Taylor Davidson » Innovation & Entrepreneurship

On business models, niches and originality

Taylor Davidson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:54:53 +0000

Rules, London, England, Jul 2009

For every explicit rule, a method of communication…

Continuing with multiple thoughts on niches and nuances and originality…

Jan Chipchase, Unexpected Profit Centers:

For every business model, externalities – the only question is who pays.

Grant McCracken, Where Have PrimeTime Viewers Gone and What Do They Find When They Get There, commenting on the decline of broadcast networks and the risk of cable networks from 1984 to 2008:

The question is this: does this movement to more popular themes represent a compression of cultural offerings and a dumbing down of programming. We can argue this a number of ways. But I am impressed with the fact that reality television is often a very successful ways of getting something like the lives of real(ish) Americans into the programming mix. Without the innovations driven by cable, there is no way we would now have such detailed ethnographic treatments of, say, the Housewives of New Jersey and Orange County.

It’s a question then of winners and losers.

Two groups are relatively displaced by the “new cable:” the avant garde who prefer indie content, and taste elites who care about arts content.

Two groups are served: a carnie audience interested in sensational coverage and the rest of us who like this window on other worlds.

For every business model, niches served: overserved, underserved, unserved.

Mike Masnick, The Myth Of Original Creators:

Nearly any creative work can be shown to be built upon the works of those who came before…

Law professor Peter Friedman recently had a few interesting blog posts that helped highlight this. First, he noted that the very notion of an author as the originator of a new work is a relatively recent phenomenon, and part of the Romantic Movement. However, prior to that, the view was much more akin to what we’re actually seeing today with online tools of creation: “creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing.”

… People still want to create the way they always have, but the industry of the last century, that has relied on copyright law to make its product seem different and “original” freaks out about this ongoing content creation…

… The idea that there is a single “author” or “creator” who deserves to get money any time anyone else builds upon his or her works is something that should be seen as increasingly ridiculous as people recognize that all works are created based on the works of others, and it’s inherently silly to try to charge everyone to pay back each and every one of their influences in creating a new work.

For every creative work, an influence, a collaboration (explicit or implicit, known or unknown), and an expectation of credit and compensation (financial or recognition).

Can nuanced discourse compete against “strategy by soundbite”?

Taylor Davidson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:21:58 +0000

Simplified strategies that can be condensed and packaged into soundbites spread into society’s collective conscious and accepted wisdom far faster than nuanced, complex ideas under the economics of today’s media. While the clamor for heuristics, stereotypes and easy answers isn’t new, if we demand thoughtful discourse and nuanced answers can we reshape the economics of media?

I’m less interested in Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” than I am over the actual debate over the concept.

If you want to dig into the debate over the concept, check out the salvos from Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Seth Godin and Mark Cuban, and then dig into the more balanced takes on the debate from Mike Masnick, Valeria Maltoni, Alan Patrick and Michelle Greer.

Put the debate over “free” aside for a moment, I simply I won’t be able to do it justice better than Masnick, Patrick or Maltoni; I’m more interested in the debate itself and how “strategy by soundbite” wins in mass media.

The demand for answers crowds out great questions.
It’s impossible for everyone to understand every part of every debate: heuristics and stereotypes are a fundamental necessity for people to process information and create knowledge. Information overload is not a new issue; in fact, as individuals we have always lived in a state of information overload even though as a society we find ways to adapt to higher levels of data and increased rates of transmission throughout the world. Supply and demand change to establish new equilibriums between content and context.

But what do these equilibriums represent? Easy answers? Generalized strategies misinterpreted and mistakenly adopted as best practices and winning tactics? Do great questions lie unasked and unanswered in perpetuity, lost to the annals of history?

Polarized positions pay, nuanced thought loses.
Patrick, The Free Market for Snake Oil and the Age of Unreason:

The lesson for the future is obvious. The truth may out, but if its not populist it will need a frigging great megaphone to have a hope of being heard.

Right now, as far as I can see, in the New Media Age there is a big risk that the Age of Reason is slowly sinking, and we are entering the Age of Unreason, as the (largely unfunded) forces of Right drown in a sea of (largely commercially funded) snake oil.

I’m not convinced this is a new dynamic in the New Media Age: even though the distribution of megaphones remains highly uneven, does the simple fact that more megaphones are available and used increase or reduce the amount of snake oil in the world?

