I am finding the whole adoption debate about a 2.0 world wearisome. All these "Social Media Marketing Experts" with 40 Tweets and 12,000 followers - all those looking for ROI.
The premise for many is that if you can only use the tools - you will be there. Or that if you can only measure the tools, you will find the value.
OK let's go back and see if revolutions are about the tools or the mindset behind them.
It's 1940 - what do you see here and what did the French General Staff see?
A Tank right? This is a Char B. It was much better than nearly all the German tanks of the time.
But in reality this is what the French General Staff saw. They saw this as a mobile pill box that could be deployed as moving strong points with the infantry.
Now let's look at the Germans at the same time.
Here they are about to launch the first Blitzkrieg in Poland. These are Mk II's a vastly inferior tank to the Char B.
This is how the German General Staff really saw them and how they were used.
A raging but narrowly confined Torrent that would destroy and disrupt all in its path - it is an idea all about controlled chaos. Only the German Army with their highly devolved culture that pushed command down could cope with such an idea.
This idea was truly "disruptive". The actual tools were inferior to the opposition. Their context was superior.
2.0 has next to nothing to so with tools. It has everything to do with mindset.
This is why the measurement idea is so foolish. For what is the context for measurement? I bet it is all about pillboxes.
Last question: why did the Germans get it and not the rest of us? I think that the answer has two parts.
Most importantly, the Germans lost WW I. The winners always have the challenge of hubris. The Losers can always examine their loss
The underlying culture of the German Army is a paradox for the rest of us. The big joke we like to tell each other is that the German Army was all about following orders. But in reality, that was not true after the reforms of the 19th century. The opposite was the truth - huge discretion was pushed out to the field right down to the NCO. The French and American Army are massively controlled by culture. The Brits are somewhere in between.
Large previously successful organizations "won" the industrial wars. They did this by having tightly centralized command and control cultures.
So they are like the French in 1940 - two strikes against.
I think that we are wasting our time trying to get the "French" to get 2.0. They can't and they wont.
Find those who have
Lost the industrial wars - why I picked Public Radio and TV
Have a culture of pushing out/down power
Only when these folks have won will the rest even listen - and then some still will not
Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario, said the H1N1 influenza outbreak needs to be put into proper perspective.
About 200,000 people die in Canada every year from all causes combined, including about 4,000 from seasonal flu.
"By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country," Schabas said Thursday during a panel on media coverage of H1N1 on CBC-TV's The National.
Schabas criticized the media for not trying to put the story into perspective, and for being "a little too easy to spin sometimes" by public health officials.
"I'm not letting the media off the hook totally, but I think the real villains of the piece here have been those public health officials who have consistently overplayed and overstated the importance of what is happening," he said.
"By the time all is said and done, this is not a major public health event, but you'd never know that from what some people are saying."
My beef with the media again is that they tend to have a POV that makes us all helpless.
First of all there is the context - It's usually "Drama" - the sky is falling or the opposite - "Unemployment is a lagging indicator" There is rarely the real context - that in the case of Swine Flu the risks of death are very small as shown by its cycle south of the equator.
Secondly there are the headlines with no context at all - Lots of vaccine - buying the spin. Then No vaccine!
Thirdly - there is no useful advice about what you do if you have the flu - how can you best prepare etc
Lastly - no real examination about what the community can do - how will we support parents etc
The result? People either panic and or switch off.
What is going on in the editors minds? No wonder traditional media is dying. It's not just the web etc, it's this focus on the simplistic and the use of fear. I think it is shameful.
The city of Chicago has over 10,000 acres of vacant land within its borders and much of it has been vacant for several decades. This acreage exists in all parts of the city, many of them places where homes once stood. For many people they have come to represent urban decay; symbols of their neighborhood’s fall from grace. For a time, the city government had a policy of tearing down all abandon homes, in order to prevent their use as crack houses.
While this vacant space may be the holes knocked in to our neighborhoods by the recession, they also represent a unique opportunity to bring us closer as neighbors. There are stories coming out of Detroit about community gardens that are springing up in abandoned lots throughout the city. A city that has known recession much longer than the rest of the country Detroit had a period in the 80’s and 90’s in which abandon hundreds of houses were burned on “Devils Night” as combination of entertainment and protest.
