IT’S Tuesday and I’m at a forum on the topic “Twitter’s Impact on Media and Journalism”, busily taking down the speeches in shorthand. As I do, the business-suited woman sitting on my left is tweeting about me on her laptop.
“This is interesting,” she types. “I’m at #timj talk about Twitter and media/journalism. I’m tweeting and the journalist next to me has paper/pen :-)”
Paper and pen? Got me! I do use them. However, I also use Twitter, which is how I caught up with her comment once I was back in the office.
Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.
These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 – details coming soon.
In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with “tip @techmeme”. The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.
Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-23 19:03:072009-06-23 19:03:07The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent
New Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.
The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.
Today I was at Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism run by The Insight Exchange. It was as usual a fantastic event with great insights – I will be digesting and musing on the conversations and ideas for a while, and will incorporate these into future frameworks.
Here are my notes from each of the presenters – taken on the fly but hopefully a reasonable representation of what they said. Some of the presentations will be put on online in audio and hopefully transcription so will post links when they’re available.
“Social media? It’s noise. Twitter? Facebook? It’s all a diversion. Good reporting is always going to be about hard work; about waking up every morning with the thought: What are the bastards hiding today?”
Over the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background.
The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are seeking value in different forms than they have in the past. Another critical driver is the war for talent. Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.
However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.
Here are some reflections on where I see the greatest potential for value-creation in the space.
DOMAINS FOR INNOVATION
There are several key domains for innovation for professional firms:
Services and products. In a rapidly changing business environment, providing the services that are most relevant to clients’ needs can provide real competitive advantage. The issue is not just in quickly generating new offerings, but also in packaging these so they can be readily communicated to clients by front-line professionals.
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-22 15:00:182020-06-18 04:06:39Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives
When we think about the future, there are some things we can predict better than others. One of the things we have the best idea of is demographics and age distributions. There remain uncertainties such as improvements in health care and gerontology, the rise of unforeseen diseases and pandemics, and devastating war, but by and large we can be fairly confident of our demographic forecasts.
In recent keynotes I’ve done on technology in aged care and the future of the global health economy I examined the implications of future demographic profiles. The forecast profiles for 2050 for some of the world’s largest economies are shown below. Source for all of the profiles is NationMaster, an excellent repository of country information. Of all of these countries, USA is the country which will have the least imbalance to the elderly, accompanied by a dramatic shift in ethnicity of the young.
One of the many implications of these age profiles is the inevitability of gerontocracy – rule by the elderly. Given the age profiles below, it is starkly clear what segment of the population any warm-blooded vote-seeking politician will seek to woo. In other words, given a democratic future, we can expect government policies to be unmitigatedly pro-aged, with barely a look in for the young.
We finally have video of my presentation on Future of the Enterprise at the TEDx event in San Francisco on May 5. The video is a nice production, very kindly done by Denis Mars to pull in the slides and Flash that supported my presentation.
The TEDx presentation format is strictly 20 minutes, so my presentation fits into two 9 minute YouTube videos below. Feel free to start at Part 2 if you want a sampler of the content – the story pretty much hangs together from there too.
In the presentation I discuss:
* Origins of organizations, from pre-agricultural through pyramid building, the guild, and modern companies
* Enterprise vs. Corporation. The critical distinction that means the “enterprise” will be more important than the “corporation” moving forward
* My personal work journey, through distributed computing, financial markets, Japan, information broking and NLP formed my thinking on organizations
* Knowledge and relationships are the only resources that matter in today’s economy
* Living networks of people, organizations and industry emerge
* Organizations are media entities – the flow of information defines its functioning
* Three driving forces today: Connectivity, Expectations and Commoditization
* Enterprise 2.0 is about creating the next phase of organizations – it is done by creating parameters for experimentation
* In the Heuristic Age structured trial and error is the only viable path to responsiveness
* Five questions: I end with five key questions we must answer to create the future of the enterprise:
What structures will emerge for allocating capital to enterprise?
What models will best turn participation into value creation?
How do we best tap the global talent economy in a virtual world?
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-18 02:30:212009-06-18 02:30:21Video of TEDx on Future of the Enterprise in San Francisco
A new mobile app called Layar has been launched recently. It will initially only be available for Android, with the intent of getting it onto the iPhone 3G S as a priority. At this point it only functions in the Netherlands, but will be available in Germany, UK and US this year. The video below shows how it could work, giving an example of identifying vacant real estate simply by scanning around.
One of the phone features required for this app to run is the magnetometer (compass). This has been available on many Nokia and some other handsets for a while, and makes its iPhone debut with the 3G S. Magnetometers are actually very inexpensive, but allow a wealth of new mobile applications that depend on knowing which way the camera is oriented.
