The Voice of the Revolution

February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution, barriers

Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08.  It details the actions of Ford of Canada:

FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.

The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”

The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.

“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.

I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).

I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?

It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.

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Profound Shift: The Attention Economy Emerges

February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory

John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.

As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”

Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.

“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.

Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:

“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”

So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.

John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”

These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.

To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.

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Enterprise 2.0 Opportunities are No Fool’s Gold

February 19, 2008 at 3:36 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Change, Collaboration, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Messy World, Social Networking, Wikinomics

In his keynote at FastForward 08, Don Tapscott asked a question I’ve always wondered about: “Why does the ‘firm’ exist? …Why isn’t everybody an independent contractor at every step of the proecss?”

I’ve always felt that there’s entrepreneurial energy in all of us, and that being relegated to worker bee roles stifles that innovation, locking it into a 9 to 5, two-week-vacation-a-year cage.

Don answered the question with the fact that the cost of transactions has historically been too high for most of us to bear.

Well, the times, they are a changing. Enterprise 2.0 has changed that equation dramatically. Don pointed out that collaboration costs have dropped dramatically, to the point where people are peers, and the can interact beyond the bounds of the traditional corporation.

Don offered an example of Goldcorp, a mining company, which had the challenge of locating new sources of the mineral within its properties.The company’s in-house staff of geologists were unable to identify new sources with the information they had. The CEO decided to open up all the information it had on its properties, including geological data, and offered a reward to anyone out on the net who could help locate new sources. Geologists and non-geologists alike offered information that led to new finds, and the company has grown from $90 million to $10 billion in assets.

Dare I say it? There’s gold out in them thar Enterprise 2.0 hills.

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McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 Economics

February 19, 2008 at 2:12 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08

Bill Ives and Sandy Kemsley have posted thorough reviews on Andrew McAfee’s (the patron saint of Enterprise 2.0) keynote at FastForward ‘08 on what’s happening in the Enterprise 2.0. You can catch the essence of McAfee’s talk from Sandy and Bill.

McAfee brought up an interesting point about something that has not been discussed enough up to this point — the role of incentives in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 use. Namely, that any incentives should be “soft” incentives, and the movement would be well served if collaboration were written into employee evaluations. (Hmm. How ’bout a nice pat on the back?)

Alas, however, the challenge is that companies will talk a good game about being all hip and collaborative and Web 2.0-ified, but when it comes down to the carrots and sticks to make it all a reality, they won’t do it. That’s because many managers work and are paid to work within siloed domains.

Getting Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the door and accepted is a challenge within itself. McAfee says even those most enlightened vendors and end users find it “hard to build good technology that is uncluttered, avoids feature creep, avoids love affairs with bells and whistles.” Managers, he said, “want to use technology to get through “pre-existing worklflows.”

And that is a challenge to gain acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 in the entreprise, which in turn will show up in job descriptions and incentive plans.

Where to start? Look for current technologies or processes that are causing people to scream in pain. “If people aren’t frustrated with what they’re doing now, getting them to move and change their work practices is going to be even more difficult.”

Moving to new technology approaches is a very painful process in and of itself, even if the move is to lightweight and collaborative applications. But this pain should be outweighed by the current pain being felt. That’s today’s challenge, McAfee said.

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Web 2.0 May be ‘Recession Proof’ — Here’s Why

February 13, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Donut, Economics, Messy World, New Realities, User Revolution, Web 2.0

A couple of weeks back, I ran a couple of posts (here and here) that talked about how social networking and Web 2.0 technologies may make things different for people in the next economic downturn — be it this year or some other time in the future. New technologies and online services may help empower people to forge through lean times with new opportunities, versus becoming victims of the economy — as has been the case in times gone by.

Rob Paterson just posted this account of a Yahoo employee who was Twittering his way out the door after being laid off. What better way to communicate your situation — and availability for new opportunities — to the world? Truly astounding, and an incredible , empowering resource. That dude probably won’t be spending too much time on the unemployment rolls.

