Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Pattern Recognition

    William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition moves his stories from a fantastical future to a world at the bleeding edge of today. A curious advertising company seeks to find out more about a series of video clips that have developed a cult following.

    The story evokes viral marketing similar to the complex story lines of games like Perplex City, The Majestic or online marketing done by industrial music band NIN and Trent Reznor. The resulting buzz in a passionate community is something that marketers aspire to create in product launches. The challenge that Gibson doesn’t fully articulate is identifying the target audience and watching it coalesce. It also reminds me of how conspiracy theories percolate online and seem to break out randomly. The Slender Man phenomenon and the obsession with number stations are classic examples of this process.

    Unlike Spook Country, Gibson only hints at a retreat from his vision of the web as an immersive experience inside virtual reality goggles. Most of the interesting locations and experiences happen in the real-world: central Tokyo, Moscow and London. Gibson’s literary obsession with Japanese culture and cities is part of the connective tissue that connects his early work to Pattern Recognition.

    These world’s are much more colourful than online. The web is now reduced to a silver screen on which the mysterious videos are projected.

    Marketing insight of the advertising agency and government intelligence operatives are seen by Gibson as two sides of the same coin. This makes sense when one thinks about the amount of data that web and mobile technology use now provides. In some respects big technology has gone beyond governments and moving towards the corporations envisaged in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

    All of this adds to the feeling that Pattern Recognition is a tale of now. More related posts here.

  • Authority beats leadership

    I had been thinking about authority versus thought leadership for a while and my interest in it got reignited over lunch with Wadds just before Christmas. We were discussing the pros and cons of sharing expertise on a blog or other social media, particularly when it comes to marketing and marketing communications disciplines.

    On the one hand, its giving your competitors (in the professional and the career sense) a leg-up. That expertise could be used for competitive advantage so I may want to hide my light under a bushel. I could then enshrine this expertise as a business process or service mark and leverage this in competitive situations. This assumes that I am smarter than everyone else online, which of course is complete hogwash: Mrs Carroll didn’t raise no fool, but she’s also aware of my limitations.

    The secondary consideration is that if I have this business process or service mark, how would the man in the street know the real power of it vis-à-vis competitor offerings? You are are in a ‘he said. she said situation’.

    Chances are I am not that much smarter than everyone else, but considerably smarter than some people (yeah and modest too.)  So kicking out ideas via this blog or other channels is way of having them picked, poked and prodded: kind of like peer review in academia but with only ten per cent of the politics and none of the corduroy jackets with leather patches or the reek of cheap pipe tabacco. Sharing ideas negates any leadership advantage that I may have, but does help to build authority.

    Authority is about trust which is more substantive than anything competitive leadership could have given me. Trust would be further enhanced by successful delivery.

    In addition, sharing ideas freely means that I don’t need to think about all areas all the time because I can build upon the thinking that other people have done elsewhere; I benefit from reviewing and critiquing commons content as well as adding to the body of the commons.

    Moving thinking forward allows the industry as a whole to grow and helps spur demand in clients once they understand what is possible.  At a time when over half the clients for online PR choose agencies from other disciplines to develop strategy and execute campaigns growing the collective opportunity has never been more important. More related content can be found here.

  • Industrial Action

    The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.

    My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.

    Newsnight highlighted two things of interest to me in the strike.

    First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party  are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.

    The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.

    British jobs for British workers Facebook group

    Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Harris’ Law

    I came across Harris’ Law due to Jason Calacanis. Jason Calacanis has touched on the issue of overconnectivity in a recent editon of his email newsletter. It dealt  with more certainty about the adverse social effects that connectivity brings which I first heard raised by Eric Benhamou of 3Com when he spoke about a decade ago in a keynote at Networld+InterOp in Paris.

    Key to the mail was a concept that Calacanis called Harris’ Law (after his friend Josh Harris):

    At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

    That sounds excessively harsh in most circumstances, since most social networks mirror life and society. Yes 4Chan and 8Chan can have lots of repulsive content on them. This is less about inflicting pain but more about the kind camaraderie that disgusting jokes brought in the school yard. Yes there are too many incidents involving bullying or hate speech on online communities, but it only makes up part of the content on these communities.

    Political groups aren’t motivated by ‘inflicting damage on the opponents, but by their concerns of things going on around them’. Their tribal ‘wars’ are reinforcing the community and manifesting those concerns rather than being purely about inflicting suffering.

    Even communities like Anonymous that seem to be full of pranking rally around some moral causes such as opposing Scientology or the Iranian government’s oppression of protestors.

