One of the most hotly anticipated political news these days is Obama’s coming announcement of who he has picked as his Vice Presidential Nominee. But while most politicians would deliver such news-cycle-dominating stuff during a carefully choreographed photo-op, Obama has decided to do so by sending a mass text message to supporters.
Great (or annoying, depending on your opinion) marketing gimmick for getting people onto the campaign’s text message list, but even more exciting are the other ways in which that list is being used.
First off, Obama uses it to tell supporters the time and location of rallies close to where the live. For a political campaign, mobilizing supporters is a core competency. But it can be difficult to do, especially when events are spur-of-the-momment. Phones often ring unanswered, emails get snagged by spam and sit unread in mailboxes for days. Text messages are received and read pretty much instantaneously, and irrespective of where the recipient is. They are also more personal than a mass email or recorded telemessage, meaning its more likely people will pay attention to them, and much less resource-intensive than a person-to-person phone call.
Second, Obama texts his supporters policy updates. I know: BORING. That’s what I thought at first. But think about it. If McCain attacks Obama, Obama’s supporters know the rebuttal before they have even heard McCain’s attack. And, they’re going to be spreading that message to people they know. Conservative TV commentators have long been accused of reciting talking points sent to them straight from the Republican Party. Whatever your view of the ethics behind that, you must admit it is an effective way to get out the message. Replace those TV commentators (which generally attract audiences with median ages of over 60) with hundreds of thousands, even millions of ordinary people of every race and every class in every corner of the country, and you have a pretty big bull horn.
Meanwhile, John McCain has yet to use text messaging at all. And I don’t just mean his campaign, I mean him personally as well. LOL I can’t wait till November.
Joystiq, a popular gaming blog, has a post up about how EA has handled a potentially embarassing situation surrouding their video game Tiger Woods ‘08 that cropped up on YouTube. Youtube user Levinator25 discovered an issue where Tiger Woods could walk on water, allowing him to make the “jesus shot.” Levinator25 uploaded a video of what he assumed to be a glitch in the game. Check out EA’s response:
It seems that hardly a day passes without a journalist trashing the blogosphere - and for some reason it tends to happen most often when someone is writing about sports. Christie Blatchford is among the most recent - see “I’m not blogging this, mark my words” on the Globe and Mail website. While I’ve written about this topic fairly extensively before (see here, here, and here in particular), a few of her points - all centered around the negative effect blogs are having on journalism - made me want to dig into the subject a little more. Notably:
And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.
Last week I directed a leadership retreat for the student leaders at the Center for the Advancement of Leadership. The past couple of years I have helped develop and train students involved in the program. As I presented the different workshops, I was reminded of the blog post that Mike Dover wrote a few months back about movies that represent a generation.
Leaders have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what the Net Gen want. Many of the answers may lie in what they pay to watch.
What are people saying about Wikinomics this week across the blogosphere?
Daniell Pritchett’s blog, sharing at work, talks about seven great communities for sharing ideas for collaboration in the workplace.He says that the Wikinomics Blog is his first stop!Thanks for all your great comments on the blog, Daniel!
Singapore Entrepreneurs talk about how Wikinomics principles are being applied in the new Singapore-based business Gogme.biz.Gogme plans to harness the minds, resources and pockets of individuals world-wide to kick-off three new businesses.They will whittle down an initial pool of 50 business plans down to 3 via votes from its membership. The final three plans will then be implemented.
Jon Mott talks about the Wikinomics of education.He talks about Web 2.0 technology in education and that it has yet to be fully utilized and that educators need to do a better job of making education more modular.
Louis Columbus talks about how Twitter can be used to enhance customer relationships on the Perfect Customer Experience blog.
JMadigan.net is reading and reviewing 52 books in 52 weeks.#36 on the list was Wikinomics.Interesting idea.The review isn’t entirely positive, but still recommends the book as a good read.He even mentions how he witnessed the power of collaboration while working at Gamespy.com (a service I used in the early days of online gaming).
Come back next week for more links across the blogosphere.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before something like this came along and I have been anxiously waiting to see how this one pans out. Launched in July, on seemingly razor-thin legal ice, it appears that beta site mygazines is still alive and kicking (not to mention enjoying the spotlight gained from a widespread AP news release).
The site provides member-scanned full digital copies of magazines, which can be browsed, shared, archived and even re-assembled to create aptly-named “mygazines”. The site is hosted by Stokholm-based PRQ, “the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company“, which is also host to (and owned by two founders of) well-known bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay.
