Implementing Web 2.0 is critical for attracting talent to legal and professional firms

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A recent article in Lawyers Weekly magazine titled Firms warned to embrace Web 2.0 opens as follows:

AUSTRALIAN LAW firms risk losing clients as well as talent if they don’t make use of Web 2.0 technologies, an expert warns.

Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, said that Australian firms are lagging far behind their US and UK counterparts, which are leading the way when it comes to adopting new web technologies.

“If you look at the corporate sector globally, the industry that has been one of the first to take up blogs has been the legal industry, primarily in the US and UK. So you’ve had a proliferation of blogs that are both external in terms of providing clients with information and internal ones used for a wide variety of means including project management, knowledge management, and effective internal communication,” Dawson said.

“One of the fundamental issues is that organisations in Australia tend to be conservative. And while it’s arguable the legal industry is also quite conservative in other countries, that can certainly be said about the Australian legal industry.”

Dawson, who specialises in assisting major global organisations to develop future strategies and innovation capabilities, said technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS feeds and social bookmarking are of most direct relevance to information- and knowledge-centric organisations such as law firms.

“Ultimately [if you don’t embrace these technologies] you’ll lose to competitors in terms of their use of these tools and their ability to bring people together and collaborate. There is now a whole suite of technologies and tools and approaches for this purpose and if organisations don’t take that up they are not as competitive or effective as others.

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Newsgator implements APML: the value of standards in an open world

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Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), the standard for sharing attention profiles that I wrote about recently, has received a major boost today. The prominent RSS aggregator Newsgator has announced that it is implementing APML, while Engagd reports that a range of significant players are joining the APML working group, including social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, feed reader Bloglines, online application provider Peepel, social recommendation tool Me.dium, and the semantic content platform Talis.

The diversity of the new participants in APML points to some of the value of the standard. Starting from the more obvious applications, APML can be implemented by any news aggregator or feed reader to provide personalized, relevant information to the user. Those aggregators that provide this extra level of value will be more useful. One of the most interesting emerging spaces at the moment is that of social browsing recommendations. I wrote a few months ago about Cluztr, a website that gathers complete data about everything that users do online, including every site that they click on and how long they spend there. One of the most valuable things that emerges is the ability to find what is most interesting to people with similar interest (or attention) profiles to yourself. Clearly appropriate security and boundaries to the use of the data are required, but given that, extremely personalized recommendations can be made. Me.dium provides a related service, overlaying the browsing recommendations with a social network that enables users to link to people with similar interest profiles.

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Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050

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When people talk about the future, they usually point to all the new things that will come to pass. However the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct.

Below is the Extinction Timeline created jointly by What’s Next and Future Exploration Network – click on the image for the detailed timeline as a pdf (1.2MB).

For those who want a quick summary of a few of the things that we anticipate will become extinct in coming years:

2009: Mending things

2014: Getting lost

2016: Retirement

2019: Libraries

2020: Copyright

2022: Blogging, Speleeng, The Maldives

2030: Keys

2033: Coins

2036: Petrol engined vehicles

2037: Glaciers

2038: Peace & Quiet

2049: Physical newspapers, Google

Beyond 2050: Uglyness, Nation States, Death

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Online bringing people together: Brooklyn Bridge Photowalk

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While I was spending some time in New York recently, Dave Sifry, until recently CEO of Technorati, just happened to organize a photowalk on Brooklyn Bridge of a Saturday morning. He was in new York for a few days, so decided to organize it, posted it on his blog, got some other bloggers to mention it, and he mentioned it on his Facebook page. Around 10 of us saw it and decided to go along. At lunch in a restaurant in Chinatown after the event, we all told of how we came to be there. David had only met two of the people on the walk – I’ve known David for quite a few years now and have previously been to one of his photo exhibitions in San Francisco – while the rest had come across the gathering in other ways through blogs, social networks, or personal connections. It was a great example of how the online world easily enables people to get together to do fun things in the real live world away from screens. Get an idea to do something interesting, and you’ll likely find similarly inclined people to do it with you.

Below are a few of my photos from the day, including some of my wife Victoria and daughter Leda, who came along for the fun. It’s also well worth having a look at the complete set of David’s photos from the day.

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Manhattan through the wires

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Bill Amelio, CEO of Lenovo, and Ross Dawson interviewed on global sourcing

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Mark Jones of The Scoop, a recently launched podcast series from the Australian Financial Review and MIS Magazine, recently interviewed Bill Amelio, CEO of PC manufacturer Lenovo (formerly the PC division of IBM), and myself in a discussion on global sourcing.

Click here to go to The Scoop podcast page.