Many of these vast community gardens have had an unexpected influence on the surrounding community. One story involves two elderly women who had been friends and neighbors in the 1970s but lost touch as they were driven in doors by crime and violence in their neighborhood. Unbeknownst to each other they both showed up to the workday to launch a community garden in their neighborhood and discovered to their surprise that they had remained neighbors for years each thinking the other must have moved away. In other cases, senior citizens who were raised on farms in the south and came north as children during the Great Migration have been connected with a younger generation eager to learn how to grown their own food. Even ex-offenders have found new careers as urban farmers. In places that were once filled with garbage crime you can now find people re-discovering what it is to be a good neighbor.
Broken out, Chicago’s 10,000 acres translates into about 75,000 city lots. The city of Chicago has made it very clear that it supports and encourages community gardens. In fact the Chicago Park District even has a program to support the creation of gardens on park district property. People in the urban agriculture movement are enthusiastic proponents of this type of land use and they are looking for allies in their cause. Local organizations like City Farm, Open Lands and Neighbor Space gladly welcome everyone’s participation.
The phenomenon of community gardening is not limited the Rustbelt or other cities hit hard by the economy. From our First Lady Michelle Obama to communities all over the United States people feel a growing sense of responsibility and a desire to relearn the skills of growing food that were once common knowledge.
This is no doubt just in time too. As we begin to confront the impacts of climate change and peak oil on the way we feed ourselves it is time to grab a neighbor and get some dirt under your finger nails.
In one of the most dramatic examples I've seen of the true reach of hunger in the United States, a new report released this week by Washington University in St. Louis researchers found that 90 percent of black children will be clients of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/Food Stamps) at least once by the time they turn 20.
Although the percentage is less for white children (the only other ethnic group studied), the startling statistic here is that, at some point before their 20th birthday,50 percent of all children in the United States will have received SNAP benefits.
More than being about access to food, the report's lead researcher says his findings represent a more important trend in the upbringing of the country's children. "Rather than being a time of security and safety, the childhood years for many American children are a time of economic turmoil, risk, and hardship," says Mark Rank, Ph.D.
Among the other interesting/disturbing statistics presented in the report:
-Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.
-91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.
-Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.
What this report really highlights are the drastic race, gender and socio-economic disparities in this country. And unfortunately, these disparities seem to be affecting our youth at a staggering level.
If children really are the future (as I believe they are), we as a society need to do a much better job of letting kids develop into the leaders of tomorrow, instead of being held back by the problems of today.
As the tiny 1% of the very wealthy pull even further away, the rest fall more too.
With a society that is based on "the market", only the vestiges of the state hang on. With so much of the burden taken by the state - how long can it play this role of lifeline?
I think that food is a great place to start to reinvent society. A local food system has the potential to give people back some power and control.
There are signs of this taking place in the worst hit cities such as Detroit and Cleveland. Small groups are starting to grow food in the ruins of the neighborhoods
One is urban farming. In many parts of Detroit, land that once held houses now grows cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and collard greens.
The city has more than 500 gardens and “we plan to triple that every year,” said Michael Travis, deputy director of Urban Farming, a Detroit-based nonprofit corporation that helps clear land and provides topsoil and fertilizer.
And that's how it took 6 hours to run one errand off-island. Yep, six hours. We left Friday Harbor at 1:40 and returned at 7:40. I
now understand why some people here only go off-island once every four
months. It's really exhausting. I mean, I like the ferry ride itself. I
love being out on the water. Love it. It's the waiting before and after
and the overall time it takes that gets me. They have a name for it here: Island time. And we're on it now.
My blogging friend Stephanie has moved to the San Juan Islands of the west coast - between Vancouver and Seattle. She comes from the LA and Chicago. She has been confronted with a huge adjustment in time - she is experiencing "Island Time". Time when the simple things seem to take a long time - especially if you have to take the ferry to go to the mainland.
My face to face friend Cynthia, has left PEI for a weeks trip to Toronto. She is experiencing the reverse - the frantic time of the big city.
"was there always this many people in toronto? peopled out."
I had the same experience as both Stephanie and Cynthia. I believe that Island living does change our perception of time.
When I first arrived on PEI in the mid 1990's, the bridge was not built. Getting on or off the Island was a journey into another world. In the summer, you could never be sure that you would make the trip. It is quite a feeling to be the last on the boat or worse, the first not to get on. "Running for the boat" was an experience that all shared. Even if you were driving from Vancouver, that last few hours, it was pedal to the metal as you did your best to make the crossing on the schedule.
There was no way to be sure of the time that it would take to make the crossing - so this meant that you had to stop believing that you could control the time of your journey.
On the other hand, with distances so short on the Island, you had more time in the day. In a big city, it is commonplace to spend 2-4 hours a day getting around. Getting to work, daycare, shopping, dinner etc are all major consumers of time. So all the rest of the day gets compressed. We sleep less, eat in a more rushed way, go from one task to another. We don't stop to chat. It's heads down.