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff has weighed in with some of his thoughts on how Web 2.0 would prevail through a down economy. “Things are different this time,” he opines. For example, we won’t a repeat of the devastation of the 2001 recession, because this is “not a tech bubble” as it was in 2000-2001. “Technology spending is not irrational,” he points out. Agreed.

Josh adds that social networking platforms will flourish in a down economy, however. While advertising may get cut, marketers will see greater value in blogs and social networks. And the best part is that social applications “can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K — a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign.” Plus, being all digital and all, social network-based responses are extremely measurable.

So the social networking platforms will do just fine in the event the economy were to go south for a while — and in fact, may even receive a boost from companies seeking inexpensive channels to their customers. And, as I mentioned previously, end users will have that power in their hands as well.

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Decentralized Co-Creation of Value … and Meaning

January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising

A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence - Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.

Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.

There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.

We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?

David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.

He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew.   Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.

It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.

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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted.  But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.

It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment.  I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people).  While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression. 

That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.

But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.

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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook

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Forrester’s Most Recent Predictions for the Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Market

January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software

This just off the presses at ZDNet …

It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.

And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.

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Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester

Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.

Not a big revelation.

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UPDATE:

Huh ?  42% "Not on our agenda" and 32%  "Not a priority"  translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?

Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.

The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:

Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:

First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.

Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.

Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester

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The Coming of the Cloud, Networked Knowledge Work and New Business Logic

January 26, 2008 at 11:02 pm · Filed under Business Model, Change, Charles Handy, Cloud Computing, Conferences, Dead Paradigms, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, open source

Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.

In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market.  The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study

David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.

It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.

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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence

Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.

[ Snip … ]

On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”

This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.

The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.

The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”

All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.

Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.

The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.

One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.

Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.

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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute.  I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.

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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy

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Here’s how Enterprise 2.0 can fix vexing management issues

January 7, 2008 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Blogging, Business Model, Change, Culture, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Messy World, Public Insight Journalism, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds

Getting people to work effectively together in organizations has been a challenge since Og and Um opened their first wheel shop in 10,000 B.C. Over the ages, various motivational and management techniques have been employed, from floggings to trinket rewards to floggings.

In the 20th century, we saw the rise of “scientific” management, but still, organizations continued to look like pyramids — with a few individuals on top, and the rest at the bottom.

Will Enterprise 2.0 flatten the pyramid, once and for all? Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School says that the Web may finally be sweeping away the rigid hierarchies and replacing them with truly participative and collaborative networks.

Here’s how he says it can happen:

Encourage more corporate democracy: Before, employees further down the food chain rarely had their views heard. Hamel urges organizations to use blogs to unleash the same “citizen media” forces within organizations as is happening across the Internet at large.

Unleash formerly hidden creativity. As Hamel puts it: “Make no mistake, your company is filled with video bloggers, mixers, hackers, mashers, tuners, and podcasters. The question is what is your company doing to help all of these ingenious people become fully empowered business innovators?”

Non-traditional funding for new innovation. Hamel notes the rise of non-traditional lenders, enabled through social markets, which potentially can create more funding options for employees eager to experiment with new ideas. Imagine, he says, a company in which managers and employees “was given permission to invest up to 55% of their discretionary resources in any idea, anywhere across the company that they deemed attractive. Suddenly, internal entrepreneurs would have the chance to appeal to dozens of potential ‘angel investors.’

Internal market for decision making. “The Web is a great tool for collating the views of hundreds—or even thousands—of individuals and has spawned a wide variety of ‘opinion markets,’” Hamel says. Suppose “your company created an internal ‘market for judgment’ that aggregated the views of a broad cross section of employees with the goal of establishing the odds that a particular project will meet its intended return. For every big new project, employees would have the chance to buy a security that would pay out only if the initiative achieved a predetermined rate of return.” Such online markets already exist for predicting the outcome of world events and elections.