There is no question that augmented reality will be a key feature of our technological future, and clearly this will be primarily relevant when we are mobile. Annotation of our environment, including detailed information about its features, and particularly user-generated content, will be extremely useful as well as fun. The pervasive nature of the iPhone means this is the platform which is likely to popularize mobile augmented reality. Layar is a player and no doubt there will be more.
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-16 16:24:312009-06-16 16:24:31The emergence of mobile augmented reality
One of the most interesting issues regarding Twitter is its impact on the media and journalism. The Insight Exchange is running a lunch event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism in Sydney on 23 June which promises to be extremely interesting, with insights from among others Mark Pesce, Renai Lemay, Paul Colgan and Corrie McLeod (click on the names to see pre-event interviews of the speakers by Beth Etling) as well as in-depth discussion by all participants.
Below are some of my thoughts on the topic. As an introduction, in the ABC TV segment below Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC and myself are interviewed about the role of Twitter in media. Mark emphasizes that people want a trusted source for their news, whereas I point to the value of Twitter in breaking news. At the time I wrote more about these different viewpoints on Twitter and media, noting that Scott’s stance “just takes us back to the traditional view that news is only news once a journalist has reported it.”
I see Five Fundamental Factors on how Twitter impacts media and journalism:
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-15 21:31:162009-06-15 21:31:16How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors
I just got sent this nice picture of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and myself at the residence of His Highness Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research. We were invited to his home in the evening for an informal conversation after the MegaTrends conference we both keynoted at in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago.
HH Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan is looking at a copy of my book Living Networks.
https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.png00Ross Dawsonhttps://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rdawson_1500x500_rgb-300x100.pngRoss Dawson2009-06-15 00:00:412009-06-15 00:00:41Hanging out with Paul Krugman
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Media convergence in action: Journalists (try) mastering the Twitterverse
By Ross DawsonThat’s influence for you. After The Insight Exchange’s event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism last week, the biggest front page article in The Australian’s media section today, titled Journos mastering the Twitterverse, opening with:
It’s a long article, accompanied by three other articles on Twitter in media. The thrust of the article is about how journalists are using Twitter. It mentions Dave Earley’s list of Australian journalists and news media people with Twitter accounts, and Anthony Dever’s list of Australian media organizations on Twitter.
Presumably from these lists they have compiled a list of prominent Australian journalists on Twitter:
Read more →
The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent
By Ross DawsonIncreasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.
A couple of years ago I wrote about Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which drew on research on how just a handful of influencers drive the content aggregation sites such as Digg, and a little later analyzed how influencers and amplifiers had helped one of my blog posts hit the front page Delicious.
These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 – details coming soon.
In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with “tip @techmeme”. The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.
Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.
Read more →
Uncovering high-value applications of organizational network analysis
By Ross DawsonNew Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.
The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.
Network analysis by Advanced Human Technologies of top executives in global corporation
Read more →
Event review: Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism
By Ross DawsonToday I was at Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism run by The Insight Exchange. It was as usual a fantastic event with great insights – I will be digesting and musing on the conversations and ideas for a while, and will incorporate these into future frameworks.
Below are quick on-the-fly notes from the event. Check out the Twitter stream #timj for the rich conversations from the event. For my own thoughts on the topic read my post from last week on How Twitter impact media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors.
Here are my notes from each of the presenters – taken on the fly but hopefully a reasonable representation of what they said. Some of the presentations will be put on online in audio and hopefully transcription so will post links when they’re available.
Mark Pesce (@mpesce)
He begins by quoting Bob Woodward:
“Social media? It’s noise. Twitter? Facebook? It’s all a diversion. Good reporting is always going to be about hard work; about waking up every morning with the thought: What are the bastards hiding today?”
Read more →
Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives
By Ross DawsonOver the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background.
The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are seeking value in different forms than they have in the past. Another critical driver is the war for talent. Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.
However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.
I’ve written before about innovation in professional services, including the White Paper I wrote for SAP on Service Delivery Innovation and in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.
Here are some reflections on where I see the greatest potential for value-creation in the space.
DOMAINS FOR INNOVATION
There are several key domains for innovation for professional firms:
Services and products. In a rapidly changing business environment, providing the services that are most relevant to clients’ needs can provide real competitive advantage. The issue is not just in quickly generating new offerings, but also in packaging these so they can be readily communicated to clients by front-line professionals.
Read more →
Gerontocracy is our future
By Ross DawsonGerontocracy n. Rule by the elderly
When we think about the future, there are some things we can predict better than others. One of the things we have the best idea of is demographics and age distributions. There remain uncertainties such as improvements in health care and gerontology, the rise of unforeseen diseases and pandemics, and devastating war, but by and large we can be fairly confident of our demographic forecasts.
