Being a casualty of today’s economic climate (aka unemployed) I have been following the web advances and coming up to speed on Web 2.0 and beyond with my extra time. Due to location and a last minute ticket from Ross Mayfield (@Ross) with SocialText, I was able to get a front row seat to some very eye-opening information. It certainly fed my data addiction for two days.
Charlene Li gave an enlightening presentation on Harnessing the Implicit Value of the Social Graph. Starting off with a statement like “Social Networks will be like air” can get your attention. Charlene then went on to show how traditional corporate “Walled gardens are breaking down.” Later in the presentation as she was looking towards the future and making use of the technology we have available to us she encourages the audience to “Prepare for the demise of the org chart.”
I would ordinarily say such lofty ideas are great, but we are a long way from realizing them. Ordinarily that is, except, I happened across a blog on Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators by Umair Haque today. Umair independently validates Charlene’s ideas by pointing out how Barrak Obama did just this; “By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.” This was very similar to the notion that Charlene was expressing.
Rich Hoeg and Neeraj Mathur illustrated how their Fortune 500 companies can be seen as leaders in the new social web era. Both individuals are in the process of establishing extensive social networking operations inside Honeywell and Sun respectively. This network enables their companies to leverage the collective brain power they have access to in order to efficiently perform their corporate functions. Having come from such an environment, I was truly impressed that these large corporations could be so forward thinking. It gave me a boost to be free of my previous employer and hope looking forward to the next one.
The opening presentation - Strategic Intuition and Defrag by Professor William Duggan from the Columbia Business School and author of Strategic Intuition was entertaining and informative. Prof. Duggan used examples from history to show where the “Aha” moment comes from. He pointed out that Carl von Clausewitz gave us four steps to get this which are:
- Use examples from history – how did someone prior achieve greatness?
- Presence of mind - Enter the situation and clear your mind of all preconceptions (what the solution is etc.)
- Flash of insight - shows you what to do. With a clear mind you now know what is needed.
- Taking off and putting flash into action.
Professor Duggan also pointed out that “great artists steal” using examples from Picaso and Thomas Edison. He also related these individual’s accomplishments to the above steps in order to achieve the Aha moment. In summary, steal a concept that was used earlier and apply it to your need today. For example, Larry Page (Google) developed Page Rank. This idea is an adaptation from an earlier concept of using academic citations and how often they are cited to rank university researchers. From this, why not apply to web pages?
The final presentation of note was Brian Oberkirch’s “Under Sousviellance: Personal Informatics & Techniques of the Self.” This was informative because Brian showed “What happens when you can make those invisible life patterns visible?”
Brian presented viewing the web as a stream of data as opposed to distinct web pages. Objects in the world are being automated and enabled to “throw off data.” Many services and ideas are coming about with how to more seamlessly make use of this data. Brian cited and gave many examples of such companies and devices like:
- Feltron.com - Annual report for himself, very interesting minutia
- Plodt.com – Chart your life using Twitter
- Xobni - email analytics
- Dopplr - business traveler tracking and carbon footprint information
- Fuelly - track data for your car
- RescueTime - Ridiculously easy time management
These services and many others like them begin putting much information about you and your life out in the open. It raises a host of questions along with providing a wide array of services.
So when you have a quite moment, think about your past year. What would you do if you new how many web pages you visited, how many miles you traveled, how often you communicated with a loved one. Now, with that information, what would you do differently in your life going forward?
