Quickthink

Om Malik wrote a nice post yesterday about Apple’s new music information sharing service, Ping. Here is the link. Check out Om’s comments about Ping if you want to learn more about this new platform. It is pretty cool. But I have a slightly different focus for this post.

Ping, and Om’s comments about Ping bring out that step by step it is becoming conventional wisdom that people like to connect on the web about things — not just connect. It follows then that Facebook and Twitter will not monopolize social networking the way Google has monopolized search. Instead, all serious web platforms over time will develop social aspects. Facebook and Twitter will prosper as facilitators. Just listen to Om, “you need to embed the social layer”. Got it?

Bottom line - Thinking about websites as stand alone things is getting very old very fast. The web is not a thing filled up with content. It is not like a book or a movie. It is a process that we are just starting to learn how to use. And what is the engine driving that process? I would argue that it is story telling. The web enables us to connect with more stories and share better stories. To do that well, we need (among other things) a better grasp of character development. Huh? Sure, just ask the guys who developed Angry Birds. Here is a link to an interview where they explain how they developed the game and why it is so popular.

So, Mr. Small Business Guy, is your web presence telling a story?

FOLLOW - Hmmm … does Tom Peters read my blog? He (or perhaps someone for him) just tweeted that “Storytelling is powerful. That’s why Tom argues to turn your brand into a story. TLBT Video #38: http://is.gd/eT3s8 ^.

Key Words: Targeting People. What the hell does that mean?

Regular readers of QT know that I follow Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC. Fred’s comments are interesting in their own right. But perhaps more important to me, Fred’s blogging style offers a nice case study in using blogging as a tool to build an online community with real world value.

Fred explains his approach in a video that he posted the other day. Anyone who is interested in how building interactivity on the web can enhance traditional or real world activities should take a look. Here is the link.

FOLLOW -  One of the things I took from the video is how clearly Fred articulates what he is trying to do and why he is doing it (Of course, we all know by now from Simon Sinek that the why is more important than the how or the what). With strong answers to these questions,  Fred understands who is in his target group and why, and this gives him a lot of confidence that the group can be cohesive. Put more simply and directly, Fred targets people in his writing. Adopting that approach, Fred puts himself in a leadership position to strengthen the group that he is targeting. He makes a commitment to the group. Simply by taking that leadership position, Fred offers a huge value added for people who aspire to be in his group. And he creates opportunities for himself and the group. Suddenly there is a flow of creativity where there was none before. We might contrast this with the crappy writing coming out of content production factories going for high SEO ratings. Scott Rosenberg at Slate tells this rather pathetic story. Here is the link.

BTW, Apple also targets people in its product development (making a strong commitment to the group). Matt Asay over at Giga explains. Here is a link to his interesting post.

So, errr …. Mr. or Ms Blogger, who are you targeting and why?

2d FOLLOW -  Hmmm … so you are not a blogger? Well, you might ask who are you targeting when you speak and why are you doing it? Indeed, the above is an example of a skill set that applies rather broadly. In negotiation, for example.

From Bits

… there’s an iPad application that could further lighten the load (in a student’s backpack). A new company called Inkling hopes to break the standard textbook model and help textbooks enter the interactive age by letting students share and comment on the texts and interact with fellow students (using their IPads).

Very cool. No more heavy and expensive paper text books. Here is the link. Does this apply only to students who use textbooks? That depends on how we think of the word “textbooks”.

QT is endlessly looking for start up modeling opportunities, and angel investor Josh Felser on GigaTV offered two areas that may be open, “distributed trust” and “offer generation”. Here is the link. BTW, he has been deluged with proposals based on “game mechanics”. It is interesting how the lingo is evolving so quickly.

Gurus are expected to say clever things all the time. And Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson has said clever guru type things, for example, in his book “The Long Tail“. But it is hard to do this all of the time (especially these days). Sometimes trends outstrip the ability of gurus to keep ahead of the game. Especially if they are looking at the wrong metrics or just caught napping.