In recent keynotes I’ve done on technology in aged care and the future of the global health economy I examined the implications of future demographic profiles. The forecast profiles for 2050 for some of the world’s largest economies are shown below. Source for all of the profiles is NationMaster, an excellent repository of country information. Of all of these countries, USA is the country which will have the least imbalance to the elderly, accompanied by a dramatic shift in ethnicity of the young.
One of the many implications of these age profiles is the inevitability of gerontocracy – rule by the elderly. Given the age profiles below, it is starkly clear what segment of the population any warm-blooded vote-seeking politician will seek to woo. In other words, given a democratic future, we can expect government policies to be unmitigatedly pro-aged, with barely a look in for the young.
Fortunately I’ll be old by then.
Read more →
Video of TEDx on Future of the Enterprise in San Francisco
By Ross DawsonWe finally have video of my presentation on Future of the Enterprise at the TEDx event in San Francisco on May 5. The video is a nice production, very kindly done by Denis Mars to pull in the slides and Flash that supported my presentation.
Read more about the TEDxAdvance event, organized by Advance San Francisco. The best description is Andrew Mager’s excellent review of the evening.
The TEDx presentation format is strictly 20 minutes, so my presentation fits into two 9 minute YouTube videos below. Feel free to start at Part 2 if you want a sampler of the content – the story pretty much hangs together from there too.
In the presentation I discuss:
* Origins of organizations, from pre-agricultural through pyramid building, the guild, and modern companies
* Enterprise vs. Corporation. The critical distinction that means the “enterprise” will be more important than the “corporation” moving forward
* My personal work journey, through distributed computing, financial markets, Japan, information broking and NLP formed my thinking on organizations
* Knowledge and relationships are the only resources that matter in today’s economy
* Living networks of people, organizations and industry emerge
* Organizations are media entities – the flow of information defines its functioning
* Three driving forces today: Connectivity, Expectations and Commoditization
* Enterprise 2.0 is about creating the next phase of organizations – it is done by creating parameters for experimentation
* In the Heuristic Age structured trial and error is the only viable path to responsiveness
* Five questions: I end with five key questions we must answer to create the future of the enterprise:
Read more →
The emergence of mobile augmented reality
By Ross DawsonA new mobile app called Layar has been launched recently. It will initially only be available for Android, with the intent of getting it onto the iPhone 3G S as a priority. At this point it only functions in the Netherlands, but will be available in Germany, UK and US this year. The video below shows how it could work, giving an example of identifying vacant real estate simply by scanning around.
One of the phone features required for this app to run is the magnetometer (compass). This has been available on many Nokia and some other handsets for a while, and makes its iPhone debut with the 3G S. Magnetometers are actually very inexpensive, but allow a wealth of new mobile applications that depend on knowing which way the camera is oriented.
There is no question that augmented reality will be a key feature of our technological future, and clearly this will be primarily relevant when we are mobile. Annotation of our environment, including detailed information about its features, and particularly user-generated content, will be extremely useful as well as fun. The pervasive nature of the iPhone means this is the platform which is likely to popularize mobile augmented reality. Layar is a player and no doubt there will be more.
Additional commentary from TUAW, IntoMobile, ReadWriteWeb, AndroidGuys, and MacRumors.
How Twitter impacts media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors
By Ross DawsonOne of the most interesting issues regarding Twitter is its impact on the media and journalism. The Insight Exchange is running a lunch event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism in Sydney on 23 June which promises to be extremely interesting, with insights from among others Mark Pesce, Renai Lemay, Paul Colgan and Corrie McLeod (click on the names to see pre-event interviews of the speakers by Beth Etling) as well as in-depth discussion by all participants.
Below are some of my thoughts on the topic. As an introduction, in the ABC TV segment below Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC and myself are interviewed about the role of Twitter in media. Mark emphasizes that people want a trusted source for their news, whereas I point to the value of Twitter in breaking news. At the time I wrote more about these different viewpoints on Twitter and media, noting that Scott’s stance “just takes us back to the traditional view that news is only news once a journalist has reported it.”
I see Five Fundamental Factors on how Twitter impacts media and journalism:
1. Twitter’s role in breaking news
Read more →
Hanging out with Paul Krugman
By Ross DawsonI just got sent this nice picture of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and myself at the residence of His Highness Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research. We were invited to his home in the evening for an informal conversation after the MegaTrends conference we both keynoted at in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago.
HH Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan is looking at a copy of my book Living Networks.