01.28.10
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The iPad – a social computer?

I’ve been ignoring all the build-up to this year’s Apple produce announcement, mainly because I just didn’t want to get my hopes up. But it turns out that I’m actually quite excited about the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer.

I had a very spirited discussion with my husband on the train last night as we were catching up on the announcements made whilst we were in a plane. My thought is that there will be two reactions to the iPad: the spec-geeks who will pour over the physical specification and find it wanting in comparison to their own laptop or desktop. People who look at the iPad the same way they looked at the Air, as a smaller version of their existing laptop will be disappointed, as many of them were with the Air, because the iPad is not as powerful or as fast as a laptop.

Then there’ll be people who come at it having used an iPhone or iPod Touch. For them, the iPad is a different proposition. It will give them a bigger and better browsing experience. Reading ebooks will be easier, videos will be bigger, email more readable. For people who want a better sofa experience, who want to be entertained and kept busy on a long journey, or who want a less conspicuous machine to take meeting notes, it looks like a goer. It’s not going to be a MacBook replacement, but a machine to sit between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook.

Obviously I see sociability in everything, so I think the iPad is going to be great for social media. I find the iPhone too small to write a blog post on, yet I have most of my blog post ideas whilst I’m out and about. Would an iPad encourage me to write more?

Because the iPad taps into the existing App Store and is able to run apps either at iPhone definition or x2, without any interventions necessary, it comes ready to rock and roll. There’s already a WordPress iPhone App along with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many others. Your social web is there, ready and waiting. App writers can, if they want, upgrade their apps to take advantage of the bigger screen, which means potentially more functionality and a richer experience.

And because of the form factor, might we see more people using an iPad in scenarios where you wouldn’t get a laptop out? I have long felt that opening a laptop, e.g. in a meeting, is a bad thing from a psychological point of view: Flipping up the screen puts up a barrier between you and the person you’re talking to, something I greatly dislike. Would an iPad be better in meetings or at social gatherings? Would they make the iPad user able to socialise both in person and online simultaneously without the people present feeling blocked out?

For my money, though, Apple has some changes to make to ensure the iPad’s success: Stop inhibiting innovation by placing strictures on what sort of apps are allowed in the App Store. By all means, have a QA process to ensure that malicious apps aren’t developed, but their current rules about not developing apps that conflict with Apple-provided apps is stupid and counter-productive. If I want to run a different browser than Safari, for example, a browser that integrates with Instapaper, Delicious, Twitter and other social tools, then I should be able to do so.

Equally, they need to rethink their age warnings. It is utterly absurd to see an age-related warning when you install a dictionary or an RSS reader just because it’s possible to see some naughty words in those sorts of applications. Apple needs to understand that it can’t expect to promulgate the values of conservative America (as opposed to the rest of America, which is much more sensible) around the world in a techno-cultural hegemony.

Apple are already coming under fire for being shills for DRM, and rightly so. Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote:

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today’s Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple’s use of DRM. The group’s four-foot signs were headed with the message “Entering Apple Restriction Zone” and laid out the tablet’s detriments:

* No free software

* No installing apps from the Web

* No sharing music or books

* We can remotely disable your apps & media

Much as I love the look of the iPad, Apple needs to deal with these issues and as a community we should bring to bear as much pressure as we can. This is the one thing that dulls my enthusiasm for the iPad. I was vehemently against Microsoft’s Vista and all the DRM and ‘phone home’ controls that it supported. Anyone who felt that Vista was an invasion of their privacy must apply the same logic to the iPad. We can’t just let Apple off the hook because their device and OS are prettier.

I’m confident, however, that people will take steps to route around the barriers that get in their way. It didn’t take long for someone to jailbreak the iPhone and we can expect the iPad to come under much more scrutiny. I never felt comfortable jailbreaking my primary communications device, but I’d be much happier to fiddle with an iPad in order to install the software that I want to use. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

I’ll leave you now with the iPad keynote for your delectation and delight:

01.27.10
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Embrace your daydreams

Psychology Today has an article by Amy Fries on how daydreamers are also more intelligent:

Researchers using brain scanning technology found that the “default network,” the relatively new buzzword for the daydreaming state, was significantly more active in the “superior intelligence group” than the “average intelligence group.” According to the study, this suggests that the stronger connections displayed in the “functional integration of the default network might be related to individual intelligent performance.”

