QVIews

Clay Shirky, quoted below, provided a great perspective to the NY Times on the discourse of blogs, noting how people can use them to inform one another or not. I have observed that in any online discussion, convergence is a struggle where people have to be committed to listening to each other. In this NY…

I’ve really struggled with the concept of ‘brand community,’ and now Gary Stein has a more accurate, though less catchy, descriptive phrase… Link: Gary Stein: Jupiter Research Advertising Coverage: Focuses for 2005. Communal-Creation of Brand Equity: Centered two strong forces: blogs and affiliates, will form the core of a new way of talking about managing…

Rob-at-BusinessPundit.com has an interesting perspective on the growing importance of connections–who you know–in American business. Although I resist the idea we succeed based on who we know, I do agree that the overwhelming sea of choices is forcing us to use our connections to make more decisions. From the post on fading meritocracy: We have…

I’m going through last month’s issue of Fast Company to make sure I save the good bits. This is from John Byrne’s Dec. 2004 editorial: Link: Fast Company | Finding Your Inner Creative. Imagine how dynamic our economy would become if more companies were open to new ideas, if more of them truly understood how…

Wade Roush has a good article on how Amazon is enabling innovation at MIT Technology Review, Amazon: Giving Away the Store. While companies such as Google and Microsoft are also experimenting with the idea of letting outsiders tap into their databases and use their content in unpredictable ways, none is proceeding more aggressively than Amazon.…

One of the best reads on the internet is Grant McCracken’s This Blogs Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. I laughed out loud twice during the post below. Link: Asians of America. I was sitting in his tiny, chilly living room. Jetlagged, disoriented, and freezing, I was asking slow pitch questions in the…

I’ve found another place to get free information about trends, this time about internet trends: www.morganstanley.com/techresearch. (But if you’re Meeker-phobic stay away.) Plus, if you’re trying to figure out the big deal about blogging and syndication, and how it could change the way we get information, download An Update from the Digital Word–October 2004 (pdf).…

Last November I attended a conference put on by Net Impact, an organization whose mission is to "use the power of business to positively impact social and environmental concerns." Everyone spent a lot of time talking about ‘giving back’ and ‘social responsibility.’ There was a strong underlying theme that ‘making money’ wasn’t enough. Now, I…

Over at Poynter.org, Steve Outing has a terrific two part article on what bloggers can learn from journalists and vice versa. His first suggestions to bloggers is to ‘recruit yourself an editor.’ I wonder if anyone at 43 Things is willing to trade editing labor. (See more progress on "43 Things"…) Anyway, Steve Outing’s recommendation…

It’s hard to find a short definition of "The Long Tail." You can read the original article in Wired, but here’s a good summary by Joe Gratz, a law student studying digital rights: Link: joegratz.net ? The Long Tail and Free Culture. In it [The Long Tail article], Anderson argues that new dissemination technologies make…