Outsourcing

Do you know the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something when a topic keeps coming up and up and up again?  Well, I do and it just did these past days.  The New York Times had several articles on outsourcing.  One in particular, Outsource Your Way to Success, talks about how a couple invested in a housekeeper even when they were starving students to be able to focus on their studies and be more productive. I wish I had that kind of singular focus, actually, no, I do not. I’m interested in just about anything; at least for a while.  But you get the gist.  I get excited.

So, the other day I decided that it was silly to pay programmers and designers to do all the work on my websites and I could go ahead and learn with the help of templates and WordPress, or Square Space how to set up and implement websites myself.  I signed up at General Assembly for a two day class called “WordPress Bootcamp”. Our teacher Nate Cooper was awesome (that is patient, humorous, and of course, super hero knowledgeable) and off we set into the sunset.

Links and Plain Old Plagiarism

Sometimes an opportunity or a trend just hits you over the head every which way.  You guessed it: time for a blog entry on the topic of plagiarism, or maybe we call it links, pingback, copy and borrowed.

(As an aside: plagiarize is one of my favorite English words. I learned it as a teenager listening to Tom Lehrer songs and was mighty proud to know such a difficult word – the song in question is on YouTube.  If you don’t know Tom Lehrer – you must! Harvard mathematics professor fired for singing political songs back in the 50ies and 60ies; darkly funny, cynical and on the money with his social observations.)

To the point: I met with a serial entrepreneur last week. We were connected through an acquaintance. I had looked at his LinkedIn profile, looked at his newest venture and figured he’d be interesting enough to meet.  We met and turns out he’s a twenty something. I went back to his bio on LinkedIn and looked at the dates more carefully.  It seems this young man has achieved more since high school than most of us will in a live time. He told me that he didn’t want to waste his time with University he had too many ideas of what he wanted to do so he DID them. 

I visited his blog and found a profoundly funny and interesting infographic on getting things done (I’m a fan of that; getting things done I mean), some of the infographic. I do not agree with but that’s beside the point.  On a second visit to his blog, now with a bit more time on hand to read further I see that the infographic is linked to a different source. Totally legit, but still, I felt a tiny bit put off, because for that 12-or so hour span in-between I thought he was beyond brilliant – which I’m sure he is, but not THAT brilliant – as in coming up with THAT infographic.  I was wondering if I’m just too naïve, or if I missed the point somehow.  

I subscribe to the wildly popular Swiss Miss blog, not only because I know Tina (she designed the first Clock Wise Website back in the 90ies), but also because her blog is a collection of all things design – and her taste is towards the clutter-free, clean, minimal, fun and very sophisticated.  Through her blog posts I found another design blog that I liked enough to subscribe to it as well, only to find out that I looked at the same content every once in a while. Are there enough readers or subscribers for both to duplicate? It seems so.  Do they copy from each other, or do the same people submit their ideas to both. I guess the latter.  

It begs the question however, where does link end and plagiarize start? Is this a cultural phenomenon or a generational one?  Are we faster to read a visual image and to ‘link’ it to the publisher without paying attention much to its true origin?  Why do the links on Swiss Miss not bother me and why was I bothered with the infographic on the serial entrepreneur’s blog?

It’s all about trust and context.  Today’s hyperlinks are the footnotes of yesteryear.  The difference is that formats of delivery and context change from blog to blog.  With the overflow of information I choose a few blogs and newsletter to deliver information (of whatever kind) and with that I curate content and I do so by choosing trusted sources (see earlier blog entry on trust agents).  Swiss Miss is a trusted agent and her blog is set within the context of: “I show you the design world through my eyes”. Naturally that means she goes out and curates for me, the reader, and I know that I’m looking at other people’s work (be it jewelry, art, design elements or furniture). On the other hand the young serial entrepreneur is not a trust agent (yet) and so with I was missing context. 

But there is also the cultural versus the generational phenomenon.  Americans are much more at ease in passing along a great idea without much concern about, or burden of crediting the source.  A Swiss person would much more so be reluctant to pass an idea along without making sure it was clear that they really aren’t the brilliant ones to come up with the idea in the first place – this modesty also creates a buffer of “not my idea originally” when it falls flat.   

