Why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term

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A couple of months ago when I was spending a few packed days of meetings up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley, several people asked me about Web 3.0. I told them pointedly what I thought, and at the time I determined to write a blog post on why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term, but never got around to it.

This seems worth coming back to, since Jason Calacanis has just proferred his own definition: “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

Which is a fabulous illustration of my point: that when people refer to Web 3.0, it means whatever they want it to mean. In other words it’s a meaningless term until the point that there is a reasonable degree of common understanding of its meaning, so it can be used in a sentence and actually convey something.

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APML gains momentum – this could transform the personalization of advertising

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I’ve written before about attention profiling as one of the major trends in the online world. One of significant initiatives in the space is APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), an open standard for how people’s attention profiles are described. Having this as a standard will, among other things, enable applications to refine how they provide information to users based on their interests, and allow people to publish their profiles so that they are better served by suppliers and information providers.

Bloglines, the top or second placed feed reader, has just announced that it is looking at supporting APML in future releases, while Chris Saad, a founder of APML, says that they expect a number of other similar announcements from major players over coming months. While Bloglines has not yet included APML support in the product, voicing its interest indicates this is very likely, and is no doubt intended to spur other companies to follow suit. There is little value to an open standard unless it is widely adopted.

One of the interesting things about APML is that it operates at a fairly high-level, giving a framework for people’s degree of interest in topics on a scale of +1 to -1 (accurately reflecting that people have negative interest (revulsion?) in some topics). Anyone who uses APML can use whatever means they wish to uncover what people’s attention profiles are. In this case, whichever companies are better at determining attention profiles will win, while the standard for sharing those profiles remains the same.

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Video interview on Enterprise 2.0 by Melcrum/ KM Review

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The other day Alex Manchester, Editor of the Melcrum publications KM Review and The Internal Comms Hub, did a video interview of me, covering a broad range of issues relating to Enterprise 2.0 and the application of social media inside organizations. The video is posted on the Melcrum Blog as well as below. Soon Melcrum will post a slightly longer version on their site – I’ll post the info on this when it’s available.

A brief summary of the questions and answers in the video are below.

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Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships popular in Consulting and Customer Service

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My book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships has popped up again on a few Popular lists on Amazon.com, notably on Consulting and Customer Service. The first edition, which came out in January 2000, was for two months #1 on Amazon.com from Australia, and spent two years in the top 20 book purchases from Deloitte & Touche among other topseller lists. Sales of the second edition have been solid and consistent but not spectacular so it’s good to see it get some more prominence. While one of the chapters is devoted to how technology is used in professional client relationships, very little covered by the book dates quickly, which means it continues to be relevant over the years and has a long shelf life. Maybe a third edition in 2010 or so?

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Dennis Howlett of AccMan fame recently wrote a brief review of the book, excerpted here:

If you don’t know the book, I recommend it goes on your must read list. It is packed full of examples, presents a coherent set of arguments and provides a framework for action.

Deconstructing the press release: how tagging will change journalistic workflow

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One of the big debates in PR over the last couple of years in has been whether the press release is in the last throes of death, or still healthy and thriving for years to come. Tom Foremski, formerly of the Financial Times and now publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher, has no doubt on the matter, and wants the press release to be terminated with prejudice, writing a blog post titled Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!

However rather than leaving a gaping hole in how organizations communicate to the media, Tom has a specific proposal to succeed the press release. In summary:

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Creating the Future of Advertising – looking back to look forward

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The other day I was chatting with a top executive from one of the advertising conglomerates about the current pressing topics in the advertising industry. Executives’ top-of-mind issues center on clients’ perception of value creation by agencies, which has continue to erode over the last years. Specific symptoms include pricing pressures from a procurement mentality, increasing competition from adjacent industries such as the new digital media companies and strategy consulting firms, and a drive to the commoditization of advertising creative within the array of services offered by the advertising and marketing communities.

I recalled that in 2000 I had written an article on the future of advertising for BOSS magazine which discussed all of these issues. It is often instructive to look back at the state of the industry to gain a better understanding of where it is today and where it’s going. Here’s the article, originally published in the July 2000 issue of the Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine. What it covers seems to be just as relevant and topical today as it was seven years ago.

Chasing the Play

If a potential client goes to London advertising agency St. Lukes and asks them to go away and create an advertising campaign, they refuse. Yet last year their billings increased 64%, more than twice as much as any of the other top-20 UK agencies. “We only co-create with our clients,” says St. Lukes chairman Andy Law. St. Lukes as a matter of course works closely with its clients to result in campaigns that have been created by the joint efforts of both parties.

The global advertising industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation, and St. Lukes is one of the agencies at the vanguard of these deep shifts. Through the 90s traditional advertising agencies were squeezed hard both by new competitors and by clients, who often saw them as providers of commoditised services. Now the dramatic explosion of media and communications driven by digital technology is resulting in massive opportunities for agencies. However only those firms that adopt new ways of working with their clients and develop new skills will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, while the less dynamic firms will struggle at best.

