard of it.

So I shall wait. And bide my time. Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" and Everett Rogers's "Diffusion of Innovations" talk of the importance of critical mass...so hopefully the masses will leave criticism to others and get on board so that people such as I can play properly.

I could, I suppose, actively go out seeking geek friends... but then we'd be in danger of only talking about Google +... and that would not be healthy.

What business could learn from the riots...

2011-08-09T10:15:00.000+01:00

There seems to be little else to talk of in social media and through broadcast news in the UK these past couple of days than the riots spreading through London and to other cities around the country.

Photo from the Guardian

This blog talks more about social media than social unrest, though it is easy to see how different the riots now are different from the riots of the eighties. True, both happened under a Tory government imposing swingeing cuts to public services. Both happened at a time of great recession and increasing unemployment. But the riots of today are not politically driven. They have simply become a combination of street-party and shopping spree (with 0% credit and nothing to pay until you get caught).

The Great Google has, once again, provided a lovely mash-up to show exactly where the riots have been having across Britain's capital:

View London riots / UK riots: verified areas in a larger map

The traditional media have spoken of the rioters (or looters) self-organising through social media; whilst the Urban Mashup Blog has pointed out that it isn't the usual social media the looters are using, but BBM, Blackberry's Messenger service, which is private and has recently been heavily promoted to the urban youth in the UK with promotions by Jay-Z etc.

So what can business learn from this?

First of all, Blackberry is still a robust system for internal communications and the messenger service could be used more (I've not seen corporate use of BBM).

Secondly, the legal profession should be flooding BBM with ads for criminal solicitors as looters are slowly hoovered up by the police and will need representation.

Thirdly, buy shares in glaziers - a lot of windows will need replacing very soon. Sell shares in insurance companies (or are riots considered 'acts of God' - a strange god that would allow such things...but anyway).

Fourthly, there is a great opportunity for producers of GPS and RFID locator chips. Many products are already have such devices already fitted. What I predict will happen more from now on is that everything from expensive trainers to LCD TVs will have the chips fitted, meaning that producers can locate them at any time. This should help after-sales service and warranties (are there more defects occurring in specific areas that might be due to a particular shipping agent?); but will also mean that looters and normal everyday thieves will no longer be able to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.

Fifthly, and finally, mass collaboration. It has been shown time and time again (see Wikinomics for some examples) how mass collaboration can not only benefit businesses through knowledge sharing, ideas generation and stakeholder engagement, but also create huge profits by tapping into the 'crowd' and using the world as your workforce.

If rioters and looters are able to self-organise when the incentive is a new, free TV, the only obstacle to harnessing that energy for good is to find the right incentive.

That, for businesses today, is not only a challenge, but an opportunity.

What if a robot could write this?

2011-08-08T08:47:00.000+01:00

Ironically, only a day or two after writing the previous post about digital excess and transience, I saw this TED video (see below) by Adam Ostrow from Mashable on how our digital selves - that is all the content we have created and uploaded during our lifetime - will be replicable by machines, to the extend that robots could continue producing content in our style long after we're gone.

What Adam, or the people he refers to, forget is that our online selves are often not our offline selves. Our online content might be, as this blog aims to be, focused on a specific subject and not a general insight into our personal lives.

We may choose to publish nothing at all about our families, friends and home life.

Equally, we may choose to only show photos of our children and never talk about our professional lives...many still not seeing the value digital holds for every type and sector of business.

What would be interesting, however, is if the robots could be trained to produce content in our style while we're alive. If the robots could be trained to do our work for us. If the robots could be taught to give us more free time, to do with what we wish...

What if a robot had written this? Would it know when to stop (I rarely do)? It would probably produce better and more logical tagging... and importantly... it would allow the world to see what a wealth of opinions I have without me having to think of them...

...roll on the future...

The price of digital is excess and transience...

2011-08-05T20:07:00.002+01:00

Back in the good old days, we used to have vinyl albums and cassettes and photographs that you might actually put into albums. We were limited in how many albums we could own only by the size of our shelf/room/house and the depth of our pockets. You could tape someone else's albums, and build a large music collection off the back of the local library and friends who bought vinyl, but then the cost was in time, sitting by the turntable and putting in cassettes at the appropriate time, waiting for the record to end, pausing, turning over, writing out the inlay cards. If it would only have been an interesting task it could have become a hobby...

And with photographs, films were relatively expensive, developing them even more so. During some of my childhood years in the seventies, there were probably no more than 20 or 30 photos taken during the whole year! As a result, one valued the photos, kept them safely in a special drawer and selected the best ones for frames or albums.

Digital has changed all that. Despite the best efforts of the large record companies, some artists, the performing rights agencies and various governments, the sharing of mp3s is abundant and the cost of albums and individual tracks sold digitally is far lower than it was when a physical product was involved. Most people now have a far larger digital music collection, whether or not they paid for it, which they may hold in two places: on their main computer and on their mp3 player. New services from Apple and Amazon allow collections to be pseudo-saved to the cloud, but the lack of a physical product to care for and cherish means that most people don't actually make sure their music collection is safe.

And again, the same goes for photographs. The advantage of digital is that you can see the image immediately after taking it, and take another, and another, if it isn't up to scratch. But do you then delete the 'bad' images? I don't, and I suspect many don't. I intend to, but don't have the time when it comes to putting the images on the computer, so simply save everything to go through them all carefully and properly (with appropriate Photoshopping where necessary) when I have time. Who has time?

Cloud services, such as Flickr and Picasa, have existed for many years, but I'd be interested to know what percentage of casual photographers put their photos up on such sites? I started uploading photos of our baby, born last August, to Picasa so that his grandparents who live abroad could see the evolution. I didn't have time to edit the photos, so after 8 months had uploaded over 2000 photos! And thank Darwin I did.

I have always taken 'back-ups' seriously, having a good quality large external hard drive to make a clone of everything stored on my computer, including images and music.

Then I changed my computer...so the back-up was temporarily the only copy...and as soon as I had a moment (new babies notwithstanding) I was going to create a new 'original' from the back-up.

However, before I could do that, the external drive took a wee knock and stopped working. Three so-called professional data retrieving companies later and over £350 spent and there is no possibility of getting the data back from that hard drive.

In short, I have lost all photos and all memories for the past 8 years. All holidays, friends' weddings, family gatherings, pregnancy...(my partner's, not mine)... if only we'd printed off a couple of photos per 'event' for an album... if only I'd backed-up to the cloud as well (which I now have...can you hear the horse galloping away from the closed stable doors?)... if only I'd made the 'new original'... if only if only...

The music I can rerecord/repurchase/reborrow... though it might take a long long time to do so. But what price memories? The very fact that I had thousands and thousands and thousands of digital photos stopped me selecting the good ones for printing. The very fact that I had so many photos stopped me creating more back-ups (e.g. to DVDs).

When I look at my grandparents' photos, there are probably no more than 50 images to look through, showing a few relatives and their friends promenading in a park or standing formally in a front room.

When I look at my parents' photos, there are over a hundred... probably... but not an abundance. Our childhood birthdays warranted maybe a maximum of 5 photos. A holiday might warrant a full roll of film, but with 120 films that meant 12 images. Whoopie doo!

When our grandchildren look back at our photos, however, if they ever find the time, they will find tens of thousands of photos. I can't look at them all, will they? Is there any point in saving so many photos? If I'm ever rich enough to retire, will I want to finally sort them and print the good ones?

What we need, therefore, is an artificial limit placed on our digital files. Programs such as Picasa, or the camera software itself, should force us to choose a maximum of 5 photos per day for storing. The others will self-destruct after a given time limit forcing us to make the choice now.

Perhaps we could get a special 'event' button that would allow us, only twice per year, to increase that limit. To what, 10?

We would still have the problem of making sure we backed-up our back-ups, but perhaps that would force us to make sure we made copies, printed the best ones and ensured that our descendants had a vaguely manageable set of memories to look at.

Digital has cost me my memories. The solution is to create scarcity and permanence...

...and I would have put a photo or two in this blog...but I lost them all...

The internet will not make us equal

2011-03-07T10:04:00.001Z

Aleks Krotoski wrote in The Guardian today "Money and the internet: The next topic for Untangling the Web".

The following is my brief take on the subject - also posted as a comment on the Guardian.

Whilst the utopia of an egalitarian system that rewards all according to their efforts rather than according to the artificially inflated value placed on their particular sector (such as derivatives trading) - which in itself is a long way from rewarding all according to their needs - the ability for people to engage online already depends on a social divide: the digital divide.

So whilst it would be nice for everyone to have the same access to education and the same opportunities in life, making the whole 'life' thing a lot fairer, that isn't going to happen for decades to come, if not centuries. Likewise, if everyone had the same access to the internet and other digital content and opportunities, had the same minimum broadband levels, the same power in their computers, and the same knowledge of how to use the internet, be it for searching, shopping, authoring or learning, then we could discuss the possibility of the web making life a little fairer for all.

That clearly is not the case, however. The only difference with the internet is that those who are 'wealthy' in digital terms: heavy internet users, bloggers, gamers, app-users - are not necessarily the same as those considered 'wealthy' offline. The differences exist - they are simply applied to a different group.

When did the 'internet' become 'digital'?

2011-02-22T15:23:00.001Z

The time has come, the walrus probably never said but was misquoted as saying, to think of other things.

However, rather than shoes and ships and sealing wax, I have began to think of the next stage in my career...and this has provoked a lot of questions for me that I thought might be useful to share:

When does a job or work become a career?

Do 'kids' come out of university now with clear ideas about their 'career' (doctors, lawyers and accountants notwithstanding) - or do they get what looks like an interesting job and then see where that takes them? As some of my contemporaries can attest, it is easy to follow the dream - but when do you decide to abandon the dream (realising you're getting nowhere) and get a job that will pay the bills? Everyone has their own limit, depending on their dream, their pride, and the size of their bills.

How many careers are you allowed to have previous to your current one?

A headhunter recently told me that my twenties, when I had a 'portfolio career' of doing voiceovers for cartoons and sales videos, a radio programme, mis-managing local bands (mis-managing because I wasn't able to retire on the earnings), effectively running a small indie record label as well as doing some teaching and translating to make ends meet. What I hadn't realised until the kindly headhunter told me is that that was my 'first career' - which in retrospect of course it was. I was trying to have a life in 'music' and 'voice'... but music lead to the internet and what has now become my 'second career'.

How long do you have to be in the same line of work for it to become a career path?

Which is another way of asking:

Are you working in a particular function, or a particular sector?

This is very much on my mind now, as I have been working in the internet for around 13 years - since the late nineties - covering all areas of the internet from technology selection, specification and design, user experience, e-commerce, online marketing, digital communications and online or virtual learning. So, which is more important, that I can work in any area of the internet, or that I have x years working in a particular sector?
This seems to be an important distinction in the minds of some recruiters. They will see, for example, that I have spent the past 5 years in the education sector (sub-branch: executive education); and therefore assume that I am unable and incapable of working in, for example, the retail sector, or consumer electronics, or financial services.

Fundamentally the strategies one develops and the tools one uses on the internet, whether it is to sell, market, communicate, educate or collaborate, are the same. It makes no difference whatsoever if you are selling a programme on leadership, a pair of jeans, an Android tablet or an insurance policy - you do the same things. As with any area of marketing and communicating, you have to think about your audience and change tactics accordingly. With pharmaceuticals and accounting/auditing firms, for example, there are specific regulations as to what one is and is not allowed to do, but those regulations take all of half-an-hour to learn.

Furthermore, I have found that some firms are looking for a square-peg for a square hole, rather than a malleable peg that will fit any hole. It is no good, for example, being in e-commerce if you do not understand user experience architecture. It is no good, for example, trying to do online marketing if you do not understand social media. And it is no good thinking about online learning without also thinking about how one communicates, how one uses the AIDA framework (for those that don't know, the steps that you must go through on a communications campaign:

Awareness - make the target audience aware of what your message or product is
Interest - get them interested in it
Desire - make them want it
Action - make sure they actually do something about it...

As I discussed in my post on Learning through Advertising and Porn a fundamental part of getting the learning to stick is using the same techniques that are used for advertising and pornography: getting the message across quickly (using advertising techniques) and making the user want to see said communication (porn - although please note that the world would be a better place without porn - this does not condone - but observes and notes its popularity).

And so to the title of this blog:

When did the 'internet' become 'digital'?

When I started creating and managing websites 13 years ago, everyone talked about the internet. With the increase in various forms of communications through the same use of broadband (such as email marketing) we began to refer to it all as online: as opposed to offline (using print or traditional broadcast media).

Now every single job I have seen advertised uses the word digital. This is, no doubt, to cover the range of tools one must now employ online, from websites and email marketing, through to viral marketing, social media, virtual worlds and video conferencing and more.

Fundamentally, though, it all comes down to online stuff and y'know...the internet. And it is shocking at the huge divide emerging between those who have just understood the need for an internet presence, and those who understand that to engage with anyone, be it customers, potential clients, suppliers, employees, management, unions or old media - one has to use the full range of digital tools available. The sector doesn't mater. The industry doesn't matter.

All that matters is that you understand that all things are connected. Understand that, and the rest follows naturally.

Making Social Media Work: the answer is STOIC

2010-12-20T17:01:00.000Z

For the final project / thesis that will, in theory, get me an MBA, I have been conducting research on how organisations successfully implement social media, or Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0. There are some interesting findings, not least of which is that if you refer to 'New Technologies' - people are interested; but 'Social Media' is still a dirty word and not likely to get much uptake of a survey by those not in the business.

I am working on rewriting the thesis to make it palatable for general consumption, which will no doubt mean a lot of editing to reduce the 63000 words to something people will want to actually read. The cover, which is more palatable and a tag cloud of all the 63000 words, is this:

However, until I get around to rewriting it, I feel there are some issues of value that should be shared now.

The Executive Summary says most of it quite succinctly...more or less as follows....

Social media and Enterprise 2.0 are terms which have suffered from intense hype in recent years in a way that has polarised many in business into being either evangelists for the new systems or laggards who believe social media is about wasting time.

The new systems, which include a range of tools from blogs and wikis to social networks and virtual worlds, are technologies that allow users to collaborate together and to create and share content in ways that were impossible just a few years ago.

The business benefits of Enterprise 2.0, a term that usually refers to the internal use of collaboration software in an organisation for knowledge sharing and collaboration, have been described in many case studies by authors ranging from Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School and Gartner Research to McKinsey and Gary Hamel. Financial ROI is often hard to show, however, becoming a stumbling block in encouraging adoption of the new technology.

The focus of this report has been to conduct research on the successes and failures in adopting Enterprise 2.0 and learn lessons that can be applied to other organisations hoping to jump on the social media bandwagon.

Following a study of literature that encompasses the diffusion of innovations, the effect of culture on behaviour, network theory, communications methods and change, a survey was created to help find answers to the questions left hanging by the theories. The survey was followed up by a range of personal interviews to gain insight in to survey data.

The findings from the research were then condensed into five key areas that organisations need to address when implementing Enterprise 2.0, summarised with the acronym: STOIC.

Strategise: organisations need to think what it is they want to get from social media – is it for sharing knowledge or engaging with customers? What audiences do they hope to reach and is social media the best method for doing that? Who should be responsible and how should it blend with their other duties?

Trust: organisations need to trust their employees. They need to trust that confidential information will not be leaked any more than it already can be and that most employees are responsible adults who only want to do their jobs better, more efficiently and with improved results. Let them.

Open access: to social media sites, to internal networks. Organisations that lock down IT access or prevent certain groups from taking part in knowledge sharing show no competitive advantage over their rivals that have embraced Enterprise 2.0. If an employee wastes time on Facebook, this is a performance management issue, not an issue to justify blocking access to Facebook through IT.

Incentivise: be this through creating personal goals and objectives, encouraging knowledge sharing or showing that the leadership are listening and approve, everyone needs to see ‘what is in it for them’. Whatever that is will be different for each organisation, but to get greater uptake, employees need to be motivated to join in.

Champion: whether the champion is a member of the senior management team or a middle manager, the appointment of a champion sends a signal to the rest of the organisation that it is taking Enterprise 2.0 seriously, and becomes a focus for queries and hand-holding across the organisation, encouraging individuals and different teams to get on board.

These five areas are key. If an organisation follows the five-step STOIC process, it will free itself from the emotional distress of trying and failing with Enterprise 2.0.

The main points therefore are those five elements. I imagine much of this is relevant to other internal change issues - certainly when involving innovations, but they are the issues affecting organisations hoping to engage internally. To engage, one needs communication. For communication, one needs communication tools. The organisation's community (be they employees, alumni, members or other stakeholders) need to engage with those tools. For this to happen, the organisation needs to follow the STOIC model.

I had expected the research to throw up other issues, such as that control must not reside with the IT Department. However, there were plenty of examples where the IT Departments proved to be supportive and nurtured use of these tools - and the only persistent comment made was regarding open access.

I shall post more on these issues over time...

Crisis of Identity in the Digital World

2010-11-19T14:04:00.000Z

I wrote the post below in January 2009 and never got around to publishing it... so thought I might as well put it up now before it becomes too passé...

What is known as Social Media, or sometimes, ‘Web 2.0’, incorporates a wealth of technologies and tools that not only permit user-generated content, but depend on active contributions from the online community.

These might include blogs, wikis, social networks, twitter feeds and, of course, social networks - amongst others. However, participants in this digital community must make a decision from the moment they register and log-in to the service: which of their selves are they going to present to the other users? Are you the ‘work’ you, or the ‘personal’ you? It is unlikely they’re the same... we all behave slightly differently in the workplace than at home.

At the most basic level, do you want work colleagues to see personal photos of you in the bar, or on the beach, on Facebook? Even if your extra curricula activities are entirely harmless, do you want colleagues and possibly clients to know about them?

If you are politically active, could belonging to a particular group online have a detrimental effect on your work profile?

Is it appropriate for you to campaign against an arms manufacturer in your private life when they are a client of your company’s?

One of the fundamental drivers of the Internet is the ability to link information together, using ‘hyperlinks’. This allows us to find related articles, photos, videos, products and services quickly and efficiently. It also, however, means that others can quickly find information about us.

If you blog about work issues, should you use your real name, or a pseudonym? Even though you surely have no intention of saying anything negative about colleagues, the organisation or clients, it allows readers to connect to more information about you. Should you, alternatively, use a nickname for your private online presence?

