November 2005 |
Main
|
January 2006
Can I Crash?
I have had the pleasure of hosting a few bloggers at our home in the past two years.
Ming and
Jon Husband stayed here, even though we never met before, as well as
Martin Roell, whom I had met before. Our blogs, and the interaction through and around it served as the base of trust that was enough to invite them to our home.
Peter Rukavina (we
met at Reboot) today pointed me to a project by
Henriette Weber Andersen and
Thomas Kristiansen that builds on the possiblity of building trust through blogging. At
Can I Crash? "a service that lets you lend your sofa to travelling bloggers" bloggers can indicate their willingness to host a blogger at their home, or their desire to stay in a certain city. Bloggers can then judge on the content of their respective blogs and the following interaction whether they want to host or be hosted.
I entered
our place for bloggers that happen to pass through Enschede and are in need of a place to stay. I did specify a requirement that the visiting blogger should be blogging for at least a year. That way I can get a better picture of someone by the body of postings that has been created.
There are of course a whole lot of similar services like these. I used different European students networks to stay in Aachen, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna, while still at university. I know of similar networks of Ham radio operators, back-packers, and all kinds of Rotary-like service clubs. But this is a bit different as it positions your blog as a reputation builder.
4 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 31, 2005 12:02 AM)
On Networked and Traditional Views of Organisations
Chris Messina in his posting
I Represent Me, triggered by
Boris Mann, talks about how he feels in relation to organizations and groups he is part of:
I don't represent my employer, who I choose to work for represents me.
(picture to the left: Chris Messina, representing Chris Messina)
This is not simply a new version of Brand Me in my eyes. What Chris says is much more an expression of a different view of what organisations are. The networked view versus the traditional hierarchical view. (See my posting
How We Migh View Organisations for a visual representation)
In a hierarchical setting and back in the days when lifetime employment was a worthwile goal you were (supposed to be) grateful to be allowed to join the ranks of a company. You expressed that gratitude by not rocking the company boat and being representative of the company. You represented your employer. Or even stronger: your identity was derived from the company's identity.
In a networked setting things are different. There the group or organization is the sum of the people that form it. The company's identity is the collective identity derived from the individual identities. The power balance is different here, shifting from me-company to me-you-her-him, form lifetime employment to lifetime employability.
So Chris is right, whom he chooses to work for represents him.
That however is not the end of it. Ending it there is wording the new in terms of the existing, offering it as an opposite. That is what Brand Me does, placing yourself above the company as a replacement of placing the company above yourself, which is the same thing but now with you in the center of power. In the one you are a means to further the company's goals, in the other the company is a means to further your goals. It is not a distinction between me solely representing Company Inc. or Company Inc. solely representing me, which frames it in terms of dependance and independence. In a networked situation it is both, interdependence, and the acknowledgement thereof, and furthering collectively aligned goals:
Whom I choose to work for/with represent me AND I gladly represent those who choose to work for/with me.
1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 30, 2005 10:12 AM)
Innovation Reading
Recently I wrote about how I see a gap between how I view innovation and how it is generally being discussed here in the Netherlands. I also mentioned I am currently reading up on innovation and I thought I'd share some of my reading list with you.
It was Edna Pasher who pointed me to Christensen when we met at KM Europe 2003, and as a result of that I read Innovator's Dilemma and after that Innovator's Solution. I am currently rereading Innovator's Solution while making a summary and model out of it. I read a number of article lauding this book and saying it was a good guide for action, but I think it isn't. There are loads of tips and motivations for action in it, but there is no overview to actually use when you start to act. So I set out to write that summary, as I could not find one on the net.
Next to that Carla Verwijs recently pointed me to a reading list of books for 2006 of the Innovation Book Club, that I took as a starting point.
So I ordered the first four titles in the list, and they are now on my bed side table for reading:
Leader's Guide to Storytelling by Stephen Denning
How Breakthroughs Happen by Andrew Hargadon
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman
I'll try and discuss these books as I finish them.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 30, 2005 12:02 AM)
Disaster Remembrance Week
Last year Christmas saw the Tsunami killing a quarter of a million people, this year Pakistan was hit by a major earthquake, and New Orleans was flooded after Katrina hit. All of these events saw a tremendous on-line response, aided by social software and other new internet tools. Skype 'round the clock call centers, the
Tsunami wikietc.
