Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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Category Archives
December 21, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
According to Fact Monster [and Zephyr Teachout], "The precise moment of the 2005 solstice will be December 21, 2005 at 1:35 P.M. EST (18:35 UT)."
Merry Xmax!
Xmax is my new, completely secularized replacement of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, whatever. We celebrate the winter solstice, which I refer to as Xmax. We eat too much, drink too much, give presents, and break most of the major commandments.
The summer solstice is Ymax, in case you're wondering. Same sort of celebrating. Ditto for the Equinoxes.
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December 14, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
[from Tegic Reveals the Year's Most Buzzworthy Additions to T9 Dictionary: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
The top ten "buzz words" to be added to the T9� dictionary for 2005 include:
* Lifehack - a tool or technique that makes some aspect of one's life easier or more efficient
* Mashup - new information created by combining data from two different sources
* Placeshift - to redirect a TV signal so the viewer can watch a show on a device other than his or her television
* Playlistism - judging a person based on what songs are on the playlist of his or her digital music player
* Podjack - to plug the cord of one's digital music player into the jack of another person's player to hear what the person is listening to
* Puggle - a dog bred from a pug and a beagle
* Sideload - to transfer music or other content to a cell phone using the cell phone provider's network
* Vlog - a blog that contains mostly video content
* Vodcast - a video podcast
* Ubersexual - a heterosexual man who is masculine, confident, compassionate and stylish
I dare you to come up with a coherent sentence using all ten words.
[tags: puggle, sideload, ubersexual, vlog, vodcast, playlistism, T9, text+messaging, podjack, placeshift, mashup, lifehack
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December 13, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ji Lee of Pleaseenjoy.com is running a fun and potentially illegal project: The Bubble Project. The goal is to have people download various templates he's created in the shape of cartoon talking balloons, and paste them onto street advertising and to put provocative, funny, or ironic content in them.
Lee plans to collate images that people take of these tags into a book.
His idea is that we need to take back public space from the corporations. Remember, though, that the well known graffitti artist John Tsombikos, known as "Borf," just pleaded guilty to felony destruction of property, and will be doing hundreds of hours of graffitti clean-up, even if he avoids jail.
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December 06, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Last night, I was in a dinner meeting and the inevitable introductions began, rolling around the room from the host, to the first guest, and so on. As others were cleverly summarizing their bona fides I realized how bad I seem to be at this common social interaction. Its like not knowing which pair of shoes to wear, or which fork to use for the shrimp course.
At any rate, I stammered out something about being a long time student of the subject at hand, mumble, mumble, mumble. But what I was thinking, while my mouth was on autopilot, was a series of one-liners:
- "I kvetch, professionally."
- "I would never join a club that would have me as a member."
- "That reminds me of a story."
- "Twelve arrests, no convictions."
And then, when the dinner presentation soared into the hockey-stick graphs and product yellowbrick road, I was noodling over this mundane task. I knew I had at least one glass of champagne too much when I started to confabulate a social tool -- the "introductionator" -- that would generate the appropriate paragraph, based on circumstance, and surrounded in the appropriate level of puffery.
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November 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Richard Rohrer of Henry Holt sent me a (yes, it was free) copy of Ian Urbina's hilarious compilation of passive aggressive revenge: Life's Little Annoyances. I read some of the pieces to my wife the other night and we were gasping for breath -- we were laughing that hard.
My favorite piece is about John Kador, who tired of rejection letters, and wrote his own rejection rejection letter, which reads like the best Marx Brothers:
Dear ___________,
Thank you for your letter rejecting my application for employment with your firm.
I have received rejections from an unusually large number of well-qualified organizations. With such a varied and promising spectrum of rejections from which to select, it is impossible to consider them all. After careful deliberation, then, and because a number of firms have found me more unsuitable, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection.
Despite your company's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet with my requirements at this time. As a result, I will be starting employment with your firm on the first of the month.