My nonscientific translation of this: while daydreaming, your thoughts are gliding and ricocheting all over the place–past, present, future–accessing all your stored knowledge, memories, experiences, etc. What the study seems to be saying is that these connections–the ricocheting thoughts if you will–appear to be stronger in smarter people. Maybe that’s why they can get more out of their daydreaming states of mind. They can dig deeper. This seems to fit nicely with other studies that say that people who can go deeper into daydreaming states are more likely to come away with worthwhile insights.

I’ve spoken before about daydreaming and it’s importance to my writing life. I also think that daydreaming is important in business, particularly if you’re in a creative or innovative role. Yet daydreaming is verboten in a professional context. We’re supposed to be heads-down, focused on our work all day every day. That’s not physically possible, of course, so people fake concentration by doing low-energy tasks, like cleaning out their inbox, to give their brains some time to spin freely.

When it comes to social media, I see this need to freewheel as even more important. I can type at over 90 words per minute, but it can still take me an hour to write even a short blog post because for much of that time I’m reading and mulling (a more acceptable word for daydreaming, perhaps). Blogging is, at its best, about people synthesising new ideas from the works of others. That sort of thought, where you’re taking in different strands of information and forming novel links between them, requires time, not to mention a good night’s sleep.

This is why bloggers need managerial support to be effective. Blogging at work can put serious pressure on the blogger, who may want to spend a day figuring a post out, but who feels that they are supposed to be banging out something quick. Acceptance from colleagues that blogging is a legitimate way for them to be spending their time is also important – there’s nothing like negative peer pressure to kill off a blogger’s enthusiasm. Without that support the blogger can wind up abandoning their writing or not fulfiling their potential, and everyone loses out.

The long and the short of it is that if you want your staff to be creative, innovative, thoughtful and to benefit fully from their intelligence, give them the time and space to cogitate, mull, consider and daydream.

01.26.10
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links for 2010-01-26

01.26.10
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In praise of messiness and noise

Excellent talk from Euan at last year’s Lift Conference, talking about some of the daft attitudes prevalent in management and IT and how they get in the way of knowledge sharing, innovation and, in some cases the basic act of getting on with our jobs.

I love Euan’s comment in the discussion on his blog post too:

People are so much better able to cope with apparent messiness than we have been led to believe. And as you say helping them cope with messiness is better than tidying up.

How are you helping people cope with messiness?

01.25.10
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What can a dating site teach enterprise?

I wrote earlier this month about the importance of faces in profile photos. Today I stumbled across a fascinating post about profile pictures from dating site OKCupid, via Adam Tinworth’s blog.

Christian from OKCupid gathered data from their site, analysing photos and looking at the messages that people received and sent to see if different photo styles affected how successful people were in attracting both incoming messages and replies to their outgoing messages. The results are fascinating, turning upside down some assumptions about what sort of photos would be best. Women, for example, should probably put a ‘flirty face’ on, whereas if you’re a bloke with good abs you should show them off and if your photo doesn’t show your face, make sure that it’s interesting in some other way.

Now, I’m not trying to imply that professional women should put on their flirty face when posing for their business headshot or that men should be getting their abs out for their team photo. (And I’m sure I”m not the only one to heave a sigh of relief about that.) But this study does throw up an interesting question: What do we know about the impact of different types of profile pictures in a professional setting?

I’m sure that some will say that in a professional context, photos shouldn’t matter, that we judge each other based on their abilities and actions, not on what they look like. If that were true, the world would be a much better place, but if we’re honest we’ll admit that how someone looks does affect the way we think of them. Such reactions are hardwired into our brains, and they’re not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you have good instincts.

I’m also sure that we’ve all seen corporate directly photos that are deeply unflattering. Generally speaking, when you get your company photocard done, the person taking the photo probably isn’t thinking very hard about how to make you look your best. And in some cases, the results are worse than a passport photo. Unfortunately, regardless of quality, those photos then get put onto the internal directory, whether we like it or not.

