Olive Riley briefly held the record as the world’s oldest blogger. At 108 she didn’t actually type herself but she generated a phenomenon all by herself. Last week she shuffled off her mortal coil and I spent a good hour or so reading her ‘The Life of Riley‘ and it represents a rather remarkable insight into a rather normal (if you can call a woman who lives to 108 as normal) old lady. Well worth a read.
Since the start of the year we (Connected) have been slowly starting to adopt collaboration as a means of operating the company. This came out of the realisation that traditional project management techniques of timed-tasks, set-in-stone milestones and rigid development specifications were hampering what we delivered to our clients when any methodology we use should enhance it. Yes, it makes life *simpler* but at the cost of *mechanising* the process which we felt stifled creativity and brought undue and wholly inappropriate pressure on our operational delivery arm.
It has been a rough ride so far, milestones have slipped and tasks occasionally are left undone but, and it’s a big but, the quality of output has gone through the roof and we also seem to have a far better *team* understanding of what we have to do. This sea-change in approach started off with the selection of Basecamp as our project tool and very quickly we found our client buying into the approach and collaborating much closer and far more effectively.
Which brings me to a lovely definition I read recently that covers collaboration, posted by Mark Elliot (who wrote a thesis on the subject) I thought it was worth repeating
*coordination* is required for all collective activities (bringing the parts together in a way that yields synergy)
* cooperation* employs linear procedures to leverage collective potential (if each participant does exactly ‘x’, then a predictable ‘y’ is the result)
*collaboration* is different in that through nonlinear creative processes (no one knows exactly what they have to do until they do it, and even then the outcome is unknown) a shared understanding is created amongst the participants – one unique to those participants and that collaboration.
By way of example;
coordination = a web search: bringing together parts of the web in a way that creates meaning, i.e. synergy.
cooperation = social bookmarking: if many people tag their webpages using a particular platform, and a particular procedure, a resource much larger than any individual could develop may be generated
collaboration = Wikipedia editing: read an entry, contribute in any number of modes (form, content, discussion, etc) and from an infinite number of perspectives (the multiplicity of opinion and creative volition) one becomes part of a highly complex negotiation of a shared understanding (no one owns or comprehends the whole but contributes a part of it).
Thank you Mark, it was very illuminating
Tags: collaboration, coordination, cooperation
This week sees the launch of Cuil amid a blaze of statistics (3 times the index size of Google) and a strong side-swipe at Google’s complex popularity index. I’m going to give it a try for a while and the initial thoughts are good. It works well and despite heavy loading on the servers initially it performs pretty well and certainly looks a lot more up to date, making Google look a little outdated in terms of feel.
The usual issue of a lack of a region (UK) specific search is a little annoying but if it takes off (and one VC has just dumped $30m into it) then we’ll see UK versions in due course. It didn’t start well for them, on Sunday when the service went live it fell over almost immediately but that was, according to internal sources, due to the unexpected load on the server. Surely that is a great thing and not a failure? Buying hardware to provide more computing power is cheap.
So far so good, I like it 
Tags: cuil, google, searchengine
There seems to be a great deal of excitement and confusion over (another) emerging buzzword: Social Media. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of this “new” field it’s just that it is not new, nor should it be labeled automatically. Unless the old-world, flat-web society (see here) needs these buzzwords and phrases to be able to create product around them and sell it to corporates clamouring to get a piece of the action?
The new social media is simply plain-old friend’s networks neatly and easily gathered together in simple e-communication streams. It suits you, your friends and your friends friends. It doesn’t suit mass-market, control-freak PLC though, does it? Will McInnes (The Age of Snark) sums it up nicely, illustrating using some overly flowery language (he is PR after all) that the world is changing. Shame that the old guard are still living in the past.
Tags: socialmedia, flat-web, snark, will mcinnes
My Favorite Serious Game: Prius really made me chuckle.
Anyone who knows me even a little will agree that I am a petrolhead, through and through. I simply love engines, power, speed and the freedom that cars gave the world a hundred years ago. They are the greatest invention for the common man, I know that is an exaggeration but to a petrol head it rings true. For years I charged around in fast cars and bikes and generally helped a great deal to ruin the planet.
My last stab at global warming was my old work car, a 185mph Audi S8. 4.2 litres of burbling V8 packing nearly 350bhp. This was how I traveled the 3 miles to work, at 15mpg. It’s not clever, responsible and with petrol now touching £6 a gallon it’s also none too bright.
Last year I changed my car and got a puny 3.0 diesel Audi and rather than flying around everywhere at mach 1 I started playing a game. The MPG game, the Audi A8 is a little special considering it’s size and I manage to get over 45mpg on most journeys. Better than that I also tow my race car with it….the old V8 struggled to get over 15mpg at (ahem) decent towing speeds yet the new one sees nearly 30mpg when I am towing 2 tonnes of trailer and race car.
Whilst I don’t have the rather natty display that the Toyota has I do have a selection of mpg-based computers telling what I am doing and how many miles to the next fuel stop. My crowning glory was a moment a few months back where the computer told me I had another 930 miles in the tank and I had traveled over 80 since the last fill. Am I sad? Yes, probably. But I am using far less fuel, drive far better.
Signed,
An ex-petrolhead
I note with interest that Facebook has a new profile coming next week. I realise that sites do periodically need to be freshened up but any kind of change on this scale has to generate problems; users have to learn the new layout, programmers have to test and maybe change their applications etc. Is this wise? Unless there is a substantial benefit to the new layout (and I can’t see that) then it risks alienating lots and lots of people.
As we struggle with our new email implementation I’ve been looking at the whole area of how we communicate, both inbound and outbound. Whilst hunting around my attention turned to Flock, a browser I have used for the social-side of life. It offers a neat RSS and social portal (Facebook etc) interface and with some careful configuration I’m testing using Flock for the vast majority of my inbound and outbound communication. In fact, this post is originated inside Flock and nowhere near our WordPress server!
I’ve ranted on before about trial & error economics before and it’s good to see the wider-world start to realise the power in testing. Noone doubts this but the unique flexible, adaptable and changeable nature of the ‘Net means doing lots of tests really does make a difference. Recently we embarked on a rigorous T&E program, 101 tests in 101 days and the outcome was, unsurprisingly, predictable. 90% of the changes generated a 10% improvement and the big 10 ideas generated the vast bulk of improvement - in fact just 2 changes generated over 80% of the improvement in conversion rates.
Over the 101 days we saw a 52% increase in conversion from visitor to data on the site in question. Surprisingly (for us and the agencies involved) nobody predicted which of the changes would be “killers” which reinforces the concept that you have to test and test and test and test even if the results are to establish what doesn’t work.
Testing on the web is simple to do but many people make basic errors in statistical understanding or linking unrelated events and successes. It can be quite dangerous to make any assumptions about the correlation between the tests and the results unless you have a complete understanding of the data and the factors that could and do affect the test.
Bryan Eisenberg is running a series of webinars that, if knowing Bryan and Future Inc, will be pretty interesting. I’ll be watching closely.
