Planet Enterprise 2.0

Apparently Facebook and Myspace are ruining my generation’s ability to form relationships. That’s a relief, I always figured I was just really selfish. Apparently not:

Dr Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust, said social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have fostered the idea that relationships and friendships can be formed and destroyed quickly and easily.

His argument is that the young whipper-snappers of today put so much value on their digital personas, which inhabit these social networks, that their IRL (in real life) lives are taking the back seat in terms of importance. Since on social networking sites, it’s very easy to forge — and, more importantly for his reasoning, end — relationships, kids today are beginning to believe that relationships are things to be easily disposed of.

At first, this struck me as absurd, but I’ve heard stories of people discovering that they’re no longer in a relationship upon logging into Facebook and seeing the little broken heart icon, (or worse yet: the sms breakup) so maybe there is some weight to it.

For those of you already worrying about $200 barrels of oil, you may want to stop reading now. The New Scientist recently released an interactive graphic of the world’s oil flows and chokepoints that highlights just how vulnerable the world’s oil supply is to conflict, terrorism, natural disasters, and other factors beyond our control.

In a related article in the NYTimes, Clifford Krauss focuses on the effects of high gasoline prices on rural areas in the U.S., where people are reeling under the triple strike of low incomes, fuel-inefficient vehicles, and long commutes to work. Here are a few highlights:

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money. . .

The extra dollars spent at the pump mean electric bills are going unpaid and macaroni is replacing meat at supper. Donations to church are being put off, and video rentals are now unaffordable. . .

Local fried chicken restaurants are closing because people are eating out less. At the hardware store here, sales have plummeted to $30 a day from $250 a day a month ago.

Local governments are leaving grass high along the roads and doing fewer road repairs to save on fuel costs.  . . Politicians are even considering replacing sanitation workers with prison inmates on some shifts to conserve money for fuel

This article also comes with it’s own graphics — this one illustrating the varying effects of gasoline prices across the country.

Can the unstoppable gaming juggernaut continue to WoW with Wikinomics?

This week’s edition of the Wikinomics Report Card will profile Blizzard Entertainment, the creators of World of Warcraft and one of the world’s most profitable gaming companies. In case you missed my last report card about General Motors, you can find it here. Like my previous entries, I will be evaluating Blizzard on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Company Background: Blizzard Entertainment was founded as Silicon and Synapse in 1991 by three UCLA students and after a number of name changes, settled on the name Blizzard Entertainment in 1994. That same year, Blizzard broke though when they released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and solidified Warcraft as its flagship franchise the following year with the release of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. In early 1997, they revolutionized the industry by offering a free online gaming service, Battle.net, to go along with their new game Diablo. (more…)

Last week, The New York Times covered a new project by Google: having targeted, text-based advertisements that are influenced by past user search history. With this new program, a user who makes separate searches for “golf” and “shoes” is more likely to see ads for golf shoes during subsequent searches - reminiscent of how Amazon recommends products based on past searches and purchases.

Google, already owning two-thirds of the search market, has an advertising relationship with many businesses. These businesses only pay Google when their ads get clicked. So far the system has been beneficial and lucrative for both Google and their advertisers. By integrating past search data with current contextual advertisements, Google is greatly
expanding the context within which they can display ads. Google can therefore improve the relevance of ads, increasing the chance that users will click them.

If this model is successful, users become more than one-time search results; they could develop robust profiles of interests to allow very specific, tailored selection of advertisements. But does such a collection of user-interest data pose privacy concerns?

The argument in favor of new advertising approaches like this is that this data can be used to display advertisements that, far from being annoying or distracting, actually offer useful solutions and products to consumers at exactly the right time in exactly the right place.  Personally, I don’t even notice a lot of ads on websites that I view just because I’m so used to seeing ads for products that don’t interest me at all.  I’ve grown immune to ads but if they are going to be tailored to my interests, I may actually start noticing and clicking these ads now.

Is Google the right company to implement this? Already, people seem very quick to trust Google, but it seems to me that there should be limits on how much information any one company can have about their users, and those limits should be set by the users themselves.  I get the feeling that many users just don’t comprehend or realize how much information of theirs can be tracked via programs like these.