The World Wide Help Group has dubbed this week
Remembrance Week, to look back at the disasters that hit the world in 2005. But also to remember that a lot of help is still needed, a lot of work is still to be done. The effects of the Tsunami will be need much longer attention than only this year, Pakistani are still freezing to death in the Himalaya left without shelter after the quake. If you are in a position to support relieve organisations, or help in some other direct or indirect way, please do so.
The Tsunami newspaper on how relief was given
Meanwhile the Dutch relief organisations on Dec. 26th 2005 published a newspaper in 3 million copies, distributed through all major super market chains. In it they explain how they spent the unprecedented 220 million euros the Dutch population of 16 million people brought together for Tsunami relief efforts. This in part after a number of reports in the press criticizing the way relief funds were distributed to some dubious projects. I was happy to read that funds were used to simultaneously give relief and lay down the foundation for new economic activity as well. For instance by not only providing new boats to fishermen, but have them built by small local shipyards. This way the boats are the ones fishermen are used to using, work and transactions are created in the local economy and fishermen can take up their activities again all in one. Economy after all is not about the material you use or its worth, it is primarily about the number of transactions created.
Charts explaining where money went
2 Comments and 1 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 29, 2005 01:17 PM)
Innovation
In the Netherlands innovation certainly has been a buzz word in the past year. A buzz word that has been met with a lot of ridicule, especially when the government level
Innovation Platform is involved. Even though a couple of angles of the Innovation Platform are very worthwile, such as removing administrative barriers and paying attention to our educational system, to me it seems the Innovation Platform has been rightly ridiculed on other issues.
Innovation in the Netherlands is generally discussed as if it is a product. The discussion focusses on individual inventions (contests in tv shows e.g.), getting more people into exact sciences, and generally treating innovation and bleeding edge high-tech as synonyms. Creativity is acknowledged as being important in a very creativity stifling way, by designating a 'creative sector' and creating funds for groups and companies that fit that profile. This is of course not a bad thing for those involved, but it also sends an important negative message: if you're not in the 'creative sector' you are not creative. Too bad for all those people with bright ideas and useful thoughts of how to bring those ideas to fruition that happen to work in the back-office of Grey and Dull Inc: sorry you don't fit our creative category so you can't be creative, now get back to the job you're supposed to do. Anyway I'm ranting, and lest you might think I am envying those that do get money, I'm not. It is the wrong kind of money. It is the wrong kind of money because it seeks to stimulate the wrong image of innovation.
- Innovation to me is not a product, it's an attitude to create growth both in a human/social and in a financial sense, empowering more people more.
- Innovation to me is not about one-off inventions, let's kill the stroke of genius mythology right here shall we, it's about collaboration around getting things done better, faster, easier, smoother, more sustainable effectively or reliable than before.
- Innovation to me is not a synonym of high-tech, it can be about structures, organizations and routines and social conventions.
- Innovation to me is not about only getting more science students (and yes we need them too), but about teaching all people to think for themselves as well as collaborate effectively.
- Innovation to me is not about collecting more ideas, but about learning how to turn those ideas into action with a reasonable chance at success.
That's what innovation is to me. What is it to you?
Clients and clients of others I talk to and hear from in the Netherlands feel stuck because they think they need to adhere to the product centered high-tech invented by geniuses view of innovation, when all they want to do is do their work better in a changing world.
I have started to read up on innovation, and have been entering into conversations with a number of people that want to escape and change that view of innovation too.
In the coming months I intend to write more about themes I connect to innovation:
Focussing creative energy, personal information and knowledge management, knowledge nomads, complexity, turning ideas into action, networked organisation, collaboration, finding the questions of tomorrow, and a range of other stuff.
Think that sounds like nothing new? Exactly.
That's what innovation is to me. What is it to you?
2 Comments and 1 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 29, 2005 12:13 PM)
What's Up Adgenta?
I have been playing around with using ads in my postings these past few months. The ads come from Adgenta and can be incorporated into my postings when I use my Qumana editor. As this is all experimental I am eager to share whatever experiences I have with ads on this site.