    I wanted to end this post on a timely reminder which I have taken from Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame’s twitter feed:

    “People matter, Objects don’t”. That’s all you need to know about social media.

    Harris’ Law is also a good reminder to think about mental resilience and good hygiene practices with regards online interactions.

    You can subscribe to Jason’s email list here. More related content can be found here.

  • Optoelectronics + more news

    Optoelectronics

    H.P.’s Hunk of Burning Light – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – interesting update on optoelectronics in computing. This is an area that has been talked about since I worked in a technology lab at Corning’s old Optical Fibre business in Deeside in the mid-90s. That site is now a greenfield inside the fence of the Toyota engine plant. Optical interconnects still haven’t filled the potential of optoelectronics in computing. Instead while optical processing has been done with optoelectronics in the laboratory; it hasn’t had commercial success yet.

    Design

    G-Shock prototype phone hides its craggy looks at CES, only fears your stares – Engadget – there is something a bit 1990s sci-fi about this design that I really like

    Economics

    Reposting the Chinese Premier’s speech at Cambridge Uni « Perspectives – interesting speech by Wen Jiabao – The Chinese Government maintains that countries should: firstand foremost, run their own affairs well and refrain from shifting troubles onto others; second, carry out cooperation with full sincerity and avoid pursuing one’s own interests at the expense of others; and third, address both the symptoms and the root cause of the problem. A palliative approach will not work. We should not treat only the head when the head aches, and the foot when the foot hurts. As I
    reiterated at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, necessary reform of the international monetary and financial systems should be carried out to establish a new international financial order that is fair, equitable, inclusive and well-managed. We should createan institutional environment conducive to global economic growth. Let me talk briefly about how China has been responding to the crisis. The fallout of the financial crisis on China’s real economy is
    becoming more evident. Since the third quarter of last year, our exports have declined sharply, economic growth has slowed down, and the pressure on employment has been rising. In the face of the grim situation, we have acted decisively. We have made timely adjustment to the direction of our macroeconomic policy, promptly introduced ten measures to expand domestic demand, and formulated a series of related policies.

    When Consumers Cut Back – A Lesson From Japan – NYTimes.com – the UK’s bust isn’t likely to go away any time soon

    China’s mounting pink slips

    Inconvenient truths about fixing China – FT.com – really interesting analysis of China’s economy (paywall)

    Finance

    The End of the Financial World as We Know It – NYTimes.com – Michael Lewis of Liar’s Poker fame gives his take on 2008’s financial debacle

    Ideas

    An interview with William Gibson | The Verge

    Luxury

    LVMH: daring to ditch the runway circus | FT.com – interesting move

    Second-Hand Luxury Market On The Rise In China – Forbes

    Hocked Luxury Watches Make The Good Times Roll At Beijing Pawnshops « Jing Daily

    Marketing

    U.S. military recruiters use video arcades in urban areas – International Herald Tribune – interesting idea, US Army makes recruiting experiential

    Media

    RIAA Says It Will Stop Suing Consumers for Illegal Downloading – Switched

    Online

    The Language and Branding of QQ in China – its all about the context, I just knew of QQ as the dominant IM client

    Retailing

    I, Cringely » Apple, MacWorld and Steve Jobs – the Wal-Mart Connection – interesting analysis

    Online shopping and the Harry Potter effect – science-in-society – 22 December 2008 – New Scientist

    Fashion gets a digital game-changer | FT.com – Tokyo Girls Collection have been there so much earlier

    Security

    Interesting privacy hardware homebrew kit

    Mega Echelon Option – Cryptome has a very politically skewed but interesting piece alleging that MegaUpload was done in with the help of the intelligence community

    Schneier on Security: Privacy in the Age of Persistence

    Technology

    My MidemNet Presentation: Trent Reznor And The Formula For Future Music Business Models | Techdirt

    Is Venture Capital Dying? – some interesting stuff here Paul Kedrosky points out that technology is a mature sector and green tech is way off prime time. This provides a disconnect that will ripple through to investors, markets and subsidiary sectors like technology integrators, resellers

    Telecoms

    Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market – NYTimes.com – this maybe a bridge too far for Cisco, after all what is a router but a couple of line terminators (ADSL, Ethernet, wi-fi, GSM, WCDMA), a server motherboard and a look-up table. Something that IBM, HP or Sun Microsystems could easily throw together and sell at cost just to crush the competition

    Wireless

    Digital Evangelist: Guess that Six Sigma does not work – Ian Wood writes what could be the best obituary that Motorola’s handset division may ever get.