Interestingly, the site tour appears to be targeted at publishers, pitching itself as multi-faceted growth opportunity, but most industry leaders asked aren’t exactly jumping at the “opportunity”.
Why should I upload my publication to mygazines.com?
Our article-level search and archiving ability allows your audience to find the content they’re looking for faster
Increase your distribution and advertising revenue by exposing your publication to more eyes
Keep control of your publication: Mygazines will not allow for downloading or printing of your publication. Your original source file is never accessible.
Save the trees - no paper will be used in the making of your virtual publication
I’m doing some research with Accenture about benefits and challenges of hiring serious gamers (most of our research is based on games like World of Warcraft). There are plenty of upsides to hiring these people such as the ability to lead groups in remote locations, quickly analyze and react to data, create custom interfaces, divide up resources (and share spoils of war) etc. In fact, some people consider the leadership ability required of a successful WoW guild to be similar to that of a CEO of a small company.
I interviewed our friend Bruce Stewart about gaming and leadership and he brought up a good point. Old School games such as Dungeons & Dragons also indicated some potential for success in the workplace, despite it’s reputation as a game played in dark basements by mouth-breathing losers. Full disclosure: I was NOT the quarterback of my high school football team and am not proud of how much I enjoyed this article.
Role-playing games ruled by paper maps and dice developed the imagination more than (or at least in different ways) than videogame versions because the only limits are with the dungeon master’s imagination. These players, especially, have developed skills in communication, organization, and scenario planning.
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup! This time around, we’re going to do a two week roundup, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout that period. There’s some great material so take a look!
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.
I wrote a few months ago about Facebook’s translation initiative launched to get Facebook translated into many, if not all, languages around the world. I was in a meeting with Don Tapscott the other day and he mentioned a talk he had with the top Facebook people who told him a bit more about their experience with the translating application so far.
They started with the Spanish translation which was finished in less than a month by about 1,500 volunteers – since then it’s had around 8,594 translators and 66,274 translations submitted. It has been so popular that Facebook has introduced translations for specific Spanish locales like Spain, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela…The German translation was next and took less than two weeks with around 2,000 contributors. The French translation of Facebook took a few days to complete and involved close to 10,000 people! A total of 67,445 translations have been submitted so far.
There are currently 63 languages open for translation on Facebook and they will be adding translation capability for languages that read from right-to-left such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Now that’s pretty impressive, how much money and how much time do you think it would have taken if Facebook had hired a person, or even a team of people to translate their site into French or Spanish (let’s not even start thinking about 63 languages).
If you have ever fancied yourself as something of an amateur inventor or designer but never seemed to have the resources to make your vision a reality, your day may have finally arrived.
Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.
3-D printing’s uses are virtually unlimited. Small businesses and startups can order prototypes for potential customers, artists can have a new medium with which to play, friends can create their own unique gifts to give, and prosumers can whip up a redesign for a company.
In an age when Starbucks’ die-hard caffeine addicts spend hours combing mystarbucksidea.com for ways to improve a business in which they have no professional stake in, it’s not a stretch to see similarly devoted customers producing actual mock ups of improved products for a favorite brand. But will it really catch on?
Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson thinks so. He told MIT’s Technology Review that he thinks people will eventually have these printers at home.
Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?
Rasmussen Reports just released some interesting results from a recent telephone survey in the United States. Nearly half of Americans “believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, but they draw the line at imposing that same requirement on the Internet.” By “drawing the line”, they mean that 57% do not believe the government should force balance of commentary on individual Internet sites - but 31% still do. That’s still uncomfortably high for me.
You need to be a premium member to get access to the demographic cross-tabs, but I would assume that age is the primary dividing line here: I can’t imagine too many Net Geners who grew up “bathed in bits” would support the balance initiative, but I could just as easily understand how people who don’t use the Internet (or don’t use it too often), which is a much older demographic, could be drawn into supporting it.
Such people would come from a broadcast media mindset, where certain individuals could consolidate control of dominant media assets, and thus control the political messaging that the vast majority of people are exposed to (think: the one newspaper town). Read More »
Photosynth (ted talk, demo page, our coverage), a project acquired by Microsoft, made for one of the coolest tech demos to grace the internet in a very long time. The experience that Photosynth provided by inferring 3d structures from collections of 2d pictures made for a very rich — and jaw dropping — user experience. But not rich enough, it seems: Microsoft has a competing project another such tool from some people on that team, developped jointly with the University of Washington. Introducing Photo Tourism (project homepage, /. coverage). Check out the video:
Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step? Read More »
One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.
7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.
To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:
The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…
As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.
As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.
