How do you get more for less? – The Network effect!

July 30, 2008 at 12:06 pm · Filed under AP, Control, Culture, Michael Rosenblum, Network Effect, Twitter

I was talking with a client the other day and I scared and depressed her – she is already working at more than full stretch. I told here that she would have to find a way to get more for less. I did not know that this is corporate code for more layoffs and the survivors doing more.

What I meant was this.

Many papers and news outlets pay for AP membership. But as these stats from Twitter show – if you want to cover breaking news – Twitter can do it faster. They also do it better in that as a station builds its Twitter gang – as the BPP did – it builds a fanatic membership. Members who do not pay money and get a Coffee Cup – but are true members of the Station Tribe. They work for you but not for money – they work for you because they belong

Imagine your entire state covered in every area – imagine every state connected to every part of the world – now you have a news service. What does it cost? A lot less than AP.

Of course what I am talking about is The Network Effect. This is what I mean by more for less.

I think that this idea can work in every part of a station’s world. Look at me or Mike Rosenblum. Few papers or stations could afford to have Mike or me full time. I can’t speak for mike but I would never be able to restrict myself to one employer anyway – I would learn to little.

But stations can Time Share people like me. This is not transactional consulting. I want to be involved – even when I am not being paid. I worked for NPR for a full year after my contract ended and visited them on my own dime. I still am very attached. There are people with all sorts of skills who want to be attached to you. They want to do more than send a check. They want to be able to say “I work for Public radio and TV” and mean it. These people have tons of skills in all fields.

I am thinking “Tribe” more and more. In your tribe will be people who merely Twitter – they are your news wire and immediate feedback loop. There are regulars who make local content for you – video, audio, call in whtever. There are regulars who find content for you.  There are regulars who help with development.

There are experts in required fields such as media, accounting, legal, and maybe local politics.

I know all of this to be true. So what is in the way?

I think it is organization and culture – oh that again!

I see w new job in media – the Tribal Connector – do you have anyone who hosts the space for the larger Tribe – who looks out and after them? I bet you don’t. In fact many in full time parts of the organization fear the outsider who may know more than them and feel shown up.

In my ancient past I was SVP Marketing for the Investment Bank at CIBC, then the 10th largest bank in North America.  What did I know about marketing? Squat. So I did not build an empire and run it from my pinnacle of ignorance. Instead I hired a person who knew everyone in the field in Toronto. She and our secretary were the only full time people. We attracted and kept a wonderful tribe of the best people in the business. We could turn around anything in any time. All the infrastructure was outsourced but the key members of the tribe were very close. All our budget went on the deliverables.

This worked because we acknowledged that the best people in a creative field would never work full time for a bank. Our job was to get the brief right and to connect to the best people. We did this by creating trust with the inner circle.

No one knows it all. Even less can you know it all when all you do is one thing in one place.

So the way forward I think is to accept that the best people will not work for you full time but that you can get a bit of the best people – if you are nice and if you are straight.

I think that stations can get much more for much less if they were to explore this. Why not try a Twitter Breaking News Tribe First? No risk and you learn how to do this

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Life after Death – BPP Diner?

July 29, 2008 at 12:24 pm · Filed under BPP Diner, Bryant Park Project, NPR, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects

The show Bryant Park Project has been off the air for 2 show days and what is happening?

There are nearly 300 members of the BPP Diner that are assembling at a NIng site that is there to catch the fall out from the show.

This is twice the norms of the Dunbar number of 150 that will assure a healthy self-regulated site. My sense if that the site will grow much larger.

In only a few days I am seeing a number of patterns:

• Grieving – so important to tell the stories of the deceased many are humorous – just like we do after a person has died. In fact part of the site reminds me so much of being with friends and family grieving a loved one. This is so much more than a show being canceled
• Anger – I have set one rule for the site – Just be nice – this is a hard line but most are there but there is a lot of anger
• Relief – one of the parts of BPP that was not there except on Twitter was the ability of the members to interact with each other – many are so happy to be able to do this
• Global – many come from all over the world – we are all a bit stunned by the geography – Russia, France, Israel – so is Public Media really just American anymore?
• Struggle – to learn how the software really works – Ning is very intuitive but now there are a lot of people using it with varied experience – it could be easier – many cant see the Music link and the forum is constrained
• Getting lost – with so many people doing stuff – I can’t keep up any more and I am wondering how we are going to make sense of it all – I am hoping that Groups of interest will form
• It’s a world – the site is so big, so dynamic and so varied already that you can disappear into it for hours – redefines content for me

But I think one of things that we all miss is more structure – a hard core centre of content. I suspect that if we cannot repalce this – the site will die for nostalgia can only supply so much energy

My bottom lne is that the site is a very important experiment – can a community site with only a handful of volunteer admins create enough energy from content to keep us all coming back and to expand the site?

If we can find the answer, then we will have found the holy grail I think

So my friends – what to do – how do we put a sun into the centre of this system that will act as both the gravity pull and the energy push?

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Cloud Computing: Uh Oh, Now It’s Getting Serious

July 29, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Social Computing

The beauty of cloud computing was that it was something you just did without having to think too hard about it. Now, apparently, some people are trying to think very hard about it.

HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have just announced the creation of a “global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.”

What is the purpose of having a test bed?  I mean, isn’t the Internet and its user base the test bed for such things? (This is said partially tongue in cheek…) According to the joint press release, the “official” Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a testing environment to study cloud computing issues “on at a larger scale than ever before.”

The institutions supporting the test bed include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! will also host centers.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational later this year. Parties interested in using the test beds for their own budding cloud applications will need to go through a selection process, however.

This initiative is another sign — a very high-level one at that — of the tectonic shift taking place beneath the feet of the entire computer and software industry. End users are increasingly looking to the network to take advantage of applications, services, and utilities, versus installing and maintaining these artifacts at their own sites.

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It Used to Be All ‘1’s and ‘0’s… Now It’s Social, Too

July 29, 2008 at 10:52 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In the simple old days, being a software developer meant simply writing some code and figuring out a way to sell it. Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder has been poking fun at today’s brave new world of social computing.

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IBM Images in 1975 – How Far Have We Come?

July 27, 2008 at 2:41 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

What were you doing in 1975? The ISO50 blog, aka – The visual World of Scott Hansen – has displayed some great slides from a 1975 IBM presentation. Thanks to the Marktd people for pointing this out. In 1975 I was doing research for my doctorate at the University of Toronto and using equipment that looked a bit like some of these slides. It was punch cards and long waits for batch processing turnarounds. They did have a new Wang machine that would do a limited set of stats in real time. Here is an image from the larger collection in Square America that they did not show.

The ISO50 blog used the images to indicate the excellence in graphics prior to the getting locked into the limits of powerpoint. While I agree that these are more visually appealing, they required specialists and much bigger budgets than putting image making tools, like powerpoint, into the hands of regular user. I think that pre-powerpoint images like these can be inspirations for us to think more creatively with our graphics. We also have digital photography that can be integrated into our images and out blogs.

While I think the images are bolder, they do depict a world where both IT and image making were in the hands of specialists. You can argue that using powerpoint in a session takes away from a more direct connection with the audience. That would apply with these high-powered images also and perhaps they might even create an even greater distance. Here is one more that presents a very different image of what online means than we think today.

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