- Posts tagged web 2.0
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The Web's Long Tail
An unspoken truth:
Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.
The web is a collection of a few dedicators, go setters and initiators and a long tail of just content consumers and occasional editors. The difference between these people is that some know that their job is to be the designers of the world and not just to copyedit or add the occasional useless noise. The web is a work in progress and herein lies the magic: checkout this conversation below of a group of editors of Wiktionary who are debating whether '0-2-2' should be part of the dictionary or not..
I'm not sure but I think it is not a word for a wiktionary. Contrary we must to have all "words" as 3-5-2, 3-4-3, 3-3-4, 4-3-3 and so on because all of them are "A popular soccer formations". In any case, it can't be an "English adverb" --VPliousnine 09:43, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Keep. Perhaps it should be a noun, but it describes an identifiable thing with a set meaning. There are quite a few combinations of numbers that serve similar functions. This also happens to be a steam locomotive configuration. bd2412 T 14:33, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Keep. See BD 2-4-1-2 above (I doubt there are more than a dozen loco wheel formations and rather fewer soccer formations, and until you've seen the definition of one or two, they are fairly opaque). --Enginear 23:34, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
For someone with the tag "Enginear" you should know better ;-) There are at least 50 steam locomotive combinations excluding rare ones, and at least a few dozen have names: 4-4-2 is Atlantic ... Robert Ullmann 00:01, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, careless indeed! Thinking back to my steam trainspotting days, I suppose there were about a dozen, and several names, in use in England in 1960 alone, and we didn't have anything bigger than Pacifics ... it's just it takes a while to blow out the cobwebs before I can get that bit of my brain up to speed. --Enginear 01:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
So... keep. Pedant 02:32, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
I count 81. A drop in the bucket for the whole of the dictionary. Let's collect 'em all. bd2412 T 01:45, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it's a small, finite (in practical terms) set, so let's. To come up with a figure like 81, I guess you still have some reference books, so you'd better lead, and I'll try to find some good cites. I see that Robert Ullmann helped cite anorakish so he may know more than either of us. ;-D --Enginear 13:03, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
The point is that it all follows the same principle. Someone sets out with a new article, an entry that has not been defined yet or even a new book, then the community responds and expands the original thought. The risk you take when you remain silent with your ideas is detrimental to all.
Built for Evolution: The Organizational Structure of Platforms
Capability building is now the most important consideration when making decisions as to how any organization should be structured. This is particularly true for platform companies. Why? The answer has to do with how platform companies create value when compared to product counterparts. Product companies create value primarily by making their products incrementally better. Take the iPod, for instance: it started as a simple mp3 player, and then made incremental improvements to its appearance, its size, its storage capabilities, and its media display functionality. It will most likely continue on this trajectory, making sustaining innovations, or incremental improvements, to its existing product line.Now contrast this with a platform company like Google. Google relies on incremental innovations to a certain extent — its algorithm is periodically altered in an attempt to improve search results, and Gmail seems to be forever expanding its storage capacity. More important to Google from a competitive standpoint, though, is it's ability to create entirely new capabilities — for instance, Google Video and Google Base. These initiatives required a wide array of new capabilities to be established. To structure a company for new capabilities as opposed to incremental innovations, the value chain must completely atomized. In other words, there can be no long value chains where each employee is a rung in a ladder, with all the value ultimately flowing to the top. Such hierarchical organizations are essentially immobile by design; they are not capable of creating new capabilities because everyone in the vertical hierarchy is participating in a way that only serves the existing value chain. This is great for incremental innovations, as such a structure essentially institutionalizes the process of adding more value to existing value chains. It is not so effective, though, for creating new value chains. At this point, Google is the poster child for the platform company, with its bottom-up innovation style and its emphasis on group-oriented decision making and individual creativity. By giving its employees freedom to work on their own projects, it has set the stage for many value chains to be created; in other words, it has put in place an engine for building capabilities. As companies embrace platform business models to a greater extent, this strategy will be taken even further, with organizations being structured in much the way that open source communities are: no real bosses and independent members working in a decentralized environment dictated more by coordination than by hierarchies.
