Thought I’d share some great blog posts and papers I had bookmarked and finally got down to reading:
Rashmi Sinha has some really good essays on Tagging. She has a whole category dedicated to this area, and I found the following posts particularly useful:
- A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)
- A Social Analysis of Tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
- “Tagging: From Personal to Social” - a powerpoint presentation here.
Some good tips in An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise by Suw Charman. She suggests that its key to identify users “who would clearly
benefit from the new software, helping them to understand how it could
help, and progressing their usage so that they can realise those
benefits”. I still struggle with tryig to figure out how we can enable the lowering of perceived risks in using such technologies.
Doc Searls introduces the concept of the Intention Economy turning on its head the Attention Economy conversation that focusses more on the ’seller’. He says:
“The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages
the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that
they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them.
The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don’t need marketing to make Intention Markets.
The
Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection
of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from
silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info
(and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy,
the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete
for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.
The Intention
Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter.
So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those
virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and
not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols
of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.
The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.
In
The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to
the car rental market, “I’ll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I
want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget
FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don’t want to pay up front for gas or get
any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?” — and have the
sellers compete for the buyer’s business.”
Reading this, and with my limited understanding of the Attention Economy, am wondering …. does one follow the other … from Attention to Intention … or Intention to Attention?
Tracking the Future of Telephony … a great transcript of a very interesting by Norman Lewis director of research for France Telecom at eTel. Really good stuff … some snips:
And that is incredibly exciting, as far as I am concerned, because it
is like time, it is now liberated, it is not a stand alone application
anymore. It is embedded in everything we do…Time has became intrinsic
in everything. I think that is where voice is going in the future. I
think that is truly revolution“.
“… we have that possibility of taking that application [voice]…and
liberating it [voice] from that kind of stranglehold that I think
telcos have had in the past… and now we can begin to do things we have
never done before. …If you just look at the recent period with
Ebay-Skype…voice is becoming something of an adjunct to other
services and will open up new possibilities…I see this as a huge
golden opportunity for immense innovation…What we [the telcos] are doing is re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. That is essentially what a lot of us are doing in our companies. The innovation landscape has changed…”
“It can actually create a sweet spot for all of us…for me innovation is
rarely about identifying problems our customers have got and trying to
solve them. Real innovation is about social change. It is about
adopting, it can be incremental, it can also be very disruptive. But if
really had to begin with real social motivations, of why people are
doing things. What kind of things that they really want to do… it is a
social consequence that they [“digital children”] introduce technology
into their lives in ways we do not quite fully understand…
understanding customers [social] behaviour and motivations…that is the
coal face as far as I am concerned…Are we going to develop Internet
apps that really embed voice in everything we do, and fundamentally
transform that whole experience. I think that is the question.”
danah who is a really really smart researcher, ethnographer, media-ecologist, digi-culturist, sociologist, (she’s looking for someone to bestow upon her an ‘ist’) explains Why Youth Heart MySpace.
Geeks in Toyland - a Wired article on how Lego managed to effectively convert their customers to their R&D labs and effectively re-wrote the innovation game! [link via Steve at All this chittah-chattah]
might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or
confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products. After
a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity
was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity.
Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. “We came to
understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,”
Nipper says. “It’s a totally different business paradigm - although
they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have
with the basic Mindstorms set.” Rather than send out cease and desist
letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a “right to hack” into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.
Soon,
dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped
Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda
machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens
designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and
light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms
guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance
out of the kit’s 727 parts.
Lego’s decision to tap this culture
of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few
years to connect customers to the company.”
I tested VoiFi …was disappointed with the basic sound quality. Uninstalled.
Bookmarked … and still to read/play with:
- When The Long Tail Wags the Dog and The Long Tail of Popularity
- On quick glance, basic orientation by Paul Beleen in a whitepaper called Advertising 2.0 (pdf), on “what everybody in advertising, marketing and media should know about the technologies that are reshaping their business” Printed, to be read in detail on my flight to Delhi later this week.
- Veer, who has an excellent blog that I recently discovered on the Indian mobile revolution, has launched MyToday, a public RSS aggregator, with Rajesh Jain. Haven’t yet played with it … will soon! I like that it has a mobile phone edition too.
- A collection of articles on Creative Thinking [link via Chuck Frey’s Innovation Weblog]
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