Top 10s for ’10

It’s nearly the season to make merry – but it seems that it’s already the season for people to start making predictions for the coming year. I’m going to start a collection of interesting ones, hanging off this post, in an attempt to revitalise my blogging instinct.

Here’s Verizon’s top 10 in which Enterprise Social Networking comes top. No surprises there then, and this is something that we’ve been discussing with clients for a couple of years now. Couple of barriers to takeup – the lack of any really good tools, and the reluctance of business to see the real value in social tools for collaboration and effective working. Clearly, many companies still see social interaction as a distraction from the important cut-and-thrust of work, and lock down their employees’ access to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. Time to reconsider surely – we need to start seeing the ability to collaborate and communicate in a more natural way as a differentiator, and something that’s vital to success rather than an inhibitor.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time this year travelling backwards and forwards to the Middle East, and found myself wishing for better tools than we’re currently using – and on the back of this, to work with people that find it second nature to work remotely when required. We’re still not very good at it.

Google Caffeine increases social media prominence?

As more and more people give Caffeine a whirl, the increased prominence of results from the social media sphere appears to be a widespread phenomenon.

Interesting piece questioning the value of increased prominence of social media content within Google’s new, Caffeine-enhanced search engine results pages. The author suggests that maybe there isn’t extra value to be had from doing this – because relevancy is the most important thing in a search set.

via Econsultancy

TedGlobal 2009 Day 2 Session 1

Thanks to the very lovely Wieden+Kennedy, who kindly dedicated one of their  spanky (new?) auditoriums to screening a live stream from the TedGlobal 2009 conference, I and a few other LBi / ex-LBi folk enjoyed the first session from TED’s seminal conference series. Some highlights:

• Jonathan Zittrain began the day by talking about random acts of kindness, and the potential for the simplifying things by removing some of the rules. He gave the example of a road crossing that had been overhauled, and traffic controls removed. Accident rates dramatically dropped. There are obvious learnings for people that design interaction…
• I learned that Jimmy Wales didn’t originally intend Wikipedia to be quite so altruistic. I love stories like that (see: Flickr). His first intention was to develop a far more traditional encyclopaedia called ‘Newpedia’, in which experts proved their credentials before being invited to write articles.
• In an interesting contrast to many social media commentators, Evgeny Morozov suggested that a more networked and contributing populace might actually help many totalitarian regimes (see Mashable’s guide to following the Iranian elections) create open source intelligence. “The KGB used to torture people for this information, now it’s all online!”
• Asa Raskin’s demo of Ubiquity, an approach to using natural language to carry out tasks on the web that would currently demand a high level of effort. He gave the example of translating a block of text within a web page by selecting a paragraph and typing ‘translate this’ – and because the user’s context (language, intention) is already known, the tool can instantly carry out the action.
• And finally, Rory Sutherland‘s inspired talk on creating value from intangibles. And diamond shreddies had the audience in stitches…

Reputation…or…history?

Interesting piece that positions traditional views of reputation against a sense of history. In a world where everything is increasingly recorded, it asks if this is more important than an ephemeral sense of someone’s worth. Facts versus ‘opinion’…

The Cult of the Amateur Professional

It seems my return to blogging is out of time. The blogosphere is now rife with professional bloggers, online magazines and long-form writers, according to Wired. Instead it’s much easier to post pictures to Flickr and send Twitter updates.

True ‘dat.

But I guess it depends what you want or need out of writing in public…and if audience size ain’t your prerogative or you’re not eking out a living from your bloggy skills then what the hell. It’s not gonna stop me, I tell you…

UPDATE: Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 seems to point the same way, although it’s interesting that it backs up blogging as being a more reflective approach to writing than many of the upstart microblogging tools allow.

I agree – blogging for me has always been about the ritual of deepening my knowledge in a particular issue. It forces you to critique, to have a position and to enter the conversation…assuming that you have an engaged audience, of course. Otherwise you’re blowing smoke into a gale…

Google’s Friend Connect

So now Google jumps into the fray with their Friend Connect, a universal profile that will allow people to maintain one single profile across a number of different social sites. This concept has been talked about for ages now, and I guess it’s good that we’re seeing it come into fruition, with a number of other high profile sites such as Facebook and Myspace making similar plays.

It’s all about data portability, and that has to be a Good Thing, but I really do wonder how each of these sites intend to capture those ‘first use’ users that haven’t stepped into the social web world? Surely the valuations of all the major social players are based on the numbers of people registering with them, their data, and the friends that they bring with them – and as such, are we going to see a shift in how we measure their success on the back of this?

Via: Mashable

Brands becoming porous

Hot on the heels of my post about My Starbucks Idea, I thought I’d share a couple of pieces of Brand 2.0 love that I’ve come across recently:

• The church of co-creation and community, Communities Dominate Brands: go here for some deep insight into how some companies are recognising the (well-documented) need to get closer to their customers, and embed them into their processes.
• Understanding what co-creation actually means: by Corante.

I’m starting to think of brands as being porous – for the reason that the word ‘porous’ implies a flow into something, but in a gradual, slow-but-sure way. It’s not like most large businesses move (to use Tom Peters’ phrase) at the speed of light, and yet they’re waking up to the fact that they have to constantly shift and adapt to the changing needs of their customers. So…porous.

My Starbucks Idea

This is fabulous example of a global company reaching out to its customer base and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas on how to reinvigorate its customer experience. Of course, the idea is only as good as Starbucks’ willing to adopt any of the suggestions that are made – and from what I’ve seen, they’re taking steps to do just that.

I’d like to see more companies taking this kind of approach – and it ties into some thinking I’ve been doing recently around brands and how they become more porous… 

My statistical addiction

I had the sudden realisation, the other day, that my current daily routine takes in a number of different statistical feeds – and this set me to thinking that *this* is part of the reason that creating your own content is fun. It’s the sense of audience that gives you more of a perspective on the stuff that you put out there.

So, I check out my Flickr stats on a regular basis, then I check my blog stats, and finally, less frequently, I check out LastFM stats for Inaura, one of the bands I used to play with.

It’s this stuff that is ‘sticky’ for me – and I’m not normally obsessed by stuff like this…

Yahoo oneConnect aims to draw together your social connections

…and allow you to keep in touch with what’s happening across all of your different social networks – via your mobile phone. Really interesting – I just hope they have web integration as well as it would be nice to familiarise with a single aggregation service across multiple platforms.

Link.

I’ve recently been questioning RSS as a channel for absorbing the ‘noise’ of different networks. For me, I’d like to separate out my social interaction (which I see as an ongoing social dialogue) from my day-to-day feed consumption. It just feels too cluttered.

And one other thing I’ve noticed is the value of a good email newsletter. Lo-tech, huh??! I subscribe to the daily Urban Junkies newsletter, and it’s a really well crafted piece of content that points me at some of the best things that’re going on in London. If I had the RSS feed it probably wouldn’t keep so much of my attention – which makes me think that the increased relevance and personalisation of content is key for many of the different ‘trusted voice’ web services that are out there at the moment.