Extended rant: Mark Helprin is not a crowdsourcing/social tech fan

McKinsey’s Mary Kunz interviewed Mark Helprin and discussed various issues connected to his view that the “‘all free, all the time ethos’ of the Internet threatens to erode the creation of new knowledge and new art”.  Helprin is a staunch skeptic of the creative and innovative potential of the Internet.  In fact, he stakes out [...]

Look at me! Look at me!

Noah Brier notes that there is still a long way to go when it comes to enlightened communication on the Internet: Rob Walker is great at finding pithy ways to sum up problems. In this edition he ruminates on the state of “online dialogue” (which I copy in full because it’s such a short post, [...]

Who never know who you’ll bump into around here…

…as Charles Cameron over at Smart Mobs reminds us: Something very interesting is happening blogwise. An Australian intel analyst blogger, Leah Farrall, and an insurgent strategist blogger, Abu Walid, are now holding a debate in public across the blogs. It began a day or three ago. And they’re not the only ones. [T]wo other somewhat [...]

The Firm, Transaction Costs, and Organizing for Innovation

Ana Anjdelic responded to my latest post with some very interesting points.  She commented that some of my suggestions would significantly increase transaction costs, specifically information search costs incurred by firm.  Ana notes that increasing transaction costs in this way contradicts (or runs logically counter to) Coase’s view of the firm.  She writes: It’s true [...]

Organizing for Innovation: A conversation with Ana Andjelic

Ana Andjelic and I have just started a discussion around how to best organize for innovation.  (BTW, if you aren’t already a reader you should really check out Ana’s blog, i [love] marketing.)  Rather than continue the conversation in the comments thread I thought it might be good to bring it over to the blog. [...]

We are all creatives now (or, at least, will be by 2013)

SEED published an article the other day that discussed the coming impact of near total authorship.  The gist of the article is that at some point, nearly everyone will be able to publish content and that this will have profound implications for society in much the same way that near universal literacy has. So what [...]

You don’t always know what you want

Christopher Penn discusses an interesting notion–the idea that people don’t actually know what their ideal world looks like. When we try to solve a problem, or consult with others to help them solve their problems, often time we are told to start by answering this question: In a perfect world, what would this process look [...]

Measuring Happiness via the Social Web

Nathan at FlowingData points to an application on Facebook that aims to measures happiness.   The application seeks to calculate the “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) of the United States by analyzing the ratio of positive to negative words found in users’ status updates on a daily basis. It is an interesting project and certainly relates to [...]

The ‘Soft Sciences’ to get their Day?

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences. Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though [...]

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