My comment:

I was thinking about how there always used to be inaccurate information spread within social groups, but since it was hard to dip into those groups we couldn’t “see” or “hear” about the inaccuracies and faulty logic; but now we can. I always try to think about if the behaviour is truly different, or if we’re just now more aware of what’s always existed.

I’m not sure; but I have little doubt that true reason is a difficult strategy for mass media to pursue. In an era where traditional printed media struggles to be the best way to aggregate and distribute news and analysis, how many printed media outlets reach a wide audience and are financially successful using strategies based on reason, discourse and non-polarized positions?

Can a shift in demand reshape the economics of media?
When easy answers sell, polarized positions become good business strategies and nuanced thought loses out.

But need these always be dominant strategies?

Technological change creates cultural change; the changing technology behind media and communication is obvious, but less obvious is how technological change has forced society to re-consider the role and meaning of media in our world. As our relationship to media changes, is there any wonder that we are confused over how to define a “journalist”, a “photographer” or a “professional”?

Can cultural shifts create more enduring changes than technology? For example, if we demand more nuance, more love, more discourse, more thought and more authentic value, can humanity reshape the economics of media?

Change or be changed.

Taylor Davidson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:45:12 +0000

It’s all about the numbers, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2004

On change, systems, influences, uncertainty and defining goals…

Seth Godin:

I hope all of you are doing something that makes your grandparents uncomfortable

(via Jay Parkinson, who is working on something making many grandparents uncomfortable.)

Zoë Westhof (@zoewesthof), Why I’m Not Realistic:

I choose to embrace change and uncertainty, because I don’t think any of us can rely on certainty anymore. If realistic means sticking to the conventions that are quickly falling into irrelevance, then I choose to be unrealistic.

How are conventions, systems and institutions adapting to the new reality of constant disruption?
Perhaps far worse than we thought.

Continuing on the topic, whenever I read about complex adaptive systems, I keep thinking about the danger of over-optimization and the impossibility of perfection.

Mike Bonifer (@bonifer), Three Moves (You Can Make Right Now to Change the Game):

There are two issues with focusing exclusively on our goals. The first is that the people with whom we share our scenes usually have different goals from ours. … Focusing only on our desired outcomes can result in a tug-of-war for control of a scene, severely limiting the scene’s progress and potential. Not good.

The second, and bigger, issue with being exclusively goal-oriented in our scenes, is that we diminish our potential for breakthrough moves. Breakthroughs reveal unexpected avenues for productivity. Breakthroughs can only happen if we are willing to let go of our expectations about what a scene needs to achieve. And what is a goal but an expectation for a scene?

… When the goal is in our head, it has, in effect, already happened, and what we’re doing in our scenes is trying to re-live history, a very personal and private history that our scene partners likely do not share. When we let a scene define its own goals, we give ourselves and our scene partners the potential to make history together. Creating a shared history is what branding is all about.

Noah Goldstein, Changing Minds and Changing Towels, via Sean Howard:

We found that by simply changing a few words on the standard sign, guests who learned that the majority of their fellow guests had reused their towels (the social norms appeal) were 26% more likely than those who saw the basic environmental protection message to recycle their towels.

… So, does this mean that we’re just sheep? Not necessarily. But we’re definitely more likely to follow the herd when we’re uncertain about how to behave. And it turns out that we’re also more likely to follow the herd to the extent that we perceive the herd as sharing our circumstances.

The takeaway: be very careful how you define your systems, environments and goals; incentives, influences and social proof are very powerful forces. Remember, change or be changed.

Transcript, Penny For Your Thoughts with Umair Haque

Taylor Davidson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:27:17 +0000

Continuing with Umair101…

Video: Sander Duivestein, Penny For Your Thoughts with Umair Haque from the VINT Symposium.

Since I couldn’t find a transcript, I decided to do it myself; click here to view the video ~~(embedding not allowed)~~; or read my transcript below (all errors are mine, not Umair’s…)

Penny For Your Thoughts – Umair Haque from Sander Duivestein on Vimeo.

Umair Haque:

What’s really different about the world today is the fact that we’re much more interconnected. And when we’re more interconnected, we’re more interdependent.

And so the question is, in this radically interdependent world, how do we have to behave to create real value, to create authentic value. Because until we can answer that question, we’re going to see the crisis that we’ve got today, actually intensify. What it really is a kind of a crisis in the way that our organizations behave. So what that means is, we see across industries this pattern of kind of self-defeating, or self-destructive, or value-destructive behaviour, because they don’t know how to do, how to behave any other way.

