A smattering of recent quarter-thoughts (half of a half-thought) on the different incentives between a custodian and an owner, what “original” really means, the power of asking questions in public, if decentralized responses are really the best strategy, and how much attention we really pay to everything.

• Fred Wilson, Use the Public Channel For Better Customer Service, my comment:

  Point #4 is the most interesting part; in essence, “defaulting to the public channel” would be a way to flip customer service from a one-to-one response channel (cost center) to a many-to-many interaction platform (profit center).

  Private data sits stuffed inside a data center or company waiting for the owner to make sense of it, but public data is open for anyone to make sense from (and ultimately, profit from); the owner becomes a custodian, a massively different relationship.

• Why do underdogs fail to adapt and test “better” strategies if they can’t adopt the “best strategy”? Malcolm Gladwell, Annals of Innovation, How David Beats Goliath.
• Nothing is truly new;

  #1: “The trick is realizing that the success and failure of everything is all in your head”

  #2: “In the end, I live and die on the inside of my head.”

  Culture reverberates around, similar ideas voiced in different ways; it’s the way it’s always been and always will be. Even the “original” is influenced by the past, consciously and unconsciously; the new is shaped by the boundaries, possibilities, conventions and taboos of the past.

  But current copyright law simply doesn’t recognize what “original” work really is in today’s content-rich world; intellectual property law has failed to catch up with how culture has adapted to new technological realities. Whatever can be copied will be copied; instead of fighting to suppress copying and remixing, shouldn’t we focus on learning and promoting how to do it right?

• Ask a simple question like “How would you compare StockTwits and Covestor”, and in a flash, you get a long answer, StockTwits vs. Covestor. I love it when the Internet works the way it should.
• “Bill [Gates] stole my girls”; stories and motivation from Mark Cuban.
• How Jennifer Aniston hit on Malcolm Gladwell (or not); part of an epic conversation over email between Bill Simmons of EPSN and Gladwell. Dig in to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for more about “inliers”, running the full-court press, using a roster efficiency by playing a different game, eliminating the NBA draft, and how the force of individual personalities can shape teams, leagues and strategies.
• David Brooks, Globalism goes Viral:
  

  In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.

  A network of diverse, decentralized actors might be the best foundation for dealing with decentralized events such as swine flu, given the advantages that credible, empowered local actors have to create faster, “test-and-learn”-based responses; but we’ve also seen the downside: massive hype, misinformation and a failure to understand the bigger picture (context) behind these global events, a massive misallocation of time, resources and energy.

  The real question: which type of method for organization, centralized or decentralized, has more room to improve?

• Ed Cotton, People will give you 56 seconds:
  

  The average time for a site visit in March of 2009 was 56 seconds. This puts tremendous demands on the efficiency of web design, meaning designers have to make sure people get what they need as quickly as possible. Perhaps this is why most websites look the same.

  It also calls into question the depth that people want to go into to learn more. It’s not uncommon for clients and agencies to think about putting long form content and long copy into areas of their website, but with this research, one has to wonder if any of this material ever gets read or watched.

  All of that may be true, but my guess is that the average is meaningless; instead, what’s the median? What’s the distribution of site visit times?

  More interesting is the average of 111 domains visited per person; but again I’d like to understand the distribution of site visits over those 111 domains.

  In fact, I’d be impressed if you read this far…