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If you're techie and into widgets you might find the comments conversation on the 'I Can See Clearly Now - a comparison of widget platforms from a developer’s perspective' blog post on our Nixon McInnes website.
Somewhat out of my limited brain range, and for a niche audience only, but a good conversation prompted by a guy called Rob Kent.
Word of mouth, still and always the most powerful form of communication.
Still the pinnacle, despite every piece of tech frippery.
Tony Blair, $500,000 speakers fee on the circuit.
Despite telepresence and next-gen video conferencing business air travel continues to rise.
This month's Harvard Business Review lead article: 'The four truths of the storyteller'.
Which brings us to Twitter, a web service not yet in the mainstream that is apparently useless. You just write in less than 140 characters what you are doing (or thinking, or whatever).
I describe Twitter to 'normal' people and they look at me like I'm insane. 'Errrrr, WHY?' is what they say. You need to use it to find out why, but the Guardian has picked it as one its 5 'hit websites of 2008'.
Yesterday I personally discovered the alarming, disappointing news about Benazir Bhutto's assassination via Twitter. I then switched the TV on for more context and fabric to the initial essence of the news I'd received through my network on Twitter.
Many other twitter uses found the news the same way, which has prompted some interesting observations by other Twitter users on the implications of this new style of online communication by Dennis Howlett on ZDnet and another useful summary by Dan York on how and why he uses Twitter.
I suggest you check these out.
You could also mooch around JP Rangaswami's posts about Twitters utility in the enterprise (the big company), which are fascinating and deeply credible coming from an award-winning Chief Information Officer.
I remember when 9/11 happened, texting some friends who didn't work in offices (one, I knew, was roofing a house somewhere in rural Sussex) - there was something then about the networks I was tapped into, the internet, and its pace and asynchronous-ness, and the networks he was (mobile phones through friends and family) and the slower, more manual and synchronous pace of that, relying on someone thinking of him and tailoring a message for him.
The theme of all of this, for me, is about the speed of the new human communication networks. By that I mean not the physical, technological speed of the facilities, as a hardware provider would talk about, but the speed of how humans utilise them.
I keep describing this as word of mouth on steroids (and so do many others, punching this phrase into to Google).
It's the same dynamics as Gladwell writes about so usefully in Tipping Point.
But sped up, beefed up, revved up.
Word of mouth on steroids.
Word of mouth 2.0 (bleurgh - I hate this versioning thing now).
Word of network?
Super-fricking-fast-wildfire-bitchin-communication-digital-boom-ting-a-ling?
Dearest beloved Flickr,
I love you. You know that.
We spend time together every week.
Important time.
But I want you to be even better and even more useful to me.
Specifically, I want to set up rules with you.
Like those Outlook rules, but less nightmarishly bad (ideally).
These rules should be triggered by tags and determine belonging to a set and the licencing for a given photo.
As an example, I want to tell you that whenever I add a photo tagged 'Jack' to automatically add it to the Jack set, and to automatically set it to 'all rights reserved' rather than my default creative commons license.
That's all. Just some nice, automatic rules that do some of the admin for me so that I can sit back and enjoy a bit more and fiddle a bit less.
If you already do this I apologise - I am a dork.
Sound good?
Cool, thanks :)
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