And we don’t seem to be able to overcome that pattern; and so until we can overcome that pattern, I think that the crisis that we see today, even if we bail ourselves out of it, by bailing out the banks, by bailing out the automakers, the crisis will keep on repeating itself, across industries; it will keep on going on until we answer that problem, of very very self-destructing behavior; and so they’re kind of zombies.

They know that they have to behave differently to create real value, but they don’t know how to do that, because they haven’t been organized and built in a way to do it.

It’s kind of in their very DNA, because the question is not one of strategy, not one of competition but one of institutions. And unless you realize that institutions are what you have to change, you wind up as kind of as a zombie.

Why do we see these patterns of destructive behavior going on? I think the reason is actually very simple: capitalism in the way we built it today kind of undercounts costs and overcounts benefits. Many of the costs that we’re now becoming more and more familiar with – social costs, environmental costs, human costs, the costs of unfairness – and it overcounts benefits, that’s kind of a structural flaw, the heart of the way that we built capitalism itself. And what that translates into is that we see this pattern of behavior of where I strive to make myself better off but I’m indifferent to whether you are better off. And if I can do that, then the result is very, very small amounts of real value that are being created, and today we’re facing that fact.

The way that we should think about it in the 21st century is that we create the world through out action and through our behavior.

So the world is kind of a function of what we do. And when we act in one way, we create one kind of industry, one kind of environment, one kind of world; and when we act in another way, we can create a very different kind of environment, or industry, or world. And so I think the question of “how do we respond to the world”, we have to think about the fact that we are responsible for the actions that we take, because those actions then go on to create the kind of world that then comes back to effect us. And so the challenge in the 21st century is learning to create authentic value, real value.

So my question would be is how many of your innovations are really not innovations, how many are really unnovations.

So I think the most important question companies can ask themselves today is are we innovating, or are we doing exactly the opposite? Is what we are doing really an improvement?

(Hat tip to Jon Bischke for the pointer to the video.)

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More Umair101:

Beyond the massconomy, humanity wins.
A collection of my favorite posts and insights from Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″. Tag your own links and insights with “umair101″ to help us get an understanding of which posts and insights were most “mind-blowing” to you.
And, for a more curated and collaborative look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges and contribute with the posts and specific insights that were most important for you in understanding Umair Haque.

Privacy is a cultural context, not an immutable law.

Taylor Davidson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:31:31 +0000

Watching, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006

A couple related notes on privacy:

Joseph Bonneau on The Economics of Privacy on Social Networks:

The most interesting story we found though was how sites consistently hid any mention of privacy, until we visited the privacy policies where they provided paid privacy seals and strong reassurances about how important privacy is. We developed a novel economic explanation for this: sites appear to craft two different messages for two different populations. Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life. Sites take care to avoid mentioning privacy to them, because even mentioning privacy positively will cause them to be more cautious about sharing data. This phenomenon is known as “privacy salience” and it makes sites tread very carefully around privacy, because users must be comfortable sharing data for the site to be fun.

… The privacy fundamentalists of the world may be positively influencing privacy on major sites through their pressure. Indeed, the bigger, older, and more popular sites we studied had better privacy practices overall. But the desire to limit privacy salience is also a major problem because it prevents sites from providing clear information about their privacy practices. Most users therefore can’t tell what they’re getting in to, resulting in the predominance of poor-practices in this “privacy jungle.”

(via Alan Patrick, We support privacy, but not in public)

Jan Chipchase, Practices Around Privacy:

Increasingly, the choice of whether to adopt, or opt-in to a technology is one of whether to opt-out of society.

Privacy, lest we forget, is a cultural context, not an immutable law.

All of us are defining our shared privacy rights by what we reward with our attention, through our actions online and offline and the technology we use, in how and what we discuss, what we write, link, share and like, every single day. Supply has an odd habit of meeting demand…

Me, April 2009, Our misplaced notion of privacy (or, why social media has a major perception problem).:

The login page to Facebook might be the biggest contributor on the web to this mistaken notion of online privacy.

Really, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine data about our online actions being aggregated and structured, we’re not stupid; the real issue is that we just don’t have a real reason to care (yet). The issue isn’t about privacy, it’s about control.

Vendors: give me a way to give better data to you, to have more control over our “relationship” and to scale that across multiple vendors, and I’ll give you even more data about me.