Some try and keep LinkedIn for their work contacts and Facebook for their private contacts? But what do you do then if a client, colleague or manager tries to link with you in Facebook? If you refuse that friendship in the online space - will the client, colleague or manager take it personally?
Much of social media encourages and depends on honesty between users. However, if there is complete disclosure online, if you give your expertise away for free through blogs and wikis, where is your competitive advantage?

If you move into virtual worlds, the questions are even more complex:

Should your avatar be the same gender/colour/height/weight/physique as you?
Should it be ‘human’ - or is it acceptable to be a virtual penguin?
Does the quality of your clothing matter in Second Life? Research suggests that, yes - appearance is every bit as important in the virtual world as it is in real life.

The younger amongst us, otherwise known as ‘Generation Y’ and the very young, ‘Net Generation’, will have grown up with these issues and are likely to be comfortable managing the various selves - either accepting that everything about one should be available to all one’s friends and colleagues, or by smoothly switching from one identity to another. There are, however, billions of us who have delved into the online world to a greater or lesser extent, and have already been faced with the dilemma of what we want different people to know about ourselves.

If you twitter on work related issues, is it appropriate to also twitter about the state of the trains, the weather, the joys of doughnuts or the cricket results?

Surely combining our work selves and private selves means that we all become a little closer - we learn things about colleagues we wouldn’t otherwise know - and potentially might find a kindred spirit who loves morris dancing when everyone else mocks it mirthlessly.

We might learn that a colleague has visited a particular country and could offer advice on restaurants in the city. We might understand better what our friends do at work, rather than simply summarising them as ‘working in the city/office/school/hospital/newspapers’.

Fundamentally, the issue boils down to one question: are we happy with our lives? If we are, then we have no need to hide one part of it from the other. We won’t be embarrassed by people knowing our hobbies... nor will we be embarrassed about telling our nearest and dearest exactly what it is that our daily work life involves.

Perhaps, therefore, the question is not one of which ‘self’ to use, but to get therapy to ensure that we have only one ‘self’ and that we’re completely happy with it.

The tide isn't turning yet for Enterprise 2.0

2010-11-09T11:28:00.000Z

Reading Andrew McAfee's blog post from a few days ago entitled "A Sea Change?" I was struck by the huge differences between people in different organisations.

McAfee talks about finally meeting a group of CIOs who know and understand Enterprise 2.0 and are frustrated that their organisations are not embracing it quicker and moving towards fuller integration.

This is a cultural difference. One of the comments by @keithprivette suggests that the CIOs on the East and West coasts of the USA are more advanced on E2.0 than those in the mid-west.

My experience is that those outside the USA are even further back on the adoption curve of innovations. I never fail to be surprised by how many people in business, both young (i.e. 28-35) and old (i.e. 45+) who know nothing about Enterprise 2.0, or Business 2.0, or Web 2.0, or Social Media...assuming that Facebook is, you know, 'for kids' and that's the end of it.

Admittedly not all of them are CIOs (although some are), but all fail to see the potential for internal collaboration, internal and external communications, crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing offered by these not-so-new tools.

I am currently undertaking research into the problems, obstacles and successes of integrating E2.0 and hope to be surprised by my findings...I hope to see the people I interview echo McAfee's blog post.

I fear, however, that that will not be the case... not for the vast majority...

What will 2040 look like?

2010-10-19T16:59:00.000+01:00

On the Future Trends group on LinkedIn there's a discussion started by Brian Merritt which simply asks:

What will 2040 look like?
There's a lot of discussions about what you can do now, or what is happening soon, but what do YOU believe will be happening in our future in 30 years time?

To which I, late to the conversation, posted the following comment:

Ray Kurzweil says we shall see 10,000 years of innovation in the 21st century compared to the 100 years of the 20th century (that @Michael Hanson's grandmother saw).
My maths isn't good enough to work out what fraction of 10,000 years on an exponential curve corresponds to the year 2040, but I would like to assume that:

we won't be using the internet, we should be able to transmit telepathically thanks to the bio-chip implant in our heads;
we won't need to work as all our needs will be taken care of through efficiency, leaving everyone in the world to just concentrate on leisure and pleasure; and
population growth will have been slowed through efficient birth control and education and the climate change will have slowed to zero, giving the planet a chance to recover.

Of course the reality will probably be:

we'll be using 7 different types of internet that are incompatible with each other (one based on iPhones, one on Android, one on Simbian, one on RIM etc. etc.);
we'll be working more hours and doing more in those hours to try and make up for the pensions deficit and the fact that the current double-dip recession will leave us with a decade of very low growth (under 2%) that will leave a legacy of sluggishness for decades to come; and
the climate will change beyond repair, oscillating between extremes of drought, floods and hurricanes - sweeping increasing misery on the 25 billion people living in the third world and more guilt on the 5 billion living in the first.

It's not so much as 'glass half-empty' as 'can I borrow your glass please?'

The Death of Free

2010-10-16T14:56:00.009+01:00

As a person without a huge salary with which to be the early adopter of new technologies that I fundamentally feel is my birthright, I welcomed with open arms the new type of business models defined as 'Freemium' by Chris Anderson: a basic free version for those who don't mind the occasional advert or limited personalisation, and the paid version for those that do.

This seemed eminently reasonable...even a 21st century take on socialist ideals of 'From each according to their means, to each according to their needs'.

However, what has become increasingly apparent to me is that there are too many with little means and too few with demanding needs. Spotify, for example, recently told me I could no longer log on - as I have been doing for around two years now - for free. That is, 'Freemium' has been replaced by a traditional 'Squeezing the Lemon' model where we, the paying punters, are the lemons.

If I now want to log on to Spotify, it offers two options as before: Basic and Premium: the latter still costing £9.99 per month with the former now requiring a monthly payment of £4.99!

I'd be interested to know if this change has forced a huge drop in Spotify's user numbers or a huge rise in subscription fees?

I'd also be interested in knowing if this was always the intention: to gain market share before forcing people to pay, or if it is a result of the decline in advertising spend since the start of the recession?

What is clear is that you can trust no one...keep your own records, CDs, tapes and mp3s; do not assume the freedom of the internet will forever be free (just look at News Corp's paywall); and remember that the 'man' can turn off the juice any time he (or she) wants.

Internet access should not be considered a human right like water, food, shelter and freedom from torture, but there should be controls ensuring content providers get paid whilst also allowing access to that content for all.

The only way to do this, as has been mentioned before, is through taxation. Tax the broadband and mobile connections (naturally and rightly corporations would pay more than little old ladies doing supermarket shopping online) and distribute the funds to content owners according to the amount they have been viewed or listened to.

A brave new digital world where everyone wins...

Why business and IT needs a middle-man...

2010-10-07T15:10:00.008+01:00

Having just had to sit an exam on Information Systems as part of my Executive MBA, we were studying the original article by Nicholas Carr in 2003 "Does IT matter?" which then had a response from Cisco's Brad Boston saying, more or less, "Well...duh!?!"

I have to say, coming to the debate seven years later, that I agree with Boston's 'Duh'. Porter spoke about a similar subject in 2001 when he discussed "Strategy and the Internet" and suggested that the internet simply reduced margins (through cutting costs) thanks to lower barriers to entry, ease of access between customers and suppliers (avoiding middlemen) and, at the time, ridiculous business models that meant companies such as Buy.com were selling goods below the cost of manufacturing them to try and gain market share.

First of all, a caveat: apologies to anyone if their thoughts are misrepresented here.

But in short, I would be curious to know Carr and Porter's opinions now.

With the mass user collaboration and 'Value Constellations' (as Normann and Ramirez put it) where everyone creates value and everyone gets value...surely the possibilities for competitive advantage are huge? One just needs to find one's niche ('do what you do best' as Jim Collins would have it) or be truly innovative...which is easier all the time with the new possibilities the technologies provide.

Remember that Kurzweil's 'Law of Accelerating Returns' which was written at the time of Porter's article and before Carr's, states that we will see the equivalent of 10,000 years' of innovation in the 21st century compared to what happened in the 20th century. With such innovation, where changes happen quicker than ever, what is more relevant now is that any organisation that does not seek to innovate and does not embrace the potential of information technology (in all its forms - it isn't just email, internet and word processing) is really missing the boat.

The challenge, of course, is that there are so many organisations, and people, who still do not understand (much less use) social media and all that that can provide, that when then next level of tools come along, whatever they might be, those people will be left further and further behind. The digital divide is growing. It isn't necessarily income based, but there is a level of education involved. People need to be educated on the potential of IS&T.

In a business context this should be the role of a CIO, but many organisations don't have such a role. The IT Directors, talking from a technical standpoint, talk to the business. The business says 'we need X' and the IT Directors go away and make it to that specification...rather than having a dialogue, saying 'if you do X...would you like Y as well? It's easy to do at the same time?' or 'X will take us 8 months and a lot of money, but we can do X-1 really easily within a week or so'.

This, I believe, is the fundamental reason IT has a bad reputation in so many organisations and why big projects don't deliver. There is no one in the middle negotiating between business needs and requirements and what is possible.

Well there is, but I'm a little busy right now...

Google Instant - just add boiling water

2010-09-11T03:51:00.002+01:00

A lot of people have already been discussing the new possibilities with Google Instant, that allows users to view the top results as they type the search...each extra letter added changing the results below.

Personally I know this is going to save me hours or even days. If one is studying and searching for references, articles and so on, you go through a lot of searches until you find the right thing. You could argue that what Google does is finally provide intelligent help to an intelligent searcher.

For example, my current research is focusing heavily on Everett Rogers, the author of 'Diffusion of Innovations'. What I was unaware of until the search shown below is that he also has his own 'Change Theory'!

As Matt Cutts, from Google, said in his blog:

As the Google Instant page mentions, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone used it.

But for the average punter who might just need to search for the local cinema or garden widgets it must also help, right?

But user behaviour, as usual, can still make a difference. Gina Trapani explains in her blog how to use tabs and keyboard arrows to navigate the search box more efficiently.

As a touch-typist, typing my search queries is my preferred user-interface. But what of speech? How will they integrate this functionality into the voice commands? Will they be able to?

This tool should also help SEO for those little people who can't afford to use an agency. It is a sobering thought that this very blog doesn't appear in any of the results for SealTree:

Maybe something I should work at...or maybe I'll just carry on playing with Google to see what searches I wasn't thinking of...

...hey...is Google reading my mind? If so, I never knew I knew so much!

What is the future of E-Books?

2010-08-20T15:56:00.000+01:00

Matt Eaton recently wrote in the Bodhi Tree Blog how the next revolution in publishing will be driven by children's books and not adult literature. See Matt's blog post here.

The revolution is beginning, I'll grant you that - but I fear it may be a very long, slow, drawn out revolution. Many revolutionaries will die in the process, and some of the old-guard will manage to maintain control of their own little domain.

I wrote about e-books a couple of months back and think that there are two important issues here:

a. the digital divide is growing ever wider. As some are only just beginning to get online, others are streaking ahead with multiple portable devices, such as iSmartPhones and so on and all the interactivity that they can bring. Consequently, it is easy to go months and never see an e-book reader (include iPads in that) - simply by being in non-techie crowds.

b. for the revolution to truly take hold, formats need to be homogenised. At present we can all buy a print book and know that it will be compatible for both our eyes and hands and those, for example, of our children. The multitude of conflicting formats, however, makes me think that e-books for entertainment, business and education will only truly take-off when there is consensus on formats such that all readers will be able to access them. I think Google's project to scan all known books sets them apart as a likely source of dominant formats in the future, but it's too early to tell yet.

Enough already with the competiton! Work together and everyone wins...

2010-07-30T15:19:00.000+01:00

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on ReadWriteWeb how Microsoft seem to have created a virtual skateboard-view to scroll through maps. They call it, apparently, "Street Slide".
As Marshall says, it seems to knock the pretty multi-coloured socks off Google's StreetView version that first allowed us to see the streets before we got to them by following the map.

Many is the time I've found the name of a business I know to exist on 'X' street, by checking on StreetView and then searching for their details online.

So Microsoft have shown they don't just to Office software...but can do fun stuff too. Check the video here:

The problem that I have is, once again, there is TOO MUCH CHOICE!

I personally prefer Google Maps and Google StreetView to other systems in the UK, such as MultiMap, or StreetMap.

And whilst I like the ethos behind the Open Source version: OpenStreetMap, where generous, earnest people give of their time to help create a publicly owned (that is, license-free) detailed set of maps, I find that I still rely on Google.

Why?

Because it's all there. It's all connected. I can go from a Google Search to local map view to a company's website more or less seamlessly. Now the other maps can and probably do a lot of that.

My problem?

Too much choice. Why can't they all get to together, have one big happy love-in, and create one map.

One map to rule them all.

One map to do everything, from geo-location services, to hyper-local advertising and community features, to feature-rich 3D views of the places in question.

Competition is not good. Competition just confuses the issue. Most people do not go for the 'best' option available. They go with what they know. Most people use what they have already installed on their mobile. They use what's easiest to find on the Internet - and, curiously, a Google search on 'Online Map' produces not Google Maps as the first link, but MultiMap. Google is only fourth on its own system! This could, arguably, be to show how it is not indulging in anti-trust (or monopolistic) practices. It could also be that the right hand of Larry Page doesn't know what the left-hand of Sergei Brin is up to.

In fact, I realise that this is beginning to become a theme. I've discussed too much choice in software for Office functions, too much choice in online dynamic display systems (i.e. Flash vs Silverlight), and too much choice in E-Book formats.

Whilst I commend inventive minds with entrepreneurial spirits for trying to make the world a better place, I can't see how having a myriad of competing systems helps anyone. They all have their pluses - and their minuses. They all appeal to a core set of users, and then to the rest of the world according to the almost random process of innovation diffusion. One system is adopted by Apple, and becomes almost defacto on mobiles. Another is adopted by Google, and becomes the dominant one on the internet.

What we need, of course, is a benevolent dictatorship to force the geniuses in all these companies to work together, to ensure that there is only one system and it is the best and it incorporates the best features of all the other systems and everyone's happy and everyone knows where they are.

And while we're about it - I put myself forward for the job...or will there be too many dictators all patronising their preferred system....?

Test tube babies should be just that: from a test tube

2010-07-23T14:30:00.000+01:00

Our baby, Lucas, will be born any day now. His due date is 2 days from the time or writing this. The pregnancy has gone well, the mother has had virtually no nausea, cramps, swollen ankles, cravings, back problems, high blood pressure or any of the other myriad of problems that can affect a woman during pregnancy.

We are lucky - we know this.

Lucas was conceived at approximately 8.30am on Friday 6 November 2009. We know this because we had to use IVF, so calculate an hour or so after egg harvesting and sperm collection for the samples to get to the laboratory and for them to do their stuff.

The IVF process involved "ICSI" or "Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection"...which is when they select a sperm and inject it into the egg itself, as shown here:

The egg, now fertilised, is allowed to grow for a couple of days before being transferred to the womb in the hope that it will attach and continue to grow.

And then begins nine months of waiting, fear, hope, panic, excitement, hypochondria and incessant scans and tests....leading up to the most traumatic moment in most women's lives: labour.

Surely it would be far easier to keep the embryo out of the womb and let it grow in a petri dish? One could monitor the food and drink that is input to through the synthetic umbilical chord to ensure it has the best possible nutrition.

One could play recordings of the parents' voices so that the baby gets used to their voices, and even play recordings of their heartbeats to help it bond with those sounds.

One could play music or read the works of Tolstoy in Russian to the child, just to try and get those synapses connecting as early as possible.

And on due date, the baby is collected from the laboratory (sorry, 'birthing centre' as they should be called), or perhaps you could pay extra for home delivery?

No trauma. No tearing. No breach-births. No C-sections. No pre-eclampsia. No 38 hour labours.

Science has allowed conception to improve but still relies on ancient, barbaric 'natural' methods for extracting babies from wombs. Science needs to catch up.

Science needs to help women.

Science needs to create a true 'test-tube baby'.

Books are like vinyl - nice for geeks but most prefer the technology

2010-07-05T13:25:00.000+01:00

In The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, Marcus Du Sautoy wrote an article called "Liked the book? Try the app" and said:

Non-fiction is different again. What is a footnote, after all, but an attempt to break out of the linear structure of a book? How reference books could change can now begin to be imagined, but I'm particularly interested in apps for non-fiction that are not designed to break up a narrative in a radical way, but rather to augment a storyline – for me, non-fiction works best when it tries to emulate the narrative that drives a reader to the end of a novel.

As many comments on the page have mentioned, it reminds one of the concern regarding CD-Roms. But to me, it sound exactly the kind of non-linear arguments that might be possible if people were able to link to more information on sub-topics or include richer content, such as images or video.

Like the internet does?

So in short, the only new issue here is the ability of the portable devices such as the iPad, iPod and, please do not forget, the dozens of Android portable devices (and others besides) - it isn't just Apple - to provide the interactivity of the internet on, well, a portable device.

As Du Sautoy says, there is an issue with batteries dying on you. And one can't show off one's intellectual snobbery with an iPad, only one's wealth and willingness to buy overpriced new technology.

Of course handheld devices are the future. Far better to carry your access to the internet in your hand, rather than in your backpack or leave it on your desk.
Once battery life, 'ruggedness' and screen resolution make iPad type devices suitable for long stretches on the beach, by a pool or ten hour flights, they will become more ubiquitous than they already appear to be.

So will they surpass the book one day?

Let's look at another industry: music.
Napster - where art thou?
Was I the only person to have an Archos mp3 player before Apple created the iPod?
The iPod was not the first mp3 player. It wasn't the first portable music device. It wasn't suitable in many contexts and situations. Battery life was far worse than for many competitors. But Apple's genius was in tying the content to the device...making iTunes the distribution network of choice and with easy integration to the player.

The iPod device hasn't killed music. It hasn't killed live performances...if anything, concert attendance is up compared to a decade ago. But fewer and fewer people buy CDs. Vinyl consumption is up, thanks to lots of collectors and music geeks wanting some 'old-skool' physicality.

But it has radically changed the music industry and who it is that makes money from the new distribution platform.

The same, to a large extent, will undoubtedly happen with the publishing industry.

Once enough people have a portable device, smartphone, tablet computer, iPad etc. and are able to store their entire book collections, study materials and have access to the internet, their photos and their music, in one place, with them, wherever they are... people will stop buying printed books.

Of course books will continue to exist. Some with linear plotlines and arguments, as currently exist. Some exploring the new possibilities where every reader can experience the book in a new way. But there will be far fewer books made out of paper and cardboard.

