Why Crowdsourcing is the future of EVERYTHING (including 12 key areas (with just 3 exceptions))

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The theme of Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, coming up soon in San Francisco and Sydney, is how crowdsourcing (applying the minds of many) is the future of everything.

It’s a big claim, though to be frank I can’t think of many things it’s not the future of. Anything of human creation, which is most of what we know, has in some ways a crowdsourced future. There are probably three categories of things that will NOT be fundamentally shaped by crowdsourcing:

* Things in our environment that humans don’t impact (possibly volcanic activity and asteroid impact, though even those might not be immune)

* Individual creativity (important but historically overrated to an extraordinary degree)

* Aspects of our humanity that are intrinsic and we do not shape (sex (perhaps) and actually not much else given our increasing powers over our genetic destiny)

Let’s look at some of the things that crowdsourcing most definitely will shape:

Work. Unquestionably work of all kinds is being rapidly distributed across organizational and national boundaries and increasingly broken down into components with structures suitable for crowds to address. The nature of work for many individuals is likely to change dramatically in coming decades.

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A fantastic success story in local TV, newspaper and web: aggregating audiences and linking to transactions

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Next week I am giving the opening keynote at the Regional TV Marketing Association conference in Byron Bay, which brings together the top executives across regional television, media buyers, and corporate marketing roles.

I’ll share more on what I cover when I get a chance (not for a few weeks probably), but I thought it was worth sharing one of the standout case studies of success in local media, including TV and newspapers.

This has been driven by Clark Gilbert, who has famously come from being a professor at Harvard Business School to running a media company in Utah, the heart of Mormon country. The results so far have been exceptional, including 20% growth in the Deseret News newspaper in 2009, the highest in the US. This interview with Gilbert brings out some deep insights, making it well worth watching.

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Why this year Crowdsourcing is the topic of our Future Summit Series in San Francisco and Sydney

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I’ve been remiss in not yet mentioning Future of Crowdsourcing Summit on my blog, so here is a bit of background to the event. Full details are on the Summit website with an overview in the flyer below.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010

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Conversation on the future of books and publishing

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I am at a lunch organized by book publisher Blurb with Robin Goldberg, SVP of global channels at the company and a variety of authors, journalists and photographers. Blurb’s focus is on personal self-expression such as photography, travel journals, wedding books and so on, so they largely print on hardcover in full color. Blurb has been running for four years and did $45 million in sales last year.

One of the interesting differences between Blurb and some of the other print-on-demand suppliers is that Blurb doesn’t take any cut from the markup that authors choose to put on the sales price of the book.

Below are some of the many discussion topics at the lunch (some with my own thoughts and perspective inject), in no particular order.

  • Does anyone read purely on digital devices any more? One person at the lunch, Stilgherrian, says he rarely reads on paper, and he intends to get rid of any books he hasn’t touched in the last six months. Some others in the group are rarely buying books. I am rapidly shifting to buying e-books though I expect I will still buy some physical books. We’ll see.

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Six steps to success in a world driven by cloud computing

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I recently gave the keynote for an event series on cloud computing run by Telstra Business across five Australian cities. My keynote was followed by a presentation by Telstra’s Chief Technology Officer Hugh Bradlow.

In the current issue of Telstra’s customer magazine Business Insights the feature article is based on Hugh and myself. The article is here, with the full text of my quoted ‘Six Steps to Success’ is below.

Cloud computing: Interview with Ross Dawson and Hugh Bradlow

SIX STEPS TO SUCCESS

For businesses, the challenge is understanding the new technology and realising they’ll have to make significant shifts in the way they think and work to take full advantage of it all. Ross Dawson describes this process in his six steps to success, which covers everything from more flexible approaches to working, to new technology strategies.

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Getting an online identity from before you are born is just the beginning of a life online

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The invention of the graphical web browser in 1993 was the moment that ‘getting online’ became meaningful, when we could start to post ideas, photos, and more that anyone in the world with an internet connection could access. However you needed a certain amount of tech knowledge to do that, and it was only from around 2000 that it began to get easy for anyone to blog, post images, share personal media among friends, and a little while after that to upload videos for the world to see.

Those born in the last five years, in this era of ready online sharing, have rapidly gained online identities, sometimes pretty much at the same time as their parents. Internet security firm AVG has done a survey showing how quickly these images are posted to the world.

babiesonline.jpg

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Experiential futures and the intersection between design and foresight

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I have just attended a very interesting presentation by Stuart Candy on prototyping possible worlds. Stuart joined global design firm Arup six weeks ago after finishing his Ph.D on experiential futures at Hawaii’s Research Center for Futures Studies. Below are some of my live notes from his presentation plus a few reflections.

Stuart uses the word ‘monofuturism’ to describe the mistaken assumption that because only one future will happen, only one future can happen, so we need to try to work out what that future will be.

In thinking about the future, he brings out the issues of breadth and depth: breadth is about thinking widely about what could happen, depth is about thinking in sufficient detail about what could happen and the implications. 

Breadth can be dealt with by scenario planning and alternative futures, and that is being done reasonably well by leading organizations. Depth, generating specificity in what future worlds will look like, is generally done less well. 

Presentation of one of the scenarios from Hawaii 2050

Stuart used the example of a Hawaii 2050 futures project he helped created in which they brought the scenarios to life in an event, getting people to participate in what those scenarios would look like. He provides a nice overview of the scenarios and how they evoked them in an event for over 500 people.

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Review of Telstra Business Insights event on cloud computing

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In August I went on a five-city roadshow run by Telstra Business on cloud computing. In the breakfast events for Telstra clients, I gave the opening keynote providing a big picture view of the forces driving change in the business world, followed by a presentation by Telstra’s Chief Technology Office Hugh Bradlow on the technology and Telstra’s offerings.

Telstra have created a video review of one of the events, including snippets from Hugh’s and my presentations, and comments from attendees. This provides some useful highlights from the series.

I’m glad they included Hugh’s opening words: “You will succumb”, suggesting that despite business reluctance, they will all before long embrace the cloud.

I will soon post a video of my complete keynote at the event for those who are interested.

What can destroy the boundaries of your industry

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The hefty tome The Support Economy by Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin is a challenging but rewarding read, describing in detail the rise of distributed capitalism. Of all the big ideas of the last decade, the concept of business and society being driven by connected individuals and small groups is one of the most powerful, and Zuboff has arguably captured better than any.

From an even broader perspective, the biggest strategic issue in almost every industry today is the erosion of industry boundaries. Every industry is encountering new competitors: from adjacent industries, from start-ups with lower entry thresholds, and from substitutions.

At the same time, the strategic opportunities to stretch beyond your existing positioning have exploded, giving an extraordinary premium to the flexibility to take advantage of these openings.

Zuboff has a nice article in the current issue of McKinsey Quarterly, titled Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism (registration required), summarizing some of her key ideas, focusing on the idea of “mutations” in business and capitalism.

At the end of the article she provides a useful list of 7 circumstances in which mutations can destroy the boundaries of industries:

1. The products or services you offer are affordable to few but desired by many.

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Australia’s top 25 business blogs ranked by traffic

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SmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.

With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.

From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.

Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.

My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).

See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.

1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069

2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771

3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866

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