But on PEI we get back most of this time. Say 3 hours a day. This is a huge amount really when you factor in sleep. So time moves more slowly. We stop to chat in the street, in the shops, wave at people in cars - because we are going slow enough to notice!
In Arabic there is a term - Buhkara. It is defined as Manana without the sense of urgency. Buhkara would be an idea familiar to Islanders. Things in the service area move sloooooow. It is surely part of the total view of time. Things sometimes never happen. Like many traditional societies, Islanders hate to be overtly rude. So when your plumber says that Yes he will come on Tuesday - Yes does not mean Yes. It is easier not to turn up than to say No.
So sometimes time stands still!
I winter with no tourists there is even more time. All the yard work goes. There is parking everywhere. There is no traffic. Few visitors. Time slows to a crawl. Space shrinks too. We retreat to the kitchen, home office and bedroom. Only the dogs get us out and about.
All this is normal for natives but for new folks like me and now for Stephanie, adjusting to Island time is hard. But when you do adjust - then returning to the big city seems like being exposed to madness.
Everyone looks haunted and harried - and they are. They are all in time deficit. They don't have enough time. So much of the social oil is not there. I walked down the street in Toronto the other day and a man stepped out onto the street from his gate. I said "Good Morning" - he looked at me as if I was mad. My son, embarrassed as hell said "Daaaad!!!! This is Toronto!".
There are so many people! I have to switch off all my social radar. I feel the crush and I have lost a lot of my social armor. It's exhausting just to be in contact with so many people.
I also get ill nearly every time I go to the big city. I have lost some of my immune system - like the Incas?
So Stephanie - if you can allow Island time to sink in, you will find that your armor drops, that you notice more, that you align better to the seasons and the world itself. If like me, you learn to love this, then it will be hard to fit into the time stressed big city again.
Newspapers were dying anyway but the Internet has hastened the process by exposing the newspapers lack of accountability.
The average schmuck buys a paper and sees it as a product designed to inform him, the customer, about the world around him/her. But in any financial transaction the customer is identified as the person who pays the money, and since newspapers only get 20% of revenue from subscribers this means the subscriber is not the “real” customer.
Newspapers get 80% of revenue from corporate advertisers, so they are the “real” customers. And since the corporate advertisers don’t take delivery of the newspapers it means the newspaper is not the real product. The real product is the reader, and the newspaper is just a medium (like radio waves or tv signals) that is used to “deliver” the real product (our eyeballs) to the real customers (corporate advertisers).
Here is a great interview by Peter Rukavina of Mike Proud of the Office of Energy Efficiency. I have known Mike for years now and we are lucky on PEI to have someone as committed and knowldgeable about what we can all do to improve our energy situation.
Central to Mike's view is that we have an opportunity in the heating are - 94% of Island homes are heated by oil. Better insulation and alternatives such as wood offer us a major gain.
So what can each of us do?
Inspired by Mike, I set up a web site called Island Energy - that has as many resources as I can find on how you can save money and on how PEI can do the same. Try the search button - I have got most topics covered.
Strange day marked by buying ahead of, and even after the FOMC release, but then a meltdown at the end of the day. Fundamentally the Fed is on shaky ground and the market is seeing through all the word games and bullshit. Zero percent interest rates and money printing are their actions, the rest is just spew. Here’s the real deal… loan delinquencies, defaults, and bankruptcies are soaring. Employment is WAY down, and been down so long that people are falling off the roles. We have nearly 12 % of our country living on food stamps. Credit and the shadow banking world of derivatives is collapsing (greater than government stimulus). We have made it through the bulk of subprime resets but are now entering the beginning of the wave of Option-Arm resets. This next wave of resets, along with the simultaneous collapse in commercial real estate will stick a fork in already insolvent banks that are pretending to hang on.T2 Partners chart of resets, current as of 1 November:
Nathan is so hard working, thorough and prolific - he is where I start my day. This is the opening of his very comprehensive post today - he reminds us of the fundamentals.
Too big to fail? The obvious way to remove systemic risk is to distribute risk by taking single points of failure out of the equation. Small is beautiful. How did we kickstart the economy after the 1980s fall? Pulling apart huge conglomerates like Hanson, for one. The same needs to happen now to really get the economy moving. We need to make it a lot easier to identify winners and losers. I was expecting a lot more demerger activity already this time around, whether voluntary or enforced.
