Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.
Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.
Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.
However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.
How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?
So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.
Is our propensity for social media part of our design – so humans are stepping stones to the creation of a global brain?
By Ross DawsonBack when I wrote Living Networks in 2002 the idea that we were all part of a global brain was hardly mainstream, though a community of people were actively engaged with the idea.
Today the idea of the global brain seems to be very much alive. I received a tremendous response when I recently resurrected the buried introduction to Living Networks in which I described how connectivity was literally creating a new lifeform. That helped me discover Tiffany Shlain’s forthcoming film Connected which describes the implications of a nascent global brain.
Now Robert Wright, to me best known as author of the fabulous book Nonzero, has written a couple of articles on the global brain in the New York Times – the public response to the first one meriting another column. These are rich philosophical discussions, delving into some of the many issues that we are in fact all beginning to engage with.
In the first column titled Building One Big Brain, beginning by commenting on Kevin Kelly’s forthcoming book What Technology Wants, Wright writes:
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Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding
By Ross DawsonBig news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.
Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.
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Word of mouth in Australia vs US – Apple is a stronger brand Down Under
By Ross DawsonAt our Future of Influence Summit conference last year Sharyn Smith of Australian word of mouth agency Soup was one of the key local experts to speak. Given that Australian companies have been a fair bit slower than the US to take up broad word of mouth initiatives, it’s good to see what Soup are doing.
Soup has just released research on word of mouth in Australia they commissioned from the dominant US firm researching the space, Keller Fay.
Apparently Australians have 67.8 branded conversations each week, of which almost two-thirds are positive. Below are the headline results with a few quick comments
Top brand for overall word of mouth (both positive and negative)
Source: Soup
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Five frameworks to build strategies for the future of media
By Ross DawsonWe are big believers in the power of visual frameworks to help people understand complex landscapes and build effective strategies. One of the domains we have been applying these frameworks to is the future of media.
For those who haven’t been following our work through the years, here is a collection of five frameworks we’ve created to help companies understand and act on the future of media. These are frequently used in strategy workshops, and also in more structured strategy development processes.
We have also created a number of custom future of media frameworks in the course of strategy consulting projects for clients, to address the particular issues they are facing, however unfortunately we cannot share these publicly.
Click on the title or images for links to the original posts, which contain full explanations as well as large versions of the frameworks.
Future of Media Strategic Framework
Released ahead of our Future of Media Summit 2006, this has been one of our most popular frameworks with over 500,000 downloads and extensive use by media organizations and governments in forming strategy. It is still as relevant today as when it was created over four years ago, and its perspectives such as the symbiosis of social media and mainstream media have certainly borne out.
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The Six Mindsets of Adaptive Leadership
By Ross DawsonMadston Black, a top-tier leadership development consultancy, recently engaged me to do some executive briefings on the future of business as part of some of leadership programs they are running for major Australian organizations.
For two of their major client leadership development programs, Madston Black also brought out Professor Ron Heifetz, Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, to run workshops. They also organized two very well-attended public presentations for Ron in Sydney and Melbourne, and kindly invited me along.
Here is the video of Ron Heifetz’s Sydney presentation – while it’s an hour long it’s well worth watching for the rich insights and examples he offered on adaptive leadership (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is his latest book).
Professor Ronald Heifetz Adaptive Leadership Presentation from Jimmy Tsang on Vimeo.
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Facebook tells CNET but not Victoria Buckley they have apologized for Nipplegate
By Ross DawsonWell hopefully this story is finally completely done – but perhaps not quite.
I originally broke the news that Facebook had banned doll nipples, reviewed the saga of how they arbitrarily closed down the Save Ophelia protest group, and how, until today there had been major media coverage in 13 countries about this story, but not a peep in the US press.
Earlier today Chris Matyszczyk at CNET wrote Facebook apologizes for censoring doll’s nipples, reviewing the story and closing with the punchline:
Spokesman Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail: “Our reviewers look at thousands of pictures a day that are reported to them. Of course they make an occasional mistake. This is just an example. We apologized and have encouraged the poster to put it up again.”
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Headlines around world for Facebook doll censorship story but NOTHING in the US media yet
By Ross DawsonQuick update on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook doll censorship row:
The latest news is here. In short: The ‘Save Ophelia from Facebook censorship‘ Facebook group was simply deleted by Facebook without a trace (AFTER they had deleted the offending doll images leaving only the discussion of Facebook censorship), and Victoria has had to take down any images showing a trace of porcelain (the doll equivalent of flesh) from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.
There has been more coverage of the story overnight. Victoria particularly likes the coverage by Toronto Sun in a story titled Facebook censors nipples on $40K doll which brings out her thoughts on some of the issues at sstae here:
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The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose
By Ross DawsonOver the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.
Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.
Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.
However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.
How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?
So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.
Facebook’s arbitrary, unwarranted, and unexplained actions: it needs to learn from its mistakes
By Ross DawsonThe background: On Saturday Facebook threatened closing down Victoria Buckley Jewellery’s Facebook page because it showed an unclothed doll (top image at left), prompting widespread media coverage and global discussion. Many mainstream media such as Sydney Morning Herald and London Evening Standard used the original picture, suggesting that they didn’t think it was objectionable.
As Victoria was scared of losing her Facebook page with now close to 2,000 fans, a key way of connecting to her customers and community, she deleted images of the doll from her fan page, and replaced them with self-censored images, black bands hiding what Facebook presumably considered to be ‘nudity’ (middle image on the left). She put the original images on a new Facebook page Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Facebook promptly deleted the images from the site, and shortly afterwards closed down the site completely. Given all the offending images had been already deleted, they presumably objected to the discussion of Facebook’s censorship.
The latest: Facebook have now deleted the self-censored image of the doll from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, leaving her with nothing (bottom image on the left, though she has now replaced it with an image that contains no trace of either flesh or porcelain, for safety’s sake).
Since Facebook have yet to contact Victoria, or to my knowledge respond to the many media requests for response on this issue, we can only guess what they found objectionable about the censored image. Her chin? The way her legs are crossed? The length of her hair?
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Nipplegate escalates: A faceless Facebook shuts down protest group and proves it REALLY doesn’t like doll nipples
By Ross DawsonOn Monday Sydney Morning Herald wrote the story up as Now Facebook bans doll nipples. The headline spent 12 hours at the top of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald online site, and became the single most read story on the newspaper. Since then it has made news all over the world, in leading newspapers such as London Evening Standard and Der Spiegel, and in countries as far away as Timor and Finland.
In fear of losing her Facebook page with its close to 2,000 fans, Victoria deleted the offending photos and posted them on a new Facebook group ‘Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook’ to show these beautiful images of the exquisite doll, and to discuss art and what constitutes nudity.
In response Facebook deleted the doll images on the Save Ophelia Facebook group. A short time later they simply shut down the group with its 500 members, with no indication of what remained to offend after the pictures were gone.
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