Curtis points to some TED commandments, that sounds like not only good rules for conferences, but a lot more in life besides… The guy who posted them recounts:

After you’re asked to be a speaker at the TED conference, a number of things happen to you, some of them by mail. The most dramatic so far would have to be a freaking slab of rock with the TED speakers’ guidelines printed on it.

They are:

1. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
2. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow The

Euan loves Umair’s Twitter commandments, which, as Mr Semple says “I reckon are spot on for how to be successful in whatever you do in the future”.

As expected, set my brain sizzling. Like Euan, I will leave them as headings and encourage you to read the whole of Umair’s post.

1. Ideals beat strategies.
2. Open beats closed.
3. Connection beats transaction.
4. Simplicity beats complexity.
5. Neighborhoods beat networks.
6. Circuits beat channels.
7. Laziness beats business.
8. Public beats private.
9. Messy beats clean.
10. Good beats evil.

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Image: Grin-and-bear-it optimism...

Being utterly besotted with the web, and especially the social web, as I am, I tend dislike nay-saying about its significance, and the manifold benefits this thing will bring to society, the world etc. You know the sort of Daily Fail nonsense: Facebook gives you cancer, Twitter rots your brain, bloggers never meet real people.

But there’s a difference between reactionary nonsense and thoughtful critiques. Over at the O’Reilly Radar blog, Joshua-Michéle Ross has been poking at some of the more troublesome prospects that social technologies bring. Like how much of our identity and personal data are we surrendering for analysis by corporations and governments (since analysis of that data is a big part of my business, but I also value personal freedom that’s a particularly interesting issue for me).

He takes through a series of four posts that I highly recommend reading:

1. The Evangelist Fallacy, Social Media and The New Age of Enlightenment: In which we are reminded that the Enlightenment with which we draw so many parallels to today brought not just progressive new ideas about equality and rights, but new (very effective) thinking about how to control the massses.
2. The Captivity of the Commons: With the whole world connected and people living their lives in public we need to re-think privacy and how corporations work (so that they are less amoral).
3. The Digital Panopticon: How the nightmare of the Panopticon is effectively at hand if corporations are able to see every detail of our livs in plain sight.
4. Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation: Funding for social sciences will increasingly come from corporations as they try to understand how to manipulate mass social media.

As Alan Patrick says on Broadstuff:

hat makes this post extremely fascinating is that it comes from the O’Reilly Radar, which - in my experience anyway - have tended to be on the “cup overfloweth” side of the New New Social Thing, never mind a Glass Half Full - so this Glass Half Empty article - the first, it seems, of a series, is a rather fascinating shift of tenor, methinks.

He senses the beginning of a backlash, good and proper, perhaps coming from businesses (that aren’t managing to figure out how to get value out of networks as fast as Joshua-Michéle fears) as well as individuals wanting to rein in how much web shadow they are comfortable casting.

Meanwhile, Ian Delaney has a melancholy reflection on this subject that makes for good further reading and thinking matter, about how his early hopes that social media would bring socialist values to the fore are fading. He picks up the Panopticon analogy and extends it to society.

philosopher Michel Foucault back in the 70s picked up and ran with the idea of the Panopticon, especially in his best-known work Discipline and Punish. His idea was that Bentham’s model wasn’t just an idea for a prison; but for a society.

He argued that prisons are a really new idea. Back in the past, we simply thrashed/burned/drowned/stabbed transgressors. That all changed in the C18th with the Enlightenment . The idea of law-enforcement was ‘enlightened’ with the  understanding that resources [people] didn’t need to be wasted and that better social control is exercised through freely-given compliance, rather than co-option.

People could be turned into machines, a consequence of political thinking in the emergence of industrial society and the rush to efficiency and cost-allocation. Once properly mechanised, they could be ‘trusted’ – the scare quotes, because the trusted prisoner is no longer human. A big part of that process is surveillance: once people know that they are always (potentially) watched, they’re a bit more compliant to the rules, and a bit more like machines.

Actually, Ian turns from melancholy to fighting talk. Where is the transgression, he asks? What passes for subversion online is often just prnaksterism, often funded to, in small feats of legerdemain to slip in a flash of brand in front of the viewer.

The echo chamber is another danger in all of this, Ian says. Where are the racists in his network?:

Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

Add some racists to your feed list? I don’t know about racists, but I enjoy having different views on hand in my inbox. I detest a great deal of what some political bloggers say, but I like to try and understand. Sometimes I have had my mind changed too. I understand people on the right (OK, mainly the centre right) much better than I did when I was a pre-web student. Then I used to sneer at people for reading the Telegraph for goodness sake. Now I’ll read it’s leaders and blog posts alongside Comment is Free and the Guardian.