Circumstances change and one can never know when new demands for rejection arise. Accordingly, I will keep your letter on files in case my requirements for rejection change.
Please do not regard this letter as a criticism of your qualifications in attempting to refuse me employment. I wish you the best of luck in refusing future candidates.
Sincerely,
John Kador
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November 09, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
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June 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
John Hagel comments on my recent post, All Edge, No Center:
[from comment at post]
Stowe - Sorry you were disappointed by our interview with Wharton. I hope that will not discourage you from listening to Ross in terms of reading our book. I sense that we are much more aligned than your post suggests. We make the point in the book that we are in the midst of a major change in the focus of IT investment in the enterprise from process automation to practice enhancement. The new technology tools are largely being adopted in a bottom up fashion by communities of practice who are wrestling with better ways to address the exceptions that standardized processes can't cope with. The point I was trying to make in the quote above is that there is a side-benefit of making local innovation and learning more visible to the rest of the organization rather than risk having it be lost forever. But this is only a side benefit - the primary value (and the reason the new technology is being adopted within the enterprise) is that it is really helpful to people on the edge in harnessing the power of swarm intelligence and distributed communities of practice (and, by the way, much of the relevant swarm resides outside the walls of the enterprise - something that previous generations of enterprise-centric technology failed to acknowledge).
I guess I wasn't disappointed in the interview, since I didn't really have any preconception of what might be said. But maybe I was dinged by the tone or angle of the discussion, which seemed to be following familiar ruts in the road.
I am still certainly planning to read the book, and I look forward to it more eagerly now that John has cleared up my misperceptions of the authors' intentions. Thanks John.
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June 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ross Mayfield tells me I must, must read the new book by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?. I haven't had a chance, but I did see [pointer from Ross] an interview with the authors at Wharton's Managing Technology column, interviewed by Kevin Werbach.
Many of the premises that were developed in the piece seemed almost shopworn -- executives need to think about competitive advantage in dynamic terms rather than static, sustainable advantage requires people at the edge being able to perform new work, the need to be faster to develop capabilities faster than competitors, and so on.
I think what I was struggling with most is the implicit premise: the book is written for executives of large companies, rather than speaking to individuals living in a new world. If it's people at the edge doing all this invention of new capabilities, isn't that where we will see the new use of social tools? Is that itself one of these capabilities? My bet is that fatcat senior executives are not going to invent much of anything in this regard, although -- in typical self-congratulatory, great-man-theory-of-history fashion -- if various front-line engineers, customer support staff, or product managers develop innovative ways of applying social tools that enable increased productivity, better products, and more profits, the lions of industry will certainly take credit for it.
One comment in particular jumped out, though:
[from
Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown]
Hagel: One of the big issues we see is that to date most of the social software tools we are talking about have tended to be one-off kinds of tools. You have instant messaging, Wikis, a whole array of collaboration workspaces that have been developed, but there isn't an operating environment where all these social software tools can come together in a seamless environment. Part of the opportunity here is that as you create these environments that are open ended so you can plug in social software tools as they develop and evolve, you can also create a record-keeping facility. By doing that, not only are you helping people to resolve the exceptions, but you are also creating a record of who came together over what kinds of issues, what was the context of the issue, and what was the resolution of the issue. That creates the basis for doing pattern recognition and dissemination of the learning to a broader part of the organization.
This is an echo of the Nerdvana meme I have been chasing, although my desire for the Nerdvana model is not really motivated by an enterprise vision of analysis and feedback about handling exceptional cases in defined workflows -- I spent what feels like eons chasing a dream of the perfectability of process, and have left it aside. While I believe it is still useful to define business scenarios -- how to process an insurance claim, and the like -- increasingly, the work left to people are the exceptions, where automation fails. In this domain, the language of process holds no power.
