Ross Dawson Blog | Keynote Speaker, Futurist and Author

(Good) blog aggregators are the best source of news

As one of many deeply absorbed in the US Presidential elections, I spent a lot of time scouring the news to gain insights into the latest as the extraordinary story unfolded. I consistently found that blog aggregator Memeorandum provided the best view on what the most relevant and interesting news was. Often stories became prominent on Memeorandum before they hit the mainstream press.

This points to what I first wrote six years ago in Living Networks, and have often restated:

“Blogs are not necessarily important individually, but in aggregate they are massively powerful. The “blogosphere” pulls together what millions of talented people around the world are discovering and thinking. Collectively, blogs enable us to collaborate to filter and uncover the most worthwhile news.”

The Guardian is the latest to say Memeorandum runs rings around Google News.

“Memeorandum is embarrassingly better than Google News. Google reckons that the more coverage a story gets, the more important it is. Unfortunately, broad coverage takes a long time to develop, so Google News can run hours or even a day behind Memeorandum. This is fine for casual consumers, but if you’re a news junkie – or a journalist – it’s hopeless.”

Read more →

Celebrate at the 10th Annual Self-Employed and Entrepreneurs Xmas Drinks! Sydney, 16 December

By Ross Dawson

In 1996, when I left the world of corporate employment to do my own thing, I soon realized that not only do you not have anyone organizing a Christmas party for you, you may have no-one or very few people to party with.

So together with some of my self-employed and entrepreneurial friends, we decided to have our Christmas party together. This year is the 10th anniversary of the self-employed and entrepreneurs Xmas drinks.

It just seems like a really obvious thing to do, and every year it’s been a fabulous event, with a stack of great people turning up and celebrating. It’s primarily intended for the self-employed, entrepreneurs, and those working for micro-businesses, but absolutely everyone is welcome to turn up and join the festivities. Open to all.

Date: 16 December

Time: From 6pm

Where: Centennial Hotel (front bar), 88 Oxford Street, Woollahra

Drinks and food available for purchase at the bar.

You can RSVP on the Facebook site for the party (and see photos of who’s coming), or just see you there!

Every year I say that next year I’ll do something bigger, and maybe get sponsors to provide some food and drinks, but I always get busy. Hopefully next year I’ll get my act together on this…

Registrations open for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009 on 24 February 2009 – providing a clear roadmap for organizations

By Ross Dawson

I’m delighted to announce that registrations are open for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009 on 24 February – full details on the website.

To help you make up your mind early, there are significant discounts for registrations before Christmas, and the first 25 registrations get a free copy of my book Living Networks.

Click here to download flyer for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009

The inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum was in February 2008, attracting a sell-out audience of senior executives and extensive media coverage, including Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Computerworld, NineMSN, MIS The Scoop, Smartcompany, The Financial Standard and many others.

This year will be bigger and better, building on an additional year of experience from Australian and global enterprise experience in successfully implementing Web 2.0 and mobile technologies to transform their organizations.

Major announcements soon on a fantastic speaker line-up.

Read more →

Design our new logo – get rich and famous!

By Ross Dawson

The existing logo for Advanced Human Technologies was designed in 1997. Not only has the world changed a lot since then, it is now becoming a very different company. It is time for a complete rebranding, starting with the logo, and including a complete redesign of the website, which is also sorely out of date. More on all the updates later – in brief Advanced Human Technologies will go far beyond being a consulting company to also being a publisher and supporting several new start-up ventures.

I have chosen to use 99designs to get the logo done. I have long written about and explored online service exchanges such as elance, Guru, and vWorker. In fact the subject of my next book is about the global talent economy. As such I’m keen to try new models, and since 99designs seems very interesting, I’m giving it a go.

The way it works is first you put up your brief for a design such as a logo and you set a budget for what you’re prepared to pay. The interesting part is that all of the designers’ submissions are visible to all, and you rate them and give feedback on them until there is a winner. See How it Works.

This iteration process with multiple designers promises to give better results than the process on the other service exchanges, where you have to go through that process with one designer. In one case I selected a bid on elance to design a flyer, and it quickly became apparent that no amount of feedback would create a worthwhile result, so I paid the bidder half the bid amount to close out the arrangement.

SO: If you are a designer, please submit your ideas. Or if you know designers who would be interested, please let them know.

Click here to see our logo brief and submit your designs.

