Being a
casualty of today’s economic climate (aka unemployed) I have been following the
web advances and coming up to speed on Web 2.0 and beyond with my extra
time. Due to location and a last minute ticket
from Ross Mayfield (@Ross) with
SocialText, I was able to get a front row seat to some very eye-opening
information. It certainly fed my data
addiction for two days.
Charlene Li
gave an enlightening presentation
on Harnessing the Implicit Value of the
Social Graph. Starting off with a
statement like “Social Networks will be like air” can get your attention. Charlene then went on to show how traditional
corporate “Walled gardens are breaking down.”
Later in the presentation as she was looking towards the future and
making use of the technology we have available to us she encourages the
audience to “Prepare for the demise of the org chart.”
I would
ordinarily say such lofty ideas are great, but we are a long way from realizing
them. Ordinarily that is, except, I
happened across a blog
on Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical
Innovators by Umair Haque today.
Umair independently validates Charlene’s ideas by pointing out how Barrak
Obama did just this; “By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization.
Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly
controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors,
contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.” This was very similar to the notion that
Charlene was expressing.
Rich Hoeg
and Neeraj Mathur illustrated how their Fortune 500
companies can be seen as leaders in the new social web era. Both individuals are in the process of
establishing extensive social networking operations inside Honeywell and Sun
respectively. This network enables their
companies to leverage the collective brain power they have access to in order
to efficiently perform their corporate functions. Having come from such an environment, I was
truly impressed that these large corporations could be so forward
thinking. It gave me a boost to be free
of my previous employer and hope looking forward to the next one.
The opening presentation - Strategic Intuition and Defrag by Professor William Duggan from the Columbia Business School
and author of Strategic Intuition was
entertaining and informative. Prof.
Duggan used examples from history to show where the “Aha” moment comes from. He pointed out that Carl von Clausewitz gave
us four steps to get this which are:
- Use examples from history – how did someone prior
achieve greatness?
- Presence of mind - Enter the situation and clear your mind of all
preconceptions (what the solution is etc.)
- Flash of insight - shows you what to do. With a clear mind you now know what is
needed.
- Taking off and putting flash into action.
Professor
Duggan also pointed out that “great artists steal” using examples from Picaso
and Thomas Edison. He also related these
individual’s accomplishments to the above steps in order to achieve the Aha
moment. In summary, steal a concept that
was used earlier and apply it to your need today. For example, Larry Page (Google) developed Page
Rank. This idea is an adaptation from an
earlier concept of using academic citations and how often they are cited to
rank university researchers. From this,
why not apply to web pages?
The final
presentation of note was Brian Oberkirch’s “Under Sousviellance: Personal
Informatics & Techniques of the Self.”
This was informative because Brian showed “What happens when you can make
those invisible life patterns visible?”
Brian presented
viewing the web as a stream of data as opposed to distinct web pages. Objects in the world are being automated and
enabled to “throw off data.” Many
services and ideas are coming about with how to more seamlessly make use of
this data. Brian cited and gave many
examples of such companies and devices like:
- Feltron.com - Annual report for
himself, very interesting minutia
- Plodt.com – Chart your life
using Twitter
- Xobni - email analytics
- Dopplr - business traveler
tracking and carbon footprint information
- Fuelly - track data for your
car
- RescueTime - Ridiculously easy
time management
These
services and many others like them begin putting much information about you and
your life out in the open. It raises a
host of questions along with providing a wide array of services.
So when you
have a quite moment, think about your past year. What would you do if you new how many web
pages you visited, how many miles you traveled, how often you communicated with
a loved one. Now, with that information,
what would you do differently in your life going forward?
Did you
have any revelations?
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