Planner Reads

I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.

“We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience not indirectly through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers  to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”

I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety ...

  Nice musings by chum David C and Stowe Boyd around this study that suggests it's the not the number of connections you have that determines your influence, but rather the nature of those connections – your "betweenness" as Stowe calls it:

"It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses." [SB]

But David makes this important point:

"Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam…

…This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence ...

I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.

“We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience not indirectly through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers  to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”

I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety ...

  Having passed on my slot to the folks at Dachis Group, I will not be speaking this year at SXSW (interactive) but I will be attending. It will be my second time, and I’m happy to share that there will indeed be a sequel to the sleeper hit event last year known as “Allhat”. This year we are going with “Allhat II: Return of the Cattle”, and it’s sure to be even better complete with local live music thanks to the support from Edelman Digital. That said, there were several things I learned from surviving SXSW, and you might want to take some of them into consideration.Go With The FlowSXSW can be chaotic at times and with so much going on, you will be tempted to think you can schedule everything and cram it all in. You won’t. There’s simply too much going on so the best thing you can do is commit to a few “must attend” and be flexible for the rest. It’s the serendipity of who you meet and how you spend your time that makes the event special. Also, scanning Twitter will tell you ...

Remember that “If You Printed Twitter” image that made the social media rounds two weeks ago? A similarly formatted graphic that describes the state of Internet use and adoption has been published today for your infotainment.

The focus is on exactly who uses the Internet, and how often. It breaks things down by gender, age, income level, and nationality. It even serves up average broadband speeds for both landline and mobile users at the bottom. Some of this stuff surprised us a bit — For example, desktop computers are still much more common than laptops. You wouldn’t guess that in day-to-day life in the developed world — at least not when it comes to personal use.

Here are some of the other points (the image itself is farther down):

- There’s no gender bias when it comes to the Internet; 74% of men use it, and so do 74% of women.

- The older people are, the less likely they are to use the Internet. 93% of people ages 18-29 use it, but only 38% of people 65+ do. 65 is where the big drop off happens, though; 70% of ...

In 1999 Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger penned The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Of the 95 theses, the very first is perhaps the most striking, most quoted, and most resilient: markets are conversations.

Hard to disagree, especially these days, no?

These wise gents argued that brands had to learn how to speak human again – to do away with the smooth and overly charmed PR tongue and speak to people in a relevant and honest way. After all, markets are made up of human beings, not homogenous, zombie, consumer segments.

Then came the social media tsunami.

Now brands want to be your friends. They want to follow you. Remember kids, your local giant mega-corporation is just like you. Well… they’re hanging out in all of your favorite places and they’re trying ever so hard to look and talk just like you. They’re sorta like 21 Jump Street without Johnny Depp and with way more Richard Grieco.

The next lesson for brands is that conversations are markets.

Conversations are transactions of information. A conversation is a complex negotiation of valuable resources.

Brands have to come to understand how and why these conversational transactions take place.

When we rally for spreadable media over viral ...

Who will save book publishing?

What will save the newspapers?

What means ’save’?

If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

If by save you mean, “who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys,” then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.

We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.

If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don’t worry. It doesn’t need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don’t have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.

Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, takes on ChatRoulette, that strange new site that connects you, via webcam, with a stream of strangers:

The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive–one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels. Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what ...

If marketing is to become a more integrated part of the product experience/context, baked in and/or eventually become more important than the product:

Then it means a different set of demands needs to be put on marketing.

Digital services can’t be measured by downloads, clicks, uses or other advertising-type measures. Marketing integrated with the product needs to be measured by its ability to create value in and business from the relationship with the participant. Marketing needs to be measured by its own business model.

When the marketing becomes the value provider in the company/participant relationship, it needs to define its idea, value proposition, revenue stream and how this is going to measured. Not merely how much attention and use it has generated from being available.

In short, marketing initiatives need more business model thinking integrated into its design process. (And of course this is not exclusive – forcing the BM-ideas to collaborate or grow from narrative ideas creates an environment set to earn from the combination of both worlds).

Some novel research on the social networking phenomenon has turned up a slightly surprising result: The most influential spreaders of news aren’t necessarily those with the greatest number of online friends or followers.

The research is coming from a study made at Boston University, and it’s all about k-shell decomposition in social networks–but more on that later. Until this research, lots of thinkers have concentrated on the idea that the people with the most connections (the highest “degree centricity” if you’re talking in network analysis terms) hold the keys to spreading new information best through a social network. This jibes with the common-sense thinking you’d probably develop yourself if you took the time to try and work out how, say, gossip spreads through the office water cooler grapevine. And at one level, it is true: If you have very few people connected to you in a social network, it may take more “leaps” between other people for your news to gain a wider audience.

Now Boston’s Maksim Kitsak looked at the networks in a different way, breaking down the complex Web of people’s friendship groups into k-shells (essentially a simplification of the number of neighboring nodes people ...