Some hardcore readers will continue to seek out real books, paper books. Books you can touch and feel and smell...just as the hardcore music fans will seek out vinyl records and even wax cylinders and like to listen to whole albums, with the good tracks and the bad tracks in the order the artist decided, rather than cherry picking the good stuff and mixing it with completely different sounds as most now do with digital music.

Books are lovely, but those of us who think they cannot be surpassed by technology are living in a fantasy.

Can Social Media co-exist with traditional marketing strategies and techniques

2010-07-02T16:14:00.000+01:00

Jack Greene posted the following question on LinkedIn:

Can Social Media co-exist with traditional marketing strategies and techniques

I've been attending a variety of seminars on Social Media, as well as reading a couple of good books on the subject. What I'm finding is that traditional marketing seems to be adding social media to their arsenal, whereas, those who focus on social media / networking tend to suggest that there's is the way of the future and traditional marketing will fade away. Whose right and who's left?

There are, interestingly, 313 comments at this time...the original question was posted seven months ago, which shows a high and commendable level of engagement of those in the Social Media Today group.

However, what many fail to remember, particularly in fora such as the LinkedIn groups and this very blog, is that most people are still offline. They are not 'connected'. They are not 'social'. So social media can reach millions and millions of people in ways that were not possible before, but if you only focus on social media, you miss the millions and millions who prefer face-to-face, print and broadcast for their information and entertainment.

An example is virtual worlds. Most of the LinkedIn generation are not in virtual worlds... but a well considered and well implemented campaign in Second Life or another world will reach those people far better than a newspaper advert, for example. And, of course, the newspaper ad will reach the millions who don't know their avatar from their emoticon.

The future is not one thing or the other. It never can be. The future is everything. That makes it increasingly difficult for anyone who professes expertise in marketing to truly be an expert in all areas of advertising and delivery - which is another question entirely.

In the new world of old media, new media and social media, should roles be clearly defined or should we expect experts to be an expert across all platforms?

Censorship Works - should be the name of the department

2010-06-12T14:53:00.000+01:00

I've come to Beijing as part of my MBA course and everything is wonderful, different, exotic, interesting, new and, well, what I like about travelling.

But we're also here to work. So I have the laptop plugged in to the internet through the hotel - a good four star hotel in the centre of Beijing.

And I thought 'I know, I'll update my blog'. Well, a good idea, but not easy to carry out. According to the internet from China, my blog, or indeed any blog at www.blogspot.com doesn't exist.

You can't find it.
No excuses.
No apologies.
No explanation.

You simply get a page that says the website doesn't exist. Now if I didn't know that my own blog existed, I might leave it at that. Fortunately, without being an übergeek I have geek tendencies and know that I can connect to the servers at my company through a VPN connection.

When I do that, I'm seeing the internet as if I was in London, not Beijing.

But most people aren't geeks, and much less übergeeks, and if faced with a page that says a particular website doesn't exist, will accept it and move on to another.

Another couple of websites that do not exist in Beijing?

Facebook, and Twitter.

It is an admirable system. Censorship is crude - they don't put a false page there, they simply say the page doesn't exist - but effective. Censorship works here. The only ones who can breach it are geeks and techies...not the majority of the population.

What would be fascinating to find out is how much 'dissent' there would be if people were to have access to completely uncensored internet. The US and the UK have, more or less, just that - barring a few websites promoting terrorist idealism - but are the people better informed about the world outside? Arguably no. But it would be an interesting research project to undertake - to see how informed people are about the general state of the world, and how much they bothered to change it, if they had access to all the information of the internet.

Is it possible, therefore, that China is using a hammer to crack an egg? Let the eggs become chicks and chickens and they will be obsessed with finding grain, growing, and laying eggs. They probably won't even notice that they're penned in and unlikely to survive the season.

Is it a blog? Is it a wiki? Is it a wave?

2010-05-18T16:32:00.006+01:00

Google Wave has now been around for the best part of a year... with public access for over eight months. But is it only a geek thing? With so much hype and buzz (not to mention Google Buzz) surely the great potential of wave has been ignored by the masses because the masses are late adopters. Or laggards. The critical mass isn't there to get teams or organisations properly using it away from the changes-tracked Word document.

So, in an experiment to see if there are any legs to wave within a small community, a simple wave will be embedded below...

What's the role of video in e-learning?

2010-05-13T16:14:00.000+01:00

Video is beginning to play a big role in education. Or is it?

The Open University in the UK began to use TV programmes late at night to reach thousands of distant-learners from the early 1970s onwards. Primary and secondary schools have dabbled with pre-recorded programmes and watching TV for a few decades too.

The cost of video equipment (and skills to edit the recordings) have usually been out of the hands of most educators, however, until recently. But now, with cheap video cameras, open-source editing software and free tutorials on YouTube, everyone can create a video to use in the classroom or lecture theatre.

But they still don't. Most educators, or lecturers, or teachers, will use something that others have made. The process is still too long, too convoluted.

Even making something decent from PowerPoint (and putting it through Articulate) is beyond the skills of most educators... and they need the imagination as well as the time to put the learning objects together.

But as I explore video-conferencing with a view to potentially using it in the classroom, for example when the next ash cloud means people can't travel, I learn that high-schools and sixth-form colleges have already been using video-conferencing to teach diplomas across entire education areas, where there may only be one or two students per school who want to take that particular class.

And when you mix that with interactive white-boards and experiments with virtual worlds, it makes one wonder how quickly certain levels of education are leaping ahead of universities and other higher education establishments in terms of the technology used? Do we need to wait for those youngsters to come through to universities and business schools before implementing the new technology, or are thirty-something and forty-plus executives willing to learn new tricks?

Perhaps one way to get them on board is to use fancy tricks they'll 'ooh' and 'aah' over. For example, if you're studying internal medicine or engineering, why not have the teacher walk through the intestines, or pistons of a car, and point out the various areas directly?

The technology to do that used to be prohibitive, but now you can get your own green screen for virtually nothing... it's a little bit of training on the editing software that will be the bigger barrier.

So we educators don't need to try and do effects of the quality seen in the video below (which you really should watch. Honestly - only a few short minutes of your life - but you will go 'ooh' and 'aah') ... but why not walk through our graphs of economic collapse or our strategic human resource management models to combine the lecturer and the slides in one lovely package?

The biggest question I'm facing now is what we need from the video-conferencing side of it all. What's more important? To share documents or see the person? Can we do both live with good quality, without having everyone sat at a $250,000 tele-presence unit?

And do we need to see the others? Are we not happier knowing that by telephone people can't see us in our pyjamas, or scratching ourselves or picking our noses (I believe some people do that)?

Facebook have broken the implicit contract with us

2010-05-02T20:13:00.003+01:00

social media,For several years now I have been extolling the virtues of social networking to friends, family and clients... all of whom have had varying degrees of ludditeness (or should that be 'luddity'?).

One of the main issues that the laggards complained of was the lack of privacy in systems like Facebook. I, in defence of the networks, would explain how:

you can control your own privacy settings;
you get the benefits of relevant advertising rather than, for example, the blanket-bombing style of advertising on TV and in newspapers; and
if someone wanted to find out things about you, they could do that through various databases anyway.

After listening to the wonderful podcasts from This Week in Google and also seeing an article on LifeHacker however, I realise that not all internet companies are run by nice people. Not all internet companies try (even if occaisionally unsuccessfully) to 'Not be evil' ... as Google claims publicly to be. Not all internet companies care about 'us' the users, but are more concerned, as with the old paradigms of stockholders and maximising shareholder value, of making as much money as they can, in anyway they can.

It is, if you like, akin to selling cigarettes to children. The kids think they're cool and don't have the nous to realise the long term damage tobacco can cause.

And so, thanks to TWiG, I learn that Facebook are changing their systems so that they (and eventually the advertisers) can track Facebook users across the internet, tracking what sites they visit, what they do there, what they purchase and so on.

Of course there are ways to opt-out of the tracking, but that's the problem. It is all 'opt-out' rather than 'opt-in'... and one has to spend quite a lot of time trying to define one's privacy settings (see my own settings below):

There's a good little time-line from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that shows how Facebook have gone from benign to malignant.

Furthermore, if you decide you've had enough of the pernicious attempt by Facebook to control your online life and you want to cancel your account... well good luck! It can be done, but you need to be patient and go through many pages of settings and prompts before achieving that end.

So now I'm stuck. I still see huge value in social networking and Enterprise 2.0 in general, but how can I guide the laggards over the threshold and embrace the benefits of the new systems, when the most famous brand of them all is trying to screw them?

And perhaps we need more transparency across the board... how many other brands in the social media-verse are tracking our every move and collating data that may come back to bite us?

Not for nothing did I recently install software that will allow me to hide my IP, but will that be enough? If they're personally identifying me, it doesn't matter at all what computer I'm on.

Maybe I'll pack it all in and go back to books, pen and paper... so long as no one copies my notes...

The death of business travel: the birth of virtual working

2010-04-20T16:10:00.001+01:00

Virtual working has been around for many years now, with many people specialising in helping virtual or distance workers to keep connected, helping managers to manage virtually, and helping ensure virtual customers do not suffer from the lack of face-to-face contact.

I am lucky enough to work virtually on a regular basis, and it has its benefits and drawbacks. It is easier to get things done without the distractions of the office, but the flip side of that same coin is that I can easily go a whole day without saying one word to anyone.

However, the question many have now been asking, is whether or not the problems travellers have experienced throughout Europe recently due to the Volcanic Ash Cloud will affect the way we do business in the future?

Many of us have rejoiced in the peace and quiet of not having planes screaming overhead when trying to enjoy the sunny outdoors.

Many of us have thought about how our lifestyle may revert to the 1950s, with air travel restricted to the very rich and the rest of us mere mortals enjoying the slower, quieter things in life, such as a train journey, or holidaying within our own country. There are many areas of the UK I have not visited because, sad to say, it is cheaper to fly to Italy for the weekend, for example, than it is to get to the Lake District (quicker too!).

Despite the disruption to friends and colleagues over this period, and wary of the damage to business that the reduced (or removed option of) air travel might bring, it does also suggest a brave new world, stepping away from environmental catastrophe, stepping back from the relentless pace of modern business and leisure, and stepping smoothly over to a more intelligent way of doing things.

Back in the 1950s and since, business people travelled because they had to if they wanted to see their clients. The recent improvements in modern technology, with video conferencing, virtual seminars and virtual worlds allowing users to interact in every way except using touch (and that will surely come) provide the opportunity for technology companies to show what they're made of. To show organisations of every size that you can save huge amounts of money by not travelling, but without losing those international clients. To show individuals and organisations that you can trust someone online... not just face-to-face.

The only problem I see (and contrary to what Harold Jarche says) is that too many people have no idea what virtual worlds are, they don't concentrate on virtual seminars (because they carry on working on the computer) and they haven't properly tried video conferencing. The majority of people I meet through business are not techies. They don't use modern technology unless provided to them by their IT departments (despite having all the latest gadgets at home). They certainly aren't 'power users'.

Consequently, there is a great opportunity here for both the tech. companies to provide the means for virtual working and virtual business; but also a great opportunity for those involved in training and education to help organisations embrace the new technology; to change their working methods and their mindset so that they understand the value of it in the same way they understand the value of a telephone.

The biggest opportunity of all is when you get the complete solution: new technology with coaching and change consultancy combined, to make sure the new stuff sticks.

Introducing Web 2.0 in organisations

2010-04-14T23:46:00.000+01:00

I am currently reviewing the literature on the diffusion of innovations and managing technological change in organisations for some research that aims to find a framework that organisations can use to help them embrace new technology.

There seems to be, from my early research, much published on what people or doing, what they could be doing and why - but little to help organisations decide whether or not they should bother to try. After all, if the chances are that you are not in the right position for it to succeed, why waste precious energy and resources?

Everett Rogers wrote 'Diffusion of Innovations' which, thankfully, describes everything you ever wanted to know about the diffusion of innovations but were afraid to ask. Others have talked about organisation change...often with specific regard to technology... so what the research is going to focus on is the practicalities of what type of organisation can/should introduce Social Media or Web 2.0, be it by sector, size, culture, geography or age... and how they should try to embrace the new technology.

The problem, as mentioned before, is the wide disparity of knowledge on the subject amongst organisations. Some are innovators and early adopters, to use Rogers' monikers, but some are not even laggards. They have no idea of the potential of Social Media and think it is all just, you know, for kids.

But whilst my frustration at this status quo is considerable, I should rejoice in the fact that at least it means I shall have a job for some time yet teaching and consulting on how Web 2.0 can help an organisation, be it through communications, operations, organisation design and culture, marketing.k k

Once I finish this research, I think the next step is to try and compare the adoption of Web 2.0 with Web 1.0, to see if there are any disparities and, if so, why?

What price convictions? Shouldn't everyone pull out of China?

2010-04-06T11:26:00.001+01:00

"Google has pulled out of China"... so ran a number of headlines recently about the decision by Google to not back down with China.

The news, however, seems to have quickly died down as last week's chip wrappers... and China gets back to the usual grind of tracking potential dissidents and blocking sites, with the full implicit support of the companies who still operate there (such as Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and so on).

But, there are two questions I've not seen anyone answering so far:

1. if we do, which we do, as a whole, all agree that abuse of human rights is bad, and that freedom of speech is good (although there's another debate to be had there), then surely we should all be against any company tacitly condoning regimes that abuse those human rights? Surely, therefore, all Western companies should withdraw from China and we should stop purchasing Chinese products, just as many did with South Africa in the seventies and eighties?

Oh dear... damn... I forgot... we need the Chinese economy. So, Nelson Mandella and the millions of compatriots must be thanking their lucky stars that no one (except Barclays) actually gave a damn about losing the benefits of trading with South Africa... for if they had been a major oil producer, we must assume that they would either have been:

a. invaded to ensure an uninterrupted flow of oil (as with Iraq); or
b. peacefully ignored so long as there is an uninterrupted flow of oil (as with Saudi Arabia, Burma and so on).

Seeing as China is too big to invade (who wants to take on an army 1 million strong?), it seems that the best that those 'dissidents' (or human rights campaigners and so on) within China can hope for is that one day they'll have a benevolent dictator who will decide to change things for the better.

Good luck with that.

However, the other question:

2. who says who is a dissident? Throughout history, those who oppose the established government have been called 'dissidents' or 'terrorists' or 'the resistance' or 'freedom fighters'. The 'terrorist' groups that forced the British out of Palestine (now Israel) and Ireland (now the Republic of Ireland) are now considered the founding fathers of those countries.

The war between the native-born Americans and the controlling British, known as the 'War of Independence' in the USA, showed how civil unrest against an undemocratic ruler can be viewed as heroic if they manage to overthrow the incumbent rulers.

As we speak, are not the US and UK governments (amongst many others) tracking emails, telephone conversations and other communications between a range of people that might have the most tenuous links with terrorism (having attended the same mosque as someone, having the same surname) or with anti-capitalist groups (having attended a legitimate public demonstration)?

Without wishing to condone any human rights abuses in countries such as China, are not the main governments in the West also guilty of infringing people's human rights also? And if that is the case, surely none of us can complain about what happens abroad until we get our own house in order?

Perhaps we, in the West, must also wait until we get a benevolent dictator who will put things right, stop abuses by the security forces and enshrine certain rights as unassailable?

By the way, if the job's going, I'm available...

The Future of E-Books is Mobile...not E-Book Readers

2010-03-16T09:56:00.000Z

Over the past few months there has been much talk of e-book readers from the likes of Amazon (the Kindle) and Sony and a host of others. Apple are launching their new iPad around now, HP have the 'Slate' coming out soon, and the mini-tablet laptop that is portable enough to be used on the move means that people are suddenly, seriously, talking about e-book readers as the future.

They are wrong.

The tablet products from Apple and HP are going to be best used in the home. They will allow one to access multimedia at the dinner table, in bed or in the garden, without a spaghetti junction of cables or heated and flattened thighs to worry about from traditional laptops.

However, for people on the move, the iPad type products, and I will include the Kindle and other E-Book Readers here, are inappropriate. Purely and simply, do they fit neatly in a jacket pocket?

No - only if you are wearing a large suit jacket. Women may choose to carry them in their handbag, and many businessmen will use their briefcases for that too... but for universal acceptance of the medium, it will have to become far more portable.

Two weeks ago I finished reading my first Sherlock Holmes book (it was free, being out of copyright, and so a good way to test e-books)... but read it entirely on my mobile phone. I don't have an all-singing and all-dancing iPhone or Nexus1 either (nor any other type of touch-screen)...but a relatively small-screened Blackberry clone from Nokia, the E61.

Why did I go with Nokia? It's very simple.

I'm cheap and it was free.

My mobile company wanted me to renew my contract and begged me to take one of these Qwerty keyboard mini-computers at no extra cost. I said 'Thanks'. If they want to offer me a Nexus 1, I'll say 'Thank you'.

Anyway, I downloaded the ebook of Sherlock Holmes: "The Valley of Fear" from the Libris app on the Nokia Apps store... the app was free. I've since also tried 'Wattpad' from the same app store...but this is not about comparing apps.

This is about the ease of use, or usability if you will, of having your e-book in your mobile handset. It meant I always had reading material with me. I didn't have to check if I had space in my pocket for an oversized e-book reader. I didn't have to worry about switching a Kindle or Sony reader on, booting up etc. to start reading.

I didn't, very importantly, have to worry about holding the still-heavy e-book readers in one hand while standing on the tube, or waiting in line. Whilst my partner was in the changing rooms in a clothes shop, I was able to battle the potential boredom by instantly whipping out the mobile and continuing with my e-book. For those who like to read in the toilet (not that I would ever suggest such a thing) it is easy to use the mobile handset (as many already do for calls and texting)...less so with a bulky e-book reader.

My mobile - as with all smartphones - is also able to hold my music and podcasts. It's my portable camera. I can browse the web (albeit in an unsatisfying way with such a small screen), email and, of course, even use it for phonecalls (remember those?).

In short, Sony, Amazon, the Cool-er, Elonex, Barnes & Noble, Apple, HP and probably a number of other manufacturers hoping to tap into the e-book market should think carefully about who is going to use the machines. They absolutely do have a market - I'd love to be able to buy one reader with all my study-books pre-loaded (including the online extra information that some text book publishers provide).

But they will never reach the ubiquitousness of the mp3 player and iPhone if they can't become truly portable.

We need one machine to rule the world ... not a dozen of bulky single-use gadgets that will break, get stolen or be too impractical to use.