I don’t know of anyone who has studied the responses provoked by different photos in, say, LinkedIn, but I think it would make a fascinating topic of research. Are there particular types of photos – looking the camera or not, smiling or not, naturalistic or posed, for example – that make people more predisposed to think positively of the subject? And how might this affect the way we interact with people professionally?

There is no doubt that very subtle things can affect the way we think of others. In one experiment, subjects were asked to hold either a warm of cold drink for a brief time. They were then asked their opinions about the woman who gave them the drink to hold. Those who held a warm drink thought more kindly of her than those who got the cold drink. (Lesson: Never give your boss anything cold to hold!)

So, are we doing ourselves no favours by allowing poor photos of ourselves to be used in social networks and internal directories? Should businesses pay more attention to the way that they photograph and present photos of staff? Should we be allowed to provide our own? If so, what guidelines should we follow?

I know one things for sure: I need a better avatar photo because apparently “with an animal” scores worse than any other typo of photo if you’re a woman. If you’re a bloke, however, you should go and get yourself a kitten right now, because even getting your abs out is less popular than a guy with an animal. It’s probably more socially acceptable too!

01.23.10
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links for 2010-01-23

  • Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Jeff Jarvis's cockeyed economics
    Kevin: Nicholas Carr has a very smart post looking at some of the economic theory behind the New York Times' paid content plans. The idea is based on Hal Varian's concept of "versioning" for digital goods. "One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction."
    (tags: journalism economics nytimes)
  • Prague, Futuroom, and the new hyper-local news hybrid. | lo-fi, hi-style
    Kevin: A look at a hybrid pro-am hyperlocal project in the Czech Republic called Futuroom. Google, mobile phone company O2, Atex and investment and media group PPF. The project will work with internet cafes around the country. Journalists will work there, giving them a place to file stories but also interact with members of the public.
    (tags: newsroom CzechRepublic Google)
  • BBC College of Journalism – Blog – Just give us the data
    Kevin: Excellent piece on the BBC College of Journalism site. Michael Blastland writes: "Perhaps the biggest effect will be not on broadcasters or other media, but on the public, once used to thinking that data was served up by big media, now helped to see that it can be easily, colourfully obtained, with scope for interaction, at a high level of detail and relevance."

    There is a phrase sometimes heard nowadays – data-driven journalism. Is it already out of date? My question is – I admit to mischievous provocation – if you have a data-driven public with endless goodies to choose from, will you need the journalist?

    (tags: data journalism bbc publicbroadcasting)
  • Flexible Or Paradoxical? Why The NY Times' Plan Is Inherently Self-Limiting | Techdirt
    Kevin: The New York Times digital paid content plans could create a conflict between its subscription department and its advertising deparment.
    (tags: nytimes businessmodels paidcontent)
  • Steve Jobs Is Building AppleWorld – And Google's Running Scared — Seeking Alpha
    Kevin: Jason Schwartz warns content companies looking for a lifeline from Apple. Steve Jobs is building a "closed digital neighbourhood where Apple controls who makes money and who doesn't".
    (tags: apple microsoft app google web digital businessmodels)
  • What could Kodak have done differently? at Creative Disruption
    Kevin: Simon Waldman looks at Kodak responded to the shift to digital. He concludes:
    * There are rarely simple solutions to profound structural problems
    * Short term competitive pressures can’t be ignored, but nor can they be allowed to obscure long term strategic challenges
    * Redefining ‘what business your in’, only works if it is credible financially, as well as conceptually
    * Beware hybrid solutions that reframe disruptive forces as growth opportunities – they are often too good to be true
    (tags: businessmodels newspapers photography kodak)
  • Inside Google's Secret Struggles With Chinese Cyber Power – The Atlantic Politics Channel
    Kevin: A dynamite post by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic looking at not only Google's struggles with Chinese cyber power but more broadly the US. The first line is a bombshell: "U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that December's mass cyber attack against 33 American companies was most likely the result of a coordinated espionage campaign endorsed by the Chinese government." Even further down in the post Ambinder talks about differences in US and China cyber security stances. He asks: "If China is so intent on stealing stuff from us, why haven't we (the US) responded?" Fascinating post. The Atlantic with Ambinder and James Fallows has been an excellent source on Google-China-US.
    (tags: china google government hacking intelligence internet business censorship espionage)
  • The Internet Freedom Agenda | Marc Lynch
    Kevin: An excellent analysis of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's address on internet freedom, coming on heels of Google's threat to quit China if it cannot operate an uncensored search engine in that country. Mark Lynch (long known for his Middle East blog Abu Aardvark) cautions of a moral hazard of suggesting that we might support internet activists. "It's great to support and encourage internet activists and protestors of all sorts. But such support can lead them to take some very risky, dangerous activities against their brutal governments, perhaps in the expectation that the United States will protect them from the consequences. Will it?"
    (tags: internet censorship US foreignpolicy China)
  • ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
    Kevin: Nick Bilton of the New York Times Bits blog has an excellent look at what I've often called the "networked filter" of social media. He discusses the issue of curation and filtering. He write: Surfing the Web has become even more of a challenge as more content appears online. We are asked to navigate any number of new obstacles when finding new content: which site should I click through to read the latest earthquake news? How many blogs should I check on a daily basis? What if I miss something? Do I read the comments everywhere, too? Which social network should I update in the morning, noon or night? The list goes on.