Today I looked at my site and saw an ad for "genuine replicas" of Switch watches. This raises my suspicion. The url for the ad is the same as in spam e-mail messages I have been getting by the dozens daily in these past weeks leading up to Christmas. Apparantly we should all be giving these fake watches to each other for Christmas. No thank you, I removed the ad immediately. (Even though the line "don't settle for a cheap fake" made me laugh. Yeah, let's all go out and buy expensive fakes!)
screenshot of the removed adI do have some questions to Adgenta for Christmas however:
Are advertisers vetted before being admitted into the programme?
How come this obvious spammer selling possibly illegal products is advertising on my site through your programme?
What are you going to do about filtering out these ads?
How are you going to assure me that this won't happen again?
Adgenta wants to put control with the blogger, which sounds like good thinking to me. Let's see how we can work this out.
[UPDATE] Have been in touch with the people of Adgenta (thanks for the quick response folks!). They are taking this as a serious problem which can be a major threat to their credibility. The ads itself are delivered to Adgenta by Miva, one of the biggest on-line advertising supply networks. Adgenta is trying to get Miva to react to this stat.
1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 23, 2005 09:01 AM)
Santa Comes Early: New House
Today we got the final confirmation. We bought a house! At the end of next month we'll get the keys, and early February we'll be moving our stuff out of our current apartment into a bigger place with a garden, in a greener and less crowded part of town. Big plus is also that we will be able to dedicate a whole floor to create our workspaces in, so that we both can work comfortably from home. The place was originally built in 1975, with extensions added front, back and top, in 1989 and 2003.
So Elmine and I will spend the coming holidays planning and looking forward to the move.
Merry Christmas everyone!
2 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 21, 2005 03:02 PM)
Why tagging and Wikipedia work
With clients and others I often have a hard time explaining my information strategy when it comes to blogreading and e.g. searching stuff on the web. When I explain to them that I don't look at individual information-items but hunt for the large scale patterns, and the subjective and opiniated pointers to other sources they often reply with something like "But that only yields untrustworthy information". Of course I know that on the level of the information object itself (a posting, a quote, a pointer etc) the information is most likely not entirely accurate or even false. But I navigate the patterns and for that the points that make the pattern don't have to be all accurate themselves, it only has to be correct at a aggregate level.
When I start drilling down towards individual pieces of information, that info itself has to be correct. For evaluating that I use its social and human context, so that to me information can never be judged only in and by itself. But doing that is a totally different information strategy.
It is key that we are able to distinct between these different approaches and switch the information strategies we use accordingly. It is a subject I have covered here before, and that I am eager to discuss at any given opportunity.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 19, 2005 03:09 PM)
Les Blogs 2.0
Yesterday and today Les Blogs 2.0 is taking place in Paris. Loads of familiar faces again. The travelling circus of the Bloggerati.
Have been following the IRC back channel on and off (#lesblogs op Freenode) from home.
Thusfar this is the greatest picture. Suw Charman and Marc Canter on the social media panel, with a picture of Marc taking a nap in the background, taken earlier during the conference. It's fun and playful, and it shows engagement. I like it. (Picture by Paolo Valdemarin). More Les Blogs photo's at Flickr of course.
Some video on the net as well. Maarten Schenk taped Mena Trott's presentation. Frank Meeuwsen is there as well and bound to be posting vid's to Rhinofly.
2 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 6, 2005 03:16 PM)
Douglas Adams nailed it 6 years ago
On Internet as a threat:
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Replace crime with terrorism and you're in 2005.
But a much more important part is the following, on trust, social filtering and human interaction. It is what social software helps you roll, live, and thrive with.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants.
Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.
One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
4 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 6, 2005 11:43 AM)
Never delete anything says Google....
Unless of course if you're Cyprien.
Like he said: Worrisome.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks |
Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 3, 2005 01:44 PM)
Weblog by 
Lilia Efimova *
Gary Murphy
Sebastian Fiedler *
Thomas Burg *
Terry Frazier
Dina Mehta *
Stuart Henshall *
Spike Hall
Phil Wolff *
Jim McGee
David Gurteen *
Elmine Wijnia *
Julian Elvé
Denham Grey
Ian Glendinning
Paul Goodison