Cinema needs 3D like a fish needs an avatar

2010-03-04T09:41:00.000Z

The fashion, once again, is for 3D films. Three dimensional imagery on the big silver screen. People sitting in cinemas with ridiculous-looking plastic or cardboard glasses to be able view the impression of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional projection.

Why?

When cinema began, as everyone knows, it was short films of black-and-white imagery, with no sound. Music was provided to accompany the images later on. And then they discovered 'talkies' - where the audience could actually hear the dialogues and not have to judge the miming qualities of the actors. This was clearly an obvious and essential improvement to the cinematic experience.

The next stage, of course, was colour. Was it necessary? No - not for story telling... some of the best films were black and white (Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Third Man, Les Enfants du Paradis), but it did give the audience a greater experience in being able to see colour - to appreciate if it was a sunny or cloudy day other than by shadows, to see the colour of the ball-gowns worn by the actresses.

It's a shame that so many audiences today refuse to watch black and white films and the old masterpieces are now being corrupted with false colour to meet modern tastes.

But why have 3D? In what way does that improve the cinematic experience?

It doesn't make you feel like you're there.

It doesn't improve the story-telling.

It doesn't help one identify with the characters.

It doesn't allow new environments to be painted for the audience - false or fantasy worlds have been made on screen for decades... all it gives one is the impression that one character is in front of another character.

Furthermore, am I alone in finding it hard to focus with the 3D specs? The eye easily adapts to a shallow depth of field on a normal film, accepting the blurry bits were blurry for a reason. But my eyes kept trying to refocus the blurry bits of the bum-numbing Avatar... and I know I'm not the only one who left with a headache. 3D films on a 2D screen are a waste of time.

This is shouting into the void, but directors and producers of Hollywood, please desist from wasting your time and money on 3D.

Wait until we have 3D surround-vision virtual reality goggles. Then everything we see (not just the screen on one wall) will be 3D and I can accept that then the viewer will feel like they're in the film. They will feel part of the action. They may even feel like they're a character.

When those goggles are ready...roll on. That will add to the cinematic experience. But until then, spend more time on script development. Spend more time on the cinematography. Spend more time on editing (no film needs to be 3 hours long). Spend more time getting the story right.

The rest, after all, is secondary.

The same, it should be said, must be said for education in virtual worlds. It's never going to completely take-off until the user is able to feel that they are in the world, rather than sitting at their desk looking at a screen... and hopping between one application and another, answering the phone and so on.

Immersive reality is what is required. Until computers and entertainment providers can, um, provide that, we should just let stop wasting time thinking this is going to change our lives.

From the bottom of a long glass tube

2010-01-23T20:23:00.001Z

A year after I was born, Zager and Evans had a US number one with their dystopic vision of the future: In the year 2525 (written by Rick Evans apparently).

One of the lines reads:

In the year 6565,
Won't need no husband, won't need no wife,
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too,
From the bottom of a long glass tube

One has to congratulate Evans for his prescience in 1964. The first test-tube baby (i.e. born through IVF) wasn't born until 1978.

And listening to that song, all my life, I didn't think it would particularly speak to me (though I like it as a song).

But technology is a wonderful thing and I sometimes wonder if we should continue to allow biology to cock things up, or take advantage of the abilities now to screen for genetic defects, Down's Syndrome and so on, and avoid a lot of suffering on the way.

Don't leave children to chance (or alcoholic fumbles and mistakes), I have a vision of a future where there will be no child abuse, no child neglect, no unwanted babies. Preventable diseases will be avoided through screening to ensure those genes do not reproduce.

In short, my idea is to tie the tubes of all babies (of both sexes) at birth. Then, at a suitable age (21?) people (they don't have to be couples) would need to pass an exam and undergo therapy to ensure they are neither child abusers nor drug users; that they understand what healthy food is and the need to engage with a child; that a child is for life, not just for Christmas.

On passing the exam, they have a small procedure to 'untie' the tubes. If they want to go the natural route of procreating, fine... but why not do a GATTACA and ensure that every baby is given the best possible start in life by avoiding degenerative diseases, cancers and other genetic-based problems?

Of course this will never come to pass, and children will continue to grow up in abusive households. Children will continue to die from neglect. And in some cases, children will continue to be used as sex slaves.

It is a disgusting world we have - and yet the wish to leave a genetic legacy is strong. The will to leave the world in a better state for one's existence than without it is what drives many people.

And, regardless of knowing that this world has many dangers, many horrible examples of human's inhumanity, we, that is my partner and I, have decided to undergo IVF and try and have our own baby.

Thirteen weeks have passed, we're entering the second trimetester, and everything is fine!

Oh joy of joys!

The world is a wonderful place. Technology is a wonderful thing. Thank Darwin (or should that be Steptoe and Edwards?) for the opportunities we have to bring a life into the world.

In short, we're going to have a little sealtree!

The future isn't dystopic...it's going to be wonderful.

Do you speak digital pidgin or digital creole?

2010-01-18T16:13:00.000Z

When one discusses the generational differences for online activity, usage and ability; I've often found people rightly point out that there are many silver surfers who are experts on the internet, and many Gen. Y youngsters who can't be bothered with Facebook, or virtual worlds and so on.

However, I finally realised the best way to explain the difference is to refer back to Noam Chomsky's work on acquisition of languages and Stephen Pinker's work on how the brain, erm, works.

And, thinking about it more, it is of course just an extension of the idea of 'digital natives'.

You see we (and I include you, dear reader, by virtue of the fact that you're reading this, you are within a demographic that is almost certainly outside Generation Y, let alone the Net Generation) speak digital pidgin. But children growing up today, playing with virtual worlds and making friends through social networks, adapt immediately to the new way of connecting: they speak digital creole. It is engrained in them. Their brains are hard-wired to create grammar in any language, and therefore, they must be hard-wired to create social etiquette and the 'grammar of life' in whichever environment they find themselves, right? OK - this extrapolation is my own work (based on no research) but it does seem to me to be self-evident.

So why pidgin versus creole? Well, when the colonising invaders reached (modernised/burnt/ravaged - delete as you find appropriate) a country and imposed their language (such as English) on the natives, those natives would speak a very simple form of the language: 'Pidgin English'. However, their children, who would hear the simple ungrammatical bastardised language that their parents were forced to speak, would naturally create a grammar from 'Pidgin' and, in effect, create a new language: 'creole'.

The question I was asked yesterday, therefore, of 'how do you recreate those coffee-shop or water-cooler moments in the virtual space' do not apply. The young will not think of the coffee-shop or the water-cooler as a place to meet people or exchange gossip. They will have other places and technologies to do that.

Once people can get over the idea that a digital future is not the same as the present, but online, it will be much easier for them to understand the true potential it has. After all, the future is, like, still to come, right?

And to illustrate the point, Douglas Adams, author of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, said in the early eighties:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Fun Theory - using new technology for good

2009-11-25T16:39:00.000Z

Here's a wonderful video from FunTheory.com that shows how new technology (or maybe not so new) can be used to get people to change their behaviours.

The potential is huge... can we use this for education? Can we get people to exercise more, give up smoking and drinking, be better people, work harder, play harder and have a happier life (by their own standards) by using such ideas?

The irony of driving to the gym is still lost on many, and fully aware of the irony, this particular blogger has been guilty of it on many occasions.

So what are the options?

Does it mean all education has to be converted into a game, with some kind of reward for correct answers? Does that devalue the knowledge gained - or surely the intention should be to teach 'by any means possible', right?

Business 2.0

2009-11-24T15:01:00.001Z

Have just finished preparing the slides for another session - this time to an Executive MBA class, on Business 2.0. More the point, I've finally taken my own advice and logged on to Slideshare to help share the noise.

Business 2.0

View more presentations from SealTree -.

E-Book readers: it's Betamax vs. VHS all over again

2009-10-27T09:49:00.003Z

I like gadgets. I'm male, of a certain age, living in the UK. Demographically speaking, I'm a core target for manufacturers of gadgets, widgets, gizmos and, as I like to call them, 'kerchunks' (the sound that a good gadget should make when opening and closing).

However, long before I could afford to buy gadgets of any quality, I had to be very careful where I spent my money. I would wait and see if the prices came down (which, according to Moore's Law, they always did). In some cases, (such as a decent Digital SLR camera), I've postponed the purchase so long I'm not sure when I will finally buy... but I'll obviously get far more megapixels for my money than I would have 2 or 3 years ago.

Back in the eighties (showing my age) I couldn't afford a Walkman (or a clone) until I was 16... no one bought one for me (we lived in a cardboard box in't' middle of road), and I had to save up to pay for one. And when the time came, I looked at Which? Magazine to compare the models available at that time, and traipsed up and down Tottenham Court Road in central London going into every electronics shop to compare prices and haggle with the shopkeepers until I found the bestest one that fit my budget.

It was an easy choice, all of the players played cassettes. CDs didn't exist then, but the same search would have been undertaken just a few years later for a CD player, or stereo. For TVs - again - the same kind of search. You can decide on CRT or flat-screen, Plasma or LCD, but they all need to show broadcast content.

When mp3 players came along, the choice was equally easy, until Apple reared it's over-styled head with the iPod, which was unable to play the 25GB of mp3s I'd accumulated by digitising my entire CD collection...without me going to the hassle of reformatting my entire collection. Disc space on my computer at that time meant that that was not going to happen easily, and anyway, why should I? The other mp3 players were cheaper, had more capacity and had built-in FM radios and voice recorders as standard. But to the great unwashed masses, they weren't as 'cool' as Apple.

Apple, to give them their due, did a good job of tying people in to their brand with the vertical integration of their iTunes store with the iPod players. So why did the iPod win over the other mp3 players to become the defacto player? Could it be that by providing legitimate, (i.e. 'legal') downloads for the hairy hoards, that is that by providing the content, they were guaranteeing the success of the player?

And not for the first time has this happened. When video cassette recorders (VCR) came along at the end of the seventies and early eighties, the decision was between two rival formats. The superior format, superior in quality of image and fidelity of recording and playback, was Betamax... the choice for professionals before and since. The popular format, however, was VHS. Why? There has been lots of debate as to the reasons, but I'm going to add my tuppence-worth to that debate, for our household pondered the same question at that time, three decades ago. Ultimately, we wanted content. We wanted to be able to rent any film (well, to have a selection of hundreds rather than dozens)... and the local videostores all had huge selections of VHS films and one tiny shelf of Betamax. Simple. We went with VHS... as did most people... with Betamax dying an unhappy death as a consumer product.

What is irritating is that the issues of the Betamax vs VHS debate repeat themselves. We do not learn from history (or do we?). Betamax was the superior product, but VHS won out. Everyone who bought a Betamax player ended up storing it on the attic for another 20 years, unable to throw away such an underused piece of equipment, and fuming that they'd wasted hundreds of pounds, backing the wrong proverbial horse in the format wars.

So now to the latest gadget. The e-Book reader. With the recent launch of the Amazon Kindle in the UK, there have been lots of articles telling the world how wonderful they are... but ignoring the same problem we saw with mp3 players and video recorders. Format.

So, the ones that are on my radar now are the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader Touch Edition, the Cool-er, the Elonex eReader; and the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the US book shop chain. Will I buy one? Not yet.

I've tried the Amazon Kindle. After hearing so much noise about e-Ink (or is it e-Paper?) I am quite disappointed to find the dull screen that has all the lack-lustre of paper with none of the comforting texture of it. I'm also surprised at how heavy it is. It's a small gadget, thin, not much bigger on the front than a typical paper-back. But it can't comfortably be held in one hand for any length of time, as a paperback can. You'd need to rest it on your knee or a table... although for that, why not use a laptop? And no touch-screen? Where have they been hiding for the past 3 years? It took me a while to realise that they expected me to use buttons to turn pages rather than swiping the screen.

The Sony Reader has a similar screen size, looks cleaner, and the leather-pouch makes it easier to hold (like real books) than the Amazon version.

But I fear that ultimately, it's going to come down to content again. Amazon is the online bookstore of choice, but since Google announced last week that they were going to start selling e-books themselves (and remember that they've been scanning all known books over the past few years - including hundreds of thousands of orphan books), one has to assume that content is going to win again... and the reader that wins will be the one that has the biggest catalogue of books available to download.

But... but... what if... what if Google's Eric Schmidt, Sony's Howard Stringer and Amazon's Jeff Bezos sat down together and came to a deal? What if they decided to not follow the Apple model of tying people into one particular format, but allowed all Google books, and all Amazon books, to be downloadable on all readers, be they from Sony, Amazon, Elonex or whoever?

They'd still make their money from the downloads.

They'd have a wider potential audience by not restricting themselves to owners of one particular reader.

They'd drive the uptake of e-book readers as the public would no longer hold off to see which kerchunk wins.

Everyone talks about 'collaboration' and 'Web 2.0' and 'Social' until they talk about business... then it's back to the same old cut-throat winner-takes-all mentality of decades ago.

Learning through Advertising and Porn

2009-10-02T19:20:00.002+01:00

Following a conversation yesterday with someone very interested in online learning, particularly leadership etc., and following the Future of Technology in Education conference today (well, in fact, a Tweeted comment on virtual worlds I picked up after leaving the conference) I feel that the two conversations (if reading someone's Tweet is, in fact, a conversation) are indelibly linked.

The first conversation was on why advertisers are so good at producing messages that get through to us so effectively and efficiently. Minimal time... but you remember the brand. You know what the brand values are. You know what the brand stands for. You know what it doesn't stand for... or what it stands against. So, the crux of the first conversation was, 'Why can't educators find ways of doing that?'

Is that the Future of Learning? We just create 'blipverts' of a couple of minutes in length that tell us all we need to know on a subject? We may need to go through hundreds of these blipverts, but if they are carefully crafted, surely they are going to be more effective than reading a text book, or a Harvard Business Review article, or a case study. After all, most business or management books don't really need an entire book to get their message over. I saw Professor Kim, author of Blue Ocean Strategy, talk about the book when it first came out. He gave a one hour seminar in a conference. Within 30 seconds he'd explained the concept, the rest of it was examples of what Blue Ocean Strategy is. This is in no way denigrating the importance or otherwise of BOS, but merely stating that it didn't need a full hour to explain the concept. I've read most of the book... it doesn't really give me much more. Is that just me?

Same could be said for Chris Anderson's 'The Long Tail' and his latest 'Free'. And Jim Collins' 'Good to Great'... and so I could go on.

My point? These 'important' management books may have been the product of much research and certainly many hours of hard graft, but one doesn't have to read them to understand the basic concept they're trying to explain.

I think, also, that the same goes for large amounts of knowledge in all areas of learning... not just management and business.

So how can we distil the important concepts into 1 minute easy-to-absorb 'bites'...dare I say...'Learning Bites'? One would need hundreds of them to get complex issues with all the necessary appendices, but that must still be easier to learn and retain than reading a text book or a journal article or even a 3 hour lecture.

Now the second point which comes from a Tweet today at the Future of Technology in Learning conference was to do with virtual worlds and the eventual development of gloves (and other clothing) that are able to replicate the texture or tactile sensations relating to particular things.

On the most basic practical level, this will help surgeons practice with 'hands-on' practical experience, with no dangers to the patients.

However, it obviously wouldn't be long before this was subverted by the sex industry to enable online sex to be more than looking... one would, combined with a multi-user virtual environment, be able to feel as if the...ahem...touching was really happening.

And pornography, distasteful, exploitative and seedy though it is, has always managed to be popular and retain people's attention. Perhaps not for long periods, but on a repeated basis.

So here's the idea. We create learning objects and edu-blipverts which are able to educate through sex. Sex brings in the learners and keeps them coming back. The educational element is somehow combined in the video (or virtual environment).

Perhaps better if we just went for educating through the medium of advertising.

After all, which is more important? That people learn, or that people study? It would be nice if the former came through the latter, but surely the main issue is to educate. By whatever means necessary.

Our social tomorrow...

2009-10-02T12:47:00.003+01:00

Will McInnes has begun, finally, talking about education (and not the techie issues of where you stuff your data), in the difficult post-lunch session at FOTE09. He's talkig about widgets and communication/education where fragmentation is everywhere... with 'insane challenges' - such as mobile phones being within arms reach most of the time. So how does education fit into this world?

Will's talking about his colleague, Tom Nixon, using the Nike gadget in his trainers to track his jogging, and he's now talking about 'Smashing the Brand' - i.e. can you break your 'brand' (such as a Coca Cola bottle) and still identify it?

Good, and welcome laugh, unexpectedly from Will talking about dead cats... we obviously all love dead cats.

But we seem to be finally reaching a discussion on the issues that matter. You can drag a horse to water but you can't teach it to swim... and you can build all the collaboration tools and cloud computing you like, but they won't teach anyone anything without addressing fundamental issues of engaging people in education. The technology - the tools - should help. But they do not provide the answers.

The Toyota Prius have turned good environmental driving (maximising miles per gallon) into a game... by showing in real time people's mpg - thereby indifferently encouraging drivers to improve their mpg constantly and to adjust their behaviour to achieve that.

OODA Loops by John Boyd explain how fighter jets fight, the one who reacts quickest, survives... as an analogy for Social Media...if it works for some to understand that...great. A good indication that the principles are nothing new...

In summary, Will posed all the questions that, of course, no one has an answer to but that we should have been debating all morning. How do we deal with this overload of information from all sources at all times.

James Clay from Gloucestershire College did a nice little survey of conference attendees this morning to try and 'capture the crowd' and has just presented the results. Nice tag clouds, but not much information to be honest.

His session is finally talking about how learning takes place everywhere... mobile learning doesn't have to be on a mobile phone. If you're reading on the train, that's mobile learning. If you're using your laptop in a coffee shop, that's mobile learning. And certainly, from my point of view, if we have more transportable laptops (that don't start to burn one's groin, such as this laptop is beginning to do) then we will extend the realm of mobile learning far far more.

We use podcasts, for example, but how many of us give audio feedback through recordings?

And he's just dropped a video camera in a jug of water... nice demonstration of how it's easy to find cheap, rugged, reliable technology that can be used in a classroom.

GPS will change the way we learn? Not sure how...but absolutely...the e-book readers (such as Sony etc.) will help enormously. We need to change lecture theatres so that they have charging sockets and free wifi everywhere.

We need to change IT policies (and others) so that all systems are easier able to connect within institutions and also from outside.

But for now, a break.... and I must leave the conference just when it's getting interesting...