As for the generational difference: stuff gets shared and if possible for free, this holds true for my generation to a big degree, but even more so for a younger generation of millennia, irrespective of culture. Not only geographical boundaries are taken down by the World Wide Web (sic), but also intellectual property rights are fuzzy at best, and I’m not talking about the major film studios, record labels and publishers. Context is important and ‘knowing’ your source.   

The moral of the story:  make the context of your blog entries crystal clear, hyperlink diligently and only plagiarize when you’re sure the idea is beyond brilliant and you WANT to be credited for it (oh, and take some error and omissions insurance out).   

The Importance of Local

As I am sloshing through “Within the Context of no Context” by Georges Trow I find myself torn between total awe for his insights and alienation for his fragmented writing style and the realization that it is the style that makes the reading so thought provoking and painful but also beautiful.  I’m a fast reader and this is a slim volume, but this book is one paragraph, often just one sentence, at a time reading. I’ve been digesting “Within the Context of no Context”, morsel by morsel for well over a year. 

Today I came across ChrisBrogan’s latest blog entry about how “local” will become more and more important, and I immediately had to think of “Within the Context of no Context”.  It made me realize just how much more we feel disconnected the bigger our virtual reach becomes and that a need for immediate connectedness and belonging to a smaller subset that is ‘manageable’ might not be filled in the physical world, especially where business is concerned. 

Trow talks about those opposing forces as quadrants. The quadrant of man alone and the quadrant of all (in this case all Americans). Trow writes about the loneliness of man in terms of one person looking for a connectedness in a one-way relationship with the TV (Trow’s essay was originally published in the New Yorker and as a book in 1981) and how we personalize and ‘make our own’ the stars and TV personalities we watch every day in an effort to shrink the distance between our quadrant of physical living and experiencing and the quadrant of the rest of America. Trow might as well have been talking about the internet 2.0. 

I would that that a step further and say, that the larger our network becomes the more we become a group of one in the physical world.  In an effort to manage our growing reach, we create an “us”, which in our own eyes encompasses “all”, but really only means an “us”; a group who’s sentiments, or geography, or political views we share. Everything beyond “us” is foreign and out of our reach, sic understanding. This, also a powerful explanation for any ‘club-yness’ to the exclusion of ‘the other’ (another favorite topic of mine). 

The internet has made the stakes higher and the distance between man and the ‘rest of the world’ more distant. Trow’s quadrants have moved even further apart.  Any business who understands to fill the void between the quadrants has a lottery ticket in hand.  

If a business can reach out and have a meaningful two-way interaction with its customers on a global, virtual, all-connected platform, AND can give them their local 'heroes’ on the ground (as Chris Brogan calls them) – it will have a very powerful brand and a very strong relationship with its customers and consumers indeed.

The Big Unfollow - For All The Idiots (Keep Reading)

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan posted a story on being “unfollowed”. I read it, thought it was very interesting (as I think about 98% of his writing is and I have no clue where all his information and ideas come from; he’s either got a huge head or very dedicated and smart people working for him).

A few days later, as I’m preparing to write an email to a friend I’ve not heard of in a long time I go onto FB to make sure I have his new (and ever changing) physical location right, not to ask him how Florida is when in effect he’s moved on to California. I type in his first name, and…. nothing. Strange I think. Type his name again … nada. YIKES. He’s un-friended me! I have a bit of a gut reaction and think immediately: “what have I done wrong”?…. “is he mad at me”? Alas – it turns out he’s un-friended us all – no more profile on FB. Uff.

Chris Brogan unfollowed everybody on Twitter to take care of a spam issue. The reactions he writes where at times visceral, even hostile and some just plain strange. I’ve noticed that I have about the same amount of Twitter followers every time I log on, which is three to four times a week (I know not enough, or too much – depending on who you are), but I do average a new follower daily. That means seven people think I’m boring enough to drop me from their Twitter list every week. That’s a sobering thought.

When I started my Twitter account I would follow everybody in an account that was similar to mine, hoping I might find an audience (back then mostly for my film Abraham’s Children). It mostly worked like a charm until I went to unfollow the lot to make space for new conquests. “Retaliation” was often very swift.

I use FB, LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out and to communicate my thoughts on what I think is newsworthy. News coming to me: I’m not so good with. With (still) only 24 hours a day is there ever enough time to digest but the tip of the social media iceberg, let alone interact and react?

