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A lot has been written about the future of Wikipedia. Given some recent involvement I have had with the Wikipedia deletion process, it set me to thinking about who determines what is important and what is not on the Intenet. Read on for my conclusions...
And now for a brief diversion from technology... I found some videos this morning on YouTube of an improv troupe called ImprovEverywhere. I can only descibe it as "mob improv". I think its pretty phenomenol and well worth a watch. A simple example shows them invading a Best Buy dressed in the standard Best Buy Khaki pant/blue golf shirt uniform (very Thomas Crown affair of them):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utkkXCF8ZVc
And a much more complex adventure with many more people at Home Depot (scroll down for video segments):
http://www.improveverywhere.com/mission_view.php?mission_id=59
A while ago I wrote a spirited piece attempting to merge the best of Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns philosophy with some of Chris Anderson's ubiquitous Long Tail theory. To some extent the merger was also meant to sweep under the rug some weaknesses that I found in both approaches. If you are so inclined, you can read all 8000 words of it or simply let me sum it up for you here: in a platform war, the winner is always the one that delivers the killer app first and then does everything possible to give end users tools to develop and extend the value of their platform (the end of the tail). I called this the Increasing Tail strategy. Microsoft is, of course, the poster child for this. And Apple is the hat-trick contender (Mac, Newton, iPOD) for worst place in this game.
A few days after publishing this I got a great comment from Jim Plamondon which I ended up publishing. Turns out he had worked at Microsoft and was validating that they intentionally used (and funded) this strategy. Ahh 60MM funding or 20/20 hindsight - either one.
Well, the boys (and girls) in Redmond are up to it all over again with the XBox. Two announcements in a row should have Sony investors shaking in their boots. Not so much for what Microsoft can do, but what Sony has historically missed the boat on doing.
Announcement #1: Users can download games to the XBox across the net from a central store. New characters, weapons, demos, games, trailers, oh my! In case you blinked, the XBox in now a video game commerce platform!
Announcement #2: Any one and their first-person-shooting-grandmother can write their own games for the XBox and sell them online. The world of gaming box development, traditionally closed off to all but a few vendors, is now open to everyone.
Hold Increasing Tail batman! For anyone that can't see the correlation with their earlier dominance (Windows, Office, etc..) this is the exact same strategy. Build a platform (XBOX/Online Store), launch killer apps (Hello, Halo anyone) and then give away as many developer tools as possible so everyone can add to the end of the tail for you (XNA). If the folks at Sony and Nintendo miss the cluetrain this time, shame on them!
For a while now I have been waiting for MySpace to actively introduce products as "anchors" in people's social networks. Affiliating with a band is one thing but affiliating with the X Box, Rockstar's new Bully video game, HeadOn, or Boy Meets Grill is a totally different gig. Apparently the Washington Post got a friend request from the Ricky Bobby MySpace page and has finally played the game out a few positions and realized where this all headed. The only thing I have to do now is decide if I want to invite Optimus Prime or Megatron to be my friend.
ps - I saw Taledega Nights. Five star spangled stars!
One of the things I try to do is keep this site content-heavy and advertising light. To some extent that is the same philosphy Tonya has taken at Newmerix with our webinar and presentation series. Because I feel that there is compelling content for PeopleSoft and SAP customers in our webinars, I wanted to put out the upcoming Newmerix webinar agenda. There is also an archive of webinars that can be viewed at any time for the schedule constrained.
Please click through below for the schedule...
A few of you have probably seen by now the Enterprise Irregulars' rebuttal to Guy Smith's SandHill article. Guy's article essentially heralded in the end of enterprise software's reign and ordained it's next ruler: open source. Well, some of us in the Irregulars simply didn't agree and we chose to do so publicly.
By no means was our rebuttal an attempt to gang up on Guy or challenge SandHill's editorial capacity. Quite the contrary, it was an opportunity to take a provocative statement from SandHill and debate the core topic in open forum. I am very grateful that SandHill took the time and effort to compile and edit the over 4000 words of rebuttal to something they themselves had published. To me, this bodes well for the future of SandHill as an organization dedicated to quality content and one that can rebut it's own positions publicly.
Unfortunately, due to format at time, SandHill did not have the ability to publish all of our comments in their entirety. As those of you know, i tend to write longer pieces so it will be no surprise to find out that I wrote a much longer original submission for SandHill. There are actually a few arguments in the longer piece that I think are very relevant both to the rebuttal as well as the general Open Source debate as well. So i have published the full unedited text below. If other Irregulars put their full comments online as well I will do my best to link to them.
Uneditted Posts From the Group:
Update:
Some interesting commentary on our rebuttal - it seems everyone thinks everyone else doesn't have a clue.
Dan Farber does an overview on ZDNet
Jason and I get re-rebutted on an InfoWorld blog
Don Dodge tackles the semantics of Open Source vis a vis our rebuttals
Dan Farber follows up on Matt Assay's rebuttal to our post
For a while I have watched dating sites subdivide their possible audiences like mitochondria in a heated petrie dish. In the beginning there was Match.com. Then dating sites subdivided by religious affiliation (e.g. JDate). Then there was demographic subdivision (e.g. the Onion personals). And finally we've gotten all the way down to author-centric subdivisions. My recent discovery bears this out: the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site.
This is simply to good an example of juxtaposing Chris' Long Tail with Bob's Network Law to pass up mentioning. So in the spirit of naming things, I am going to propose Robertson's Law (also known now as "John Galt's Law"):
The value of a social network is propotional to the square of the number of users of the system multiplied by the inverse of the social networks rank amongst similarly themed social networks.
In other words, the social network value of 100,000 people connected to the "Da Vinci Code Dating Site" is much less valuable than 100 people connected to the "Atlas Shrugged Data Site" assuming that Atlas Shrugged is more than 1000 times less popular than The Da Vinci Code.
All joking aside, I think I may be onto something here. In any event, I hope the process of dating site subdivision continues because eventually someone will create the extremely niche oriented "Niel Robertson Dating Site" that only includes two members. Wouldn't that be nice. Fingers crossed!
