So after much reluctance I have finally entered the world of Twitter so I could follow various folks reporting on events at this week’s Cisco C-Scape event in San Jose. Within a few minutes of registering I was able to quickly find friends and colleagues and follow their feeds. Without so much as posting a single “Tweet”, I already had folks following me. So I’m still a little skeptical of the whole Twitter craze, but there are some key value propositions….
The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?
The New York Times reports this morning that Facebook is set to expand “Facebook Connect”, the controversial service that reports your activities on external sites to your Facebook profile. Facebook caused a stir a while ago when it launched this service without giving users the ability to control updates, leading to people finding out that their shopping habits were now open to their Facebook friends. While Facebook has addressed privacy issues, this move is sure to spark a wider war for ownership of on-line identity.
Over the last two weeks, I read two books on how marketing, like every other enterprise function, is changing under the onslaught of 2.0 technologies. One, Spanning Silos: the new CMO imperative, by David Aaker was a serious surprise. It underpromised and overdelivered. I felt educated. Though written in a classical, non-2.0 idiom, it is extraordinarily smart and analyzes its topic solidly. You can read my review/summary at the link above. But the other — and there is no other way to say this — just made me very very sad. It is Seth Godin’s Tribes (free audio book here).
TechCrunch: Interview with Ray Ozzie on MS Cloud-based OS (Azure):
Ray Ozzie on Azure, Office unchained, and Openness
LinkedIn opens up Open Social-based platform to developers, focuses on business applications:
LinkedIn’s New Apps Are All Work and No Play | Epicenter from Wired.com
Microsoft introduces new Windows OS and mentions plans for web-based MS Office to compete against Google Docs and Zoho:
Microsoft Introduces Windows 7, Ending Vista Brand - NYTimes.com
Did your company make an announcement or did I miss any significant news? Feel free to comment.
Melanie Turek posted a piece last week, on a contest sponsored by Plantronics, inviting submission of terms to replace “telecommuter.”
Never one to pass up an opportunity to win nice goodies for a single word, I threw “cloudworker” into the hat. I hope the term is evocative enough that you get the reasoning behind it without much explanation. Anyway, the process of coming up with that term (5 minutes of private brainstorming) sparked a whole interesting train of thought, which I just captured in a post on my blog, The Cloudworker’s Creed.
Here is a picture and a little extract. Do check out the article and weigh in on the merits of my pen-portrait of the archetypal information worker of the future. I’ll be writing a fair number of follow-up posts in a series.
The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work
Go to the full article.
Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.
As companies deploy (or simply allow) Web 2.0 tools in their organizations, they often forget the need for enterprise content management. But as employees use and contribute to wikis, blogs and social networking tools, they create a lot of content–and that content needs to be secured, compliant, and accessible to others within the organization. For more on this topic, check out this podcast, and post your comments below.
Steve’s comments below got me thinking about why we don’t just accept information overload, but actually ask for it.
There was plenty of chatter in the blogs this weekend over the decision by the Obama campaign to text its supporters news of the VP pick as soon as it happened (well, as soon as the campaign was ready to release it). Most of it seemed centered around (1) the timing of the text’s release (another 3am brouhaha), (2) the “next-gen Internet outreach” approach, and (3) the pick himself. Mainly lost in the discussion was whether anyone really needed to know the information in real time, on their cells and PDAs.
I love the flexibility Enterprise 2.0 tools provide and have made it somewhat of a personal quest to find new ways to use these tools to make my job easier. But as I and my employer adopt new applications to help manage information, I find the number of tools and all the little pockets of information they generate to be a little unmanageable. Here’s why:
Via AlwaysOn, Business Week has launched a Business Exchange
Details are light, but it appears that they are trying to create something similar to Digg, but focused toward their readership.
@e2conf on Twitter
Dec 10th, 2008 |
