The Question: What is the most interesting thing you came across today?

By

Twitter has moved from asking ‘what are you doing now?’ to ‘what’s happening?’, and now describes itself as an ‘information network‘.

The Twitter News Network is a manifestation of the global brain, in which we create value for others by contributing to the visibility and availability of high-value information.

While many contribute nothing of value to Twitter, many extraordinarily talented and interesting contributors are doing what they can to add value to others. It is a choice we make, by how we engage in our social networks.

If we consider what we can best contrbute to global consciousness, it is very likely the most interesting things we come across. The most intriguing, through-provoking, stimulating ideas, whether they be in the form of an article, a video, a conversation, or anything else from the vastness of media and ideas we encounter each day.
Read more →

Looking for talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media on cool tech, media, and future topics

By

We have just posted an ad on Elance, looking for editors/ writers/ project managers for some of our existing and forthcoming online publications.

Please apply on Elance if this seems like a match, or pass it on to others if you think it might be of interest. If you have questions before applying you can use our contact form. We hope to find some awesome people!

Talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media for cool tech and future topics

We run a series of content websites on topics related to technology, media, and the future, among many other activities.

We are looking for highly talented editors/ project managers who can drive quality content and traffic on these sites.
Read more →

Capturing all your browsing data: the difference between Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mobile

By

Chris Espinosa has written a very interesting piece about the Silk browser that comes on Amazon’s freshly announced Fire tablet.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web.

In a discussion on Twitter, Mark Pesce and Alexander Sadleir pointed out that this is basically the same as what Opera Mobile does. The Registry wrote last year:
Read more →

Compulsory viewing: A CEO perspective on the business value of internal social networks

By

A few days ago Arie Goldshlager pointed me to the fantastic video below of Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte Australia, talking about the company’s use of micro-blogging. Shortly after Forrester announced that Deloitte Australia’s Yammer network had won its 2011 Forrester Groundswell award in the category of Collaboration Systems.

Undoubtedly a major factor in Deloitte Australia’s success in internal social networks is the unreserved support of its CEO. However, as the video below clearly shows, Swiegers is not a man who likes social media for its own sake.

He simply recognizes that it can help lead to outstanding business outcomes. As an accountant and business leader, he sees the business value of using social networks well, and has helped Deloitte Australia to tap that value.


Here are some of the things that Swiegers says in the video:
Read more →

Why diverse viewpoints are critical in dealing with complexity

By

The September issue of Harvard Business Review focused on complexity, with several excellent articles.

One of the pieces was an interview with Michael J. Mauboussin, the chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management, whose investment approach is fundamentally based on understanding complexity.

His answer to the last question in the interview was very interesting:

What are some of the rules of thumb for getting yourself into the right mind-set to deal with complexity?
Read more →

Keynote slides: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

By

This morning I am giving the external keynote at a closed conference for senior client executives run by a major professional services firm. They know the technical content they are presenting is rather dry so my role is to provide a highly engaging kick-off to the day (spouses are invited too) which is also practical and useful for attendees.

As is quite often the case these days, my client asked me to combine two of the topics from my general list of speaking topics, bringing together the ideas from The Power of Social Media and The Future of Work and Organizations. In fact every presentation I do is customized for the specific context and audience, including many topics not on the list, but it can be useful for clients to use the general speaking topic list to work out what they are looking for.

Here are the slides to my keynote. The usual disclaimer: the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to be viewed by themselves, but you still might find them interesting.

Keynote: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

View more presentations from rossdawson

Read more →

Creating social TV: lessons along the way

By

I recently wrote about social and participative TV, as one of the important aspects of how TV as we currently know it will evolve.

Of course, this is not to say that all TV will become social. A key characteristic of the TV format is that it is passive, and that is what many people are looking for. Part of what we need to learn is not just what the mechanisms of effective social TV are, but in what situations it works well. While the term ‘social TV’ is becoming commonly used to refer to a variety of initiatives, I distinguish between social TV as focused on a shared viewing experience, and participative TV which is about viewers contributing to the program itself.

In this context, local TV station KOMU in Columbia, Missouri has recently created an hour-long participative TV show hosted by Sarah Hill. Here is the program preview:

TVNewsCheck has a detailed review of this and similar initiatives, saying:
Read more →

More research: browsing for fun at work boosts productivity

By

My post yesterday about Angry Birds and productivity at work: why distractions can help has generated some good discussion.

Ever a source of great information, Arie Goldshlager has now pointed me to additional research that supports the National University of Singapore study I pointed to in the article.

In this brief video Dr Brent Coker at the Department of Management and Marketing at University of Melbourne presents their research findings on the productivity impact of browsing for fun at work.


Read more →

Revisiting the future of PR

By

For many reasons PR (or perhaps rather what PR could be) is close to the center of my interests. As we shift to a world driven by social media and influence networks, arguably the PR industry has the best background and capabilities to help organizations deal with the new challenges and opportunities that are emerging.

Yet the PR industry has not markedly prospered relative to adjacent industries, which have muscled in on the new work generated in a rapidly changing landscape. ‘Public relationships’, if we take the term literally, dominate the agenda, yet PR is not dominating the discussion.

I recently recalled that I wrote the article Six Facets of the Future of PR well over 5 years ago now. It’s nice to see that it is still the #1 result on a Google search for ‘future of PR’.

As a good article about the future should be, it is still entirely relevant today. I thought it would be worth revisiting a few of the points I made, as they probably bear repeating.

Six Facets of the Future of PR

Read more →

Detailed stats: Social networks dominate Internet usage, Australia still #1

By

Research company Nielsen has just released detailed statistics on online activity, focusing on social networks and blogging, which at 22.5% of time spent online dominate Internet usage, with more than twice the next category games, at 9.8% of time spent. Below are a few highlights and comments from the full report.

Facebook completely dominates the social networking and blogging space, with over 70 times the next most prominent social networking site. Interestingly Tumblr’s dramatic rise (+183% over the last year) has taken it to overtake Twitter in time spent online. However Nielsen’s methodologies look only at website visits and don’t the majority of time spent on Twitter, which is on web and mobile clients. Facebook also dramatically surpasses the amount of time spent on Google, however Google is still mostly not a destination site. Over time initiatives such as Google+ may change that.
Read more →