    But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation."

    (tags: twitter nytimes curation socialmedia web2.0 aggregation)
  • Rob Grimshaw on the paywall backlash | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog
    Kevin: Whether you're pro- or anti-paid content, FT Managing Director Rob Grimshaw's comments are well worth a read. One important point in terms of online advertising that he flags up is that it shouldn't be seen in monolithic terms. "Grimshaw’s firm belief, as he has said before, is that newspapers cannot live by advertising alone.

    Citing IAB figures from last year (available at this link), he said it was paid-for search that took “by far” the bulk of the money: around 62 per cent; with 19 per cent to classified; and only 18 per cent to online advertising spend."

    (tags: paidcontent FT online advertising businessmodels)
  • How Content Companies Should Deal With Apple In An iSlate World | paidContent
    Kevin: While overall, Arnon Miskin is optimistic about Apple's upcoming media slate, he does have a word of warning for content companies. "But over the next few years, content creators and audience aggregators should be careful about how they deal with the e-readers or it could turn into primarily a bonanza for Apple, as the Kindle may be primarily a bonanza for Amazon."
    (tags: apple tablet paidcontent publishing mediaslate)
  • Digg to Undergo Drastic Overhaul
    Kevin: Kevin Rose talks about changes coming to Digg, the popular 'read-submit-vote-comment' site, as Stan Schroeder at Mashable puts it. The stories will now be displayed in a "more real-time nature". I wonder if some of these changes will mirror the Digg Labs type of visualisations that have been on the site for a while. I doubt it, but I expect it informed their thinking to some extent. Whatever the nature of the cases, it does sound like they are trying to jump on the 'real-time' web bandwagon.
    (tags: digg redesign realtime)
  • Brill: Why We Should Pay for the New York Times – Newsweek.com
    How significant is The New York Times's decision to charge for its Web content? Very, says media gadfly Steven Brill.
    (tags: NYTimes businessmodels paidcontent)
01.22.10
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Customer outreach doesn’t trump genuine change

Sucking up to disgruntled (and well-connected) customers that you’ve found on Twitter is by now a fairly well established social media CRM strategy. Trouble is, your well-connected disgruntled customer doesn’t necessarily want to be mollified. She might want to see real, tangible change, not just for her benefit but for all your other customers. Says Tara Hunt:

I don’t take bribes (#12) even when they don’t look like one. I want change. I don’t want to see change for me, I want to see change for everyone. I want banks to stop experimenting with how far they can push us before we cry ‘uncle’ on their policies and start thinking about how they can help us achieve our dreams with customer-empowering policies. I want business to invest in technology that streamlines and helps the customer experience, not technology that spies on us.

Social media marketing and word of mouth isn’t just about finding new ways to gloss over cracks and quieten down the loudest critical voices, it’s an opportunity to learn about what really doesn’t work in your business and then figure out how to fix it. Permanently. Anything less is a whitewash.