The dynamics of group interaction and the interaction between groups, when all is not known, and people need to invent solutions, is very different. The critical factor is not each person doing the role assigned to them, but each person applying their own personal knoweldge and network to the issue at hand, based on their own imperfect reasoning. This moves into the realm of Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds: swarm intelligence works where people do not converge to a consensus, where they independently apply their own thoughts, and then share them through social connections. Paradoxically, providing the same information to everyone can lead to bad outcomes, because it can lead to information convergence, and then to bad decision making.
So the vision for the Nerdvana client is not about the enterprise gathering information about how individuals respond to exception situations, so that the enterprise home office weenies can analyze it and send it all back out to the edge as a new operations manual. Nerdvana is about the individual, managing in a complex and fragmented world, but bringing together all the threads of our social relationship of the world into one metaphor. It is a focus on the needs of the individual, not the need of the enteprise to have it all managed in one seamless, centrally controlled social architecture
Learning naturally follows social paths, so I think all of the sorts of things that Hagel and Brown are talking about will take place at the edge. The future of work is that there is only edge, no center: there will be no one at HQ analyzing invention going on at the edge. Any analysis will be direct, on both sides of the social connections that link us. Any model of social architecture -- as outlined by Brown and Hagel -- will need to account for the intensely personal, as opposed to corporate, forms of social interaction that increasingly typify the world of work.
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May 13, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
David Weinberger just reached an important milestone on the way to publishing his next book, entitled "Everything is Miscellaneous." Namely, he finished the book proposal. I for one can't wait. I devoured Small Pieces Loosely Joined (here's my review), and I am salivating for this one. Certainly our finest sensemaker of digital connectedness.
[tags: David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything Is Miscellaneous]
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April 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I get a perverse pleasure from Steven Johnson's arguments about TV being more complex today, and that this makes TV viewers smarter (see New York Times piece, here). His argument conflates the notion of complex plotlines -- more characters and scene jumping -- with viewers getting smarter. But I think that he is missing the point: it's not intelligence, per se, that is being stretched through these mental gymnastics, but instead, the same sort of situational awareness and attention shifting that goes on with serious video gamers. Intelligence is about making judgements, and reasoning, rather than being able to keep track of which shell the pea is under. On the other hand, increasing situational awareness and inculcating a predisposition toward Continuous Partial Attention is a requirement for surviving in the modern world, so I shouldn't knock increasingly complex TV, although I avoid watching it myself. Still, I buy into some of his premises:
The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.
Still and again, the days of huddling around the TV to receive a daily dose of mediated culture from the analog media moguls are numbered. Digital media will absorb TV and other analog media, and that's when we will really see smart TV: when TV can be socialized like blogs, when the shows are not mass-produced reality nonsense, but real people videoing their own lives, telling their own stories, and when we finally walk away from the constraints of mass markets. Internet TV will be something completely different.
[pointer from David Weinberger]
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March 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jennifer Rice inspired me to try the Book Meme 123.5 exercise: open a book to the 123rd page, find the fifth sentence, and post it. I grabbed The Support Economy by Zuboff and Maxmin, which yeilded this:
Economists from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, concluded that the average length of the workweek for many groups has changed little since the mid-1970s, but the distribution of work hours among groups has changed considerably
Basically, people are working longer hours, and most critically, women are working longer hours. Although the average worker is working slightly longer hours, much more people are in the workforce than before, with an especially large growth of women entering full-time employment. This has profound social impacts, leading to what the authors call "no time for life."
This is an indicator of the way that work is increasingly intruding into and stealing our private lives (which is another echo of the argument I was leveling in the Niall Kennedy brouhaha, here, here, and here, over the past few days).
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October 09, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I am reading Shoshanna Zuboff (author of In the Age of the Smart Machine) and James Maxmin's The Support Economy. They advance a startlingly fresh synthesis of social psychology and business theory and suggest that we are, in fact, just past the threshold of what I have been calling the "post-everything" era, and that we have entered a new phase of human civilization, driven by a new sort of people, who are driven by new dreams.