Better yet, Facebook: let me make my entire profile public. Seriously. Nothing would stop people more from posting information they think is private (but isn’t) than by owning up to reality and making everything public.

Or perhaps, merely giving people the option to make everything public…

Which is a bit of a hot topic at the moment: even if Facebook is only testing and has yet to become public by default, consider this story about Zuckerberg from Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do?, via Fred Wilson:

At Davos, Mark told the story of an art class he took at Harvard. He was busy starting Facebook and didn’t have time to attend the class or study. The final exam was a week away and he was worried about flunking. So he went to the Internet and downloaded images of all the art that he knew would be on the exam (not sure how he knew that – Jeff leaves that part out). He puts them all up on a web page and adds blank boxes under each of them. Then he emails the web page to all of his classmates and tells them he just put up a study guide. The class responds by marking up the page, editing each other, and getting it perfect. Zuckerberg aces the exam, of course, but also the professor told him that the entire class had done much better than usual on the exam.

Old habits die hard :)

“You never want to be an agenda item at a meeting to which you’re not invited.”

Taylor Davidson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:55:46 +0000

Corner, Arlington, Virginia, 2009

Disparate thoughts…

Craig Calcaterra:

“One of the most important things I’ve learned in my life is that you never want to be an agenda item at a meeting to which you’re not invited.”

(via Rob Neyer)

Jan Chipchase, Practices around Privacy, 10 practices related to mobile phone privacy from around the world:

8. Increasingly the choice of whether to adopt, or opt-in to a technology is one of whether to opt-out of society.

Consider: how many “meetings” are you missing because you’re not engaging?

Geoff Manaugh, Infrastructure as Advertisement:

why buy one minute of Super Bowl time when you could buy twenty years’ worth of high-density urban exposure, associating a certain sidewalk, bridge, museum, or subway station with you and/or your product?

Actually, I can think of many reasons, and I’m sure you can too…

Andrew Chen, Why metrics-driven startups overlook brand value:

The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view – but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user experience. The reason is that when all product decision-making is run through metrics-driven reports, soft things like “Brand” show up as costs, but never as benefits.

This leads to systematic erosion in many “soft” but important factors, like customer experience, brand value, and “love.”

As Andrew points, you optimize what you track; remember, incentives frame decisions and contraints guide innovation. Define each carefully…

Mike Masnick, Amazon: A Search Engine With A Warehouse, noting [Amazon's] growth happens because its not a retailer with a web presence, its a search engine with a warehouse.
Consider: what business are you truly in?

Unbundling the Photography Industry, Redux

Taylor Davidson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:10:48 +0000

Break down the stack of services in the photography industry and imagine a photography sales platform that operates as a search engine through the internet’s warehouse of images; the current issues in the photography industry are signs of long-term pressures and hints of the industry’s future.

Revisiting The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled from October 2008:

We need to unbundle the functions of the traditional stock photography agency. There is no fundamental need for the image delivery and management platform to be delivered by the same company that makes the market and connects buyers and sellers.

Platform
What we need is a quality, powerful open-sourced platform to allow photographers to control their own images in their own ways. We need a platform and a community of developers similar to Wordpress or Movable Type. Blogs exploded because people were given the tools to create and publish on their own using the range of hosted and non-hosted options; why can’t the same thing happen with stock photography?

Market-Making
Agencies would still have a powerful role: agencies would still set the rules of exchange, organize buyers and sellers and promote images: but instead of the images residing on their platforms, the images could reside on photographers’ servers.

Obviously this disaggretated model would shift around some the economic value in the stock photography business: but perhaps the industry is failing because we have not developed or scaled platforms that allow the economic value to shift in ways the industry desperately needs.

… In essence:

Decouple the the platform delivery and market-making components of the traditional stock photography agencies.

Develop open platforms that allow photographers to control their own data, on their own servers, using open-sourced software, “promoted” by stock agencies.

Let agencies focus on making markets, reducing transaction costs, making prices and image comparisons more transparent.

Allen’s comment:

I know nothing about the inner workings of the blog companies, however, they do not have the inherent problem that pro photography has — that is, a small addressable market. Millions of people use blogger and word press, by contrast, the # of “pro” photographers is in the low hundreds of thousands by most estimates. So I’m not sure an open platform system would work.

Secondly, storing digital assets and providing an e-commerce layer isn’t as simple as hosting a few bytes of blog data. Not to say that it can’t be done, but we have a ton of scripts that are necessary to control everything from conversion of JPG/RAWs into thumbnails to e-commerce systems that process transactions, email the client, and generate a downloadable file.

