Is Google a vampire sucking the blood out of media and the web?

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Here is a nice video of the highly-respected Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand speaking at Web 2.0 Expo SF about how Google plays fair and less fair, giving a balanced view of the accusations of vampirism from media tycoons such as Mark Cuban and Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton.

The video is well worth watching. Each of the many examples show how Google is using and potentially abusing its power in specific areas. Small choices, for example in showing related sites against a company website, could point to competitors and thus erode value for advertisers even as they may help consumers. It is also very easy to favor its own initiatives. Why wouldn’t you? But if you lose trust that you are providing the best search results, you lose everything.

Danny suggests that Google doesn’t want to do evil, but its initiatives have an enormous impact. Many caught in its enormous field of influence feel squeezed by its actions.

He ends up by proposing that all search engines should honor the “content compact”: Give as much or more than you take. Danny believes that Google is giving far more than it is taking, particularly in terms of giving traffic to websites.

What is most important is that the quality of search increases. I have to say I thought we would have far better search than we do today. The degree of competition in search is not quite what it should be to push Google. Hopefully the state of search can get better faster as the right sort of pressure is put on Google – not from media empires, but from people searching for the information and services they want.

What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department

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Our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is intended as a practical guide to how to create business value with web technologies inside the organization.

One of the key issues is the implications of these approaches for the organization and its key functional areas. Not surprisingly, there are a particular set of pressing issues for the IT department. These are covered in the report – we have excerpted Chapter 19 on the implications for IT below.

WHAT ENTERPRISE 2.0 MEANS FOR IT

Enterprise 2.0 has significant implications for the IT function of organizations. It is of course generally the responsibility of the IT function to facilitate the adoption of technologies that create value for the enterprise. However Enterprise 2.0 technologies both have significant cultural aspects to their use and uptake, and can have a significant impact on the underlying business processes and even value creation inside the organization.

Following are the primary issues that need to be understood and addressed, both by the CIO and his or her team, and the senior executive team and board of the organization.

1. Increased user expectations

One of the most important implications of Web 2.0 for organizations is that staff are increasingly exposed to very useful and well designed applications on the open web. The contrast with existing enterprise applications is usually stark.

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Discovering the most interesting and inspiring phrases

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I’ve long said that newspapers and books will become digital when they have all the qualities of the existing media – including readability, portability, and the ability to highlight and make notes – as well as all of the capabilities of digital media – such as searchability, compactness, and remote access.

The Amazon Kindle allows people to highlight passages and take notes – a basic functionality required for a e-book. What this also allows is to discover what others are highlighting, providing a form of collaborative filtering. Amazon has just released a list of the most highlighted books and phrases on the Kindle.

The most highlighted books are:

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Holy Bible

The Shack by William P. Young

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

A selection of the most highlighted phrases:

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Use your imagination! The potential of Annotated Tweets

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Aside from the announcement of Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s advertising platform, the most important thing coming out of Twitter’s Chirp developer’s conference was a hazy pre-announcement of Annotated Tweets.

In a nutshell, developer’s will be able to let users to attach up to (probably) 512bytes of structured metadata to a tweet (plans are to increase this to 2KB), which can be used in one or many ‘annotations’ with additional data. This can only be added at the time of the tweet, or it if is retweeted.

To put this in context, a character can be represented in a byte, so you can add over 3 times as much data as the 140 characters of a tweet, in whatever format you want.

It is very early yet, with estimates of being launch in two months, and many things to be ironed out, not least how people can untangle the plethora of annotation formats that are likely to be launched.

It is completely open what can be done with this. In its note to developers Twitter says: Think big. Blow our minds.

Ideas for what annotations could be used for, adapted from Twitter, Venture Beat, Scobleizer, plus quite a few of our own, include:

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Location-based dating is FINALLY hot, Hot, HOT!

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Some ideas take a while to come to reality. Urban Signals is a New York-based company whose iPhone app notifies you when compatible singles are nearby and would like to meet. The iPhone app is free to download but requires a monthly subscription after the first month.

While some suggest that this was only a matter of time, this has in fact been happening for at least eight years.

Back in 2002 I wrote about proximity dating in my book Living Networks.

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A few thoughts on Twitter’s ‘Promoted Tweets’

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Just over 4 years since the first Tweet was sent, Twitter has announced its plan to sell advertising on Twitter, by the name of ‘Promoted Tweets’.

A good interview of Twitter COO Dick Costolo on CNBC gives quite a bit of detail on the plan:

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There will be two types of people: content creators and non-content creators

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In the future there will be two types of people.

Either you will create content to share with the world, or you will not.

Many of us have already made the choice to share content with the world at large. We will be joined by many more.

The advantages of having a visible presence in a world awash with information will create a substantial economic and social difference between content creators and the rest.

Yet some people will not to want to share. Some won’t want to share anything about themselves beyond family and close friends. Others will be concerned about the privacy implications. They will not share of themselves to the world.

However if you choose to be a content-creator, it’s a slippery slope. Once you are sharing your voice online, be it through blogging, Twitter, social networks, videos, or other channels, the demands are intense just to keep it going. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, but it’s a commitment.

When your reputation and personal potential are driven by sharing, you do more. So as I just wrote, there can be spiralling demands from content creation.

If you choose to create content, content creation will be your life.

Managing the spiralling demands of blogging

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It’s all about content. That’s the heart of the universe today. Which is why I blog – to have presence in the universe.

But writing a blog is a continuous commitment. You’re always trying to carve out time from seemingly intractably busy-ness, just to keep the blog alive. Blogging is a priority, but it’s always easy to postpone writing down an idea when it arises, and then it never gets done.

Of course, if you’re a professional blogger/ writer, then the demands are truly intense. Columbia Journalism Review writes how Michael Calderone, just leaving Politico to the Yahoo! News Project, wrote over 4,000 posts while at Politico (averaging over 4 posts for every single day of his 2 ½ years there).

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Creating competitive differentiation with Enterprise 2.0

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 effectively is extremely challenging, as many organizations have discovered. However that is precisely why succeeding can create real and lasting competitive differentiation. In fact I believe that the ability to use collaborative technologies to enhance organizational performance will be one of the most critical competences for companies in years to come. This is not least because this ability reflects on the culture and implicit organizational structure far more than it does on technology.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0, providing some of the basic arguments as to why Enterprise 2.0 is a key management issue.

CREATING DIFFERENTIATION

Nicholas Carr’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter created massive controversy and debate by affirming that information technology was now a commodity and no longer provided competitive advantage to companies.

IT Doesn’t Matter, Nicholas Carr, Harvard Business Review, May 2003

Does IT Matter? An IT Debate – Letters to the Editor, Harvard Business Review, June 2003

Since then, numerous articles and research studies have shown that the degree and effectiveness of investment in information technology does drive competitive differentiation within industries.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008

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The power of Juicystar07 demonstrates two key trends in influence

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While we were working on the Future of Influence Summit last year I encapsulated the essence of what I was seeing in the space in Five key trends in how influence is transforming society, complementing our Influence Landscape.

If you’ve managed to avoid Juicystar07 and Allthatglitters21 so far, your time is up. They provide a fantastic example of two of the key trends in influence. Blair Fowler (Juicystar07) and Elle Fowler (Allthatglitters21) are sisters who review beauty and fashion products on their YouTube channels, with a total of 50 million and 31 million video views respectively. The video below is a “haul” review of a sponsor’s products which was also being filmed by Good Morning America.

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