Liquid power. “An ideal management system would be one in which power was automatically redistributed when environmental changes devalued executive knowledge and competence,” Hamel says. “You may find it hard to imagine an organization in which authority is a fluid commodity, flowing smoothly toward leaders who add value and away from those who don’t, yet this is how the Web works today. In the online world, power and influence are the product of de facto leadership, rather than de jure appointments. Hierarchies get built from the bottom-up, rather than from the top down.”

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Reflections of a Long, Long, Long Tail

December 7, 2007 at 6:48 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, User Revolution, videos

A song I heard frequently on the radio over the years — but was clueless about the artists — is “Reflections of My Life,” by a group called The Marmalade.

It turns out the song was big in 1970, after which the group — originally from Scotland — faded from the limelight. (A reconstituted band with one of the original members still tours.)

On YouTube, an incredible live 1970 performance of “Reflections” by the band is available, and at the time of this post, was viewed about 157,000 times. Accounting for multiple viewings, it’s likely that at least 100,000 people across the globe now have seen the performance, which up until a year ago was lost to the ages.

It’s now well established that Web 2.0 technologies now provide long tail of opportunity that can stretch into months and even years past the point a product or service was launched.

But are we seeing the long tail extending across multiple decades as well? It’s entirely possible that YouTube videos, for example, are ginning up new interest in long-lost bands and performances (as well as well-known ones, such as the Rolling Stones, U2, and Led Zeppelin), and perhaps increasing current airplay, CD sales/downloads, and thus, re-energizing revenue streams (and royalties) that went dry 30-plus years ago.

They say that the Internet has sped things up, to the point where opportunities and income can be gained or lost in a matter of seconds. But perhaps the extreme opposite is true as well.

What would you call a long tail that thins out into a long, long, tiny thread, then suddenly expands again? Is Web 2.0 delivering the ultimate time-shifted economy?

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More on War as the accelerant for Social Software

November 29, 2007 at 7:44 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Culture, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Messy World, Nato, Public Media, Secretary Gates, Social Computing, Social Media, Taliban, Terror, User Revolution, War, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, videos

Secretary Gates made this statement in a recent speech:

It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications (My post at Fast Forward yesterday)

I am starting to see something here. War has been the agency that accelerates the development of key new technology.

In the 1860’s the civil war put the train on the map. Post the war, an enormous track laying boom exploded around the world. The military made the train the backbone of the industrial approach to war.The same with flight. In Europe, the military saw the potential of flight immediately. But the US did not - that is why Rickenbaker flew a Spad.

The Wright Company in particular and American airplane companies in general continue to lose their technological edge to the Europeans. This is due in part to the U.S. Government’s failure to support the fledgling airplane       industry. While the governments of England, France, and Germany are buying hundreds of airplanes for their armed forces and supporting aviation research, the United States is spending roughly the same amount of money   as Bulgaria. (First to Fly)

By 1918, the future of flight was assured. There were no doubters - and like the adoption of the train, this new way of connecting people has transformed our world.

So back to social software. As impressive as Facebook is, as impressive the growth of blogging - this is all personal. Organizational life and how we all live has not been changed yet.  There is immense resistance in the key institutions of our time to its introduction. Leaders in business, education, healthcare etc all fear the outcome of adoption.

The big money is all based in an advertising model. If you can form a large group, you get rewarded. But the true potential of the tool set is not being invested in.

The true potential of social software is that it allows many to many to meet in real time at low to no cost. This means that you can see what is really going on - the business intelligence aspects are immense and transform research as it is conducted today. It enables you to get your message out in a real time and precise way - will transform marketing. Most of all it enables people to have very different relationships. Large, central capital based organizations are no longer needed. So everything that we do now such as how we educate, provide healthcare, provide services will be radically transformed.

Our large institutions can no longer do anything properly. The military is no exception. It is too big, too slow, too ponderous, too expensive. It cannot deal with war as it is waged today. The military are themselves full of resistance to the kind of change that social software implies.

BUT, people in the military who are losing the war of public opinion - who know now that Human Terrain  is the new battlefield - are w