I would personally like to see more adoption of standards so that distribution of your images from a hub like PhotoShelter to any number of destination sites (whether it’s Getty or a boutique agency) could be as simple as something like sending an e-mail. Ultimately, however, I don’t think the industry has the economic incentive to develop such a system — and often, what’s good for the photographer isn’t necessarily needed by the buyer, and vice versa.

Continuing to explain my thoughts:

… in my mind the open-sourced platform would be given away for free. Give away the software, create a platform for developers to create plug-ins to manage images, fans, customizations for photographers. Provide (free and paid) services to help photographers host and customize their own stock solutions. Learn from the lessons of companies that have created platforms [and movements], not just products.

… Not all photographers will want this, of course: many won’t want to manage their own systems, learn about web development or managing their software and hosting solutions. But that’s what Movable Type and Wordpress have learned, and it’s a key part of why they offer both the hosted and non-hosted paths.

Re: Storing digital assets and e-commerce layer: you obviously know what goes into this far more than I do. It’s not a trivial problem, but there are many software and web companies that have dealt with similar problems with managing massive flows of unstructured and structured data. Think of it as creating an API between the cloud of hosted software platforms and Photoshelter’s e-commerce market-making website.

What are the biggest barriers for photo buyers? It’s not just about prices … The lack of price transparency between RF / RM and in comparing images is a strategic mistake: the transaction costs (time, effort, energy) are a significant barrier to closing a sale.

Continuing with a related thought from an interview from April 22 with Ellen Boughn (@ellenboughn) on the future of stock photography:

John: I am hearing predictions that Google is the ultimate stock search mechanism, and that someday all the searches will be done on Google image search…even including Agency collections. Can you comment on that?

Ellen: I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that Google has taught us all how to search. We no longer look for anything with just one or two words. The vast amount of information on the web compels us to become more and more specific in our use of search terms and to use more words in a search. This knowledge spills over into how we search for images. I believe that photographers with collections on specific subjects and who have implemented best practices as far as SEO goes may find that they can make more money selling stock direct than with a stock company in the near future.

Today I am excited about the prospect that we may be at a convergence of technology and user behavior that will shortly enable photographers to license their existing images.

As Ellen continues to explain, we are beginning to see web tools break down the industry stack to help photographers distribute images, handle sales, licensing and infringement.

We’re starting to see bits of the chain emerge:

Distribution platforms: In addition to the more traditional stock photography distributors, collections and portals, a number of platforms, including ImageSpan, Photoshelter, Fotolia and others, provide a variety of web platforms for photographers to sell and manage licensing from their site;

Distribution platforms with alternate licensing and/or pricing models: Cutcaster, GumGum and Photrade provide distribution platforms with alternate licensing and/or pricing models;

Syndication (distribution management): iSyndicate helps photographers upload images to multiple stock photography platforms;

Analytics: LookStat helps photographers track sales across multiple sites, creating the data behind image sales and performance necessary for stock photographers to make informed decisions about their business;

Direct sales and E-commerce: Fotomoto helps photographers promote and sell prints directly from their site with a simple, small code change to their existing website, and almost all of the distribution and promotion sites also handle print and license sales;

Tracking: Digimarc, Idée and PicScout all help track usage and infringement (with different methods, goals and business structures).

Promotion: A number of companies, including A Photo Folio, liveBooks, PhotoBiz, NextProof and Pictage, provide solutions for photographers to create websites and manage clients and sales.
But there are still a dearth of powerful tools and platforms for photographers to manage their own marketing efforts. Photoshelter might have the best range of tools, widgets and other solutions for photographers to promote their work; but it is still a relatively undeveloped space. How can photographers manage, track and understand their own web marketing efforts? How can photographers track their social media engagement / marketing efforts across the variety of tools and communities? How can photographers reach out and manage their fans and customers? Who will create the Topspin, su.pr or awe.sm for photographers? How will we bring humanity to the market for images and photographers?

I’m sure there are many other solutions available, and I might have missed a core part of the industry stack, but at the end of the day the photography industry still struggles with a mess of largely closed, non-interoperable solutions for matching buyers with sellers.

The photography industry may be suffering right now, but general interest in photography is at an all-time high; even though individual photographers will continue to struggle through the transition, big problems create great opportunities. Find your vision, target your niche, create great work, expand your business model, learn to market, and find a way to swim through the industry’s tides; if you figure all of that out, businesses will emerge to help you thrive.

