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Posts Tagged ‘context’

Are “Online Conversations” Really Conversations?

Kicked off in my mind by a post by Scoble on Friendfeed…

Are “online conversations” really conversations?

We talk and listen, but do we process and interpret?

  • We have a multitude of tools to create output and start discussions, and because creating and distributing content has become incredibly easy and cheap, we’ve inundated ourselves with information.

  • We’re starting to create the tools to listen to, search through and filter the output.

    Friendfeed was one of the first services that created easy ways for people to aggregate their “personal content” distributed across multiple web services.

    Backtype is one of my favorite new services on the web, because by aggregating people and their comments scattered over the web they create very powerful ways to find, track and search through interesting people and valuable discussions. [1]

    Bryan Landers recently pointed out PeopleBrowsr as a “dashboard for social media junkies … to cover input and output”. Robert Scoble provides a good overview in this video, in which he randomly highlights me during his demonstration of PeopleBrowsr. [2]

    But it’s just a start.

  • Have we figured out to process everything?

    Are we truly listening, or are we just hearing?

    Tracking and combining our daily disaggregated, multiple-channel, asynchronous conversations with different people and groups is difficult enough for any web service.

    But where is the tool that listens to all the content and picks out what is most important and why?

    Where is the service that picks out interesting and valuable posts and comments on similar topics and links together the conversations?

    Where is the tool that extracts meaning and not just knowledge?

We’re a knowledge culture; in our race to create and acquire knowledge we’ve forgotten the meaning and power of wisdom.

Perhaps it’s impossible to create a web service to extract meaning and create wisdom; perhaps that’s why we need people and not just algorithms. Perhaps that’s why we still need to connect with individuals and not just groups.

That’s why we follow people, right? That’s why “social media” is really just “personal media”, right? That’s why even though blogging has changed, it will never die, right?

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[1] Are you worried about your “ephemeral conversations” being recorded and stored forever? Bruce Schneier [via Noah Brier] points that maybe we should consider more carefully what we’re creating and how we treat it.

[2] Really random, and yet meaningless. Start the video at around 9 minutes 8 seconds if you just want to see the demonstration using my “web presence”.

(UPDATED 12/2: Removed embedded video. Click here to watch the video on Kyte TV.

The US automotive industry needs to fail to succeed

Roger Ehrenberg, Markets, Politics and Change:

Throwing $25 billion at the U.S. auto sector is akin to the $25 billion thrown at Citigroup; money flushed down the toilet. With over $100 billion of legacy pension and health care costs, a lack of globally competitive, fuel efficient cars and bloated cost structures, the U.S. auto industry as we know it has to die. Putting politics aside, it is simply foolish to pander to the UAW and their lobbyists by trying to save an industry that can’t be saved. Let’s take this opportunity through the bankruptcy process to purge unnecessary costs, sell valued assets to the private sector and re-purpose a skilled labor force towards infrastructure projects that can benefit the economy. Obama needs to make a stand that he is up for doing right, not simply thanking those who donated huge dollars and expect repayment – fast.

I can’t bear to watch or read the news about the automotive industry’s attempt to strip-mine taxpayers and the government. The automotive industry needs to fail first to succeed. Please don’t let the automotive companies, lobbyists and entrentched interests convince the government to delay the inevitable. We don’t need to flush billions of dollars into the pockets of the sycophants of a failing industry. Please.

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Random
Why do we constantly compare our current economic situation to the Great Depression?

We’ve all seen and read tons of articles and academic papers discussing our current economic situation, many with titles similar to “Worse than the Great Depression”. But we live in a massively different economic and geopolitical world than the 1930s-40s and the answers to our current problems are very different than those faced during the Great Depression.

Comparing our current economic situation to the Great Depression creates the wrong frame.

I’m not a practicing economist, so if I’m wrong, please tell me. I’d love to know why I’m wrong: I’m here to learn.

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What do I read for economic analysis? Mostly:

And, of course, a lot of other sources that might not make immediate sense to everyone…

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