What level of transparency are you prepared to offer up to Google?

He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes  in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?

Three recent articles in the NYTimes cast some doubt on Obama’s ability to can adequately distance himself and his campaign from the worst elements of big-money politics , let alone change the broader equation.

The first article describes Obama’s about face on Bush’s domestic wiretapping scandal. After denouncing the wiretapping program during his primary campaign, Obama is now supporting legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration to eavesdrop on citizens without warrants. Critics see it as evidence that Obama is now making the same Washington-style compromises that he campaigned vehemently against. Supporters, meanwhile, are asking themselves what happened to the “change we can believe in.” In fact, some 16,000 supporters have organized a protest on Obama’s own homepage, asking him to revisit his stance on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)–evidence, at least, that when it comes to providing an open forum for debate and dissent, Obama has lived up to his principles.

The second article discusses Obama’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election and thus free himself to seek out more lucrative sources of private funding. The decision marks another reversal of policy and is perhaps a further indication that Obama is having a hard time resisting the intoxicating lure of big-money politics as the realities of Washington set in.

The Obama campaign cites the record sums raised from a broad base of small-dollar donors as justification for the decision. But campaign finance experts see it as evidence that Obama is gearing up to embark on a spree of pricey fund-raising events across the country–events that will tap the resources of the large, deep-pocketed donors  who have traditionally supported the Democratic party. It turns out that as the intensity of the primaries died off, so too did the long tail of political contributions.

The third article concerns Obama’s recent ambivalence over the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after visiting with commanders on the ground. Having initially promised to withdraw troops within 16 months of taking office, his timetable now seems a great deal more flexible. His steadfast opposition to the war has been a central component of his candidacy, so supporters are naturally suspicious of what appears to be yet another retreat from his principles.

What does it all mean?

For optimists, Obama still represents America’s best hope in over a generation to elect a candidate with the vision and willpower to usher in a more transparent, inclusive and participatory breed of politics. For cynics, his campaign antics are at best naive and at worst disingenuous. Naive if he really believes that as president he can do much reverse the long historical trend that has seen organized interest groups hold increasing sway over the political process and disingenuous for selling false hope while knowing all-too-well that the Washington’s political machinery will not be easily or quickly dismantled.

Which camp are you in? Are you optimistic about the prospects for change or are you cynical? Are Obama’s recent compromises ultimately pragmatic and justifiable, or do they represent a bretayal of the political principles that he has championed?

I just watched George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead last weekend. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s your typical zombie apocalypse movie – the reanimated dead wreck havoc, attempting to eat the living; mass hysteria ensues; a small band of survivors kill zombies in gruesome ways until they realize the inevitability of their fate. Now, for the non-zombie fans, the interesting thing about this particular movie is the sub-plot that tells of the group of film students’ need to document the end-of-days (kind of similar to the movie Cloverfield). Now, I’m not one to argue the “facts” in a film about zombies, but here’s where it gets a little whacky. The movie postulates that if there was a zombie apocalypse, the fall of big media would result in bloggers taking over, leading to infinite voices and more spin:

“The mainstream had vanished with all its power and money. Now it was just us, bloggers, hackers, kids. The more voices there are, the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end, it’s just noise.”

Clearly, George did not read Wikinomics. It’s true that big media would fall with studios being overrun by the living dead, and that bloggers and citizen journalist would carry on. But, all accounts we’ve seen of bloggers and citizen journalists suggest that the more eyes you have on a story and the more voices you have reporting, the less spin there is. In fact, the truth is usually obfuscated by big media, not the other way around. Moreover, in times of crisis, we’ve seen that small groups of individuals working together online have been extremely affective at mobilizing aid and sharing information – just think of the Katrina People Finder Project and other related initiatives.

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Now I’m REALLY starting to think things being thrown at other people is a dominant theme - see here, here, and here. Or if you prefer, you can check out the original - and all the other mash ups - at www.dilbert.com.