Amelio has been a strong proponent of what he calls “worldsourcing,” laying out the ideas in a recent article in Forbes titled Worldsource or Perish. Some have seen this stance as a way of diverting attention from the significant Chinese ownership of the company. A more relevant perspective is that Lenovo is a harbinger of the truly global corporations of the future, which will be very different animals from the companies of today. Currently almost all large companies have very distinct single national identities (primarily American) that are spread across many countries, despite the common rhetoric of global organizational cultures.

In the podcast Amelio discusses Lenovo’s perspective on sourcing design and products from wherever they’re best found around the planet, and Lenovo’s current challenges.

Some of the issues I raise in the interview include:

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Fifth anniversary of Trends in the Living Networks blog!

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Today it’s five years since my first post on this blog (see the posts for October 2002). Originally it was simply the Living Networks blog, launched to accompany the release of my book Living Networks, and was part of the book website. A book is static, and particularly on a topic such as living networks, it makes sense to make the topic alive and keep the conversation going. As far as I’m aware Living Networks was the first business book – and one of the first books – to have a companion blog. Since then I have relaunched the blog as Trends in the Living Networks as an ongoing conversation.

The opening words of Living Networks, launched in November 2002, were:

Macromedia, the company best-known for selling Flash software, is blogging. Weblogs—usually fondly abbreviated by their devotees to “blogs”—are essentially online publications of people’s stream of consciousness, available to anyone who cares to drop in to their websites. Opinions and personal perspectives are offered freely and informally, almost always in the context of breaking developments and others’ views. This means that blogs are liberally filled with links to whatever is most interesting in the ever-shifting landscape of information on the Internet.

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Why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term

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A couple of months ago when I was spending a few packed days of meetings up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley, several people asked me about Web 3.0. I told them pointedly what I thought, and at the time I determined to write a blog post on why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term, but never got around to it.

This seems worth coming back to, since Jason Calacanis has just proferred his own definition: “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

Which is a fabulous illustration of my point: that when people refer to Web 3.0, it means whatever they want it to mean. In other words it’s a meaningless term until the point that there is a reasonable degree of common understanding of its meaning, so it can be used in a sentence and actually convey something.

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APML gains momentum – this could transform the personalization of advertising

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I’ve written before about attention profiling as one of the major trends in the online world. One of significant initiatives in the space is APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), an open standard for how people’s attention profiles are described. Having this as a standard will, among other things, enable applications to refine how they provide information to users based on their interests, and allow people to publish their profiles so that they are better served by suppliers and information providers.

Bloglines, the top or second placed feed reader, has just announced that it is looking at supporting APML in future releases, while Chris Saad, a founder of APML, says that they expect a number of other similar announcements from major players over coming months. While Bloglines has not yet included APML support in the product, voicing its interest indicates this is very likely, and is no doubt intended to spur other companies to follow suit. There is little value to an open standard unless it is widely adopted.

One of the interesting things about APML is that it operates at a fairly high-level, giving a framework for people’s degree of interest in topics on a scale of +1 to -1 (accurately reflecting that people have negative interest (revulsion?) in some topics). Anyone who uses APML can use whatever means they wish to uncover what people’s attention profiles are. In this case, whichever companies are better at determining attention profiles will win, while the standard for sharing those profiles remains the same.

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Video interview on Enterprise 2.0 by Melcrum/ KM Review

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The other day Alex Manchester, Editor of the Melcrum publications KM Review and The Internal Comms Hub, did a video interview of me, covering a broad range of issues relating to Enterprise 2.0 and the application of social media inside organizations. The video is posted on the Melcrum Blog as well as below. Soon Melcrum will post a slightly longer version on their site – I’ll post the info on this when it’s available.

A brief summary of the questions and answers in the video are below.

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Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships popular in Consulting and Customer Service

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My book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships has popped up again on a few Popular lists on Amazon.com, notably on Consulting and Customer Service. The first edition, which came out in January 2000, was for two months #1 on Amazon.com from Australia, and spent two years in the top 20 book purchases from Deloitte & Touche among other topseller lists. Sales of the second edition have been solid and consistent but not spectacular so it’s good to see it get some more prominence. While one of the chapters is devoted to how technology is used in professional client relationships, very little covered by the book dates quickly, which means it continues to be relevant over the years and has a long shelf life. Maybe a third edition in 2010 or so?

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Dennis Howlett of AccMan fame recently wrote a brief review of the book, excerpted here:

If you don’t know the book, I recommend it goes on your must read list. It is packed full of examples, presents a coherent set of arguments and provides a framework for action.