Read more →

Keynote: The Future of Technology in Aged Care

By Ross Dawson

Last week I gave a keynote speech on The Future of Technology in Aged Care at the Aged Care Association Annual Congress. In this case I wanted to take the audience on a big-picture journey into where aged care is going, which went down very well between the many high-detail presentations at the conference.

I was invited as a general futurist, though I have in fact written and being interviewed on the topic of aged care frequently before, particularly on the role of robots in aged care, including in a feature article in Newsday.

Below is a brief snapshot of five key facets of how technology will transform aged care.

1. Telemedicine

Health care is being transformed by connectivity. This ranges from simple applications such as monitoring medical data through to remote surgery, bringing the skills of the best doctors anywhere in the world. Accenture’s Online Medicine Cabinet is an example of how patients and the elderly can have their health monitored from home, and their medications managed effectively. Now robots such as the one in the video above can visit patients or do rounds in the ward, linking them directly by video to doctors or nurses.

Read more →

Extinction analysis and extending the hype cycle

By Ross Dawson

Nick Gall of Gartner writes about our Extinction Timeline, saying (in jest I presume), referring to Gartner’s famed hype cycle:

I think we should enter negotiations with the author, Ross Dawson, for adding extinction analysis to hype cycles immediately!

Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050

As it happens, in the wake of the enormous success of the Extinction Timeline, including being featured on Slashdot, Slate, Boston Globe, and other publications across the globe, I’ve been thinking about doing a series of features on the death and subsequent rebirth of some what we have pegged for extinction – there is sometimes life beyond extinction! Thus the cycle may get extended several phases further…

Future of Media Framework adapted into Portuguese

By Ross Dawson

The Future of Media Strategic Framework is still getting plenty of attention 2 1/2 years since it was created – we’re up to around 150,000 downloads and it is still used extensively by companies and consultants in strategy development. I regularly hear new stories of how it’s been used, and I continue to use it in my strategy projects for media clients, along with other strategy tools.

The latest use of the framework is an adaptation into Portuguese in the interdisciplinary information management journal Liinc em Revista, as below.

To see the article and original image, go to Liinc em Revista Vol. 4, No 2 (2008), and download the pdf of the article:

Fontes de informação como valor agregado ao sistema eletrônico de revistas da Universidade Federal do Paraná (OJS/SER-UFPR) – Patrícia Zeni Marchiori, Andre L Appel

As it happens I speak reasonable Portuguese, as I spent some time there in the 1990s visiting friends, going to Carnaval, and touring the country. I haven’t been back to Brazil since I gave a keynote at a knowledge management conference in Sao Paolo in 2002, but I’m hoping to get back again before long.

The article looks at the document management systems of the Parana Federal University, and uses a framework for the quality dimensions of information sources, based on the structure of the Future of Media Strategic Framework, though using different content.

Quick review of Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World event

By Ross Dawson

Oof! Well hopefully my last 13 blog posts as I chaired ONSBCW over the last two days have been useful to people, and not annoyed any faithful readers. Between Jenny Williams on Twitter, myself blogging, and various other people twittering and blogging, we had the event pretty well covered :-). It would have been nice to take a break from the constant note-taking, but once I started I thought I might as well continue.

Quick thoughts on the event:

* There is clearly a very strong appetite for the topic of social networks not just from business, but also from government.

* While this now not a new topic, most organisations are still struggling to really get traction, not least because of senior executive reluctance.

* There is strong diversity not just in the consumer social network space, but also in the many tools and platforms available to enable social networks in and beyond organizations.

* Twitter is solidly established in a core community which is rapidly extending. Those who can’t find the time or energy to blog are dabbling in Twitter. The attendees’ experience of Twitter at the event was a convincer for many to try it out, as happened at the Future of Media Summit.

* Few people really have their heads around the different spaces in which social networks and Web 2.0 tools can be applied and how these relate to each other – creating greater clarity on this will be very useful.

* Over the next years ‘social networking’ in the broadest sense is going to become central how business, government and society function – we really are on the cusp of something massive here.

So now onto other projects. Of course top of the agenda is our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009 on 24 February, which will delve into far more detail on how these issues impact the enterprise, and provide highly practical insights on governance, policies, implementation, and creating short-term value.

We are also creating an Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, which will provide a clear roadmap to organizations on this path. This will be included in the registration cost of the Executive Forum, and we will be actively marketing the report beyond that.

Lots more on all this over the next few months!