An article on CNN.com last week tells about a 25 year old teacher from the Netherlands who identified a whole new class of celestial objects. The amazing thing is that she has no formal training in astronomy or astrophysics. She is simply a member of the large online stargazing community called Galaxy Zoo. Anyone can join this community.
The site gives users instructions on how to identify objects and then lets the community go wild. Members are given access to high-resolution photos of outer-space. Everyone is then allowed to identify the objects, and if enough members concur the classification is accepted. The format is similar to Wikipedia.
This site is a great example of the power of open source communities. There are literally endless amounts of celestial objects to be identified. With the help of everyday people, scientists are able to chart the night’s skies with speed and accuracy that was never before possible.
If you are looking for a new hobby check out Galaxy Zoo, and you can become an astronomer without ever leaving your living room.
For those who have not yet heard, Don and I are working on a sequel to Wikinomics that will lift the lid on a wide range of topics that we did not really get to in wikinomics 1.0. So, for example, we’ll be examining how mass collaboration is changing education, health care, science, government, democracy, international advocacy and national security.
Based on our early conversations, I’m already convinced that we’ll surface a whole new set of meaty themes that shed new light on the emerging wiki world. But If the experience is anything like writing the last book, those themes will probably not be apparent until we’re more than 50% through the writing process! So that’s where you, and the broader the wikinomics community, come in. Read More »
For the past 2 years or so there has been much debate in the office about the state of the economy. My colleague Denis Hancock had a great post on the state of the housing market that highlighted this very interesting mash-up of historical US housing prices and Atari RollerCoaster Tycoon(R) 3. Now that we are clearly in the midst of an economic slump, there are many debates about what got us here and how it can be remedied.
During recessions company’s start to hunker down, prepare to weather the storm. We have seen this in our clients in terms of budget cuts, hiring freeze’s and even more aggressive staffing cutbacks. Regardless of the how you spin it, downsizing, streamlining or put more transparently ‘layoffs’, the point is that organization are looking to cut costs and do more (or at least the same) with less.
Personally this seems to be a perfect opportunity for Web 2.0 tools and technologies to further penetrate the enterprise. Collaborative tools are a lightweight, low cost technology designed to drive faster communication, more efficient collaboration and greater transparency in organizations. If you are an organization trying to do more with less this would seem to be the ideal solution.
Google Docs are not new. All the same, last week Caleb, Will, Jude, Ben and I decided to try using them for a project at the office. Up until then, I had only ever used Google Spreadsheets as an in-the-cloud host for files I was working on, or to share files with people easily for asynchronous editing. This was not the case for our project. Instead, we used it synchonously.
The project was to go through our research catalogue and back-tag existing content with a standard set of tags. To accomplish this, we needed to define the standard set of tags in a way that was easily accessible for all of us, and somehow it didn’t seem like that we’d enjoy much success copying and pasting from a physical whiteboard. So, we figured we’d try out Google Spreadsheets for an in-office project. It was awesome. Read More »
Late last week, newly-famed MIT students Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa were court-ordered to cancel their Sunday presentation entitled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack” at DEF CON , the world’s largest hacker conference. The banned presentation highlighted security weaknesses in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s fare system that would potentially allow enterprising individuals with the appropriate technology and process (as intricately outlined in the presentation) to add monetary value to their existing CharlieCard or CharlieTicket to receive free transportation.
The injunction has ignited a debate over the ruling’s merit, which names each of the students as well as MIT in the temporary restraining order. The MBTA has taken issue with the fact that the “students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws”, while the students’ representative from the Electronics Frontier Foundation (EFF) says “the students were simply trying to share their research and planned to omit key information that would make things easier for anyone who actually wanted to hack the payment system.”
There always seems to be some debate as to how synchronous communications tools like instant messaging affect productivity. The younger Net Generation workers in the office tend to love it – preferring it over e-mail. The affinity for instant messaging comes from years of growing up with it and using it for communication among friends; but, do the benefits really carry into a work environment? I personally don’t use IM because I find it kills my productivity, but there are others that swear by it. Is it because they grew up using it, or is it truly more efficient?
Think about other synchronous methods of communications, such as phone calls, and even face-to-face conversations. Anecdotally, people talk about “getting more work done at home, away from distractions” or the time wasted in meetings and conference calls. How then is it that instant messaging is so different?
I’ve been thinking about if for a little while and I’m becoming increasingly convinced that synchronous communications of all kinds, while sometimes necessary, are not necessarily the most efficient way to get work done. Read More »
2018 - A Vision of the Future
One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera's Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a [...]