Shoshanna Zuboff and James Maxmin [from The Support Economy]
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, people have new dreams. In spite of the heterodoxy and diversity that mark the advanced societies, we observe a common source for many of these dreams. It is expressed in a psychological awareness of one's own complex individuality. Today's people experience themselves first as individuals and shares a common longing for psychological self-determination. There are many who have lamented this, seeing only an erosion of community and the spread of narcissism. We, on the other hand, celebrate this psychological achievement as an important milestone in the evolution of humanity.
As a result of these new dreams, a chasm has opened up between people and the organizations upon which they depend. People have undergone a discontinuity in mentality, but organizations have not. Business organizations, and other institutions too, continue to treat the new individuals' actions according to the terms of the older mass society. Individuals reach out from the intricacy of their lives in search of understanding, accommodation, and support, but the complexity of their needs and desires is ignored. Instead, they are greeted by metaphorical equivalent of the assembly line, expressed in the internally consistent set of practices, attitudes, and assumptions we call an enterprise logic.
But the chasm between new individuals and old organizations contains the seeds of the next economic revolution. History suggests that the next great era of commercial innovation will require more than the production or exploitation of new technologies, however creative that undertaking may be. The next revolution in wealth creation will draw life, first and foremost, from a profound grasp of the new society of individuals and its expression in a new kind of consumption. Only the full force of this understanding can ignite the entrepreneurial innovation capable of leading such a revolution and paving the way toward a support economy and new episode of capitalism. That innovation will entail discontinuity. It will be as radical a break with the past as the break that today's people have made with the lives of their grandparents an great-grandparents. It will be as radical a break with the past as managerial capitalism was a break with the practices of proprietary capitalism and craft production that preceded it.
The authors are creating a vocabulary and a set of perspectives to help us understand the brave new world we find ourselves in [and, yes, "find ourselves" in both meanings].
Because of the social media context in which I am operating these days, the authors' contentions about personal meaning arising from an inner suite of feelings rather than through identification with larger groups or institutions drives home. In contrast to the paternalistic, elite-directed political and social movement s of the past, today's bottom-up, emergent, grassroots movements are based on a completely different dynamic:
In contrast, the values surveys of Ronald Inglehard indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. [emphasis mine] Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today's individual rejects organizational mediation, seeking instead to have a direct impact on matters that touch his or her life, just as the early Protestants rejected priestly mediation of their relationship to God. In the early twentieth century people joined organizations as a way to reestablish a sense of influence and control in a world that was spinning away from individuals. Now it is those very organizations that make them feel "out of control." They shun those associations in favor of an unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have the skills to lead, confer, and discuss, and they are not content to be foot soliders. As one political scientist put it, "legitimacy based on inclusion is replacing legitimacy based on hierarchical authority."
This is exactly the situation in media, today. Social media are growing because the "audience" is rejecting the mass market broadcast structure of media, demanding a participative role in a dialog-oriented exchange of information in lieu of coach potatohood. Information that is streaming through non-participatory media is suspect, and inferior to "true voice," and the new post-everything individuals are hip to that, and will not settle for less.
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October 07, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The Five Keys to Building Business Relationships Online
By David Teten with Donna Fisher and Scott Allen
 Building a powerful network of people who are willing and able to help you achieve your goals is the key to business success.
Some people love to network. Unlike cold-calling, there's almost never rejection. And even if you don't get any business results from your activities, you've developed some great friendships and helped a few people along the way. Sound familiar?
But what if you could have your cake and eat it, too?
What if you could build friendships, have fun, be helpful, and get more and better business results just by being more focused and purposeful in deciding where and how to meet new people and develop relationships with them?
This is the only book that will show you sytematically how to evaluate your network, align your relationship-building activities with your business objectives, and increase both the quantity and quality of your business relationships by leveraging the internet.
You will learn how to increase...
- The Number of people in your network -- Reach more people with less effort.
