Archive for Collective intelligence
by Anita Campbell
October 28, 2008 at 8:58 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Collective intelligence, social tools
Here’s an example of crowd-sourced intelligence in action, when it comes to social media:
Peter Kim put together a big list of business uses of social media. Then with the input of his readers, he’s expanded the original list and as of this writing there are 279 brands listed, with references to how they are using social media.
The list includes everything from Daimler’s Slideshare account, to Intuit’s Tax Almanac wiki, to the Progressive Insurance traffic widget on Yahoo. There are non-profits, media, government and military organizations represented too.
Now you might wonder, “what’s so unusual about a list that readers have contributed to?” Nothing, actually. Happens all the time on blogs and wikis.
But it did not stop with one list.
Then another blogger sliced and diced his list. You see, Peter had divided his list according to brands/organizations. Then Ray Schiel of the Global Social Media Network divided the list according to applications and functionality. Thus, if you want to see which big brands are podcasting, for instance, it’s easy to see at a glance. Want to know which big brands have a YouTube channel? You can find that out too, with the list of organizations involved in online video.
by Jenny Ambrozek
September 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Management, Talent Management
Marking Infoworld’s 30th birthday 9/23/08 their staff and IDG review the series of past future shocks “from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone.” to look ahead to the potential future shocks in the next 10 years. The list makes an intriguing read:
1. Triumph of the cloud
2. Cyborg chic
3. Everything works
4. Nothing escapes you
5. Smartphones take center stage
6. Human-free manufacturing
7. Perfect image recognition
8. Big Brother never sleeps
9. Unbroken connectivity
10. Relationship enhancement
Infoworld has summoned a thoughtprovoking list, but I wonder from your perspective, how many of these future shocks are already arrived? Contributor Bob Lewis’s observations about the potential of human-free manufacturing to impact job loss and wage decline particularly caught my attention:
“Right now, manufacturing in the U.S. is up, while manufacturing employment is down. By 2018, automation will have hit enough labor sectors that while the GDP will continue to grow, fewer and fewer people will receive that growth in the form of wages. This will drive either social collapse or the establishment of a no-apologies welfare state.”
Infoworld’s list makes me think about the individual and organizational challenges the next 10 years of technology innovation will bring. How will people and enterprizes adapt to put these new tools to work positively?
Stories and analyses emerging from the financial industry failures witnessed in recent weeks and months remind us of the crtical human factor in successful technology adoption. False human judgements about risk levels built into trading algorithms and platforms failed to highlight the serious and contagious financial losses accumulating in global organizations. Further, as my colleague Victoria Axelrod eloquently articulates (most recently during our KMWorld Open Networks for Co-Generating Knowledge workshop), how rapidly will organizations move to adapt compensation programs to reward more effective ways of working emerging technology enables?
Thoughts anyone? Meantime if you would like to participate in a collective intelligence project to project the future in 2019, the Institute for the Futures’s SuperStruct Game begins October 6, 2008 here: http://superstructgame.org/
~ Jenny Ambrozek
by Jim Ware
September 26, 2008 at 4:11 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Communities, Reviews, social networks, social tools
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a recluse, and not ready to become an “Island, entire unto myself” (to quote John Dunne).
But I’m getting more than a little overwhelmed by all these different social networking websites – LinkedIn, PlaxoPulse, Facebook, and there must be a couple of others that I’ve somehow been dragged into joining (though the fact that I can’t remember what they are says something about how (un)important they are to my life and work).
Seriously, though, I know many people find one or more of these networks meaningful and even helpful in their life and their work. And I’ve followed the recent research on “the tribalization of organizations” by Beeline Labs with genuine interest.
But for me right now these network sites seem more peripheral than central to my daily routine. I mean, it’s occasionally nice to find out something about one of my colleagues/associates/friends. But it really feels like most of my interaction with these networks is when someone reaches out and wants to become my “friend” or Linked to me – and about 90% of the time I literally don’t them from Adam. What I find really frustrating is that these folks who either don’t know me at all, or in many cases are a friend of a friend, send me the canned/impersonal Invitation Request – no effort to personalize it or tell me why they want to link up with m, or what’s in it for me.
Again, don’t get me wrong – I do see plenty of potential value in these networks for some people (though I get the sense that many of the folks who are actively using the networking sites are in the job market and are just blasting the linking invitation to everyone in their address book).
So what am I missing? Which of these networks is good for what? Help me – I’m really curious, and for a self-proclaimed futurist, more than a little embarrassed at what a neophyte I am about what is obviously one of the most important stories about collaborative technologies and their impact on both business and life in 2008.
