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This is a game changer:
If you haven’t factored this into your business yet, you’re already on the endangered list!
Tags: Apple, iPadThe following Sports Illustrated concept piece by The Wonderfactory for Time Inc shows some of the key themes that will shape tablet-based consumption of information:
Sports Illustrated – Tablet Demo 1.5 from The Wonderfactory on Vimeo.
I fondly remember searching the case law while at law school in Cape Town in the early 90′s. Essentially I had three choices – the UCT law library, the records at the Supreme Court itself or gopher (that’s pre-browser Internet). My preference was always gopher. It was in fact through gopher that I had my initial mindspin epiphany – the Internet was going to change our world.
Fast forward a few years – I had the pleasure of writing head notes for commercial case law and got introduced to CaseLaw 1.0 courtesy of Austlii. In 1998 I set up one of the first major legal vertical portals, Lawstream (the big picture vision was to stream live from the courts) and achieved a million page views in month 1.
Needless to say, I’ve seen the law online since its early days and I’m really excited to see Google enter the fray:
Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar.
It would be really cool if Google were to have an open API policy with respect to these cases. What I mean is that anyone should be able to write their own headnote or summary on a case or develop a set of commentary threading together how the common law has been affected by a particular judgement or other. In true crowdsourcing style, the most popular or authoritative headnotes and commentary would rise to the top to create a Legalpedia.
I really like the way that Google, in releasing Scholar, has acknowledged the work of true legal pioneers such as Graham Greenleaf at Austlii.
Next step for Scholar? – My suggestion is that they expand out to other countries and continue to democratise the black box that is the law.
Tags: Austlii, Google Scholar, gopher, Graham Greenleaf, Law
Jason Eppink has marked the step change in publishing which has left vacant newspaper boxes littering the urban landscape with a surreal glow.
[Hat tip to boingboing]
New industry sectors coalesce and crystallize as a result of a number of factors converging.
In the case of Social Business Design this is an area that has been bubbling under for about 18 months with a range of different tags, such as Enterprise 2.0, but it never really gelled together. There were differences of opinion on who the market was, how to approach it and what exactly did it constitute. Was it simply setting up a corporate blog, an internal wiki and a customer forum or was there more to this area?
Charlene Li’s book Groundswell went a long way towards gathering impetus behind this new industry sector, but still the gel wasn’t quite there. When she left Forrester and set up the Altimeter Group people took notice, but their attention wasn’t galvanized.
And then Jeremiah Oywang left Forrester as well and joined Charlene. People started to sit up and really take notice – they were primed for something to happen. Around about the same time David Armano, an exec with the Dachis Group gave a presentation at the Social Fresh conference titled Social Business by Design. The industry now had a moniker to focus around.
The key inflection point though came last week when Dachis acquired Headshift. Much has already been written about this and most industry commentators will agree with the following tweet from @amayfield:
Headshift/Dachis is massively significant. Not marketing…this is a new sector shaping up: social business.
The Social Business Design meme is now starting to spread rapidly courtesy of one of the classic tenets of this industry: sharing. David Armano had placed his deck of slides on Slideshare two weeks ago. It has since been featured on Slideshare’s new “hot on Twitter” section and is gaining a lot more viewers.
This depth of attention around the topic is rapidly turning to more widespread adoption of the term, both by potential industry practitioners and by their potential clients. An industry is born.
What is Social Business Design?
Anne McCrossan has delivered a cogent summary of this arena:
Social business design sits at the intersection of organizational development and marketing, and can loosely be described as the practice of developing communities of engagement to develop ideas, activities and outputs for commercial and social benefit.
As organizations adopt the principles of social business design, intangible, soft assets like brand value, purpose, human resources, processes and capabilities come to the fore. Social business design is about engendering involvement and it’s inbound.
Slightly differently, marketing services and ‘broadcast’ media operate on the basis the message and transaction are the means to the end. Marketing services communicate primarily outbound.
Her entire post is pure gold and I highly recommend anyone who has read this far to jump over to her site and continue reading.
You will be hearing a lot more on the topic of Social Business Design and I will aim to synthesise and analyze as much of it as I can.
ADDED: Gaurav Mishra has posted a comprehensive summary of this burgeoning space and I wanted to point to his thoughts as they complement the thread in this post.
The key take out, for me, from his comments are that both Altimeter and Dachis focus on using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers.