I’ll unsubscribe because people are boring, not because I disagree. Maybe that’s just me. And maybe I need to listen more to some Green voices, some far right voices, some Socialist Workers Party voices.

All is not lost, I say. Fight on…This world is still ours to shape, perhaps as never before. We’re right to identify these pitfalls and blind alleys, but nothing is inevitable in all of this. There’s still a revolution to be had.

After we’ve read these warnings, go and read some Umair Haque manifesto. Then think about what you will do this year to change the world. Seriously.

Point is: there’s a lot at stake.

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“It’s all about the networks.”

We say it, I say it, a lot. But I’m not sure that we’re really appreciating what that means.

In a way, Gladwell did us a disservice with the Tipping Point. It over-simplified networks, when the most important thing you need to understand about networks, especially human, social networks, is just how very, very complex they are.

And of course, the Tipping Point, or perhaps more the endless retelling of the Tipping Point by marketers, gave us, or bolstered further, the cult of the influentials.

Find them, these gatekeepers to the herd, the idea went, persuade them of the merits of your cause, or pay them to pretend, and the masses will adjust their perceptions accordingly and success will be yours.

I think you may be better off thinking about models, strategies, tactics for success communicating, influencing people in networks by looking at evolutionary models, complexity theory, than hunting the ever-elusive influencer.

And they did exist. And you find them. What are you going to do? Buy them?

As for the people you sometimes see in Twitter and elsewhere proclaiming themselves to be influencers by dint of a spammy follower count. It’s like in the blogging days of yore, when someone pronounced to be, or alluded affinity with, the A-listers, I lost interest in them.

If you say you’re cool you not. Sort of thing.

My thoughts keep returning to a quote I heard via Brian Morrisey: “You get the network you deserve.”

For more coherence on this subject, check out this collection of thoughts and links on networks and influence at Data Mining.

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I blame the Puritan, protestant streak in our psyche for that. Something that connects utility with functional, work-like stuff. And sees entertainment as other, as a pleasure, and pleasure a somehow being separate from being useful to us. like at some level all pleasures are guilty ones.

Thanks to Curtis for showing a nice Charles Eames quote that reminds us to question thought habits like that.

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My favourite blogger at the moment, for style and approach at least, is Andrew Sullivan, because he blogs a stream of thinking, so many things that come across his desk, field of vision, screen, conversations…. It helps that he is a professional journalist who has put blogging at the core of what he does. I still keep trying to find ways to brign it closer to the core of what I do.

I didn’t mean this post to be a plug for it, but I may as well mention that this week myself and two brilliant colleagues of mine - Matt Neale and Tamsin Hemingray - put out a new iCrossing e-book that is designed to help people with Starting Blogging [download a free copy of How to Start Blogging here].

It gave me a chance to write again about why I love this format. Now that the “why aren’t we doing X” corporate marketing spotlight has moved from blogging to Facebook and Twitter, I feel more comfortable with urging people to blog. It sounds less faddish that it once did now. And it really is the most incredible medium.

And as with all the best social computing platforms, the reasons to do it, the reasons I list begin with what it does for you. A space to think.

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Image: Wanna Play Revolution? Some fine graffiti behind Brighton station...

Networks change everything they touch. New models for business will emerge as we begin to understand their potential.

Recently I’ve seen a potential model for loose networks of individuals to be applied to real-world challenges.

Let me tell you about it…

The SOMESSO conference in London on Friday was a deep draft of insights on how the age of networks is beginning to transform business.

I arrived after lunch, just in time to catch a double-blast of Lee Bryant and Umair Haque. Both had intensely engaging and compelling arguments to make - Lee about throwing off the 20th’s century organisation’s legacies and Umair about how the Obama campaign gives us a view on how 21st century organsations can succeed. More on those later, mostly likely - they were taking mee deeper into ideas I’ve been following them develop on their respective blogs.

There was something very new to me though, in Lloyd Davis’s presentation based loosley around the themes and stories of being a “social artist” and the work of art that is the Tuttle Club.

Social Media Club’s been running in London for a while now, and new nodes are springing up in various locales. And now Lloyd a hundred or so Tuttlers are trying out a new approac to appying their distributed talents, experiences and knowledge to real-world problems.

The formula is simple: Crowds / Tribes / Teams. (Its so elegant and compelling that I recalled it immediately afterwards without referring to notes, and have had the phrase/structure bouncing round my head all weekend.)