This isn't the future, this is the now

2009-10-02T11:28:00.003+01:00

The Future of Technology in Education conference is now post coffee break and Leeds Metropolitan Uni are talking about how wonderful Google Apps have been for them.

As a business case, it's difficult to argue with avoiding licensing fees, avoid support issues... but what's surprising is that Robert Moores (from Leeds) says that everyone seemed to accept the downtime. Perhaps that's OK for students on undergraduate programmes (tho' it surprises me.... I find it difficult to believe that people are happy to wait to finish their essay/dissertation when they're in full flow and against a deadline, just because the system is down). Perhaps this is more because everyone now has a laptop and is able to do everything offline... so very few students are actually using GoogleDocs and Apps through LMU as their primary source of computing?

James Ballard (or is it Richard Davis?) from ULCC are now talking about Moodle and connecting it to Flickr, Google, YouTube and having central repositories etc. so on and so on and ... greatest respect to James and/or Richard, but this is all nothing new.

I was hoping to learn how educators are engaging in MUVEs (Virtual Worlds). I was hoping to learn how educators are engaging with technology in the classroom, but getting students to use handheld devices or interactive whiteboards and how they are taking the classroom out of the classroom.

That was James, we're now getting Richard... talking about further repositories. All are essential, but these are issues of knowledge sharing and knowledge management, and as far as I can tell they have very little to do with education specifically.

We're now hearing specifically about repositories in Moodle... but as we discovered recently, Moodle is fine up to a point, but it is severly limited on any kind of Social Networking facilities. For that you need to plug-in Elgg, or similar. Then you probably need another system plugged in to actually do such things as blogging or online creation.

This is great for small institutions which don't have money for licenses and can grow as they go, but if you are a little bigger, and you want an all-singing all-dancing system that will work, more or less, out of the box, without any extra configuration to get things to fit, unfortunately you have to go for the big boys...such as IBM or MS.

Tim Marshall: "Progress: Tube staff man in perfect uniform with mohican. He's delivering a service but personalising his engagement."
True - this wouldn't have happened 20 years ago... and I agree that that certainly is progress. But more importantly, Tim is finally a good speaker... he's natural and relaxed at talking to the audience (he's chairing the panel) and, wonderfully, left his mobile on which just went off while he was by the microphone.

Unfortunately, when the others start talking, I switch off. They're not too coherent, they don't ENUNCIATE enough, and maybe it's because I'm stuck at the back of the room, but I have to strain to hear it over the click of my keyboard.

The law related to Cloud Computing is not the most pressing issue. Simone from Amazon explained how users can define where they want their data held, to ensure it doesn't breach regional data protection issues.

Now they're discussing whether or not there are issues related to others controlling your data... so if you run out of money (and can't pay the bill) can you access your data? Perhaps this is also a red herring. If you run out of money and can't afford a new server stack or have to sack 90% of your IT team, then you will probably also not be able to access your data. So the risks and benefits on this issue cancel each other out.

But I want to shout loudly (shame I'm too shy to do so) - WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR CONNECTION IS DOWN?!?

Perhaps I should be patient and see what happens, but no...morning session over and no one addressed the question at all.

Very big harumphs all around!

The Future of Technology in Education

2009-10-02T09:44:00.004+01:00

This day-long seminar, held in the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington, London. England. Europe.

I do like Kensington.... I aspire to being able to afford a view over Kensington Gardens, but realise that mere mortals will only ever be able to walk through it occasionally.

Anyway, Dr Paul Miller from 'Cloud of Data' helped dispel some myths about Cloud computing. I'm curious to know if the audience are the right one for this. Are they IT Managers, or tech-savvy educators trying to integrate more technology in the classroom and the learning process? And how related will this be to education, as opposed to technology? I imagine that those of us who know already, knew... and those who didn't... are now wiser, but it isn't really going to affect their day-to-day job.

Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist Europe, Amazon Web Services is now talking. He refuses to give his email address as, I guess rightly, it will be clogged by conference delegates asking for a job or help with technical problems with their server configuration or a great new idea they have for a product. But not a bad job he has... something, again, I could aspire to.

But this whole morning is talking about 'Cloud Computing'.... so now they're talking about, surprise surprise, Amazon Web Services.... and all the various services... Simple Storage Service (S3), Import/Export, CloudFront, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Virtual Private Cloud, Simple Queue Service (SQS), Simple D8, Elastic MapReduce and Mechanical Turk.

I'm sure Simone is excellent at his job... and gets people singing in the aisles when he starts evangelising. Problem is he's talking techie. Now that's never pretty, and I know I'm not the only one who has half-switched off and started surfing the greater Interweb while only occasionally looking up to see if he's moved on from differentiating EC2 and S3 and BBC and whatever.

And essentially he's only talking about security. Is this the concern of most people? They trust Amazon and Microsoft and Google more than their own in-house IT team (remember, most people here are not techies)?

I think he's missed the point.

The main issue against going on the Cloud is when your internet connection fails. What do you do? You're on a bus, train, plane? In a tunnel, in the countryside, in an 'unconnected' country? Suddenly you can't access your files. So, what data should be included and what data should not? At what point must you accept that occasional connection failures are merely slowing you down in the way that slow computers did before?

Size is important, at least to get you interested...

2009-09-29T10:01:00.002+01:00

Innuendo is important too... to get people interested. And flesh. That's obvious, surely? Hence tyre manufacturers seeing the need to drape naked young women over their calendars. Hence the need for so many youngsters (how old am I?) to walk around with various appendages showing when out on a Saturday night.

And size is important for websites. For the number of Twitter followers. So, having read Euan Semple's blog: http://bit.ly/sealtree01 on whether or not being on Twitter's Suggested User List is important or not, and following the comments on the blog that celebrities are neither big nor clever when boasting tens, hundreds or thousands of thousands of followers.

As the Guardian noted a few days ago in conversation with Joi Ito, of Creative Commons and an early Twitter investor: "Getting users, getting distribution, getting attention, becoming viral - that's the single most difficult thing on the internet to do. And just about every product fails because they don't have any users."

So it is a good thing that there are celebrities with millions of users on Twitter, as that has encouraged Joe and Joanne Public to join up to the site. Twitter only makes sense, like Facebook, or the Internet in general, when you have enough people using it that there is the 'Power of Many' or the 'Wisdom of Crowds'. I remember going online in 1993 and thinking, 'OK - now what?' because there was nothing to do. Few websites to visit. No friends or relatives online to connect with.

However, us 'real people' most certainly should not boast about the number of followers. I've gone through some of those following me and occasionally find a porn-spam Tweeter. When I see them, I block them. I don't want them following me. I don't want my other followers looking through the list thinking that the porn-spammers are in some way connected. Of course they're not, they chose me, not I them. But there is still an issue of being tainted by association.

In the same way that an expert is only an expert if other experts claim that person is an expert (although who says the experts are expert?), it most certainly is important who follows you. And it is important who you follow (particularly if your followers actually value your judgement).

But I have a modest Twitter list of around users I'm 150 following, and have realised that I miss 99% of their messages. I have a job. I have work to do. I have a life to live away from gadgets, desktops and the big worldwide Interweb... so it is impossible to follow all but a select few with any level of depth. Hence the apps such as Tweetdeck to categorise them and help sort the wheat from the gluten-free substitutes.

So to return to the smutty innuendo, if you have a big one it might make others prick up their ears... and pay attention. But a small one, and a small one of good quality, is going to be of real value in the long term. As with all things, quality counts. You have to know what to do with it. And size is important, but that doesn't mean big is best.

We shall shortly be joining pantomime for a quick run through of other double entendres...

What's in it for you?

2009-09-22T15:08:00.003+01:00

An interesting discussion around the table on what do we want from all this 'Social Business' stuff?

If we engage with everyone through an online 'jamming' community system, rather than face-to-face (impossible with the hundreds or thousands of people involved), as one colleague says, it will 'amplify the negative'. I argue, however, that it will also amplify the positive, and it is only by amplifying all responses that we can hope to actually find out what people think.

It will, hopefully, also amplify honesty.

However, can we bring everyone together when they don't actually want to, as one half might see the other as completely against everything they stand for? Perhaps there's no need to have everyone engage with everyone, though it is my preference.

And if people do not engage with each other, what are the negatives?

Surely there is a potential lack of synergies...
There is a potential duplication of work...
There is a hole in potential knowledge sharing...

So can we force individuals to engage?

Can we go through HR and 'process' to use a nice big colourful stick to beat people into engaging with the wider community?

Surely we need to also change our processes so that individuals are not appraised on individual targets and performance if we want them to also think about doing things which are beneficial to the community?

If we need to drive them through personal performance targets, are they people we also want to engage with in the community? Should we have two-tiered communities within the organisation?

Euan Semple takes the floor (but where we will we stand then?)

2009-09-22T13:45:00.005+01:00

Euan Semple: "The way we got people engage to the extent that we have 30,000 people connecting, several hundred blogs, 5000-6000 on wikis, is by being interested."

The question is getting those people interested... the big question... once more... HOW?

ES: "I was sent a dress code for the Barclays building in Canary Wharf, and then told I couldn't connect my laptop to their projector for fear of spreading viruses, and I heard the older staff moaning about the younger staff leaving at 5pm rather than working late. But the younger staff were going home to connect online through Facebook etc. as they were not allowed to connect at work."

But as some of us agree in the session (not all....the luddites don't agree), it's a people management issue, not a technology issue. When I was a student in the 80s and temping in various offices, one particular office banned the use of telephones because some Indian ladies working in the office had been phoning relatives in India. I've worked in open-plan offices where talking is banned between workers... so certain types of old-fashioned and ineffective management will always try to limit communication between workers. The technology will change, the desire and need for workers to actually need to communicate will not.

ES is saying to many that count here what I've been banging on about for ages.

So this is my way of saying it:

Get your staff to blog. Get your customers to blog. Everyone blogging? Good. What are the down sides? Someone says something negative about you? Well, they're thinking it anyway, so better that you know about it and can do something about it, rather than having a disgruntled worker, supplier, client spreading invisible poison! And most of the time, it's only good.

You're spreading the word.
You're engaging with the wider world.
You're allowing the wider world to spread the word.

....just make sure the word people are spreading is a good one. How?

Make sure your company works well.
Make sure your organisation is a healthy one.
Make sure your products and services are doing what they should.
Make sure your customer services are open and ready to absorb and pass on feedback from customers, to improve those products and services.

It is, very basically, Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) brought into all areas of all of the chains... workers, clients, suppliers...

Back to Euan Semple.... Crumpler helped him re-thread the strap on his bag after observing him tweet about it being impossible to put together. A similar example to Jeff Jarvis' "Dell Hell" story.

And a reminder from Euan that I (and we all) really have to find time to read Jeff's book "What would Google do?"... and see how you can impassionately look at data and see what is happening. With your brand. With your company. With your staff. With your customers. And then react to that data...

Euan blogged on "Why most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 fail" and said:

1. They think it is about technology.
2. They aren't prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates.
3. They will assimilate it into business as usual.
4. They will try to do it in a way that "maximizes business effectiveness" without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective.
5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up.
6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions, think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad.
7. Lack of patience
8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.

Now for some coffee....

No Straight Lines session, continued....

2009-09-22T10:47:00.004+01:00

Alan Moore is continuing, after a wee break, to discuss the old paradigm and the new paradigm, or are they, in fact, the same paradigm?

AM: Businesses have to be:

Life enabling
Life simplifying
Navigational

A high social networker has a higher 'social value' than those who don't network as much. But what do we mean by 'social value'?

Social Intelligence - which surely is crowd theory, the power of many and all to do with empathic resonance, right?

Can employers demand access to a person's private Facebook page? Well, apparently so... although that is surely a breach of a person's human rights? But apart from the option of someone deciding to sue the company concerned, what young person looking for a job is going to risk their entire future (at least as far as they see it) by taking the particular company to task?

Back to the 'flow of information' - flow is good. As Goldratt said, 'Balance flow' - but there is a lot of information that simply cannot flow. Right? If I give away all my information, what value do I have? How can I sell consultancy? How can I sell my skills? How can I get money for my intellectual property (although, fair enough, I can only get paid if I allow the information to flow)? What about, however, the IP that companies block to stop competitors getting potential innovations... killing off ideas that could improve 'society'? Not a nice thing to do, but it does happen. The ever-lasting light-bulb?

"Company Command": online learning environment for commanders from, on and going to the field of battle sharing experience, wisdom and intelligence to help share and collaborate.

Alan talks about the 4 Cs:

Commerce
Culture
Community
Connectivity

and how Girlswalker.com, the Japanese fashion community, was built on the 4Cs model. It is all very clear, right? The community needs to be connected and have a common culture to create commerce from it.

Alan's now talking about his own project allowing people to tag their videos in a way that allows people to buy the products specifically used within that film... which is a nice idea for physical products.

However, what we need to also find is a way to also sell the very boring, very unsexy B2B products and services in a same way.

Obama's socially networked campaign was, according to Alan, based on: Awareness, Interaction and Engagement. The big thing, as we all know now, is how he engaged the general public, by allowing them to donate just $5 to his campaign rather than eliminating everyone who was unable to cough up the $2000 minimum for Hillary Clinton's campaign.

But I fear there are a lot of business examples that could be used in explaining how social media (or collaboration technology) that aren't being mentioned... apart from YourEncore. Open source and collaboration is easy to justify on moral grounds, but we really need to prove to the 'deciders' in business (at whatever level of the organisation they may be) that collaboration and embracing this new technology can actually be profitable.

The question is, it seems, to find where the value is: if we have mass collaboration on a project, who owns the patent? Who owns the copyright? Who can make money from it? The world benefits, but it's difficult to drive people to open their own IP to the world... as they'll feel they're giving something for nothing.

Social Media Session with Euan Semple and Alan Moore

2009-09-22T10:06:00.005+01:00

Two 'recognised' experts on Social Media (not victims to the big question of who is an expert and can you call yourself an expert), Euan Semple and Alan Moore, are running a session today on Social Media.

There is a part of me that hopes I learn nothing from the day, which means I know everything. Of course, I'm still hoping I learn something as otherwise I'll have wasted my whole day... but it's also comforting to have one's own theories and opinions confirmed by these two.

Alan Moore has mentioned the issues I've been thinking about for a while as to identity, and comparing the way we lived two centuries ago to the way we lived now. Social Media opens our horizons and breaks down our boundaries, but paradoxically it also brings us closer together. Our private lives and public lives can no longer be completely separated... OK... this is my interpretation...I'll talk about it more at another time.

Euan Semple: "There are no conscripts, there are only volunteers."

Now this is one of my problems. We need people to volunteer, but not everyone volunteers. So how can you engage those who neither volunteer nor would know that they are able to because they don't realise the option is there?

Alan Moore: "Culture made by the folk and we make it every day of our lives."

But if we're all creators, who has time to be spectators? Do the creators need spectators... or are we going to end up with a system where it's no longer the multi-logue i.e. the many talking to the many, because it will be (what, a 'new paradigm'?) of everyone talking to no one?

AM: "We've made the public domain highly efficient, but not highly effective." i.e., CCTV doesn't encourage trust.... we need to somehow engage with people and make them more trustworthy, rather than relying on frightening them into compliance.

AM: We need to be:
Networked
Lightweight
Flexible
Adaptive

Alan is now talking about 'Creative Commons' but I'm certain most people in the room don't know what it is... but he's going beyond social media and into fundamental problems with society and how it, and organisations, need to change to truly embrace the possibilities of the new networked society. No arguments there... but how? If we could change society there are so many forces for good that we should strive for... so will it really only be a generational thing? Will we need to wait for the young 'uns to grow up - as they know it all and embrace it 100%? But, what will their young, new generation then think about it? If you have exponential growth in technology and future abilities, by the time the Generation Y or even Millenials have grown up, who knows what will be possible? Social Media will be like a nineteenth century local newspaper compared to what the future technology could provide.

AM: "There is no offline and online, only blended reality."

Hyper-local v Super-global: a nice use of terms...

Technologies of Cooperation - Rheingold... certainly a better term than Social Media or Web 2.0... but it's all the same thing I guess.

AM: "Information is only valuable when it's flowing".

But is that true? I need to read more about this but it occurs to me that there are plenty of examples of information only having value when it is controlled... or often (in the case of trade secrets, intellectual property etc.) completely hidden from the world at large. I don't necessarily agree with that world, but surely a lot of business, and the economy in general, is based on the control of information... the restriction of that knowledge.

End of Alan's session, more to come....

I'm a 'Creator' - are you?

2009-09-18T15:03:00.006+01:00

Forrester have produced a nice wee tool to accompany the book 'Groundswell' that shows the six different levels on what they call the 'Social Technographics Ladder'.

It seems to be an extension of Pareto's Rule (i.e. that for our purposes, 80% of the content on the InterWeb 2.0 is created by 20% of the users... or 90% created by 10% etc. etc.): but splits people further. Here's a slide from their ladder:

Now, by virtue of writing this, I'm clearly a 'Creator'. By virtue of you reading this, you're at the very least, a 'Spectator'.

So if you check the tool:

you can see how special you really are. Which we all need occasionally!

In my case, given my gender, age and country, I'm in the 13% of creators, compared to 62% who are just spectators.

But once more I draw the learned reader's attention to the bottom category, 'Inactives'. In my demographic, that's 26%.

26% of males in the UK between 35 and 44 do nothing with Web 2.0. They don't read blogs, they don't listen to podcasts, they don't rate things online... nada de nada. Zilch.

That figure goes up to 43% for the 45 to 54 age group. The decision makers in companies and other organisations, politicians, journalists, researchers, academics... and the figures are far higher for females in the same age groups.

So whilst those of us who 'create' are looking at all the wonderful possibilities of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Everything 2.0, we're never going to get the proverbial groundswell if we can't get that quarter (or more) who do nothing, to do something.

So, how to engage those who don't want to engage? There will always be people who don't 'engage'... in the same way some still don't carry a mobile phone, or have a TV, or use a microwave. But 26% is an awful lot.

Is it education? Is it simply that they don't know about the new possibilities? That they read a newspaper for opinion, but don't read blogs for opinion?

Do they think that it's all about egomaniacs telling the world what type of porridge they had for breakfast and the colour of socks they're wearing?

Are they concerned with privacy? Do they think that by reading a blog, they are somehow giving information to 'Big Brother' and they will then be bombarded with spam? Or that all blogs are synonyms for phishing?

I shall continue to play my part, running sessions wherever possible to educate... but if you can bring a horse to water, and it refuses to drink, can't you get a hose and just soak the stupid mare?

