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Ali Fisher is Director of Mappa Mundi Consulting and a former Director of Counterpoint, the cultural relations think-tank of the British Council. Ali blogs on network mapping and Public Diplomacy at WandrenPD.com
This [above link] is the first in a series of posts that will explore our world of disappearing boundaries – from geographic to linguistic to time to organizational – that create new opportunities and challenges to agenda setting and influence. Wikileaks, as an exemplar non-state actor in this world of “now media,” requires analysis beyond the superficial and polarized debate common in today’s coverage of both the organization and the material it disseminates. The MountainRunner Institute is working to convene a series of discussions with experts across the spectrum, including (ideally) someone from Wikileaks, to discuss the role and impact of actors like Wikileaks and the evolving informational and human landscape. If you are interested in more information or in participating, email me at blog@mountainrunner.us.
In a memo, Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie warned that the industry is moving to a post-PC world, and warned Microsoft employees that they must either lead or be pushed aside.
Ozzie said that memo had helped Microsoft on to success in the cloud, with products like Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Windows Live, and a socially-connected Xbox.
“Our products are now more relevant than ever,” Ozzie wrote. “Bing has blossomed and its advertising, social, metadata & real-time analytics capabilities are growing to power every one of our myriad services offerings. Over the years the Windows client expanded its relevance even with the rise of low-cost netbooks. Office expanded its relevance even with a shift toward open data formats & web-based productivity. Our server assets have had greater relevance even with a marked shift toward virtualization & cloud computing.”
Ozzie's latest memo, however, may have much less impact than his previous missive, however. That's because Ozzie said he would step down from his post as chief software architect after an undisclosed amount of of time. Ozzie apparently has no plans after that.
Ozzie's memo acknowledged the reality of “always-on” services like Facebook or Twitter, or Web mail services like Gmail or Hotmail, combined with connected devices like the Boxee Box or Apple TV.
October 15, 2010 – Large institutions have massive amounts of data in this modern age, the question is what to do with all of it. Extracting the right information can help avoid waste, delays, systems failures, even terrorist threats. A perfect example is Toyota’s customer support and repair data. If business intelligence had been applied and management had been looking, they would have noticed that something was going terribly wrong.
NewsBreak brought this to our attention in their article, “Search and Business Intelligence: The Humble Inverted Index Wins Again.” Business intelligence means mining through all that digital data—in legacy systems, databases, and even spreadsheets—and reporting what’s going on. Institutions with all that data know its value. When implemented well, business intelligence can be a huge success to all involved.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
Phi Beta Iota: The two graphics below, one from the 1990's the other very recent, sum up all that governments and businesses simply do not get, do not practice, and do not leverage. Dashboards, like Smart Phones, are fairly stupid. Existing “data mining” systems do not adapt, scale, or make sense in relation to externalities. It takes humans to do that, and not geek IT humans but rather all-source holistic analytics humans. We have a ways to go.
What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:
the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
it is critical to their success; and
they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.
Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.
Peggy Holman knows a lot about change in organizations and communities and she wrote Engaging Emergence to help people not only deal with unexpected and chaotic change, but even come out ahead by engaging it proactively.
But proactive engagement means letting go of some things just as much as discovering new things. To help you navigate, Peggy presents her list of The Five Things We Need To Let Go Of To Effectively Deal With Emergence:
If you were going to pick an epicenter for mainstream media, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz would not be a bad place to land. With his running scorecard on Beltway journalists, his interviews of other scorekeepers on his “Reliable Sources” show on CNN, and his ceaseless fascination with network news, Mr. Kurtz embodied the folkways of the traditional press.
Until last week, when he announced he was leaving his privileged perch to become the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, a two-year-old toddler of the new digital press conceived by Tina Brown and owned by IAC, run by Barry Diller. Mr. Kurtz’s lane change evinced gasps reminiscent of when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
On the heels of decisions by Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Peter Goodman of The New York Times to go to The Huffington Post, it would seem like a bit of a tipping point.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert has it half right–news you can use. The value has shifted from the T in IT to the I in IT. We told NSA this in Las Vegas in 2000, but the money is in the T not the I, so they ignored us. Public Intelligence about everything is about to emerge as the new arbiter of value. True cost will be known, transparency will expose corruption as well as waste, and there will be, as our friend and mentor Alvin Toffler has written, a PowerShift.
Census of marine life shows how various underwater life forms are connected to one another
Census of marine life took place over a ten-year period and cost $650 million. Over 200 thousand life forms were identified in the census of marine life.
. . . . . . .
“We didn't know so much about the deep sea…,” Arbizu said. “We believe now that the deep sea is more connected, also the different oceans, than we previously thought.”
Phi Beta Iota: Science is on the cusp of a major new learning period, finding connectivity and co-evolution in tangible forms that can be documented. Science is also on the verge of a mental and ethical meltdown, between fragmented sub-specialties and rampant fabrications. Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three. It's time we rescued education, intelligence, and research, together.