The Houston Chronicle ran a story recently about how major video game companies are allowing independent and amateur developers to create games. Being an avid Counter-Strike player back in my heyday, I’m very familiar with the fruits of fan customization and modification of games (like custom maps, player models & skins, and the like) but such customizations were usually the works of teams, and found exclusively on the PC gaming platform.

Consoles have traditionally been a completely different story, with efforts to open the platform to amateur developers being borderline illegal. The three console giants, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have now opened up digital distribution channels to their consoles. This is great news: after all, who knows what gamers want better than the gamers themselves? The openness empowers both gamers and amateur developers alike to get their feet in the door and generate new content.

This is a very sensible move by the video game companies; they greatly expand the developer talent base while incurring very little cost of their own. What’s more, often larger scale teams come together to collaborate on the development of more ambitious projects. With a larger collaborative community of game developers, the potential for creativity and quality games is sky high. This is also a way for video game companies to keep an eye out for up-and-coming talent.

Creating a game is by no means an easy task, but this shift makes things easier. It may take a while for this to catch on, but with ever-increasing technological advances and having the internet as a tool for cheap and effective distribution, I foresee a great influx of user-developed games within the next few years.

Yesterday I went to see the new movie Wall-E at the theater. It was an enjoyable movie with a warm fuzzy plot, but a clear agenda.

In the movie, people of the future were obese, self gratifying and selfish. They only used telecommunication to talk with one another. Technology had made them both uneducated and oblivious to their surroundings. The movie manifests society’s ongoing debate; is technology hurting or helping us? Shows like  South Park mock, some writers condemn, and others seek ways to better harness the potential of these new tools.

The movie does raise a valid argument. Someone very close to me became so addicted to WoW, that she cut herself off from the world, neglected her children, and it later destroyed her marriage.

Regardless of the horror stories, we can’t toss the baby out with the bathwater. Companies like trusera are linking sick people with others that have been in their shoes. Others like ideaconnection are connecting people with important and innovative ideas to people with great resources.  The private and public sectors are creating alliances through information sharing.

These communication tools, the community focused culture change, and open access to information give people today more potential to influence and improve the world than ever before. So do we need to hop on a treadmill? Sure. Do we need to get out into the sunlight? Of course, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with us. These tools are tools. It’s how we use them that really counts.

Things being thrown at heads seems to be an emerging theme here… you can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

I had a birthday recently. It went well; a pretty relaxing long weekend with lots of well-wishers. The birthday wishes got me thinking though – a birthday provides a good opportunity to review one’s communication mix. Many of my good friends are living far away, so I’ve been forced into using less and less in-person communication and more online communication. In the post-Facebook era, my network of weak ties has also grown, meaning that the amount of “random” communication with not-as-close friends has increased as a percentage of my total correspondence. To the extent that birthday wishes can be used as a proxy for overall (personal) communication, the breakdown looks something like this:

On a related note; what’s the protocol on Facebook birthday wishes anyways? I mean, when someone calls or e-mails you a “Happy Birthday” you tend to call them back or drop them a line. What about all the “Happy Birthdays” that show up on your Facebook wall? Are you obliged to respond?

If we ever needed a greater example of social networking in the 21st century, then New Orleans would be the first place to look. After being destroyed being flooded on account of failed levies in the fallout of Hurricane Katrina, the “sixth-strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the third-strongest hurricane on record that made landfall in the United States,” New Orleans was in desperate need for aide and restructuring.

In an article by Network World, we learn about a non-profit organization called Think New Orleans where an underpaid programmer, Alan Gutierrez highlighted “how a crash course in social networking helped people emerge from the rubble; find their voice; fight the government; solicit help; and save their neighborhoods, schools and each other.” He explains that residents hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina used their creativity to use social media sites such as: Flickr, WordPress, Yahoo Groups, and Google Maps to increase rebuilding efforts “away from the wrecking balls swung by city government.” (more…)

It’s no secret that Google sees mobile phones as an emerging frontier for search; as smart phones (and carriers’ data plans) become more sophisticated, it becomes possible to interactively exchange data in new and innovative ways, while also allowing people to tap into existing sources of information, such as the Internet.  Google recognizes that the cell phone is developing along the same path that the personal computer did – it is a tool that we increasingly use to connect ourselves to people and relevant information, wherever we go. The question for Google then becomes, in what ways can it enable people by connecting them with the information that they need, as well as advertisements that provide relevant solutions.
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Prosumerism is everywhere. From the oft-told example of Lego’s build-your-own sets to Starbucks’ customer co-creation website, My Starbucks Idea, prosumerism is turning up all over the place: your kids’ toy box, your cup holder, and now, your Word document.

