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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ABC24: Can newspapers successfully charge for online content?

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My thoughts on newspaper content paywalls were recently featured in an interview on ABC24.

The segment begins with an overview of newspapers’ plans to charge for online content, including quotes from Rupert Murdoch and industry commentators, and is followed by an interview with me.

My comments in the interview include:

* There are better chances of charging for online news working for Australia, given the unusual concentration of media ownership.

* Of the various models of charging for online content, Australian newspapers are most likely to provide some content for free and a subscription for full access.

* While we cannot know whether the ‘grand experiment’ of charging for online news in 2010 will work given changing consumer attitudes, the chances are slim it will succeed.

* Some newspaper proprietors seem to hope that bundling online and iPad news with newspaper subscriptions will increase print subscriptions, though that is likely to be negligible.

Holidays in Fiji – yay!

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We are about to leave for Fiji! We planned our holiday a couple of months ago, when we realized this was one of the only times I could carve out before the end of the year. Since then I’ve been too busy to appreciate the fact that it’s coming up, though knowing I’m about to go on holiday has made my intense schedule a bit easier to cope with. I will realize that it’s real when I arrive there.

We went to Fiji just over a year ago, a few weeks after Phoebe was born, and Leda hasn’t stopped talking about it since then, so it will be great to get her back there. It’s an easy destination to get to and spend time in.

I have long thought that a great holiday is one in which you start thinking things you couldn’t even imagine before you left. One week is a bit short to allow submerged ideas and perspectives to emerge, though I think they might, as I play with the kids in the pool.

Back soon!