Is our propensity for social media part of our design – so humans are stepping stones to the creation of a global brain?

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Back when I wrote Living Networks in 2002 the idea that we were all part of a global brain was hardly mainstream, though a community of people were actively engaged with the idea.

Today the idea of the global brain seems to be very much alive. I received a tremendous response when I recently resurrected the buried introduction to Living Networks in which I described how connectivity was literally creating a new lifeform. That helped me discover Tiffany Shlain’s forthcoming film Connected which describes the implications of a nascent global brain.

Now Robert Wright, to me best known as author of the fabulous book Nonzero, has written a couple of articles on the global brain in the New York Times – the public response to the first one meriting another column. These are rich philosophical discussions, delving into some of the many issues that we are in fact all beginning to engage with.

In the first column titled Building One Big Brain, beginning by commenting on Kevin Kelly’s forthcoming book What Technology Wants, Wright writes:

I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way.

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Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding

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Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.

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Five frameworks to build strategies for the future of media

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We are big believers in the power of visual frameworks to help people understand complex landscapes and build effective strategies. One of the domains we have been applying these frameworks to is the future of media.

For those who haven’t been following our work through the years, here is a collection of five frameworks we’ve created to help companies understand and act on the future of media. These are frequently used in strategy workshops, and also in more structured strategy development processes.

We have also created a number of custom future of media frameworks in the course of strategy consulting projects for clients, to address the particular issues they are facing, however unfortunately we cannot share these publicly.

Click on the title or images for links to the original posts, which contain full explanations as well as large versions of the frameworks.

Future of Media Strategic Framework

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Released ahead of our Future of Media Summit 2006, this has been one of our most popular frameworks with over 500,000 downloads and extensive use by media organizations and governments in forming strategy. It is still as relevant today as when it was created over four years ago, and its perspectives such as the symbiosis of social media and mainstream media have certainly borne out.

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Facebook tells CNET but not Victoria Buckley they have apologized for Nipplegate

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Well hopefully this story is finally completely done – but perhaps not quite.

I originally broke the news that Facebook had banned doll nipples, reviewed the saga of how they arbitrarily closed down the Save Ophelia protest group, and how, until today there had been major media coverage in 13 countries about this story, but not a peep in the US press.

Earlier today Chris Matyszczyk at CNET wrote Facebook apologizes for censoring doll’s nipples, reviewing the story and closing with the punchline:

I believe many people at Facebook to be extremely nice, reasonable and progressive. In addition, I now spend every day with Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum about the need to share more of myself as my guiding light. I therefore contacted Facebook for comment and received joyous and uplifting news.

Spokesman Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail: “Our reviewers look at thousands of pictures a day that are reported to them. Of course they make an occasional mistake. This is just an example. We apologized and have encouraged the poster to put it up again.”

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Headlines around world for Facebook doll censorship story but NOTHING in the US media yet

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Quick update on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook doll censorship row:

The latest news is here. In short: The ‘Save Ophelia from Facebook censorship‘ Facebook group was simply deleted by Facebook without a trace (AFTER they had deleted the offending doll images leaving only the discussion of Facebook censorship), and Victoria has had to take down any images showing a trace of porcelain (the doll equivalent of flesh) from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.

There has been more coverage of the story overnight. Victoria particularly likes the coverage by Toronto Sun in a story titled Facebook censors nipples on $40K doll which brings out her thoughts on some of the issues at sstae here:

“I’m tired of the female form being an object of prurience exploited by men. I think people are so becoming used to the female form as a symbol for lust, that they have trouble reading it as a representation of other values.

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The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose

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Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.

Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.

Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.

However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.

How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?

So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.

Facebook’s arbitrary, unwarranted, and unexplained actions: it needs to learn from its mistakes

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VBJ_composite.jpgApologies if you’re sick of this story – I am too. But the latest in this sordid saga needs to be reported.

The background: On Saturday Facebook threatened closing down Victoria Buckley Jewellery’s Facebook page because it showed an unclothed doll (top image at left), prompting widespread media coverage and global discussion. Many mainstream media such as Sydney Morning Herald and London Evening Standard used the original picture, suggesting that they didn’t think it was objectionable.

As Victoria was scared of losing her Facebook page with now close to 2,000 fans, a key way of connecting to her customers and community, she deleted images of the doll from her fan page, and replaced them with self-censored images, black bands hiding what Facebook presumably considered to be ‘nudity’ (middle image on the left). She put the original images on a new Facebook page Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Facebook promptly deleted the images from the site, and shortly afterwards closed down the site completely. Given all the offending images had been already deleted, they presumably objected to the discussion of Facebook’s censorship.

The latest: Facebook have now deleted the self-censored image of the doll from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, leaving her with nothing (bottom image on the left, though she has now replaced it with an image that contains no trace of either flesh or porcelain, for safety’s sake).

Since Facebook have yet to contact Victoria, or to my knowledge respond to the many media requests for response on this issue, we can only guess what they found objectionable about the censored image. Her chin? The way her legs are crossed? The length of her hair?

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Nipplegate escalates: A faceless Facebook shuts down protest group and proves it REALLY doesn’t like doll nipples

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ophelia2.jpgOn Saturday I first wrote about how Facebook was warning my wife Victoria Buckley that they may close down the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page , presumably because it showed a doll’s nipples.

On Monday Sydney Morning Herald wrote the story up as Now Facebook bans doll nipples. The headline spent 12 hours at the top of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald online site, and became the single most read story on the newspaper. Since then it has made news all over the world, in leading newspapers such as London Evening Standard and Der Spiegel, and in countries as far away as Timor and Finland.

In fear of losing her Facebook page with its close to 2,000 fans, Victoria deleted the offending photos and posted them on a new Facebook group ‘Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook’ to show these beautiful images of the exquisite doll, and to discuss art and what constitutes nudity.

In response Facebook deleted the doll images on the Save Ophelia Facebook group. A short time later they simply shut down the group with its 500 members, with no indication of what remained to offend after the pictures were gone.

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Better ways to help readers filter and edit the news

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fomframework_content.jpgBack in our Future of Media Framework we showed some of the dynamics in content creation, as in the image on the left, where both users and traditional media were engaged in creating and filtering content. User content creation, in the form of blogging, micro-blogging, sharing on social networks and more, has of course surged exponentially.

User filtered content, which I’ve talked about for many years now as an alternative to human editors, has recently progressed primarily through tools that aggregate the links shared on Twitter, such as Tweetmeme and Topsy. This is because Twitter (and Facebook, though the data is not readily available to third-parties to use) has become the dominant platform in how people share links and content of interest.

These Twitter-based content filters are very crude, not least having no good way of sorting by interest profile. As such they are filled with the trivial rather than what would be interesting to any one person.

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Facebook’s Nipplegate hits the front page

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Hey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn’t show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.

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Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:

Facebook’s prudish police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of exquisite nude porcelain dolls posing with her works.

Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used the dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn’t had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window.

But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the dolls, which show little more than nipples, constituted “inappropriate content” and breached the site’s terms of service.

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