Word processing individuals no longer need be confined by the fonts available within their software or even by fonts available for download online. Don’t like what you see? Build your own font.

FontStruct, which describes itself as “a free font-building tool brought to you by the world’s leading retailer of digital type FontShop,” lets users sign up, download their software, and build fonts by “construct[ing] geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.”

Don’t have the time or creative inspiration to create your own? Browse other users’ fonts, which are available for download for free (if the creator feels generous with the rights). Or, for $250, FontShop will create a font based on your own handwriting, which you then own the rights to. On top of it all, FontStruct aficionados have built a tight community where they rate each others’ fonts and discuss all things font and beyond.

FontStruct seems to be gaining momentum. It’s been chatted up here, here and here. There are some legitimately cool fonts available to download for free, but I don’t think I will be making my own anytime soon since it looks pretty time-intensive. As the explosion in prosumerism provides lazy consumers like myself endless choices, I think I will leave the labor up to someone else and pick something someone else spent hours creating.

Tech companies have long suffered from patent trolls: companies that bulk-buy cheap, unused patents from bankrupt companies, wait until someone becomes successful at doing something similar, and then launch a frivolous infringement suit that gets settled out of court. Well now the big tech companies are teaming up to fight back. Verizon, Google, Cisco, HP, Ericsson, and others have formed Allied Security Trust (AST): a venture that will buy-up patents that members might be interested in using down-the-road.

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An article on ZDNet announces that the Openmoko Neo Freerunner will debut in markets July 4th. This new phone will run a linux based operating system and is entirely open source. It will include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3 axis motion sensors. The one thing missing is a camera. It will cost $399 and can be purchased directly from Openmoko.

This is a big step forward in the cell phone industry. Big cell companies like AT&T and Sprint can no longer dictate what applications you can run or how big a dent they will make in your pocket book. Now if you want your phone to do something, you can just design it yourself. The operating system is entirely open source. This means that with a little programming knowledge, you can make your cell phone… beep when it is lost; detect air quality; help you practice your golf swing (this is feasible with the motions sensors on phone). The possibilities are endless. Big cell companies beware: This is the future.

What will you create with your open source phone?

I have to credit Nicholas Carr’s blog for pointing me towards this interesting little article by Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia. For a long time, wikipedia promoted itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Now, Wales describes it as “the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing stories on any encyclopedic topic.” While at first it doesn’t appear to be a huge difference, there are a lot of little insights that can be pulled from the subtle changes. Off the top of my head:

1. the word “free” is gone. While Wales goes on to add it is a “charitable humanitarian effort”, one could hypothesize the “free” part is now of much lower importance to the wikipedia value proposition. When it first started, one might argue that “free” was one of the key differentiators, and now it is just par for the course.

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Reminds me of the most innocent sounding insult I ever remember hearing - when asked about the performance of a one-time collaborator, a particular gentleman stared straight ahead for a few seconds and then deadpanned “he met my expectations precisely.” As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.

Editor’s note: this is the second in a multi-part series from Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns. You can check out some of his other work a Grow Your Wiki, and his first post on the wikinomics site is here.

In Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, New York Times writer Matt Richtel looks at the growing problem of fractured attention in the workplace - thanks to email, instant messaging, and other interruptions that are costing employees 28% of a typical workday - and the cost isn’t just measured in time:

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

I often talk about email as a “push” medium - that is, you push messages out to recipients, and each person gets their own copy. This seems simple enough, but two problems emerge in practice. Each new email message can be an interruption, and the fact that a separate copy goes to each person means that it isolates people from each other.

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Let’s just say it’s in honour of Canada Day. You can check out all the other mash ups, and the original, at www.dilbert.com.