The final article in the series will look at the seismic consequences of this shift in organizations, and how it will ultimately bring about the demise of corporations and nations.
via Kid Mercury's Blog by Kid Mercury on 05/16/07
the Huffman code
Godin vs Gladwell on Anderson's Free
Although Chris Anderson may have 'mistakenly' referenced a few Wikipedia paragraphs without any citation, his argument of Free in his new book is still up for heavy debates and viraling across the web. My observation however has led me to a sort of a perplexed state in regard to Bruce Nussbaum of BW's coverage of the tiff between Godin and Gladwell's refute of Anderson's thesis.
Nussbaum says in agreement with Godin:
"I agree. That's always been at the core of capitalism-unique things or services we crave and pay for become over time commodities and cheap (almost free) and are replaced by new stuff, which we are willing to pay lots for."
His previous post however in regard to his anecdotal account of boomers loving their Kindle ended with an overly contrary support of Anderson's exact prediction and argument that "Tech is too cheap to meter..." What I do gather from Anderson's argument is that digital goods in essence will undoubtedly have a hard time at fetching a price.
Excuse me Gladwell, but a pill is not a digital good. It may be intellectual property, but its far from ones and zeros.
Illustration: Rodrigo Corral
i am the long tail
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has just released a seven-minute movie called “I Am the Long Tail”. Here’s an excerpt of their description:
Analysts estimate there are as many as 1.2 million Web sites that support themselves by selling advertising, through their own sales forces or ad networks. Most of them constitute the vaunted "long tail" -- small sites serving the refined interests of niche audiences, whose existence is premised on the Internet's near-barrierless opportunity to create and distribute content. But the term "long tail," based as it is on such abstruse mathematical concepts as Pareto's law, can seem bloodless. It hardly does justice to the countless lives made better because of the ad-supported Internet.
the evolution of writing on the internet
This illustration says a lot about the evolution of writing on the web and our decreasing attention span.
A Very Brief History of Micro-Media. Credit: David Armano.
euro startups are still pitching
via TechCrunch by Mike Butcher on 10/27/08
The European startup scene appears to be relatively unfazed by the downturn so far. But then, they are, even now, still getting used to the mere idea of pitching their idea. O’Reilly’s Web 2 Expo Europe event in Berlin last week featured a bunch of startups all trying to get some exposure to a swathe of European VCs at a “Pitchcamp”. But luckily it featured a crop of some of Europe’s most interesting companies to date…
experimenting and innovating in a new online society
The allowed possibilities of cheap communication tools and Google are ever more becoming an inconceivable paradigm shift to how we express ourselves and conduct businesses – at least for me.
It is horrifying however to imagine that some CEOs of large corporations and head of governments do not posses the slightness notion of this metastasis. Creativity has gain new meanings. It is an age of talent abundance. One may experience this with just one video of Youtube, a platform where every minute 10 hours of video are uploaded. Yet it seems the people who make important decisions that affect us all are afraid to experiment. To quote leading innovation author Scott Berkun of HBS:
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
The problem is that most business managers hate experiments. They want guaranteed returns. Predictable profits. Introducing uncertainty works against what they're trying to do. The comedy is that whatever profits they're talking about protecting originated from the founders of the company doing a huge experiment: starting a new company.
Experimenting leads to the risk of not knowing what the outcome will be. It is a learning process that ushers creativity and innovation and which displaces us from the norm.
I believe creativity has always been part of us. We now have however a public audience and we can be assured that our work will be made permanent. Despite other’s reluctance to embrace innovation democratization, I remain steadfastly with the belief that the future society will be govern by rules which ourselves have no control over. Jeff Carvis explains:
…a new society… [with] the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