Or as Neelie Kroes, EU competition director memorably put it this week:
“Some banks Are Too Big To Fail. However no banks are too big to restructure”.
Between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974 world oil prices quadrupled.
The effects of this sudden increase were dramatic everywhere, but particulary so here in Prince Edward Island, Canada. With 100% of electricity coming from fossil fuel generators, gasoline and home heating oil prices that were already higher than elsewhere, and a lower per-capita income than most of Canada, the so-called "energy crisis" hit the Island hard, and spawned interest in looking at sustainable alternatives to meeting the Island's energy needs.
Politically Prince Edward Island was well-poised to take steps in this direction: in the midst of a bold 15-year "Comprehensive Development Plan," the Island's provincial government was already on a drive to modernize the economy and infrastructure. Premier Alex Campbell, spurred on by his executive secretary Andy Wells, who had become interested in the work of the Club of Rome, of E.F. Schumacher and of Louis Mumford, redirected some of this drive for modernization into an exploration of energy alternatives, taking an uncommonly broad, ecological view of the challenges. At a 1976 speech in Montreal, Campbell laid out the broad view of his administration:
What I am presenting to you then, is a suggestion, not for a new society, but for a new direction to our society. One that emphasizes self-reliance and involvement of our citizens rather than encouraging them to be passive consumers. It accentuates decentralization of capital and decision making, rather than intensive control. I envision a highly diversified society. I believe this is in keeping not only with our traditional values but also with our modern aspirations for a pluralistic society.
This would be a bold statement for a leader to make today; in 1976 it was doubly so coming from Campbell, leader of a small, remote, conservative province averse to dramatic change.
Peter has done a wonderful job here - This is a compelling story - Told with passion by David - "I came for a weekend and stayed 35 years..."
Surely we can take Premier Campbell's words then and apply them today - Work to shift our society to "one that emphasizes self reliance and involvement of our citizens ..."
As a 60 year old with a grand daughter, I feel that I can no longer simply talk and exhort. I have tried to do a few things at home but it is not enough.
Sophia is one year old - what will life be like when she is 60? Will I die knowing that I have done my bit?
UK: Darling confirms government to break up too big to fail banks
>
In a clear break with US economic policy, the UK government have decided that too big to fail is too big to exist. As a result, three large financial institutions now owned at least in part by government are to be dismantled. Moreover, talk of Tesco’s or Virgin getting the assets is yet another momentous shift in the British banking landscape.
Chancellor Alistair Darling has confirmed that Lloyds, RBS and Northern Rock will be broken up and parts sold to new entrants to the banking sector.
He said there could be three new High Street banks in the UK over the next three to four years as a result.
But the chancellor said he would only sell parts of the banks when "the time is right", to ensure taxpayers get their money back.
There is speculation that buyers might include Tesco and Virgin.
One should not understate the importance of this decision. This is a game-changing move by the UK government. One year ago, it was the U.K.’s decision to recapitalise its banks which changed the economic policy landscape. U.S. policy makers were forced to switch TARP policy from buying up dodgy assets at inflated prices to injecting capital (see my post “Recapitalising Britain” from 7 Oct 2008).
Yet again, the British are leading the way in reform. If you recall, just two weeks ago Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, made a blistering attack on government policy and advised breaking up too big to fail banks. At the time, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly rejected this idea.
A lot of the discussion about the future of TV is about how it will die in the context of the online alternative. I myself watch nearly all the video that I do on the web now. I think that it is inevitable that in a few years this will be commonplace.
This raises the large question - what is the new business model? For stations and for producers?
As Dave Snowden suggests, when you have a complex problem, you can only experiment until you see the new emerge.
In this context, KETC has been conducting as series of experiments to seek out answers. I have shown you how they are using their ideas about being the convener for major community issues such as the Mortgage Crisis and Flu. KETC are getting close to answer a related question - how does a public station get the support it needs from its local community.
Today I would like to share with you a big idea that they are trying to answer the Producer question. How do you get a return on high quality content in the online social age?
Here is quick summary of what we are trying. Then I will unpack the ideas and show you the details - my hope is that you can see the DNA of our approach and hence then see how you might use this or improve it.
We picked a community that exists - that is not merely a fan based community - but a community of rabid Participants that had an equally rabid following. A Community that spans North America with chapters in every major centre. We picked a community that everyone admires an thinks is worthwhile. We picked a community that does something very visual and where drame and story is built in. We picked an ideal starting point to create a Social Object - We picked First Robotics. If you are one of the 3 people in North America who know nothing about this - here is a link, In essence this is a community that hosts teams who kids who build robots and then compete with them in a national series.