- Their Relevance to your professional goals -- Do more with less effort by knowing the right people.
- The Strength of your relationships with them -- Learn how to build trust and friendship online.
- Your Credibility with the people in your network -- It doesn't matter who you know if they don't believe you.
- The Diversity of your network -- Diversify your portfolio of people just as you do your finances.
You will learn the essential skills for building your network online...
- Using online social networks and communities
- Blogging
- Communicating effectively online
- Netiquette
- Building and maintaining your contact database
- Targeted networking
- Writing for publication
- Web publicity
- Starting and running an email list
- Developing trust and friendship online
Buy it now for just $14.95 and start building your powerful network today!
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September 16, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A new Corante Brief (available here in PDF):
Stowe Boyd
 Consumer instant messaging has led to a communication revolution that has swept worldwide, and is now charging the face of business.
This change involves more than adopting casual and ad hoc IM communication in the business context. The integration of real-time communication into business applications, exploiting the medium for real-time response and resolution of time-critical business events, offers an even greater opportunity for increased business efficiency and competitiveness.
As my proof, I explore the elegant and innovative Opera Instant Messenger solution from Pegasus, which is tightly integrated into the Opera II accounting and business management product line.
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August 06, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I get a sick kind of pleasure (and I don't know why) about the fracas between Radicati and Ferris analysts various Lotus stalwarts over the content of a recent Radicati report that disses IBM's Workplace strategy and supports Microsoft's market approach.
What has happened is an enormous mess:
- Ed Brill, a Lotus executive, posted a link to the report on his weblog, and his readers began reading it, and commenting on it.
- A Radicati analyst (or analysts) posted responses to the criticisms under a psuedonym.
- Various folks uncovered the ID of the Radicati employee, and traced the fact that the same email addresses were used to demand that anti-Radicati bloggers should be fired, including Ed Brill. Various IBM excs recieved such emails.
Sean Gallagher [ Lotus Bloggers and Analysts Brawl, Bogus Postings Alleged]
Radicati said she was surprised by the harshness of the initial response to the white paper. "I'm pretty appalled by it," she said. "We'd never seen the discussion stoop to this level [on blogs] before, particularly the viciousness in which things were discussed."
The white paper, a summary of five recently published reports from The Radicati Group, was critical of IBM Lotus' handling of its roadmap for its Domino messaging server and the upcoming IBM Workplace collaboration platform, calling it an "end-of-life" strategy for Domino and predicting that "many Domino users will migrate away from the platform."
Radicati said the analysis was based on surveys and interviews with corporate executives with purchasing decision power, and an analysis of the information provided by IBM and Microsoft.
"The people who are writing on blogs—those are Lotus diehards, IT managers and midlevel people who've built their career on Lotus," Radicati said. "They're not necessarily the people who hold the purse strings. I think that's where some of the disconnect is."
This affair provides an almost textbook example of the sort of grassroots marketing support that vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems hope to gain by projecting their corporate presence into the blogging world.
At the same time, it also shows how complicated that interaction can be. To be successful, a company's community relationship should be built on honesty and trust—or at least on trust.
I am almost afraid to point out the various white papers I wrote last year, agreeing with the Radicati views on IBM's confused marketing message relative to Microsoft. In February November 2003 [Ed Brill's comment led me to correct this], I wrote First Take: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, where I said the following:
Undoing Sametime: The Battle for the Enterprise
In past years, IBM Lotus Sametime was the solution to beat for enterprise instant messaging, but Sametime is undergoing a wholesale restructuring within a larger IBM product family. Built on the reputation and functionality of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform, Lotus established a leadership position for enterprise real-time collaboration, both instant messaging and web conferencing, with its Sametime product.
As a part of IBM’s move to obsolete the venerable Notes/Domino technology, Lotus Sametime – as well as other collaborative technologies pioneered by Lotus – is being repositioned as a component of WebSphere, IBM’s enterprise application platform. IBM has been reorganizing all collaborative technologies around WebSphere, to the point where Lotus has become little more than a brand under the WebSphere umbrella.