It's the same with voting (as I mentioned a few months ago here) - it's never going to completely work unless you get everyone doing it. So, when we make voting compulsory, perhaps we can somehow force people to engage online? Measure their Internet activity and if they're not at least spectating, then tax them. It would solve the government's finances and get true engagement at the same time! No down side!

MBA graduates cherry-pick technology employers

2009-09-18T09:44:00.002+01:00

A little late, perhaps, but such is the way of the web that so much information makes it hard to keep track of everything.

My excuses for only now seeing a CNN article on the Top MBA Employers, published in May 2009.

What is interesting is that tech. companies like Google and Apple are in the top 5, alongside the predictable consultants such as McKinsey and BCG. Microsoft is at a still-respectable 12, but then there's a huge gap before getting to IBM (31), Cisco (42), Yahoo! (67), Ebay (69) and HP (70) and Nokia (85).

The tech. companies surely have a more secure future than many of the others in the list. BMW, for example - a car manufacturer - is at 22. Even the CIA fairs better than some, at 47.

So why is this? Is it based on salary? I doubt Google pay the best...

Is it based on prestige? Having to read endless reports and models by McKinsey and BCG for an MBA may give them an unfair advantage (if the post office began producing endless research, case-studies and 'nineteen Ns' models for logistics supply-chain management, maybe they'd be top of the list).

I admit to being surprised that MBA graduates aren't targetting tech. companies more, but perhaps the biggest problem is that they tend not to be taught much (in my experience) about new technology. They'll study ERP systems from the 80s, or how to project manage a new implementation, but they're not too hot on keeping up with the latest trends.

Is this the fault of the business schools who teach what is known (the trouble with new technology is no one can be 100% certain what will work and what won't) or with the students - who tend to be younger than the faculty - not engaging with their peers outside the MBA and seeing the potential of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, bio-tech and so on?

Some schools concentrate on entrepeneurship, but that doesn't help the majority who want a good job with good prospects and a good salary. It would be interesting to see a study of the tech. firms who have recruited MBA graduates, and an attempt to measure (against a control firm) whether or not the fledgling company has benefitted from their educated intake.

Can we use Enterprise 2.0 to Motivate our employees?

2009-09-17T13:19:00.004+01:00

Now anyone who's done a half-day class on HR, or psychology, or performance management, or, for example, an MBA, will be familiar with the concept of motivating the staff of an organisation... how to do it, how not to do it, and what are the potential pitfalls.

The names 'Herzberg' and 'Maslow' figure highly in such discussions (though not everyone agrees with them). In brief, the idea is that once you surpass a minimal level of salary that affords you a 'decent' lifestyle (define 'decent' as you wish), i.e. a house/flat, food, clothing, entertainment and the security in knowing that it won't all be taken away next week, you are no longer motivated by salary increases.

Of course there are those who are only concerned with getting as much money in the bank as possible, but the vast majority seem, apparently, to be 'happy with their lot'. So if you can't increase someone's salary to motivate them, how can you get them interested in their job and performing better?

Well, (and correct me if I'm wrong any of the millions of people who know more about this than me) but Herzberg suggested (following a study of thousands) that it is certain intangible features of our working life that are more important than tangibles.

So rather than giving them (us?) a great canteen, gym membership, pension, health insurance, good holiday entitlements and, of course, a decent salary, it is more important to give them (us!) more responsibility, more automony, more freedom to manage tasks and interact with eachother.

To me this is obvious. We're all grown adults (if you're not, surely you should be playing video games rather than reading this blog?) and no one likes being patronised or treated like a kid... which is exactly the way many organisations, or at least many 'team leaders', seem to treat their staff. Processes are exact. Staff are reprimanded for arriving at 9.08 in the morning rather than 8.59 (despite the amount of total hours they work). Access to social networking sites such as Facebook are blocked, or certainly limited to a few minutes a day.

And yet, when one looks at the struggle of integrating Strategic Human Resource Management into an organisation, one of the biggest challenges is communicating the corporate strategy down to all levels of the business - enabling them - the workers - to know their part in it all and why they are being asked to do things in a particular way.

So what is 'Enterprise 2.0' (i.e. Web 2.0 for business purposes) if not the biggest, newest and bestest tool for communicating? Let's not even discuss the issues of collaboration and crowd-sourcing... the simple tools available through anything called '2.0' can make organisations work better, quicker, with more integration, and more enfranchisement...

... so ... at a time of recession when organisations are unable to promise long-term benefits or salary increases to their employees, what they can do is give those employees a voice. Let them talk amongst themselves. Let them talk to people outside the company... the contractual guidelines for employment can still stipulate that employees are expected to behave 'reasonably', to not abuse the system and to keep confidential information just that... that is, remind them that they're adults and treat them as such.

What's the worst that can happen? That 99% of the company spends 8 hours a day on Facebook? That's unlikely. That rivalries between different departments sprout up through an internal network or intranet? Such rivalries probably already exist and this simply gives the management a chance to identify potential problems and try and sort them out.

I find such issues a 'no brainer' - and yet am constantly surprised at the number of people I meet in the big wide world who have an attitude to staff that belongs in the nineteenth century. Not everyone will be stimulated by their jobs. Not everyone will reach the level of CEO or start their own business. Companies need people to do what are often, mind-numbingly boring jobs... so they should look at help relieving that boredom.

After all, motivated staff are more likely to stay on at the company - reducing recruitment and training costs and increasing productivity. And yet I feel that may organisations will take another 20 or 30 years to accept that the world will not end if they allow their staff to enjoy themselves.

...and another thing!

2009-09-16T09:41:00.003+01:00

Another fine example of what I was talking about yesterday... increased choice provides increased confusion. The first and biggest on the block will usually win (tho' not always, as Google has often shown)... and, (and this is the plea for world peace on earth and goodwill to all whatsits), why can't Adobe and Microsoft work together to produce a product that works for everyone?

On every system.

Always, combining the best bits of both Flash and Silverlight.

This article on the Wall Street Journal shows that this is very far from what is happening.

As it is, Microsoft's size and persistence means that more will adopt Silverlight, but surely this just makes it more complicated for us, the punters, the users, who now have to download (and regularly update) yet another plug-in when browsing the InterWeb?

Just imagine the utopia where all website producers knew which format they needed to produce video (and other animations) in... all users were able to view all content on every website... and the big companies could stop wasting grillions of pounds, dollars and euros investing in R&D to re-invent the wheel. If the wheel exists, maybe suggest putting a nice pneumatic tyre on it, or paint it pink, but don't think that we need a new type of wheel that won't work with any of our existing carts, roads or tyres!

Why can't they all agree on one software package?

2009-09-15T09:32:00.004+01:00

I read a wee article today on VNU Net (www.v3.co.uk) that "IBM is reportedly dumping Microsoft Office in favour of its own version of Open Office, Lotus Symphony" and again I felt a bit of a rant coming on.

I've sat down now, but that hasn't removed the desire to rant.

I like to think I'm not a geek, but I do like good technology. Let's remember, from the Compact OED, is defined as:

technology

• noun (pl. technologies) 1 the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. 2 the branch of knowledge concerned with applied sciences.

— DERIVATIVES technological adjective technologically adverb technologist noun.

— ORIGIN Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment’.

So.... 'the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes'... so let us assume the 'application of scientific knowledge' is the software...be it MS Office or Lotus Symphony or Google Docs or Open Office or whatever.

The 'practical purposes' are removed by virtue of the fact that the documents produced by the different software systems are never 100% cross-compatible. Now, one could easily argue that none of them are perfect... but by having large endorsements of different packages means that smaller companies and inidividuals are increasingly going to diverge from one package to purchase and/or use, by choice, the one they know. Which will be the one they experience every day at work (at IBM, or Microsoft, or Google, or any organisation that uses their software).

Shurely (hic) it wouldn't be too much to ask for the different software-makers to collaborate on producing the definitively perfect office package? They could brand it differently and price it differently to tie in to the other software or Operating Systems if they must (e.g. Windows, Leopard, Linux, Chrome...) but at least they would all be compatible with each other across machines of different ages. That, as anyone who has tried to open a document at home done on Office 2007 at work, when the home package is Office 2003, is not always simple.

So slapped wrists and eternal shame on IBM for trying to get their staff to use Lotus Symphony rather than MS Office. If any of us outside the Big Blue do business with them, we'll now have to make sure our documents are saved appropriately and have appropriate plug-ins to open their documents and...

...and while we're talking about it, why can't all mobile manufacturers use the same operating system... it's irritating enough trying to format for the hundreds of different handset screen sizes and resolutions currently on the market, without also having completely different systems every time you upgrade a phone.

I've just upgraded from a 'quite good phone' to a 'smart phone' - within the same nameless Finnish brand - and yet basic functionality from the old phone doesn't exist on the new one. One would have thought that the most basic usability testing any software or hardware manufacturer would do would be to ensure old habits are easily translated onto the new system.

But, harping back to Office, the 2007 version proved that the Seattle giants do not know their arse from their 2003 elbow... and I now spend up to 10 minutes hunting for certain functionality. Surely (again, so soon?) it would have been better to provide the new interface on 2007 as the default interface, but allow users to switch back to the previous one (where they know where to find things)? That way they could educate new users in new 'best practices' without irritating the hell out of those of us who were very very used to the previous incarnation.

Technology everywhere, and ne'er a drop to drink

2009-08-26T19:34:00.006+01:00

I co-ran a session this morning looking at 'E-Nabling the Operation' and (OK - it was 2 sessions) the 'Future of Operations'. Looking at production processes, procurement, planning and capacity, supply chains and so on; and:
a. how they can be improved now with Web 2.0 stuff; and
b. what the future brings.

A fun session as:
i. 'twas a good class - not too big - enough loud-mouths tho' to make it interesting and have a bit of an argument; and
ii. it's an interesting subject. 'The Future'.

So perhaps that's what I'd like to be when I grow up - a 'Futurist'. There are a couple of videos on Youtube which I can highly recommend - in particular: 'Shift Happens':

... but... big question here... how do you become a Futurist? It must be the ideal job - dream about what might happen and never be proved wrong as the future never comes...

Anyway - the big problem with the class was, ironically and most irritatingly, technology not working. So one can lead an organisation to the trough of technological innovation, but if you can't show them how the stuff works there and then; they are just as likely to dismiss the idea out of hand and never try again.

And this wasn't 'amazing' technology - just a simple private Wiki that they had already been playing with - but which we were hoping to continue on during the session. So, in the end, we had to 'fire up the flipcharts' and use the ancient technology of pen and paper... a shame... but it is more reliable and works first time around (well... as long as the pens have ink and there's enough paper).

So my dilemma for today... or if you prefer it... my challenge to you dear reader:

How can we teach technological innovations and encourage people to use said technology through the medium of technology?

If we can get them online to do these sessions in Virtual Worlds or WebEx or any other collaborative system, surely the battle is over? They know what the technology is, and they know how to use it.

So it comes back to the same-old same-old... we need to have a pre-Internet; pre-computer technology session in real-time with real people in a real classroom, to teach those real people about new technology, how to use it, what the business benefits are and why they need to get on board.

One more question that does keep coming around though is whether any research has been done thus far on when is the best time for a company or organisation to jump on board the new technology bandwagon?

Answers, as always, on a postcard to the usual address please. Correct entries will be pulled at random and be given the prize of ephemeral fame.

The Future of Learning Conference... what did we learn?

2009-08-21T13:13:00.002+01:00

The Future of Learning Conference has just finished at Ashridge Business School, in conjunction with the University of Cape Town's Graduate Business School and Mount Eliza Exec. Ed., from the Melbourne Business School.

So, lot's of business school and executive education people talking about the future of learning in the business school and executive education environment - including yours truly presenting on Classroom 2.0 - how Web 2.0 stuff can be (and is) used in learning in the exec. ed world.

The main issue we have with integrating more technology in Executive Education is that the participants are often only with us (the educators) for a week. They may come back for other week-long modules over an 18 month period, but that doesn't always happen.

And so many of the participants on courses are unaware of Web 2.0/Social Media and technology in general. Thems that know, know. Them's that don't, have no idea.

So one could set up brief induction sessions at the beginning of modules, but there is an issue of learning curves getting people using this stuff in such a short space of time that makes it far harder to introduce than in, say, an undergraduate programme where the students are with the institution for 3 years + at a time.

SecondLife is the biggest problem, once again. It's too unintuitive... I'm not sure how and when we'll be able to actually put participants in the space for their learning. Certainly, when we do try it it will be slowly and with very small reduced groups.

But there are other issues of technology that are equally unembraced in current executive education. Social networks - for example - through corporate intranet systems are sorely underused to map competency frameworks to individuals according to their annual appraisals, future development needs, the needs of the organisation and so on.

The sessions in the conference were all insightful and very interesting - some people, such as Ashridge, are already facilitating Virtual Action Learning and even run a course for others to learn how... but no one seems to be using virtual worlds in executive education and I'm still looking for someone who might.

There were two sessions that particularly stood out for me. Well, three...

First of all, a session summarising research that shows that 10% of audio teaching (i.e. hearing) is remembered, compared to 65% if there is some visual stimulation as well. So the idea of downloading podcasts to listen to in the car isn't as effective as, in theory, watching them on the computer.... although there's a big issue as to how the podcast is created. Talking heads won't stimulate anyone, but judicious use of good powerpoint slides (and video and other materials) might make it work. It seems the brain likes to receive the same information via different senses and mix it all together to make sense of it. Good to know... and it explains why I like 'visual' powerpoints (images, photos, big bold (not pastel) colours).

Secondly, a talk last night after dinner by Professor Kevin Warwick on the future of Cybernetics. He famously had a chip implanted in his arm in 2002 (was it?) becoming the first Cyborg and working on the way the human nerve system can interact with electricity. So, on the medical level, we can enable amputees to operate robotic prosthetics from their brain; and it shows how Parkinsons sufferers can already chips implanted in their brains that are able to counter the brain-freeze that seems to cause the shake-attacks of Parkinsons.

Of course the 'fun' part is the suggestion that one day we'll be able to operate everything from our brain with no need to physically handle a control. I'm sure the military have long been interested in this, but it opens the gates to 'telepathy' (or transmitting from brain to brain with no external output such as speech, text or eye contact); faster implementation of thoughts into actions (useful, I'm sure, for the military too, but maybe it will help us otherwise); and the idea of having chips in our brains that will hold all the information we need. No need to learn by rote, try and memorise and regurgitate in exams.

What education would then need to concentrate on (which some places already do) is cognition (understanding and interpreting the information); communication and relationships.

And if we all spent less time on learning information and more time on relationships, in the words of Sam Cooke: "What a wonderful world it will be!"

Finally, the first keynote session this morning by Robert Burke was about Futures Thinking. In short - everything is moving so quickly, how on earth will we know what to teach next? One of the quotes (which I'll probably misquote here) was that 40% of what technical students will learn at university now will be obsolete more or less by the time they finish their course. He also recommended the following video on Youtube which has some lovely stats to make you think: "Really? Oh shit!". I recommend it: Shift Happens

What I will love to see is how much technology is used by exec. ed institutions in the coming months and years. Next year's iteration of the conference should be interesting to see if there have been any major changes in that direction.

The future's bright? The future is a half-burnt candle...

2009-08-15T18:52:00.003+01:00

Whilst preparing to co-run a session in a couple of weeks to a second-year Executive MBA class, we've been looking for examples of how Web 2.0 and Social Media tools are used NOW in Operations, or Supply Chain Management and so on.

We already have a load of examples of how they could be used, but we don't have many examples of how they are used. I've used the great Social Web to ask a question (via Twitter and LinkedIn Groups: the APICS The Association for Operations Management and Supply Chain Management Group) and have had the enormous response of ZERO comments or answers. None!

I admit, this surprised me. A few months ago I posed a question to another couple of groups (on E-Learning) and got around 20 long text answers (near essays in some cases) from people around the world.

So, does this mean that none of the people on the LinkedIn groups, despite understanding the importance of social networking, understand what Web 2.0 is and how it can benefit their sector?

Or does this mean that they understand Web 2.0 and have implemented it (beyond 'Web-integrated ERP') and can't be bothered to answer?

Or is there, in fact, a huge business opportunity waiting to happen? Communications tools (such as Blogs and Twitter) being used to improve communcitions along the supply chain.

Folksonomies and Wikis being used to improve training and enable workers at all levels of an organisation to participate in creating strategies, guidelines, work processes etc.

Widgets being made from Mash-ups that provide Operations managers with all the information at their finger-tips, comparing and combining all possible data sets (from their organisation but also further up and down the supply chain) so that they know what their clients' clients' clients' clients are doing now, and ensuring their suppliers' suppliers' suppliers' suppliers are not going to create a shortfall in production.

This stuff is obvious, isn't it? Or will it take another ten years before SAP and their ilk integrate Web 2.0 features (by which time we will be on Web 7.43)?

If anyone has any comments or examples of Web 2.0 in an operations context that are being used NOW, do please let me know.

And if anyone wants to invest in us setting up a consultancy to exploit this huge hole in the market, again, let me know! ;-)

Hanging's too good for them...they should have their gadgets confiscated!

2009-08-09T18:44:00.002+01:00

It really doesn't matter how technologically minded we are, how connected we are, or how virtual we are, we are still subject to the wonderful kick in the teeth that is petty crime. You can protect yourself... be sensible about not showing off with your fancy expensive gadgets and accessories, you can avoid dark alleys, walking alone at night, dodgy areas, leaving items on display in the car, having car/house/personal alarms, CCTV and wireless webcams... but you'll still get some little herbert knicking something when you, for once, let your guard down.

Last Sunday I left my car parked in a side street in a nice area in North London. I accidentally left the window on the driver's door open about half way (but the car was locked).

And, guess what?

Nothing happened! I came back 4 hours later and everything was still in the car, no vandalism, the car was still there.

However, last night, I left the car parked on the street outside our house. Not a bad area. Not ridiculously expensive or posh, but not a bad area. A residential area, people walk to the tube to commute into town. Not far from the above one either... and also in North London.

Nothing was on display, but said herbert broke the quarterlight and went through all my secret cubby-holes. And guess what he found? He left (I say 'He' as it has the marks of a male fuckwit rather than a female one, although perhaps that's being sexist?) the bluetooth handsfree thingie for my mobile phone. He left a hammer/knife multi-tool thingie I have in the car. He left the tyre inflater and first-aid kit (although, that I can understand) even tho' the first-aid kit is still in the original wrapper. The umbrellas were there. A very very old camera was still there. £3 in change was still there (but he stole about £6 more). In fact, the only thing Herbert Fuckwit stole was a cheap satnav (the cheapest on the market when I bought it) and a three-year old mp3 player. Oh, and a £4 mobile phone car charger.