We then picked a series of partners that would enable us to follow many teams on their way to the finals and from all of this found our "heroes" and our narrative. That was the classic Content part that was not new.
We then built a supporting web world that will act as the Social Amplifier for not only the film but the entire community - that is the new aspect and this has a number of features that I think will become useful for any such community and project. Imagine a "Jane Austen" community that enfolds Masterpiece Theatre? Imagine A Science Fair community that enfolds say Nova?
So here are some of the features that we have put together - as you can see this is not hard to do technically - the barriers, as always are cultural.
Just a taste of the excitement.
Lesson 1 - While we have a banner on our main page that takes you here - we have a dedicated piece of real estate for the community. With the web, we can have an infinite amount of dedicated real estate. At KETC we have an Economic area - A Flu area and now the Gear Up area - there is really no limit. This is the SPACE where the community will be hosted - not just a page.
Here you can see a small section of the national map for First. These are the nodes of a scale free network. Each community can have their own local space. So what is National is also local. In aggregate we might get something remarkable.
This is what all scale free networks look like. This is actually a picture of flu!. This is the test for you. The Pattern" must look like this, if you have any chance of getting life and emergence from your network.
The Gear Up First design enables this to occur.
If we follow the Jane Austen Book Club idea - every city can have a boo club. People meet face to face and then go on to meet regionally and then nationally. Such a network can afford to have say Colin Firth visit! The national producer has this huge keen and identified group to base their ideas, projects and funding on.
QW
We are using Facebook and Twitter to bind the local, regional and national groups more tightly. We have used our Trust as the host.
With more and more safe and trusted connections - there is more chance of Emergence. The deep value of Public TV is Trust. Communities need this to flourish. So part of our role here is Hosting - providing that safe place on the unsafe web.
Now the kids themselves and their families have a local, regional and national place to put up their own content. So this space is not just for chat or for KETC to show content - but for all in the group.
Having a film that is a social object means in the end that people get together. The climax for First is the nationals. This is the SXSW of First. For the next few years, St Louis, the home of KET, will be the host.
As many of us who are the children of the social web have found, meeting each other is the payoff. Star Trek? First? Jane Austen?
These kind of events in themselves create more energy - social and economic. Is not the new model for authors to use the book as a social object to convene face to face meetings that pay?
Such a process is different from the traditional mass media model where over time, interest wanes and more and more resources are required to keep the show on the road. With a good social object, the social power scales over time and the group resources take over from the seed resources.
It's like gardening. If you tend and care for your tomato plant until it is time to plant, by fall nature and the plant will give you the crop.
Our film is just the seed for a whole garden of First related stuff to come.
Of course this is early days. This is an experiment. There will be some parts that do better than others. But I think we are close to a model that will work - will offer the public and the producer a great return in the new web age.
Prince Edward Islanders spent eight per cent more than they earned in 2008, says a new report by the Atlantic Province Economic Council.
APEC senior economist David Chaundy told CBC News Friday that the spending could catch up with Islanders as the recession ends.
"At the moment interest rates are very low," said Chaundy.
"As we move out of the recession and into the recovery, especially the end of 2010 and into 2011, we'll see interest rates rising and therefore the cost of servicing that consumer debt will increase, which again might put some pressure on credit growth and consumer spending, and obviously there may be some implications for solvency for some individuals."
In addition to outspending their income, Islanders had zero net savings in 2008. APEC recorded consumer savings of about two per cent of their income in 2000.
Suppose that the economy were to keep growing at 3.5 percent. If that happened, unemployment would eventually start falling — but very, very slowly. The experience of the Clinton era, when the economy grew at an average rate of 3.7 percent for eight years (did you know that?) suggests that at current growth rates we’d be lucky to see the unemployment rate fall by half a percentage point per year, meaning that it would take a decade to return to something like full employment.
Worse yet, it’s far from clear that growth will continue at this rate. The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us.
Here is Paul Krugman on good form - My own feeling is that the best kind of "growth" will come from a focus of local resilience. Local Food, Local Energy - this way people not only get work and jobs back but they keep them and keep the value created for their own community.
There is something to be said for the phlegmatic nature of the British. I imagine that if I were attacked by a lion, even if it was only playing, I’d be screaming my head off. Of course, I’d then probably be dead.
Here, the attacked reporter is actually more excited about getting some stitches, which he is around to get because he was so very calm as the lion bit him, while clawing his back. Why don’t we have any reporters in America as interesting?
Recent Comments