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The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled, Oct 2008.
Everyone is a photographer, Sept 2007.
Photographers are your customers, not your competition, Oct 2008.
Expanding on the role of middlemen in stock photography, May 2009.

Hire nobody, hire everybody.

Taylor Davidson — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:05:40 +0000

May 19th, discussing lessons learned from researching prior art and copyright infractions, Would you hire a couple professionals or every single passionate amateur?

Next time you need to dig through a massive amount of publicly-available information to find prior art, research copyrights or patent filings, would you hire a) a team of experts or b) an intern and spend $1,000 on Mechanical Turk (or, more possibly, c) both)?

Or perhaps you’d choose a better strategy, d) dump all the information on your website and enlist tens of thousands of volunteers using a public, fun, fast, scalable system that creates a feedback-driven narrative?

That’s what the Guardian newspaper in the UK recently did to crowdsource their investigation into the recent scandal over MPs’ expenses (link via Ethan Bauley).

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Professional journalism isn’t dead, and it never will be; it’s just a vastly different game. Ignore the new world at your peril.

Build bridges instead of fences.

Taylor Davidson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:17:22 +0000

Stop | Arlington, Virginia

Quoted in the Economist from 2006, Joe Kraus of JotSpot, (link via David Sanger):

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed. “The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out.”

I would argue that we have always been working to figure out how to integrate the new with the old; in fact, this division between “old” and “new” media is an ultimately meaningless debate. The question isn’t about either/or, but both; Ethan Bauley:

It changes the game when you have a deep perspective on the pros and cons of both angles [of any issue]. … the simple fact is that there is a wide market of information out there these days. In the same way that risk is inexorable from reward, veracity and depth are strongly negatively correlated to speed.

As my friend Bryan Payne puts it,

Not everything is zero sum – it’s not black and white – it’s not us versus them. We have to stop thinking that way. We place such limited left and right limits on ourselves; it’s as if our society goes through life with blinders on; we limit ourselves from seeing 80% of reality out there. Look – new media/old media – whatever. Why don’t we toss out those labels and recognize that they are both just tools to communicate information. … In the end it’s a good thing to have a wide array of tools and hopefully in the longer run the ones that work best for accomplishing certain things are the ones that are most widely adopted; until a newer, better, more innovative tool comes around and the whole cycle repeats.

We need bridges instead of fences; the real future economic returns will come from integrating various forms of media rather than staking one’s name and/or economic livelihood on one side of the fence.

I know half of my time is well-spent, I just wish I knew which half.

Taylor Davidson — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:49:56 +0000

“I know half of my time is well-spent, I just wish I knew which half.” This is the well-spent half…

Eric Gordon and David Bogen, Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention”; noting the work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in developing the concept of “choice architecture”:

People will be more inclined to actively engage with the world, they argue, if they are given small choices to make within discrete attentional frameworks. … Choice architecture is … about supplying focused choices in situ for people who are otherwise aimless and wandering. Most of us never change the default settings on our operating system, or go through the trouble of actually mailing in rebates (that is precisely why companies offer them). But if significant choices that require little energy … are designed into our environments, we are more likely to make use of them.

The notion of how defaults frame and ground judgments and actions is hardly new, but consider how “cheap, ubiquitous interactions” in our “hyperconnected” world are creating opportunities for us to make more decisions using less energy; consider how we can capture, aggregate, benchmark, access and publish online and offline personal data in realtime throughout our networks and communities. How?

Jonathan Mendez, API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next, outlining the layers of the API stack into content, utility, development and analytics; well worth a read to consider how we are creating tools to aggregate, restructure, understand and use distributed data.
(link via David Sanger)

Bijan Sabet, Beware of the complicated deal:

There is an old saying: “don’t let a great deal get in the way of a good deal”. There is much wisdom in that one. You can interpret it in several ways but I take it to mean – keep it simple, give yourself some flexibility and go execute.

Yes, this incentive structure appears complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Contracts structured with more flexibility and less “defaults” result in less negotiation, more decisions and more execution; instead of attempting to allocate value, time, effort and passion is spent creating value.

Robert Hotz in WSJ, A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight:

“We often assume that if we don’t notice our thoughts they don’t exist,” says Dr. Christoff in Vancouver, “When we don’t notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively.”

(Sigh of relief…)