I am not that keen on the word “crowdsourcing”, because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.
I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.
One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.
An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:
Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.
The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:
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The battlefield for mobile platforms and mobile applications becomes clear: fragmentation, innovation, and dead-ends
By Ross DawsonI was just interviewed on Sky Business this morning about the news coming out from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
In the plethora of announcements, what stands out for me is the increasing clarity of the emerging platforms battle, which is happening on two levels: mobile operating system and applications.
Mobile operating system
The launch of the iPhone 3G redefined how people thought about mobile devices. Now we are finally getting a range of serious and comparable alternatives.
The most visible of these is of course Android. Eric Schmidt said yesterday that there now 60,000 Android phones sold every day, and there appear to be new mobile models launched almost daily.
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Research: how journalists use social media (and PR professionals)
By Ross DawsonGeorge Washington University and media relations software firm Cision have released a very interesting study of how journalists use social media and online tools.
The headline news is that 56% of journalists consider social media to be important to some degree. This figure pushed up to 69% of journalists writing for online outlets, while just 48% of magazine writers found social media to be important.
Journalists on the importance of social media for reporting and producing their stories
Source: Cision
Social media is used extensively by journalists to publish and promote what they have written, with just 14% saying they don’t use social media at all for spreading word on their work. Almost two-thirds say they use blogs (presumably usually not their own), and 57% use Twitter or other microblogging sites to point to their articles.
Journalists on the social media tools they use to publish, promote and distribute what they write
Source: Cision
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Predictions for enterprise social software and social network analysis
By Ross DawsonGartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.
By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.
This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.
By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
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Sky Business: The implications of social media for business and why Australia leads in social media usage
By Ross DawsonLast week I was interviewed on Sky Business about recent data showing that Australia leads globally in use of social media, and the implications of such high levels of social media usage for business.
Here is the full interview, with major points noted below.
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The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent
By Ross DawsonA few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.
This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:
In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:
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Tapping the power of crowdsourcing for good
By Ross DawsonI am not that keen on the word “crowdsourcing”, because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.
I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.
One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.
An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:
The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:
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7:30 Report: the social impact of the population boom and Australia’s future
By Ross DawsonLast week the ABC’s 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.
It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC’s website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.
The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.
Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.
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Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)
By Ross DawsonWell there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!
To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.
Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.
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Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?
By Ross DawsonSome very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.
However the data point that struck my interest most is that…
Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media
This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.
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We are fast learning how to create “enhanced serendipity”
By Ross DawsonSerendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of “the Three Princes of Serendip”, which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).
For the last decade I have been talking about the idea of “enhanced serendipity”. For example I wrote about how I used social networking software to create enhanced serendipity at a Living Networks event that I ran in New York in 2003, used the term to describe what was done by mobile social networking platform Dodgeball (the first attempt in the space by the founders of today’s success story in the space Foursquare), and a longer post about Creating Enhanced Serendipity in 2006.
In today’s New York Times, Nick Bilton writes a post titled ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web. He writes:
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