Tags: 
LinkedIn 
PlaxoPulse 
FaceBook 
socialnetworking 
futureofwork
by Jenny Ambrozek
September 4, 2008 at 9:19 am · Filed under
Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Videoconferencing, Web Commuting
Did anyone else hear John Chambers interviewed on CNBC Wednesday September 3? The video is available here.
In response to a question from Australian telecommunications company Telstra’s CEO Saul Eslake about new ways for companies to grow organically, Chambers talked about the growth in video, telepresence and visual networking and it’s potential to increase productivity.
Chambers made the case that the load on Cisco’s network grew 400% last year with rising use of video a key factor. He forecasts generally 200-300% network load growth with increased use of video and telepresence.
Cisco’s CEO argued that while there has been a lull in U.S. productivity growth following the 3-5% during 1996-2004, he forecasts increases going forward driven by the Internet’s second wave built around visual networking and collaborative capabilities like wikis, blogs, discussion forums and telepresence.
Clearly given Cisco’s WebEx and other collaboration tools acquisitions Chamber’s promoting telepresence has a clear business agenda. Still the discussion about use of telepresence and visual networking in the context of a challenging high fuel costs, slow growth economic environment makes the case for less physical travel and increased technology enabled collaboration compelling.
John Chamber’s forecasts make Celine Roque’s recent post here about Are the reasons against telecommuting valid? a must read especially her closing call to action:
“..these obstacles should be seen as challenges and opportunities for businesses and their employees to grow together and actually make things work.”
No doubt the technology to support remote collaboration will continue to arrive and to compete enterprises must figure how to leverage and adapt organizationally.
~ Jenny Ambrozek
by Anita Campbell
July 26, 2008 at 8:36 am · Filed under
Collective intelligence, Web Apps
David Meerman Scott wrote a book called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” In it he talks about using online content to market and reach customers directly.
One of his underlying premises is that providing good content widely and freely online is a powerful way to market a product or service. As David says, “It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.”
That brings me to the point of my article today:
The new breed of content aggregation sites available on the Web should be viewed as valuable business applications.
These sites can play an integral role in our marketing to reach prospective buyers, if we just learn how to use them.
WHAT ARE CONTENT AGGREGATION SITES?
The designation “content aggregation sites” can refer broadly to anything from a blog to an RSS feedreader to Wikipedia. But I am using it in a narrower context. I am specifically referring to large public sites designed specifically to share knowledge, documents and other content.
Examples of the kinds of sites I mean include:
Work.com
Google’s Knol
Squidoo
HubPages
Scribd
Google Base
YouTube
eZine Articles
There are hundreds more, especially of the article submission sites and places to submit press releases for free. The ones I’ve listed are just some of the bigger, better-known sites.
These are sites that are open to all comers. A basic account costs nothing — they are free. Once you set up an account you simply add your content: upload it (YouTube and Google Base) or compose it (Work.com and Knol) or curate it (Squidoo).
What these sites give you is an outlet or distribution channel for your content — assuming you have quality information to share. You get the potential to reach a wider audience than on your own website, blog, email list or direct mail list — all through being included in the central site or database.
By sharing content publicly you have the potential to interest people enough to find out more about you, your business, your products, your services. These are people who may become buyers.
BUT WE ALREADY USE THESE SITES SOMETIMES
Most businesses are not leveraging these content aggregation sites anywhere near the extent they could.
Most of us tend to look on such sites as places for entertainment, or as places we occasionally visit to research information or get a question answered after they pop up in the search engine results. Or maybe we just view them as Web 2.0 curiosities we’re not quite sure the value of.
Instead, why not look on them as an important channel to distribute valuable information — and in the process help us market?
If we are marketing/sales people and small-businesspeople, we should be incorporating these kinds of sites into our marketing plans.
We should be training our people how to use these sites (and use them responsibly).
We should make mastering such sites a part of the job duties of specific people on our teams — they need to know how to use these sites just like we might require employees to know Excel, PowerPoint, Oracle or Salesforce.com.
IT IS NOT ABOUT SPAMMING
This isn’t about exploiting these content aggregation sites in order to spam or to plaster blatant sales brochures all over the Web. It has to be valuable content you are sharing freely. Assuming you don’t cross the line from useful content to spammy junk or blatant link-dropping sales pitches, your distribution of content can pay off.
Some businesses already have figured this out. For instance, there are search engine optimization (SEO) firms with teams of people who do nothing but create and repurpose content for clients on content aggregation sites.
When taken to extremes, these activities end up spammy and of little value and they give a bad rap to using such sites. But such activities don’t have to be. It’s up to you to use these sites responsibly.