Read Lloyd’s post at the Tuttle Club blog for more on this, but here’s the nub as it is applied to a consulting process:

We begin by meeting you as a Crowd of highly experienced, highly creative and highly competent people. As we engage with your business, we work with you to create a series of Tribes – groups formed around your specific business issues, made up of those most engaged by them, and with experience most relevant to them. Finally, each Tribe becomes a Team, committed to delivering clearly defined solutions to specific, carefully considered issues.

This model is no in play, apparently. I can’t wait to hear about their adventures…

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Twitter. It’s all about learning to see it.

Out of utter respect for Howard Rheingold (and a weariness of Twitter neologisms) I’m going to stick with calling it Twitter literacy. If you have been reading about Twitter for a while I bet you five quid a revolting part of your brain is doing back flips right now,  trying to twist “Twitter” and either “literacy” or “neologism” together.

It’s OK - the noise does that to you. Drives you mad.

The noise may quieten down soon (maybe, possibly, please) as Twitter “down the backlash slope of the hype cycle”, as Howard puts it.

He’s summing up intelligently, in the context of social web literacy, what a good many Twitter advocates have been saying in the wake of Nielsen’s data about Twitter abandonnment by new users: “it took me a while to get it”.

To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet.

He continues…

The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.

There you go. A lot of very web literate souls took a year or more to learn to read Twitter, to speak Twitter, to become literate in it and weave it into their lives. Granted, there are more people who have the knack now, who can pass the skills along. But still the sign up - try it - becomes part of your media life process is seen by analysts and commentators as the only path that will lead to success.

I’m sure there is a data viz tool out there somewhere that if applied to my Twitter stream from three years ago would show a sputtering start, some pauses, a falter and then a stream of use. I’m sure I never even started doing really literate things like “re-tweeting” until about two years after I began.

Anyway, read Howard’s post, not least because he has compiled an elegant and compelling list of reasons that

Bring on the backlash, and an end to the hub-bub that distracts from people learning to read Twitter.

: : Bonus video. You could do a lot worse than watching this video of Laura Fitton talking to Google about Twitter. Smart stuff…

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Image: I'm curating the contents of the 70s decor in my house at the moment

Quite pleased with a post about curating branded content I just put up on the iCrossing Connect blog, mainly because it draws together some thinking from a while back with a couple of practical examples of how people use search and social to curate content.

Curation’s more than optimisation, more than simply making the most of what you have got in terms of content. It’s also about being live in your networks - to curate networks you need to be listening. If you’re listening and you have aplatform for curations - such as a blog - then your approach has to be adaptive, agile etc.

It takes the emphasis off of the “one big idea” approach that has dominated the channel media model of campaigns. Creative has to tell the client what the big bet they are going to make with all their money is and then hope to goodness it ends up being a drumming monkey result rather than a airport trucks kind of result.

The big idea is “no more big ideas”, as m’learned colleage Jason Ryan put it, after we’d talked through the Toyota iQ case study.

Curation is the new creative anyone? (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)

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As Dirk at News from the Herd notes, it’s about certain kinds of useful when it comes to hitting the sweetspot with Facebook users:

1- Produce addictive but simple to use games that don’t force ad messaging down users throats

2 - Give them a way to organise their lives, and/ or:

3 - Provide them with mildly competitive ‘social comparison’ tools vs their friends.

As Inside Facebook noted, the recent redesign of Facebook shook up the developer leaderboard, bringing the likes of LivingSocial to the fore.

Interesting to see Causes in the top 5 apps out there on Facebook. Reminds me of the excellent Brita “Filter for Good” campaign in the US, to reduce the amount of bottled water being consumed. The Facebook app and the Facebook group for this were just a couple of the parts of the approach.

The brand benefit is direct in this case - but it is a brand behaving like a movement, and benefitting (in terms of awareness) from helping people acknowledge, pass on a call to action around an issue, without having to commit to a great deal of effort. If they want to talk about it more, get involved more they can and Brita will give them a little more data and tools to do so (if they’re smart, which they seem to be).

Dirk asks if brands can ever win in Facebook:

It will be interesting to see if brands manage to make much head-way here, or whether it really is a case of as P&G’s head of interactive said last year, you can’t monetise a space where someone is breaking up with his girlfriend.

It’s a nice, pithy, provocative question. But monetising, advertising, interupting, branding up these spaces are far from the only option for brands. I think that as more brands develop their social web literacy we’ll see them feel more at ease with spaces like Facebook, find their legitimate, useful places in them.

I’m not sure if they will ever be blockbuster app hits that make it to the Appdata leaderboard. I think that should probably not be an objective for a brand. That “big is best” attitude is another one of those hangovers from channel thinking.

: : You can keep an eye on who is winning on Facebook by apps and developers at AppData.

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