Author: JP

I cannot be in Washington DC on the 23rd of this month. And as a result, I’m already looking forward to a webcast of something that’s happening at the Library of Congress that day.

Yes, this is an unashamed advertisement. For someone I don’t know, have never met, and in whose business I have no stake. But I have enjoyed the things he has been doing with his class, particularly the things he has done with YouTube and Twitter.

Dr Michael Wesch, yes he of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today, will be speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube. I quote from the Library of Congress news release:

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Wesch and his classes have been doing some very interesting things with YouTube and with Twitter. (See for example his post on teaching with Twitter a few months ago.). Actually there are many people doing very interesting things with twitter, what makes Wesch and his classes different is that they capture and articulate what they do very well. And then they share their articulation.

I’m fascinated by the behaviour of digital natives; I try and understand them every chance I get, usually by watching my children; I feel I now know a little about how the dinosaurs must have felt when they foresaw their own deaths.

If any of you do get to see him speak, let me know if you plan to tweet it.

Incidentally, I’m also looking forward to seeing/hearing the Douglas Rushkoff lecture on Open Source Reality scheduled for the end of the month.

I’m delighted to hear that the BT Web21C SDK team has just won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Application Development, seeing off competition from Salesforce amongst others. Open multisided platforms are the way, and it’s great to see colleagues being honoured. Well done to the team. Full story here.

Disclaimer: I work for BT. And this is not an advertisement. Just a personal vote of thanks to the team.

So you’re finding someone’s changed his tweet frequency, he’s tweeting too often for your liking? Maybe he’s got on his high horse about something and he can’t let go. And you just wish you could tune him out for a brief period?

Help is at hand. Look at this:

TwitterSnooze. Personalised short-term filtering out of someone. Now all I need is the same thing for a something and not a someone. When I can choose to tune out tweets about a particular subject or topic or entity, for a short while. [Yes it can be tag-driven if required].

I don’t tend to do quotes du jour, but this time I had to make an exception, taken from this post.

Jeff Atwood:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews

In fact, the entire paragraph is worth highlighting:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews. Is it really even worth using at that point? The products themselves are commodities; I could buy them anywhere. Having dozens of highly relevant, informed user reviews means I’ll almost always buy stuff from Amazon given the chance. It’s a huge competitive advantage.

I could not agree more. So here’s my twopenn’orth:

Social objects are designed to commoditise over time. And as they commoditise, what makes them valuable is the tags, the reviews and the ratings around them. And in turn that makes the community around them valuable, the people who do the tagging, the reviewing and the rating.

So next time you get asked what the value of a community is, think about the role of the community in enhancing the value of objects that would otherwise be undifferentiated and valueless.

A month ago I wrote a long post about collaboration, and in it I said:

Collaboration takes place when you do what you are good at, and when you let other people do what they are good at.

Sometimes I wonder whether we as knowledge workers have learnt this. Somehow I don’t think so. Over the last thirty years, working primarily in service industries, working solely as a knowledge worker, I see something different.

I see people unable to respect the skills of others. Of wanting to be all things to all men.

Today, reading Andrew McAfee (a regular and recommended read, I’ve known Andrew for some time now), I saw this:

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

That was Eric Schmidt answering Andy’s question on what other companies and managers can learn from Google.

They can learn to listen……because it’s a great way to show respect.

I couldn’t agree more. The secret sauce of collaboration in five words. Or a baker’s dozen if you want the expanded form.

Thanks Andy, and thank you Eric Schmidt.