Not the kind of booty that's going to keep Mr Fuckwit in heroin for very long. Nor that Herbie will be able to sell for much (the mp3 player is old and not Apple... who'd want it?).

The biggest pain is:

the window is going to cost around £140 to repair/replace
I won't be able to listen to podcasts for a while - having just spent a fortune on house and garden repairs, I can't afford to replace said mp3 player.

None of the items were on display, and my guard was let down in that they were still in the car. Bert missed the 6 CDs in the CD changer too. And the umbrellas....tho' they're not the most valuable of items, granted.

So, what should I do? Pass it off as an irritating aberration in the otherwise good experience I've had with crime so far (i.e. virtually none)? Set up webcams outside the house to monitor the street and house entrance and car (when parked) 24/7? Set up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme? Or just wait until Christmas and see if Santa will bring me a new kerchunk (that's a gadget, by the way).

Or, and this is what is in the back of my mind, set up a vigilante posse of neighbours and we'll roam the neighbourhood with sticks, garden implements and sports equipment (baseball bats, hockey sticks, rifles... that kind of thing) and look for Mr Fuckwit and his friends?

What a shame that we can't do that virtually. What a shame that with all the technology now available, I can't just put a Tweet out saying 'mp3 player stolen' and someone will know someone who'll return it to me with a tearful apology and a firm but fair clip around the ear.

Like a Glam Rocker... which platforms should I go with?

2009-07-22T13:30:00.003+01:00

There comes a time when life has moved on... new stuff happens (sometimes called 'technology') and people work, or want to work, in different ways.

So they then look at what stuff they have (i.e. the technology they use currently) and decide, for example,

'it is very irritating to not be contactable when I'm out of the office... maybe I do need one of those new fangled mobular cell-type phones the yuppies have!'

'instead of wasting time sending leaflets through the post that nobody reads, I should send direct email marketing so I can exactly track and measure who has opened what and what the clicked on, to help follow-ups'

or even

'maybe if we got a decent website, we could sell stuff directly to the punters and cut out the huge numbers of middle-people'.

Well, we're currently in that kind of place, thinking 'what we've been doing so far is fine and dandy and has won awards and no one's complained about it really, but what we really need is to drag our Web 0.0 system into the 21st century and prepare it for the great Web 2.48 world where we're all interconnected and we have social networking integrated with the content delivery, integrated with folksonomies, integrated with e-commerce, integrated with collaborative wikis; and all of it held on a cloud somewhere over the Atlantic'.

But to do everything we want, there are so many options. Should we go down the route of the huge expensive monolithic products from IBM (Portal) or MicroSoft (Sharepoint) which can do everything we want but will cost us two arms and half a leg every year forever in license fees... or do we go down the open source route and get a system built on Joomla or Elgg or Moodle or Wibble or FlimFlam; which will be far cheaper, and can probably do everything we want and more (but we can't really see a case of that right now) but seems a little, as someone said, 'stickle-brick' - with little add-ons and so on. Will that see us through for another 10 or 20 years? Or will it be so hackable in 5 years' time that we'll have to spend three arms and four legs every year on security measures to stop the hackers hacking?

It's all very irritating... why can't we just have one system for everyone? And we then build on that... one social network (not Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Xing, Plaxo, Friendster...), one blogging system (not Blogger.com, Wordpress, Livejournal etc.) one Wiki system... and everything will be eternally forwards and backwards compatible with everything?

Well... I know the answer, but it's not easy. Given the money, the big boys seem like a good safe bet. But it's a lot of money. So at what point should one go with the new systems?

Is Firefox better than I.E.? Well... some of the sites I need to use don't work well on Firefox. And when it's left open for days at a time it seems to eat my RAM like a salt through a slug... in short... I'm flummoxed. Gut feelings are all well and good but once you've taken antacids, you have to think with your head. And that, at present, is in two minds (not an easy trick!).

Get Ambition - 'Does the arts speak digital?'

2009-07-17T16:01:00.005+01:00

A day-long symposium in Saddler's Wells (that's in London by the by) and I've only now managed to get the laptop working. So... how can you have an interactive, new digital meeting when people don't have places to charge their portable devices?

Then the WiFi wouldn't let me on...but I got over that.

Then there's the problem that some of the seats make Saddler's Wells the RyanAir of theatres... my knees were somewhere near my ears and deep-vein thrombosis began to set in after a few minutes.

But the great and good (or those who wanted a Friday out of the office) in the arts world gathered amongst some of us more on the technology and education side to discuss the issues of how to engage the arts sector in the UK with digital technology.

The actual set-up was quite nice. The panel discussions perhaps not so much... some speakers are better than others... but they had a big screen behind at the back of the stage on which Twitter feeds were broadcast (using the tag: #getambition), a nice lad called Saul was posting stuff from the Internet in real time that illustrated the discussion going on and when the audience asked questions, the camera was turned on them so that we were watching them watching us watching you watching... something they thought about way back when in the 60s on 'That was the week that was'.

Now, there were some lovely examples of artists using digital technology in different ways; either to get funding through the proverbial 'long tail' or to get distribution through the Pirate Bay, or to use Tweets and text sms messages to accompany an electric-cello performance.
All lovely.

There was a comparison by Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director of the ICA, on how free content on the Internet (and the Chris Anderson-coined 'Freemium' model) was similar to the Institute for Contemporary Arts removing entrance costs and allowing free entry to their exhibitions.

So - is free content essentially the same as the 'Freemium' business model?

If so, why not have a theatre performance that is completely free entry to all, but where the performance stops every 15 minutes for a brief advertising message? Will it work? Obviously theatre afficionados like yours truly will pay for the premium version, but maybe it's a way of changing the style of performance.

Dare I say it, a 'paradigm shift'?

But with everyone talking about all this digital stuff... and they even talked about 'Digial Britain' - the report authored by Lord Carter on the future of the UK's digital content, funding and infrastructure... I am still surprised no one talked about communities!

You have regional museums, regional theatres and concert venues, central world-class arts organisations that have all built a following - be it local or global. And yet very few of them seem to be 'leveraging' the community (another word that I dislike using)... apart from Jamie King and his 'Steal this Film' (and 'Steal this Film 2' etc.) system of 'guerilla' film-making.

So what we need for next year... no... what they need for next year.... no... what we need next year...for I am a member of the arts community as a keen user, purchaser and consumer of their produce... is a series of sessions on HOW the community can be engaged.

The have set up a community for those present at the sessions yesterday and today so hopefully the discussions will continue. What we need to see is how the arts organisations, both large and small, can create online social networks (they already have the communities) so that everyone can have a voice... or at least feel they have a voice...

... and yet ... as we speak.. .someone tweeted that the panel looked like they need a group hug. So they had a quick hug and everyone laughed! Moments like that that make live so much better than online... but are they? Wouldn't we get a buzz out of seeing different people make a connection online?

So... what we need are social networks where organisations can encourage fans/communities to donate small amounts (e.g. £5) to aid fund raising, rather than asking for £500 as a minimum amount; what we need are ways in which we, the core users, receive special offers and access to tkt sales before the rest - to make us feel special; what we need are systems of feedback so that occasionally the community decides what exhibition/play/work/concert/film is put on...

This was very difficult in the old days... but surely one of the big changes of the digital world is only the technology ... which has enabled the cultural shift. It has allowed people to do what they want, unconstrained by distance, cost, accessibility, class, gender, race, creed etc. etc.

So... what am I saying? Digital in the arts is not about putting normal content on the Internet... it's about using the technology to do something new. Some get it... some perhaps don't.

Who am I? What am I? Does it matter?

2009-07-02T11:11:00.003+01:00

Getting to grips with Second Life or any online system can take time. What doesn't help is that you have a range of possible criteria with which you can alter your online persona. It's not just about using a different name or a nickname/pseudonym/nom de plume... but also about the graphical and factual representation of yourself you provide.

Eh?

Well... for example, are you a boy or a girl? Easy enough for most two year olds. Research suggests that it is a distinct minority who are confused about their gender and become transvestites or even transexuals.

This is not a new observation. A quick Google search on 'Gender in Second Life' will produce a load of links to other articles and blogs talking about it going back two years or more. And why do some people have avatars that look like the 'Alien' creature or Cartman from SouthPark? Apart from the obvious fan-geek thing?

A few weeks ago I created my avatar and wanted to make him/it worse looking than me... not a better version... and modified the standard dress to be a dirty t-shirt, baggy jeans and red tartan boots. He looked like a cross between a Hell's Angel and the Bay-City Rollers.

However, I'm going to be using the avatar 'for business' - and thought it's probably better that at least I dress him in a suit. So I tried to buy a suit in one of the SL shops. Some are expensive (well... $2 for something so stupid is expensive!)... but found one relatively cheap. Only to find that somehow I had bought the poster of the suit and not the suit.

So now, if I put it on, I have a huge billboard sticking out of my mid-riff. Not good.

Then I fiddled with the settings in SL and realised that there was a suit in my inventory as standard. So I put it on.

Strangely, it changed my very pale, fat, bald white avatar to a fat, bald, black avatar! He looks better than the white version... but I feel that it isn't just the skin colour that has changed... not all the elements I'd given my previous attempt (huge chin, crooked nose) seem to have transferred to this new option.

So, now the question is, do I keep him? Will people treat me different as a black avatar than a white one? This is an obvious reason to experiment with gender in SL... as an experiment. So perhaps some 'formal research' could be conducted to see how attitudes change in SL to different avatars, different genders, skin colours, sizes (fat, thin, tall, short, muscular, buxom... )? It could provide, potentially, a real life insight into racism, sexism, homophobism etc. .. but I'm not the one to conduct the research.

And by the way...can anyone tell me where the squirrel came from? Never saw him before! Nice touch though... well... when you touch him/she/it... it squeaks!

This blog is constant...even when it changes...

2009-06-26T16:42:00.004+01:00

If I say I'm going to write about '1984 being so now' - I'm not referring to the TV programme 'Big Brother', nor various governments' ability to spy on our every move. Nor to the creation of 'thought crime'.... for example where anti-terrorism legislation criminalises intentions to do terrorist acts...without the need to actually do them. I'm not even talking about the wall-to-wall plasma screens and projections, videophones and the rest of it.

No... the need to rewrite history. Back in Winston Smith's day, he (if memory serves me) had to rewrite old newspapers to eliminate records of things happening that contradicted the current status quo (e.g. old alliances with current enemies).... so that the record(s) show that the current enemy was always the enemy.

On an important level we have had this for ages too. Just look at the turn of the 80s/90s when Iraq, a former ally of the west, was demonised and made into the enemy, more or less overnight.

And so it happens, on a minor and unimportant level with normal vocabulary. To reflect the new buzz word of 'sustainability', we've been updating almost 100 pages on the website so that the term 'society' now says 'sustainability' (in context it makes sense, believe me).

So here's the question. Is that right? Should we change all previous references to the new term, because we can? It is easy online, after all, to change anything. You don't have to recreate old newspapers or publish revised versions of books.

Will this affect history? Will the ephemeral nature of the Internet mean that future historians, despite our enormous wealth of information at present, will be unable to find the 'truth' because it is so easy to change past documents online?

Probably yes... newspapers are going out of business. Everything is moving online.

So here's the next question: does it matter?

My gut feeling is that it does. In my simple example, it is of no consequence, but there are undoubtedly situations where organisations, people's names, events and other 'facts' are altered after the, ahem, fact... and where this is of public interest.

Should we, for example, have a bill of rights and responsibilities for anything online (from blogs to websites, tweets to vids)?

Again, my gut says that we should...but being unenforceable, there's no point.

So if you see this blog change at any point in the future, it is your memory that is faulty, for this blog is always constant. Even when it changes.

Digital Britain - don't put the horse before closing the barn doors...

2009-06-23T09:08:00.002+01:00

So the government's report on Digital Britain is now out. I've not read it yet... instead I've listened, again, to the Guardian Media Talk podcast where they discussed it. Well... it's easier to listen to the podcast in the car. Sometimes John Humphries can be an annoying belligerant git first thing....lovely and cuddly though I'm sure he is.

Anyway, one of the items in the Digital Britain report, apparently, is that in the same way the analogue TV signals will be switched off by 2012, the radio analogue signals will be switched off (in favour of DAB) by 2015.

How can I put this simply?

DON'T DO IT!!!!

So, why do I dislike DAB - the digital radio system used in the UK? Let me count the ways:

I bought a DAB radio around 4 years ago which would not work in the house unless next to a window! This was a good quality one too... not cheap and cheerful. I could only get guaranteed reception in the middle of the garden... and this in an area listed by the DAB authority (whoever they are...I can't remember now) as having EXCELLENT DAB reception.
Most (many?) houses have only 1 TV. 2 at most. How many radios do everyone have? One in each room, plus one in each car, plus a couple of portable ones? My mp3 player and my mobile phone can receive FM radio. Radio-Alarm clocks? Stereos... the list is endless. So we'll have to upgrade EVERY SINGLE ONE of those items? You can't even get many DAB radios for cars ... yes they'll be more available by 2015, but what about thems that have old cars? There are currently over 32 million cars in the UK... so will each suddenly become silent? When I had a 1973 VW Beetle, in the 1990s, it had the original Blaupunkt radio. Which worked perfectly in FM and AM. And one will still need analogue radios for when you go abroad and want to listen to local stations...
Power... there are now solar DAB radios... there are now battery-operated DAB radios, but they're still not common. And DAB is notorious for using energy at a far higher level than normal analogue radios. So if you want a cheap DAB battery operated radio for the bathroom (i.e. no cables) there are VERY few options available... and why are we being forced to move to a technology that uses more energy, when we precisely need to use less energy and save the planet?
There are other systems available... i.e INTERNET radio. Why not wait a few more years and move to that...rather than this half-way house that will do nothing but create a boom business for DAB radio manufacturers... hardly the most pressing of social needs at present.

My solution? Keep radio as it is for now... for a long time. Another 20 or 30 years?

I know the emergency services want more frequencies to say 'Roger that 10-4' in, but I'm sure there are other ways than just kicking all radio stations off the airwaves. Encourage manufacturers to develop more portable/domestic radios that can receive Internet radio (and are easy to tune) - including podcasts... i.e. with one easy-to-use system you could listen to live local radio, listen to (no need to download, just stream) mp3 podcasts (etc. - whatever iTunes formats are too) and then listen to a radio station on the other side of the world that plays permanent loop of your favourite Caravan album.

It shouldn't be difficult. It would better meet the future needs of audio listening. And means I don't have to ditch the valve-operated old radiogram which still works 50+ years after it was built.

Funding content on the Internet

2009-06-18T10:24:00.002+01:00

I've been listening recently to Guardian Media Talk podcasts and one of the recent topics of discussion is how certain newspapers (such as the Sunday Times in the UK or New York Times in the USA) are planning on trying to charge for content online... seeing as their revenues for print newspapers are falling at an increasing rate.

And yet I've not heard anyone apply some logic to the situation and point out that content is content. It doesn't matter about the medium of delivery.

So... since way back when, musicians produced content, i.e. songs. Originally the songwriters were paid (well...in theory...depending on their contract) for the sheetmusic sales of that song. Then of the vinyl records (and tapes, and CDs and so on... you get the idea).

However, those sales would often pale into insignificance over time compared to the revenues musicians could earn by either playing live (concerts used to be used to promote record sales, now, with £100 tickets the norm., it's the other way around); or by having their music played on a radio station, TV, film or even in a nightclub or pub.

Those plays, in pubs and clubs around the world, were (and are) tallied by the local Performing Rights Society, and nominal sums are charged that, worldwide, accumulate and find their way back to the original musicians in the shape of Royalty cheques.

So, now consider this. Print newspapers (though I love them) won't last forever. That is clear. More and more local papers are closing every week.

However, if you consider the Internet for newspapers to be akin to the pubs and clubs for music, then it is obvious. You don't charge the customer per page-view (in the same way that you don't charge every individual in a pub for each individual song they hear). You charge the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for delivering the content. It is easy to calculate exactly how many pages of which websites have been visited for how long and how often.

The ISPs then factor this extra cost in to what they charge users to access the Internet.

Exactly the same idea as Nokia's recent 'Comes with Music' range of mobile phones, that are have 4,000 tracks (is it 4,000?) pre-paid, so the user can download and listen to whatever they like, with no extra charges. All included in the cost of the phone.

In the same way that not all pubs and clubs are charged the same amount, not all ISPs would be charged the same. Different bands could be established, as already exist, although at present it only depends on the amount of downloading that occurs in a particular period.

That way, just as we pay one BBC license fee (very very gladly) and get hundreds of hours of high quality TV, radio and internet; we could pay one fee to access the Internet... and that would cover everything. Content producers would be compensated for their hard efforts... and we don't have to resort to micro-payments or excessive ads on the content websites.

In fact, as we move closer to getting TV and Internet joined up, so that you can watch the iPlayer on your TV, why not increase the Licence fee and include everything there? One fee to cover all content... TV, Internet, radio...

...it's just a thought....

Make voting compulsory

2009-06-14T20:08:00.004+01:00

Democracy doesn't work. It doesn't even exist.

Democracy, where the government is voted for by the masses, assumes that the masses know what they're voting for. But they don't. They rely on newspapers, TV, radio and their mate down the pub to understand which party is going to put up taxes, which party is going to keep them safe, which party is going to ensure equitable prosperity for all.

And the man down the pub is usually talking out of his proverbials.

So what is the solution? Well, there are laws that force TV and radio to be impartial during an election campaign, and generally they are. But no such law exists to ensure the British newspapers and other print media are impartial... so that is the first step.

Stop the Daily Mail/Sport/Mirror/Sun/Express from making stuff up. The Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent probably do too... but to a far lesser extent. Anyway, they're usually preaching to the converted.

Second step? Make voting compulsory. People around the world are dying and being tortured and imprisoned because they want the right to vote. And yet lazy fools in the United Kingdom and many other so-called democracies don't vote...are too lazy to get off their proverbials and walk down to the polling station.

If voters don't like any of the options, they can always spoil their ballot paper... i.e. abstain. But then there is an official abstention of 70% of the electorate, which would say something to all parties.

