December 2009 Newsletter

Here’s a selection of links shared during December via Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter. Organised into four five categories: Systems and the bits and pieces that make them: People, Information and Technology plus Design makes an appearance this month. As usual, the categories overlap… Hot topics to end 2009 – social media (no surprise), lots of research published on how our minds influence our decisions (often more than the data presented in front of us) and search ends the decade showing as much potential for disruption as it did at the start. Enjoy!

Systems

• Open source proves elusive as a business model (NY Times)
• Harvard Study: Computers don’t save hospitals money – because they’re focusing on saving admin costs rather than healthcare improvements…
• Collaboration is hot, why now? Forrester report comes up with some critical factors:  innovation, efficiency, email woes and governance
• Enhancing enterprise collaboration – the role of conflict and mediation <- met someone late in 2009 who specialises in project mediation, think they’re onto a good idea
• The lowest common denominator – when introducing social media into an organisation, you need to know what barriers to overcome (and if they can be)
• The rise and fall of MySpace – expect it to become the norm, and OK, as social nets behave more like the movies than products (FT)
• Trouble lurks in social media guidelines – FTC updates its guidance regarding advertising and endorsements in social media channels
• Strange or friendly? The difference between Twitter and Facebook
• Monetising your digital self – expect social networks data mining to be popular in 2010…
• Blog post: Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle – Part 1 of a series of 5 posts covering the event
• Enterprise 2.0 Study shows adoption is real – survey of 77 members with detailed statistics
• Forbes: 2009 year in review – social media trends: consumers moved first, marketing and business are still playing catch-up
• Year in review: social networks come of age – includes Forrester research and some good statistics covering the growth of different online services
• Blog post: 2005 in review – looking back at trends from the mid-point of the decade and seeing if they are still relevant at the end
• DIY Work Hacking – “When a 12-year-old can gather information faster, process it more efficiently, reference more diverse professionals, and get volunteer guidance from better sources than you can at work, how can you pretend to be competitive?…”

Design

• Minimum desirable product vs minimum viable – business vs consumer focus to designing products and services (IDEO)
• Technical Design Debt vs Product Design debt – interesting definitions, SharePoint definitely suffered from some type II technical design debt in past releases
• Social Business Design – time to ‘socially calibrate business’ Logic + Emotion
• Trend setters may only be visible in the rear view mirror – Duncan Watts report challenges the notion of the tipping point “They start with an existing trend.. and they go backward until they’ve identified the people…'” The hindsight bias
• Time your attack: Oracle’s lost revolution – why just because one company succeeds doesn’t mean others with the same idea would have…

People

• Being online: identity, anonymity – series of O’Reilly posts on the challenges to identity in our digital age
• Of geeks and girls – how framing alters perception, context matters (Science Notes)
• Don’t feed the trolls – the challenge of presenting with real-time feedback, Danah Boyd’s experience
• Leaders get the behaviours they display and tolerate – Bob Sutton, Work Matters
• Men are from Earth, women are from Earth – challenging myths about how the different genders use our brains
• 10 psychological studies worth knowing about from 2009
• The consequences of faking it – interesting psychology research shows wearing fake goods can lead to dishonest behaviour
• The lessons we don’t learn – “An innovation economy may be able to save our nation, but not with the current crop of political leaders, regardless of party, who don’t seem to be able to take any good idea and move it forward…”
• People looked at me like I was an alien – “Danah Boyd talks about social networking, young people and how the web is more private than your home”
• What Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity – 1974 study relevant today “The presentation of self in everyday life”
• The [no longer free] sodas were just the wake up call – when seemingly rational decisions cause unintended consequences, they simply are the final straw

Information

• User data easier than ever to phish on Facebook (RWW) – and there’s even been a case of a start-up paying people to hand over their contacts’ details…
• Facebook game addicts ‘paid’ to oppose health care reform – the achilles heel of group behaviour can lead to manipulating the numbers
• Facebook gets some flak for it’s privacy changes (RWW) – and the good bad and ugly (EFF)
• Microsoft on navigation queries and best match – discovery vs navigation in our search habits
• Most popular Internet search queries for 2009 – Google and Bing search query statistics
• How many words do we use to search? Useful stats but ignore the title of the post – whilst more than half of queries involve three or more words, 70% of all queries use three words or less…
• Dealing with the data of the damned – the challenge when data doesn’t match expectations and the tendency for scientists to ignore it in their research
• 10 non-PowerPoint tools to help create better presentations – from Presentation Zen
• The World’s 10 most profitable companies – great data visualisation demonstrates what’s ‘driving’ government policies
• World map of connectedness – another great visualisation, showing importance of being an hour to a connected city, physical location still matters
• Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) wins one of the worst ideas of the decade

Technology

• Apple’s App Store is a game changer – “smart phones have become the Swiss army knives of the digital age” (NYT)
• Blog post: Google Goggles – augmented reality meets local search
• Welcome to the machine – “Technology must be used as a way to augment real world interactions, not replace them”
• Augmented reality: passive consumers vs creative contributors – ability to edit and view location-based notes
• Natural user interfaces – Microsoft products in development including touch, surface and Natal
• International location-based social networks workshop – MS Research report
• The economics of Amazon web services (AWS) – by Amazon
• Royal Mail heading to the cloud – Postal service plans switch to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (SharePoint and Office online, basically) to be managed by CSC
• Merissa Mayer interview – on the future of search and the importance of language
• Chris Caposella interview – on Google, Twitter and that infamous blue screen of death
• Microsoft’s PDC 2009 – review by Steve Clayton
• Machine translates thoughts into speech in real-time – brains going online trump non-organic versions?

And finally, to finish the year, a beautiful short film with a great message tucked in: The Butterfly Circus