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Microsoft, Facebook, and the shift of the platform to social networks

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I was just interviewed on ABC Radio about Microsoft’s mooted acquisition of 3-5% of Facebook for US$500 million or so, as written about by the Wall Street Journal today. I’m severely jetlagged and it’s well past my bedtime, but I thought I’d make a few quick notes on points I raised in the interview that are relevant to this story.

Value is increasingly seen as shifting to social networks. When News Corp bought MySpace 2 ½ years ago for $580 million, I pointed out that what it was buying was the positioning at the interstices of people’s relationships. Media – as in the flow of information – is increasingly between people rather than in a hub and spoke arrangement, which makes social networking platforms central to value creation.

Social networking platforms have figured out what works. Since 2000 when sixdegrees.com made the first bold attempt to create a system to create value from linking people and subsequently failed, social networks have gradually improved to the point where they are drawing in a massive number of participants. MySpace was the first true success story, and in absolute numbers is still far larger than Facebook. However Facebook has translated MySpace’s success to a professional and arguably more diverse demographic, through different positioning and features. Social networks are rapidly becoming central to people’s interaction with the online world.

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Working out of the US for a while

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I’m going to be spending the next few weeks based out of New York, around some stints in Silicon Valley, LA, and a day in Boston. My primary base is Sydney. When I used to be based in Tokyo and London and spend a lot of time on planes, I thought that if I were going to be travelling lots, I’d like my home base to be somewhere I loved. In other words Sydney, my very favorite city in the world out of the many that I have lived in and visited. However the nature of my work is that I have to work all over the place. A few years I go was speaking and working all over, part of the period when I racked up keynote speaking engagements on six continents. However I knew that wasn’t sustainable, and so I decided to focus on the US and Australia. I set up a subsidiary of Advanced Human Technologies in the US and got a US work visa, and have since largely split my work between Australia and the US, with just a few projects pulling me briefly to Asia and South Africa.

Now that I am married to the wonderful Victoria Buckley and my gorgeous daughter Leda recently turned one, when I travel I endeavor to be back within a few days or so, leading to some pretty intense itineraries. On one occasion last year when things were rather hectic, I flew over 40 hours to hop to Miami for 20 hours to do a keynote and get back home for the weekend. So it’s fantastic when we can all travel together, leading to a more leisurely approach. This means that with the whole family I’ll be able to work with the US as home base for a while. It’s tough to be based in more than one country, but if we can regularly all get over here for a bit, it’s an ideal situation. Victoria is also moving towards getting the right distribution setup for her jewellery in the US, so that fits perfectly.

I’m organizing a Living Networks lunch in Boston on October 3 – drop me a line if you’re interested in joining a few die-hard network enthusiasts. I might organize a casual catch-up in New York too – if so I’ll blog about it. Maybe see you en-route!

Will all newspapers be free? Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of news

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With the New York Times recently dropping all charges for its online content and now Rupert Murdoch openly discussing making the Wall Street Journal Online free, it seems that the days are likely numbered for paid subscriptions to online newspapers.

It is also useful to remember that there are now 169 free daily print newspapers around the world with a total circulation of 27.9 million, according to the World Association of Newspapers. In Spain 51% of print newspaper circulation is free, and in Denmark it’s 32%. The trend to free print newspapers is strong, with new free newspapers springing up all over the globe after the business success evident across Europe.

The trend to free online newspapers has sparked a major debate on whether online content should be free. Most recently an article in the Wall Street Journal itself titled Murdoch’s Choice: Paid or Free for WSJ.com discusses the issue. It includes the following chart to illustrate its key point that growth in online advertising is far from matching print newspaper advertising revenues (see comments on the chart later in this post).

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Defining information boundaries provides a fundamental platform for organizational strategy

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A little while ago I was interviewed for an article in CIO magazine titled Remote Control, which looked at the issues in having employees work remotely. The article quoted me as follows:

While companies tend to think of telecommuting and remote access as something to support domestic employees, business strategist Ross Dawson believes it will be increasingly important to offer access to employees and collaborators working overseas. He believes companies should strategically review their information holdings and identify what information they would benefit from sharing with trusted partners and clients, and then establish an information infrastructure to support that.

Dawson says a first important step for companies that want to create a collaborative environment is to perform a strategic information audit. “An organization can categorize its information three ways: information which is openly available, information which it is happy to share with trusted partners and information which it does not share. Once you have worked out which information sits where, then you put in place the supporting technology and business processes. So far very few organizations have looked at this from a business process and technology view,” Dawson says.

For a long time in my workshops and client work I’ve used the three core categories of organizational information, as illustrated in the diagram below, as a basis for strategy and organizational design.

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