This is a salient point. As the social technologies shift, so can the emphasis that an agency puts in those technologies. For example, Augmented Reality is still in its early infancy as a technology and a few years out from being of use within the enterprise. However, when it does mature as a technology it will have an immense impact, until then it is on all of our watchlists, but it’s not worth confusing clients with until it matures somewhat.
Innovation guru John Wolpert is always pushing the envelope. And so it comes as little surprise to learn that he is innovating again.
This time his innovation is within the publishing arena with the release of his first novel, The Hidden Stage.
Set in a civic theatre not unlike the one in John’s hometown, he was inspired to write this story by a trip to his local theatre in 4th grade. He recalls how he had to go to a play there, and thought he was too cool to go. He remembers having a serious attitude about it. But half-way into the show, he became totally mesmerized. The end of the first chaper of The Hidden Stage has a moment for the main character, Alex Cole, that is not dissimilar to something that happened to him – and it changed his life.
John believes that a lot of professional writers are starting to wake up to the notion that you don’t have to print heaps of dead tree in advance in order to publish.
The new way – and while the concept of this isn’t new, the practicality of it is very, very new – is to focus on your maven market (in the case of The Hidden Stage, the 100,000 volunteers and professionals at civic theaters in the US), go viral with them, and give them the ability to order the book on Amazon.
He found that using Scribd.com was also a huge bonus. He is able to tell exactly how the book is doing online. In ten minutes, he had the whole book – all 450 pages – online and embedded for reading on both his own site and on Scribd.com.
John’s strategy was to first write a compelling book that was a page-turner and then to really lower the barrier to reading that first page. As reading any book is a serious investment of time, the cover and the site were fundamental to getting that first page read.
He scripted a Flash website to give potential readers a really good sense of what they would be getting if they embarked on reading the story. Then he gave them a simple one-click path to reading the whole book online, and finally there is the link to Amazon.
John also points out that there is an alternative through Amazon, which is not self-publishing, but simple print-on-demand through BookSurge. Instead of authors having to put up $$ to do mini print-runs, finally print-on-demand is here. He says it costs a little more for the book buyer, but it is great that we can finally get books into readers’ hands without having to line the pockets of publishers…all the rest is tapping the market and knowing your audience.
What he’s seen so far from feedback is that people start by reading the first page just to see what it is about. Then they read a bit more, because the story is exciting. If the whole story was not available for free online, he suspects that he would not be getting readers to even try the first few pages…it’s psychological. But then they decide they want the printed book, and can get it from Amazon.
As they say: “If your idea isn’t good, you lose. If your idea isn’t viral, you lose. If people don’t want to buy your souvenir, you lose.”
Tags: John Wolpert, The Hidden Stage
Today marked the inaugural gathering of the San Francisco chapter of Triibes, the social network set up by marketing guru Seth Godin.
Meeting over lunch at Apple HQ, the group discussed what they were looking to get out of their involvement, broke ice and nibbled pizza. About half way through Seth dialled in and the conversation lifted a notch.
Seth spoke about what Triibes means to him – a place to engage in dialogue with the audience he has cultivated through his writing over the years.
He also spoke about his vision of books and how they fit into the social media paradigm. He sees them as a great way of collating a number of conversations or essays into a format that can easily shared. As proof that his theory was being put into practice, the group unanimously pointed out they had all given one of Seth’s books to a colleague.
It was also interesting to note the attraction for some folks in joining Triibe was that it is not a part of the usual social networking echo chamber. Yet.
Tags: Seth Godin, Triibes
I went along to Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit yesterday. Kudos to Ross for pulling off what appeared to be a seamless transcontinental event.
My only piece of event-management related feedback is that in keeping with the culture of participation theme running through the media these days it would have been good to have had a roving camera and/or pans so that the audience in Sydney could see and engage with the audience in Mountain View.
To some degree this was achieved in true guerilla-style by the uber presence of Phil Morle’s conference chaser. His chaser approach is to hook up ustream to tangler to create a livestream of an event together with a rich seam of commentary. He did this to great effect at the Sydney MySpace Developer Platform launch a few months back and again yesterday.
Yesterday however, the chaser took a cool twist. Phil was located near the back of the room in Sydney and wasn’t getting good video. So he tapped into the video feed from Stilgherrian, who was seated near the front and mixed this with his audio on ustream.
My biggest take away from the time I spent at the event was captured in a comment by Mark Pesce – “Content requires Salience”. I’ll let you ruminate on that for a while.
Stephen Collins has a great wrap up of the event.
Tags: fom08, Future of Media, Mark Pesce, Phil Morle, Stephen Collins, Stilgherrian