Sametime is being reformulated as two products, Lotus Instant Messaging and Lotus Web Conferencing. Note that nearly all the sophisticated real-time communication capabilities are only available in Lotus Web Conferencing. These include audio and video chat, application sharing, and other advanced features that are native to Live Communications Server.
One element of confusion surrounding IBM’s plans for real-time collaboration is the future of the two products that have been refactored from Sametime. While they are currently sold through a single license, IBM’s is positioning the two as independent products. In the future Lotus Workplace, who knows how they will be licensed or managed? IBM is unclear on this matter.
At the beginning of 2003, Sametime was clearly the market leader for enterprise real-time collaboration. However, in the past ten months IBM has worked to reformulate Sametime as a WebSphere component and is quickly moving away from the Notes/Domino platform. These activities have been the major focus of SameTime development in 2003, instead of providing new functionality.
Consider that in the same period Microsoft has brought the Live Communications Server to market, integrated with the Office 2003 release, and providing very attractive features and functionality when compared with SameTime.
In particular, IBM seems to have turned its back on the desktop, and the productivity benefits for information workers that arise through real-time desktop collaboration. WebSphere provides a portal-style integration strategy for IBM customers, and IBM seems committed to getting its customers to turn their backs on the “in-context” collaboration that naturally emerges from integration of real-time collaboration with Office tools. Even at the January 2003 Lotusphere conference, established and knowledgeable Lotus business partners were questioning the WebSphere strategy, and conjecturing that some of the technological lead that Sametime had over its competitors would be lost as the result of IBM’s strategic priorities taking precedence over product enhancement. It looks now, ten months later, as if the discouraged business partners that I spoke with were right, at least with regard to the impact that the WebSphere strategy would have on Sametime’s technological leadership.
So, although I would seem to be speaking on the side of the malefactors in this recent analyst cat fight, I have to agree with the thrust of Radicati's analytic sentiment, if not their blogging etiquette.
[Pointer from Shared Spaces]
[7 Aug 2004 -- Note: I have struck out the references to Ferris, since I was informed by Michael Sampson that it wasn't Ferris folks, but others, including him (at Shared Space) that got all spun up in this thing.]
[7 Aug 2004 -- Also note: Ed Brill suggests that my comments regarding IBM's 'retreat from the desktop' are, at best, out of date, and at worst, simply wrong. I am open to persuasion! So I hope to interview Ed later this month, and get the walk-through on IBM's Workspace strategy and client technology.]
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April 28, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
My April Social Commentary column is up at Darwin:
Stowe Boyd [from The Ethics and Etiquette of Social Networks - SOCIAL COMMENTARY]
AS SOCIAL NETWORKING solutions become part of the everyday fabric of business life, we need some guidance at the meta social level. When and how should we apply these tools, and how should we respond to others who are applying them in ways that we don't want to go along with? What are the rules of engagement?
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November 25, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The November column is up at Darwin.
[from The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking]
In an editorially schizophrenic show of ambivalence, Business 2.0's November issue lauds social networking — with mentions of offerings from companies like Linkedin, Ryze, Friendster, Spoke and VisiblePath — as the best technology of 2003, while the magazine's lead article warns that the tech bubble is about to blow again. This juxtaposition of tech rise and fall has sparked a strange turn in the media discussion regarding social networking, specifically: Is the bubble around social networking about to burst?
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September 03, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
New "Social Commentary" column at Darwin, where I profile VisiblePath, a very focused relationship management application.
[from Cracking the Social Code]
I think VisiblePath has cracked the code for enterprise adoption of social networking technology, which gets down to business basics and leaves the social altruism aside. It's not just building a better Rolodex: it's keeping your network happy, and at the same time making your partners' wallets fatter when they throw you a lead.
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