101 Culture

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem." — Clay Shirky, from “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” The image above is the mystical Cadbury factory at Bournville, the very model of innovative 19th Century organisational structure. Found via the very good cubicle17 [image from]

Open-source software development is a keen area of interest for this blog because I hope it hints at a future of less rigid yet equally as productive organisations. We've seen a looser organisational structure working well for Mozilla and in the case of The Pirate Bay, confusing the authorities. But these are not profit-seeking entreprises. Or they're of dubious legal stature. E Text Editor is trying to become an open company. At the moment it's a one-man software company. But by opening its doors partially it will seek to spread the production of its software outside of its owner without introducing the same sort of boundaries a traditional profit-seeking organisation has. Anyone can work on the open-source software. And by using a scoring system, it'll distribute the profit according to contribution from willing participants. Could we run a bank this way? Post via the ever brilliant Influx Insights blog [image from]

My speakers broke recently. Being without loud music has been difficult. And I've taken refuge in Richer Sounds on occasion. But then I found Human Speakers. This is a website the way websites were meant to be. It's a clear example of the power vested in men by Berners-Lee's Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a direct result of the fact that almost everyone can now publish to almost everyone. Human Speakers builds a range of unique loud speakers and can ship them all over the world from New Hampshire. The website is packed full of useful information and this is summed up beautifully in the FAQ section: -------------------- Q: How come your web site looks so boring? A: I have been adding more and more information to this site over the years, in the form of text, photographs and other illustrations. I trust and respect that you know how to read, and that any graphic presentations I provide will be interesting enough to be worth the time to download them. I try to make it so you do not have to load any graphics unless you specifically ask for them. I think that content matters far more than splashy layouts or gratuitous animations of any sort. At first that may seem boring; but as you begin to realize how much good information is here at your fingertips, I think you will like the way I have done it. PS, I changed the unvisited link color to a rather bright purple in February of 2002 - I hope that jazzes things up for you! -------------------- Information. Sharing information is what the web is about. And new ways to make this easier or more successful will be hugely successful. Consider blogging, Facebook and Twitter all excellent examples. And imagine how powerful audio-blogging and audio-search could be for the near-billion illiterate people in the world. It's sometimes easy to forget this. For more Human Speaker brilliance, check this for a project.

I've previously written about the digital age meaning that listening has become more a important part of marketing than it has been while TV has reigned our attention. But it's worth considering again in light of this article about Coca-cola's social media strategy. The key point is that Coke resisted the temptation to fire concise brand messages into these platforms. Instead they listened to what people wanted to do in these spaces and let their customers take the lead. They listened then participated. Marketers often speak of building brands. But it feels like we're reaching a time where distributed brands are being tended by marketers rather than just built in 30 second chunks. Not a lot has changed in people's minds but TV has long distorted the marketer's power and role. The definition of marketing is something like, 'identifying a need and satisfying it profitably'. In recent years, marketing has come to mean the communication of promotional messages, which is only a small function of marketing. So perhaps all this digital malarkey isn't bringing anything new, it's just taking us back to where we should be. The next post won't be about marketing. Promise. [image from] [Article from]

Well there it is. The first FMCG site that absolutely recognises the distributed nature of brands accross the interlove. Brands always existed this way in our collective head. And Skittles has represented itself well with a site that just pulls in its presence on other sites like Facebook and Wikipedia. Plenty of other sites do this but I've never seen an FMCG brand do it. The first response might be that they have no influence over this site. But obviously their advertising has an effect which is represented in these sites which they then pull back in. So they do. They just acknowledge the role the populous plays in building their brand. So again and again we see that, with all this data available, aggregation is the most important thing. The next step is to represent this data in a more interesting way. Bring on some lovely data art, I say. That's where this turns into beauty. At the moment it's quite boring. [image from]