Archive for June, 2005
Simple curves
I like simple things: A syllogism. Mechanical things with very few moving parts. Haiku. You get the idea. This is why I really like the post from Seth’s Blog: The four curves of want and get. Simple and straight to the point. If you are starting a new business or launching a new product/service, get very familiar with these curves and track which one best describes your expectations…and which one best describes the fruits of your efforts.
unmediated: Culture in the age of blogging
Interesting read from unmediated: Culture in the age of blogging, although I’m not entirely sure I agree. Here’s the final point made regarding the effect of blogging on American culture:
The simplest description of this change is also the starkest one: the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place, we now have a “balkanized” group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways.
I disagree. Isn’t this "balkanization" just another description for the melting pot we call America? We are still held together by a basic set of shared beliefs…democracy and freedom of speech being just a few.
The Consultant’s Dilemma
I knew it had been a long time since my last post, but I didn’t realize until today that it was actually over 2 weeks. Why the dry spell? Lack of things to say?…no. Not enough time in the day to work, blog and have a life?…no. Working on some really great stuff and just can’t disclose most of it due to client confidentiality?…you betcha!
This is the first project since I went solo last year that has me 100% consumed. And fortunately (or unfortunately for my writing), it has me working on some very innovative ideas…perhaps even disruptively innovative for the industry we are focused on.
So, the question is: how much of the innovative stuff can a consultant write about without really giving anything away? Is it OK to write about the topic in general, but simply not suggest solutions?
No conclusions today…just questions I guess.
Working smarter, not harder
Interesting comments from Marc Eisenstadt of Corante on the topic of RSS aggregators:
My conjecture is that tools like this (e.g. RSS aggregators) give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) ‘power boost’ in dealing with the ‘knowledge flow’ (forget ‘information’ and ‘content’) whipping around us. Indeed, such tools are particularly valuable in helping foster and even accelerate knowledge flow among other early adopters (who tend to correlate highly with the ‘thought leaders’ involved in the knowledge that you want to be, well, flowing)! But whenever there’s a three, four, five, or six orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) increase in ‘adopters of new technologies’, not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-orders-of-magnitude ‘power boost’ is insufficient, so we turn to new technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
New technology, however, is only a temporary fix. It help help us by doing the heavy lifting in sorting through the mass of data, but it surely does nothing to make meaning of it all. The reason for this? Very few (if any) technologies are designed to incorporate context and intent. For example, although Google provides me with valuable information (and a ton of it), it never asks me the reason why I’m doing the search in the first place. New technologies/platforms, like Technorati have stepped up to better refine searches (e.g. I’m looking for information on a blog), but for the most part the user is still left to create any meaning from the results…precisely because they are the ones who understand its context and intent.
Smarter systems (i.e. those that account for context and intent) will allow us to create knowledge from all of this data/information we swim in. The question is, "How do you do that?" And ultimately the answer may come back as less about technology and more about people.
More on this another time…Bloglines is telling me I have about 350 posts to sort through.
Babble
Herman Miller’s new company Sonare Technologies has been getting lots of play the past few days (here, here, here and here) for the annoucement of Babble: a conversation muting device to be used in open plan office settings. This product also happens to be the first commercially driven product to come out of Applied Minds, brainchild of Danny Hillis.
Although an innovative piece of technology, I think it will mainly serve to fix the largest "bug" in their Resolve System – the fact that you can clearly hear EVERY conversation around you. And I should know, as a seven year employee of the company (e-business, marketing and alliance development) I sat in a really groovy Resolve workspace for 2 years…and had to go to a conference room to have private conversation.
Kudos to Herman Miller for a potentially great relationship with Hillis and company.