So clever Chris got a rather surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mathew Ingram at GigaOm after writing his guru like article called “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet”.  Here is the link. Ouch. Perhaps if Chris were a bit more cryptic he would get more respect. After all, that used to work for Alan Greenspan.

Clueless, NYT heralds Chris’s work as one of the Ideas of the Day. Here is the link.

FOLLOW -  Fred Wilson has a few thoughts on his blog, and invited comments. If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend you take a look. Here is the link.

Checking out Giga this morning, I bumped into this quote about the online resource called Quora:

it’s sort of like trying to birth an online version Plato’s ideal society, with participants fulfilling designated roles in the interest of the common good.

This is very cool - a startup dedicated to making the web smarter. Here is a link to the Giga article which I found to be mildly provocative. Inverse blogging? Indeed.

FOLLOW - I logged onto quora and will use it for a while to get a sense of its potential. My first take was positive, though I have some misgivings about the question/answer format. But let’ see.

2d FOLLOW- I wrote the above follow rather quickly — perhaps too quickly. Because thinking about the question/answer format of web information flow opens a few doors for me. I have noticed, for example, that I am far more interested in blogs where I better understand the implied questions and answers to the post than those that present information that appears to be random. Perhaps that is a characteristic of a “tight” blog. A tight blog generates good questions and interesting answers. So far I get the sense that Quora is not that tight.

Netflix used to be mainly in the movie DVD rental business. Then it decided that it needed to get into the movie streaming business. Then it realized streaming TV shows is a potentially big market. And so it is competing head to head with Hulu.That’s a lot of change in a short while.

GigaOm via New TeeVee offers a glimpse of Netlix’s strategy for competing with Hulu. Let the games begin!

I was not expecting that much from Matt Ridley’s TED talk when I started watching. The title seemed too much like a gimmick (When Ideas Have Sex). But as I watched I caught onto a thread of thinking that helped me tremendously. Why? Matt brings out the core value that is building prosperity for us in our age (and not just for rich folks) — the value of exchange. He paints an optimistic picture for the future as our opportunities for exchange expand. In the end, Matt is talking about an eco-system that we can nurture. That is exciting — and a challenge for getting more nuanced leadership that builds competences that facilitate and accelerate opportunities for valuable exchanges.

Here is the link. I highly recommend taking a look.

I wondered about this more than once. And today CNN offered me this explanation

TED began as a California-based conference in the 1980s named after its three initial subjects: technology, entertainment and design. It has expanded its subject matter and its geographical scope, holding conferences around the world and making videos of its speakers, so far more than 700, freely available at http://www.ted.com/. Volunteers translate talks into more than 70 languages. [CNN partners with TED to present a TEDTalk every week, with added content, on CNN.com]

Pretty impressive. What I really like about TED is the opportunity to listen HOW people think, not just about the weird things they are doing. What I really would like to see would be more threads between the annual presentations and next steps in discussion and discovery.

Anyway, TED is fun. TED is interesting. TED is, well, just TED. It has become a noun in itself. Here is the link to the CNN article (which BTW, I found via Twitter following Dan Pink whom I first heard about via … that’s right …. his TED lecture).

I posted yesterday about how web platforms are really just starting to evolve. I think we have a long way to go before we have in hand (or on the tips of our tongues) a usable vocabulary for living in and enjoying web based communities.

Food 52 gives an example of how this might evolve further. Food 52 dedicated itself to developing a “crowd sourced” cookbook. BTW, I love that phrase “crowd sourced”. Well, it worked. They cast open the door for ideas on how to make dishes, offering small rewards for the best input. Out of this they got a nice product (the cookbook). More important they offer on an ongoing basis the satisfaction from belonging to a group that builds and uses routines that promote shared learning (in Dan Pink’s language, building on purpose, autonomy and mastery are the motivators). Here is the link.

I especially enjoyed this comment from Midge

I’ve learned more from a year of food 52– and had way more more fun –than from perusing my stacks of cookbooks over the years. What a great group of people. …

Enjoy!