What are the rules of politeness around a friend or a follower? How do people see themselves in the numbers of their friends and followers? Who is actually reading Tweets and status updates of all their followers? Who even notices if you ditch them? Are the numbers of followers and friends the currency of our social networking self-worth? Are we all communicating out but not across or between? How much are we taking IN?

In the old days of email marketing (about a month ago), a 15% click rate was great. With Twitter and FB I think we’re not even touching 1% but racing right into 1 per-mille. In every one in a thousand follower I have a potential customer or client. That’s another sobering thought.

Dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. Read: time-sink-run-with-the-crowd-idiot if you do and dinosaur if you don’t. I choose idiot. And you? (If you’re reading this my money is on idiot…).

Curation, the Human Algorithm & the Future of Social Media

There are two expressions I keep coming across in reading about the future of everything that’s web-based and, social media in particular: “content curation” and the “human algorithm”.

The definition of curation is that it’s the caretaking or presentation of things entered into a collection, either physical or digital. With the onslaught of information from all sides, some sort of curation needs to be implemented to collect, filter, verify and disseminate news, entertainment, human interaction in the broadest sense.

An Algorithm, according to Wikipedia is an effective method expressed in mathematics and computer science as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. (Gosh I don’t miss math classes). Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing and automated reasoning. So in a way, an algorithm is the mathematical brother of more artsy curation.

So where does curation and the human algorithm come to play? Where curation means that people manually verify and decide what content to present regardless of the readers on-line behavior, the human algorithm is a program fed by ‘trust agents’ to get you real-time information you’re looking for based on your previous on-line behavior and searches. The human comes as much from your behavior as it does from the behaviors of millions of other on-line users that share some of your on-line habits. However the above mentioned ‘trust agents’ are key.

In curating or in programming the challenge lies to find trustworthy sources and networks of followers with ‘good reputations’. Tweets and social content needs to be tied to networks of so-called trust agents and their sub group of followers. Connectivity – being linked to and linking – is the most important thing to attain trustworthy status.

Somebody with a whole lot of followers on Twitter who has a lot of “links” and “recommendations” will, in a Google search on that person, come up over another person with similar content but lesser reputation and trust. This kind of ranking is referred to as the “human algorithm” – I’m oversimplifying this.

You might want to read the following: Brian Solis on “The Human Algorithm and how Google ranks Tweets in real-time Search”, Mark Little of Storyful: “The Human Algorithm”, which really talks about curation and Mathew Ingram of Gigaom writing about the ”Future of Media: Curation, Verification and News as a Process”. The last two articles are bit redundant, but both talk extensively about the verification process of actual news stories, which is fascinating and labor intensive.

And to round it up: Soren Gordhamer from Mashable talks about the Future of Social Media and the three pressing questions regarding the future of social media: distraction, filter, and capacity.

The first is self-explanatory and so is the third, but I would like to expand on the second a bit, filter: increasingly search engines give us information they THINK we want to see. If you where to Google your neighbor from your home computer and then again from a coffee shop you could quite likely get entirely different results. Google, Bing and other search engines are filtering the search for you based on your browsing history, social media interactions and on-line purchasing habits. This brings Gordhamer to ask for three options: filtering needs to be transparent, we need to be able to make choices in the filtering applied and there needs to also be an unfiltered option.

Gordhamer’s observation is; as we will be increasingly inundated, overwhelmed and clogged up with irrelevant and relevant information with still only 24 hours a day. The new paradigm is no longer the questions of the many different ways of sharing on line, but the question of RELEVANCY.

And with relevancy being the new paradigm shift in the near future of social media we are back to curation and human algorithms. He/she who makes the most noise will be heard! What else is new?

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened up doors to unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents around the world and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are young people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gaps becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power. This is also a problem for large patches of rural areas in the United States.

There are huge patches of land, some spanning entire states with a few urban exceptions with no cell phone and internet access through wireless towers, cable or T1 lines. In the US Satellite dishes are the only solution for those remote areas, if they want internet access. Satellites are expensive to install and their monthly fees can be too much of a burden for a house hold budget.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe too) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet. The lost potential of talent is too great to ignore.