But use them you should. Consider them important business applications. Pick and choose the ones most relevant to the business you are in. Work them into your marketing plans and your everyday operations and systems. Train employees to use them and consider them critical business applications — and not just curiosities.
by Jenny Ambrozek
July 9, 2008 at 1:52 pm · Filed under
Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0
Offices without people sitting at computers are unimaginable today but it was not so 60 years ago. Under the title: “Tea-shop Boffin who pioneered business computing” the June 28 Financial Times obituary of David Caminer 1915-2008 reminds us:
“ A more incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster’s name was Leo. It was the world’s first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.”
Leo and it’s master seemed very far away the July 4 weekend as I followed a Twitter conversation about “ambient intimacy” begun by Mastermark who Tweeted:
mastermark On OSX, with Adium, that even comes with Growl notification windows, so the full ambient intimacy program is in effect. 08:24 PM July 03, 2008 from Ping.fm
For those unacquainted with “ambient intimacy” the term is attributed to Leisa Reichelt and dates to a March 1, 2007 blog post that explains:
“I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy.
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.”
Mastermark on Twitter, Mark Masterson in the real world, is an obviously seriously talented and thoughtful software architect, whose reading interests range from Bertrand Russell to Kurt Gödel. If I understand correctly, Mark used the term “ambient intimacy’ in the context of implementing Identi.ca, the emerging open sources challenger to Twitter, to ensure signals from all his social networks were ambiently present. Mastermark’s blog post describing his effort is recommended reading.
From Leo to Mastermark enabling Identi.ca to maximize ambient intimacy, I couldn’t help but wonder where to from here? If the demo pavilion at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Boston is any indicator established and new enterprise platform providers have their programmers very engaged inserting “social network” functionality. However, how will the availability of “ambient intimacy” change, or not, the nature of work and organizations?
Whether you are a Twitter enthusiast, opponent, or observer, your insights please.
~ Jenny Ambrozek
by Patti Anklam
June 30, 2008 at 5:09 pm · Filed under
Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Learning, Web 2.0
A colleague of mine teaches a course in Online Social Networks the Computer Science department at Boston University. He’s done it for two years now, and his teach method has come under some scrutiny, for what he does is pretty novel in a traditional university setting. During the course, each student needs to create a web site as part of required credits for the course work. What my friend doesn’t do it is either to tell them how to do it, or provide him with tools for web site building. He gives them enough direction so that they know where to look and get started, but after that they are on their own — almost. What he aims for is that the students will ask each other what they are doing, where they found good (free) tools to build web sites, and so on. Most of his students come away delighted with the course, though there are always a few who complain that B. doesn’t teach them anything. They overlook, of course, the fact that they actually learned a good deal.
I had similar experience recently during Enterprise 2.0 and the blogging panel that I was on (see my blog on this at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness). I am saving some bits about content and conversation for a more comprehensive note here on the AppGap anon. We on the panel had decided that we would like to do less talking and more listening so we did not do a usual panel with powerpoints. We merely introduced ourselves and started a conversation, intending to be open to questions and comments from the audience. We ended with a really rich discussion about blogging for business (that was, in fact, not really the topic we’d prepared to discuss). The audience participation was great, including a lot of information about blogging that we as panelists would never have known. Yet, in the conference wrap-up session, I took note when one of the attendees offered the comment that she was very unhappy with panels that didn’t provide content. That is, she came to be taught, and not to enter into a conversation. (We also had attendees who were thrilled with the way it all turned out.)
Learning from each other is a recurring theme for John Seely Brown (JSB), whom I heard talk a few months ago at a client’s. What he said was, “Learning from each other matters.” Speaking of formal education, he said, “we learn from other people in the room, not from graduate school.” Think of the best courses, the best seminars that you attend. Aren’t these the ones that generate the most conversation, that inspire people to share their stories? Learning occurs socially, which is why he feels strongly that Web/Enterprise 2.0 represents the future of learning.
At a subsequent panel on “Developing a Next Generation Workforce,” led by Mike Gotta. That was another great exercise in learning from each other. The conversation wanted to talk mostly about the “millennials/Generation Y” and the impact of their entrance into the workforce. An Xer piped up and made a comment that makes me understand how this shift to social learning is generational. She said, “It all goes back to how we learned in elementary school. When I was in school, we were told that when we finished our assignment we could work quietly on homework or other reading. The Gen-Yers are told that when they finish, they should help someone else.”
I see this as all of a piece: learning to share, learning to learn from others. The role of the instructor? As Andrew McAfee put it (in yet another session at E2.0), the best advice he received when he started teaching at Harvard was to “trust your students,” that is, to set up a classroom environment in which the students are learning not (just) from the teachers, but from each other and collectively building up knowledge.
Person Andrew McAfee
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