Here comes everybody – true on many accounts

Steve Cunningham is summarizing books via video, nicely produced as he’s using a mixture of visualizations and “key point”-slides. And he’s asking his followers on Twitter which book he should tackle next, cool.

Here he’s reviewing Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody” (btw, he claims to not being related with Ward Cunningham):

Nice blurb too:

Question it answers: Why we are going through the biggest change in how we communicate the world has ever seen.

Why you should care: Most books on “new media” focus on the what. This is the only book truly dedicated to the why.

Oh and btw, you may enter into my writings on Shirky and more videos via this post: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

reboot11 – recapping day 2 and wrapping it all up

Time for a wrap-up, huh? Blogged about day 1 here, now onto the remainders, which included favourite talks by Lee Bryant, Euan Semple, JP Rangaswamy, Stowe Boyd and Bruce Sterling (interview here).

And with favouriote speakers on stage I am a bit hesitating to see it like Anders who writes:

[…] the slightly holier-than-thou tech-savvy social media web crowd in the hall. And the ribbing was needed, in my opinion, since the first keynotes of the day – Lee Bryant and Evan Semple – had been gagfests of we-know-what-it-is-about-and-they-do-not-comments on enterprises and old media, entertaining and insightful though they were.

I don’t think this was only for the converted, the smart guys who get it – talks like these provide us with inspiration and things to think about. Granted, from the outside “cyberutopianism and activism” look very much like a sick insider’s joke, yet it’s more mainstream than one assumes at first. The changes are underway, both in social media as whole and in the enterprise.  And the topics of this year’s reboot are probably more mainstream than we realize, like we can see e.g. in the race for the colonization of social media. As Stowe Boyd demands:

[…] we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

So reboot11 was a success in my mind – giving us stories and storylines (or shall we say a Reboot mythology) to proceed. And some nifty action projects like the solar bike went live too (the rebike in fact turned out to offer better wifi than the regular reboot one, watch the video …). After all you can’t fit everything into two days, sometimes you just have to be content with what you’ve got, it’s like Casper says:

[…] a lot of friendly people and generally the conference went beyond my expectations for a reasonably small tech (not in the real sense anyways) get-together as this was. I hope to join next year as well.

To close, my short video interview with Ton Zijlstra, talking about what makes reboot so special (and yes, some systems work best when they’re not stable):

ps. reboot presentations get collected on slideshare, tagged with ‘reboot11’ and then probably added to the reboot group on slideshare

Stumbled upon … folksonomies, social software for innovation and collaboration

… in the form of studies, ebooks and research reports, like this one: Daniela Barbosa (from Dow Jones) published an ebook about folksonomies and taxonomies. See this for a stylish interpretation of “research report”, like it a lot.

Via Ed Brill I found this IBM Lotus “Collaboration without boundaries” whitepaper (pdf), from the intro:

Introduction: the who, what, why of collaboration

[…] exclusivity, hierarchy and solitude are already being replaced by radically different ways of collaborative working. The signs are unmistakable. People increasingly work in places other than their offices — and on teams that draw expertise from virtually anywhere in the world.

[…] Today, collaboration is the name of the game.
In today’s competitive environment, sharing information and expertise
can be critical in driving both individual and organizational success.

[…] How does collaboration yield results? By fostering innovation. In fact, true innovation is virtually impossible without collaboration. And innovation is indispensable to success. Business leaders recognize this.

They’re referring to IBM’s recent CEO study too, where “more than three quarters of the 765 chief executive officers queried cited collaboration and partnering as very important to their innovation efforts”. Now, we might see this also from a business model innovation perspective: When some talented people with lightweight technologies may disrupt your business model, it makes sense to attract and integrate them early on. BTW, this study is now available in German too (IBM, Global CEO Study, Juli 2008, Executive Summary (PDF, 91KB), mit “Registrierung für den Download der vollständigen Studie“. Nice visualizations too, but not as nice as Daniela’s.

Then, there’s another one from IBM (“IBM and Employee-Centered
Social Media: The Corporate Newsletter goes Social“) on their internal experiences with social software for collaboration and communication (found via Robert).

Need even more insights? Try Social Media – Introduction to the Tools and Processes of Participatory Economy (pdf) by Katri Lietsala & Esa Sirkkunen for an overview of social media (found this via Hugo E. Martin). This is an ebook under CC license published in the Hypermedia Laboratory Net Series by Tampere University Press. I was charmed by the fact that there’s a chapter on Open innovation, idea management and “new R&D” too, i.e. customers participating, intermediaries and innovation markets et al. Needless to say taht both CrowdSpirit and FellowForce are mentioned.