As it is, in the recent European elections in the UK, there were 45 million eligible voters and only 15 million bothered to exert their democratic right.

It should be a democratic obligation. Failure to vote would be sanctioned by fines, or making them walk around for the following year wearing a big sign on their head saying 'I'm a feckin' eejit!'.

But if laziness is the issue, people can vote by post... and perhaps the authorities can enable online voting... or calling a 0845 number. If those feckin' eejits are able to exert their democratic right and vote for 'Britain has an embarrassing number of talentless extroverts' then surely the logistics can be sorted out to ensure one vote per person and they can do it from their vinyl covered reclining armchair.

Whatever the solution, there is no excuse for a country such as the UK which has always been a haven for refugees from dictatorships around the world, to suddenly have elected officials from rascist parties such as the BNP.

Better still, let's only allow people to vote in Second Life, and then start a new party where everyone is half-penguin-half-vampire? It's a more intelligent suggestion than anything the knuckle dragging BNP have come up with...

And maybe people will start paying attention to policies and not personalities or how good they look on the evening news.

... harumph, harumph and thrice harumph!

Time for a quick survey?

2009-05-25T16:09:00.002+01:00

I've set up a very quick 5 minute online survey to gather data on what kind of people use Virtual Worlds (like Second Life) and why.
Even if you've never used a Virtual World in your life (either your real life or your second life!) I would really really really really really appreciate it if you could take just 5 very short minutes (maximum...probably less) to do the survey:
https://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/1185bg3da2a

Thank you and may the Gods rain bountiful treasures upon your soul. Or just thanks... whatever suits you better.

OK - so here are the examples...

2009-05-21T13:37:00.003+01:00

I should have known that as soon as I blog about the lack of examples of Twitter usage in business, the examples would present themselves.

And they have... Jennifer Laycock and how two U.S. firms are engaging with the local community and their customers through Twitter. Of course, if you manage to build a customer base that follow you on Twitter...you could get feedback on product development etc.

Southwest Airlines scan Twitter to detect if people are talking about Southwest and what they're saying. And, most importantly, getting in touch with them directly if there is a service issue that needs addressing.

Not something that all of us can do... but any PR person certainly has to keep their fingers on Twitter as well as the usual blog-posts, newspapers, TV etc.

Business uses for Twitter? Still searching...

2009-05-21T13:30:00.003+01:00

Every time I teach or present on this Web 2.0 stuff (or is it Web 43.88261295.2.x.4 now?), it's easy to explain what Twitter is. And it's easy to explain how it can be used in business contexts (for teams to keep in touch about a particular project, or new sales won and lost, for brainstorming (mind waft?) about issues from different parts of the globe...without being by a computer or video-conferencing suite etc.

I've read dozens (or more) blogs with ideas on how to use Twitter in business... but these are all more of the same... still no examples, no proof that someone has made it work.

However, what I've not seen are any case studies of it working in this way... and it's beginning to drag me down. It would be so nice to point at a company and say 'See? See what they're doing? You can do that too! And they made gazillions of dollars off the back of integrating Twitter into their internal team working and communications strategy'.

But I can't... so if you have any ideas.... do please pass them over.

And who knows, one day maybe I can point the finger in a nice way (i.e. not the middle digit).

What's in a word? A rose by any other name would be a thorny issue...

2009-05-20T12:20:00.005+01:00

I was reading Kevin Gibbons blog at Econsultancy about 10 online marketing phrases that should be banned.

Phrases such as Brandscaping, Mindshare and Web 3.0. In fact I wouldn't just blame marketers for Web 3.0... you will find all manner of techie-geeks telling you that Web 2.0 is so old and Web 4.62 is the latest version... but of course it's all bollocks.

O'Reilly came up with the Web 2.0 term, but if he'd called it, instead, 'Social Internet', we might have been spared everyone trying to find what the next version will be.

And of course the next version won't be a huge jump. It will be a gentle evolution, as always, in the adoption of new technologies.

And, of course, most people are still in the dark as to what 'Web 2.0' means - thankfully - as it gives me a chance to present and teach on the topic.

Then I saw the link to Simon Rattray's 'Fluidblog' about marketing- and management-speak in general, with terms that rightly ought to be banned on pain of public flogging, such as: Blue Sky Thinking, Thinking outside the box and Pushing the envelope - to name but a few. I remember my first times in 'proper' business meetings in a 'proper' large company where people were using these terms. And I have to admit, I thought 'what a load of tossers'.

Another Econsultancy blog, this time by Chris Lake, also talked recently about PR-Speak in the same derrogatory tones, with terms such as: Leveraging, Synergy and, perhaps the worst of all, Paradigm shift. How many bloody trade fairs and seminars have I been to where someone has mentioned how the industry or the sector or their underpants are going through a 'paradigm shift'?

However, mea culpa mea culpa, I have been brainwashed and converted to the cause and now will even be known to say Keep me in the loop and Adding value... I blame the MBA personally. Not necessarily the MBA course I'm doing, but MBAs in general... and specifically the management 'gurus' who write the books and the theory that the MBAs have to learn and absorb.

To my shame I even used, this very morning, the terms 'leveraging relationships' and 'discuss synergies'! What a wanker!

But then the problem is that all language we use is suffused with vocabulary and influences from modern technology and literature. We listen to mp3s, not records (or gramophones). We zap the channels on TV, because we can... our parents or grandparents had to get out of their chair to change channels - and probably only had 2 to choose from anyway.

Even the term 'management-speak' is, of course, a reference to the 'newspeak' of George Orwell's 1984. But our language, unlike newspeak, is becoming richer, not poorer. We absorb words in English from every language such as Guanxi (Chinese), Sushi (Japanese), Entrepeneur (French) and Feckin' Eejit (George W. Bush)... and the problem with wealth is that sometimes it is badly spent. Not all the money goes on culture. It doesn't all go on self-improvement. Sometimes it goes on benchmarking and brainstorming.

So we will inevitably suffer fools, sometimes gladly, who misuse some phrases and overuse others, and we will even do it ourselves. For such is language. It is fluid. It grows. It moves, like a drunk with a limp, in mysterious ways.

Kane Kramer... Steve Jobs should pay him millions...

2009-05-14T12:41:00.004+01:00

I was listening with great interest to the Guardian Tech. Weekly podcast this morning - which I try to do every week (and highly recommend it for keeping one abreast of all techie things without getting bogged down in details) and they were talking about Kane Kramer... the British inventor who came up with the idea, the concept, the technology, the drawings and business plan for digital audio downloads and portable players back in 1979! This was his drawing then of the portable digital audio player:

Everyone knows, of course, that Apple never invent anything, they just take other inventions and make them work a little better or more user-friendly and then they put them in a pretty box (disclosure, I used to have Apple computers in the 90s and that has put me off anything the company does for ever more); but it poses the lovely question of intellectual property.

Kane, as I'm sure I'd call him if we ever met, came up with the idea. Patented it. Was talking about it with various technology companies, but was unable to get it up and running. An idea ahead of its time. The idea that his idea was ahead of its time is also past... the Daily Mail wrote about it last September... and how Apple will not pay him anything.

So what happens now? Out of patent, the iPod and other mp3 players, which would not work without Kane's invention, are earning billions for the various companies (let's not forget that Apple are the biggest and worst at it... Creative are also big in the arena, Sony still muddling along etc.).

One could argue that that's always the way - the inventors might get the posthumous glory but never the riches in life... but surely there has to be a better way? With Web 2.0 encouraging collaboration and sharing on all levels, what happens to people who give ideas and knowledge freely, to see others make millions out of it? Isn't it about time that ideas should be protectable through Intellectual Property law? Shouldn't there be a global agreement on inventors getting some compensation (not much, but let's say 0.01% of gross profits... not enough to damage the companies concerned, but for every $1 million that they make from the inventions, the inventor would then make $100. OK - it isn't much. It's quite pathetic even, but over time it could make a difference. And with companies such as Apple making $5 billion per year, that 0.01% would become $500,000... which would at least allow the inventors to buy themselves a little peace of mind.

Still struggling with SL

2009-05-07T13:09:00.001+01:00

I'm not a core user... this is clear. I'm not an early adopter... tho' earlier than many, I am, perhaps, fashionably late? (I hope so - i.e. not too geeky - not too out of touch with new developments).

Anyways, this SL thing is not easy to get to grips with. Simple one now... how do I log out to change avatars?

Why would I want to do such a thing? Isn't that a little schizophrenic?

Well, yes it is, to a point, but there are things I can't do with my avatar and have to switch to the company's avatar to fiddle with permissions.

OK - so there's a reason for it... now where is the 'log-out' button? No... I couldn't find one either. I had to close the whole program before re-opening it. Now that's not very good usability.

And - perhaps I need to go on a course in SL but how does one make an object? I've tried, but it really really ain't easy, believe me!

An update when I've done something...

Ray Kurzweil... the original futurist

2009-05-05T09:31:00.002+01:00

Some of what I write and talk about... and present on... one could, conceivably, refer to as 'futurism'. Talking about the use of existing technologies and the probable development of them and integration in the near to medium-term future.

Well I just read an interview with Ray Kurzweil in Saturday's Guardian and realised that 'futurism' has been around for decades.

I'll not repeat the interview here... suffice to say I'll be quoting Kurzweil in my next presentation... in particular his idea (which I had vaguely thought of but he seems to have proven) that the trajectory or development of new technology is exponential.

From this he suggests that if current growth rates continue, we could deliver 100% of our electricity needs by solar power in 20 years' time. Just 20 years!

It certainly encourages me that things might change for the better... and blends nicely with the Gartner Hype Cycle (below) in seeing through the hype to probable growth.

What I may try and do (or find if someone has already done it) is plot usage rates of virtual worlds against the exponential graph to see when they will reach criticial mass... if I do... it'll be here.

Is this it?

2009-04-29T23:26:00.002+01:00

I've been there with the masses. I've told them about the nirvana that could exist if they simply believed... had faith... in social networking and the strange new relgion called 'Web 2.0'.

But they mocked. They said it wasn't true. The said that it wasn't going to last. They said only the young, the youth, the illiterate and ignorant would embrace it.

To an extent they were right... for now. For they were talking too soon, about the nearly-early-adopters who were not geeks but knew enough to get online.

"But", said the messiah, "what would happen if we explained everything and made it open to everyone? Without charging?"

This was considered heresy by the clericals at Second Life, Twitter, Google and Wikipedia, but, they began to think... maybe that's it?! Maybe we'll have no more free advertising revenue for doing nothing? Maybe the world now needs a sustainable business model? Maybe we need to think about how we can justify the advertising revenue with our disparate, diverse audience?

But maybe not just yet - maybe we can squeeze the lemon just a little more....

Things...they are a-changing. But it's so slow!

2009-04-25T15:52:00.002+01:00

At the EFMD External Relations meeting yesterday and Thursday at CASS Business School (it's for business schools around the globe... and briefly, some thoughts:
a. shocking that in the heart of the City of London, in a room just one floor down from street level (and a big open atrium joining all levels next to the room) there was no mobile reception. This is important why?
Well, I was trying to tweet about EFactor's workshop and how the founders, who are not Gen Y by any stretch of the imagination (and neither am I it must be stressed), are at the cutting edge of integrating social networks and other web 2.0 tools.... and for the first time in my four visits to the annual conference.... members of the audience actually knew what Twitter was. However, the mobile couldn't send the tweet until I left the building several hours later that day! The infrastructure needed to truly get everything and everyone connected is still decades away... probably.
but,
b. the fact that members of the audience seemed to know about social networks and tweeting and the rest of it... this gave me encouragement that slowly but surely the Web 2.0 stuff is moving past the 1994 stage and perhaps we will approach that critical mass of general public knowledge and acceptance a little earlier...
and,
c. I've still to see a proper conference conducted using proper video/virtual conferencing tools. I understand how the conference organisers need to use the conference as a revenue stream, so there's little impetus for them to take the lead... and it was good to talk to a lot of the people face to face... but I'm not going to see them again for another year so maybe it would help us all if we got used to connecting through the ether?

Is this the end of Second Life?

2009-04-23T11:04:00.003+01:00

Well, as I said a few days ago, I don't think so. This BBC article (or rather, blog) reckons it is. But surely SL is simply going through the downturn of Gartner´s Hype Cycle and heading towards the Tolkein sounding 'trough of disillusionment', right?

(Image is from Wikipedia by the way).

It was, is, to me, pretty obvious that SL can't have peaked if most people still don't know what it is and those who do, on the most part, have never been online.

SL itself is unlikely to be the virtual world we all participate in in the long-term, but if they manage to sort out open-id log-ins and avatars that we can take from one world to the other, then there won't be any need to only reside in one virtual world, we will be able to hop around, as we do in life. We go to one type of bar with certain friends, another with colleagues, the theatre or the football with other groups of people... it's nonsense to think we'll be restriciting ourselves to one environment (regardless of how rich that is) in the virtual world.

But - as with all these things - when is the best time to jump in to these worlds and get virtually wet? Perhaps dabbling now is good, to get the experience and be an 'advanced user' before everyone's grandparents sign-up?

That is if you want to make a difference, to use it for business or education etc. Otherwise, I guess it doesn't matter. Just avoid it until you find you can only do your Tescos shopping in SL and not on the normal internet... then you'll sign-up quickly...

The blind leading the blind

2009-04-22T15:28:00.003+01:00

I've just helped one of our MBA students set up a blog and I showed him all the technical things, but I'm telling him how to write and it occurs to me "what do I know?".

I'm still a novice blogger... he's blogging on the company systems and yet I'm using blogspot? Why? Well - he asked for the company systems... whereas I know their limitations and want more flexibility in what I can do.

So - here's the question: how can someone who's supposed to get people within an organisation to engage with new technology if they don't use it themself? Actually - of course - that's not true. I do use it, just not the inhouse stuff... and we come back to the same old question of how to make sure the inhouse stuff is as good as the outhouse stuff, but with the company branding?

I don't have the answer - so if you do, I'd love to hear it.

A Whole New World of Studying

2009-04-21T09:58:00.002+01:00

This Guardian article from today gives a nice run-down of all the different ways in which old and new technology can be used in education, from videoing marking of individual assignments so that the students get more than some illegible scribbles, to running practical sessions in Second Life.

I still come back to the same old same old? How can we embrace this stuff for the luddites? There are so many of them and surely they'd be left behind (or frightened away from enrolling) if there is too much focus on the technology they need to use.

I also have a gut feeling that this is a short-term solution. In 10, or maybe 20 years, all this current stuff that you need to be a bit geeky/techie to fully understand and inhabit, will be far more inter-connected, far more user-friendly, and hopefully you'll do all your virtual world exploring, video conferencing, blogging, tweeting and the rest of it on one platform. Available on every computer, mobile and other 'communications device'.

That's what we should be aiming for... but is anyone working towards it?

Are Pirate Bay really pirates?

2009-04-20T15:57:00.005+01:00

I will not be the only person quietly shocked that Pirate Bay were sentenced to imprisonment for breaching copyright law in Sweden and elsewhere. Instantly the old phrase, used about the decidedly ugly Mick Jagger, of breaking a butterfly on a wheel (although it would explain the strange way he moves on stage) seems rather apt.

When will copyright holders realise that prohibition doesn't work? It didn't work during 'Prohibition' of alcohol in the USA in the 20s and 30s.

It doesn't work now with hard drugs of all types throughout the world. Addicts will continue to get their fixes and, more worringly, dealers will continue to find it profitable.

What is more worrying here is that the dealers, people like Pirate Bay, (although they're not even dealing, are they? They're just putting the dealers and the junkies in touch with each other, like a community narcotics-noticeboard), don't even get paid for it. They're doing it because they see it as just and fair and everyone should have access to knowledge and content wherever they are and whoever they are.

Now if this means Bono and the rest of the multi-national conglomerate known as 'U2' lose the price of some sunglasses because someone pirated the latest CD rather than buying it, few are going to weep. Least of all Bono, probably.

If a million people do that, or 10 million, then it might conceivably make a big dent in the finances of the band, and the record company and distribution network (and studios etc.) that earn money from the creation of the music.

However, as a friend recently pointed out, what about small jobbing musicians such as he? He gets occaisional royalty checks for work he has done in the past playing on other people's albums. If those albums are pirated, he gets nothing.

So how can we encourage people to be law abiding and reward content creators (i.e. the authors, musicians, artists and so on)? Spotify sells advertising and passes the money to the performing rights bodies. Will we all have to stream music in the future? What if you're out of range, or more likely, in the car/gym/tube/plane/high street where you can't connect to Internet services?

iTunes, as well as irritating the hell out of me by restricting formats to the one format that is guaranteed to cause problems on non-Mac hardware, charges too much per song. 79p? Charging effectively the same amount of money as the corresponding portion of a CD, regardless of the fact that no physical objects are involved.

What needs to happen is for prices of legal downloads to fall to a tiny, barely noticeable amount: 10p. Or 10 Eurocents (or U.S. cents). Maybe even 5p? Why not? If I could get 200 songs for £10, I would buy them and not steal them. If I could transfer them between my two computers and mp3 player without having to reformat them, great (i.e. let's have mp3 for everything!).

Would I be the only one? I think not. I wouldn't care if 50 of those 200 songs were crap and had to be deleted... they would have only cost me £2.50, instead of almost £40 through iTunes.

We could call the system, instead of 'Comes with music', 'almostfree' of something similar. Unfortunately 'almostfree.com' is already taken, but I doubt that would be an issue...

So, what's the downside to this? Perhaps less money would go into the coffers of the big record labels, but maybe having things that cheap would encourage greater legality and a higher total revenue? It has to be better than witch hunts (and God knows how much wastage in legal fees) chasing after geeks and their narcotic-noticeboards.

How do you get people to blog?

2009-04-16T13:37:00.003+01:00

Here I am, sat in a meeting about getting a group of people to blog on a particular subject... not easy. Everyone says 'yes - lovely' and then forgets about it.

For example, can I get the Ashridge Leadership Centre team to blog together?

People like the idea... they say they're interested... but it takes a 'champion' to get started. Web 2.0 is not a 'bottom up' philosophy. It obviously isn't top down.

And it's not enough to just 'create it and they will come'... those of us that know, know. Those that don't, really often have no idea... so it requires education as well as encouragement (and beatings) to get the blogging underway.

So what is not bottom-up and is not top-down? 'Top-up' sounds like a pre-paid travel card or mobile phone, so how about 'bottom-down'. It has the potential for innuendo, which is always good - and I'll quickly copyright the term before it becomes common knowledge...