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Why the Open will win

Why the Open will win

If only my friends who have accounts in the same service can see my photos or favorite music or restaurants, then I will put less energy into participating in that service. But with a mesh of services connected by common syndication formats and open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), my friends and I can share and converse amongst ourselves or with the connected world, independent of which tools we use.

For all the services using this open model, this network of tools brings audience. People who share photos, recommend an interesting article, or podcast, or coming event will pull more people into the conversation – a conversation tied to the open mesh of tools.

Any company that sticks to a silo strategy will fail. Instead of the silo communities locking in their users, they will be locked out of the conversation.

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Obama on Veterans.

Barack Obama spoke a few weeks ago in West Virginia, and this is an excerpt of the speech where he addresses Veteran issues:

Personally, I lost an uncle to suicide largely stemming from his tour in Vietnam. I also watched the effects of PTSD on another uncle, of the WWII generation, grow worse as he slipped into dementia in the years before he passed in his 80’s. I feel very strongly that our service men and women are heroes, whether or not I agree with the policies of our civilian leadership who put them in the fight.

Obama’s speech in this podcast is worth listening to. For that matter, subscribe to the podcast series and listen to what he says on a variety of issues.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/podcast

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Pescadero Garden tour, Saturday, May 19th

My friend Monique was instrumental in organizing this year’s tour. Details are on the HMB Review webite, at:

http://www.hmbreview.com/articles/2007/05/16/community/community_news/story4.txt

Come on down! let me know if you’ll be joining us!

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Douse the controversy, or transform it?

Everyone has been making much of the Obama speech on race and racism in america. David S. Broder of the Washington Post has written well on the subject and why it will continue to be a controversy. But he suggests that Obama’s immediate objective was to “douse the controversy” surrounding his relationship with Reverend Wright.

I don’t believe that this was Obama’s objective. Most politicians seek to push away from controversy, but Obama seems to want to use it rather than to simple make the controversy go away.

This is one of the things I find impressive about Obama. I hope he continues to push us all to confront these difficult issues of race and class, so we can make America the place we all believe it can be.

Original Washington Post article

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“Them” is very much ‘Us”

Shel Israel wrote a powerful post a couple days ago. I just saw it. It’s in the general theme of social networks, but really it’s about bigotry. A Must-Read:

http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/02/its-them.html

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Anti-Customer Update – WSJ Online

WSJ Online now has a policy that shuts down your account access if they detect you logging in from more than one computer at a time.

TechCrunch does a nice job telling the story behind this fiasco.

What I find really funny is that this sort of stupidity is now considered an “understandable, and classic reaction” from incumbent executives. Erick at TechCrunch is exactly right about this.

There’s hope for WSJ, of course. If Rupert Murdock has his way…

 – but what about YOUR company?

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Danah Boyd on socialization in the digital world

In this video interview, Danah Boyd makes some great points about lack of socialization of kids. Lack of space for them to gather and be social even in with their own friends and some of the factors making this happen. Then she talks about how they DO socialize, online… OK, there’s a few asides regarding Scoble being different from normal users, but the rest is fascinating stuff.

Danah Boyd interview by Robert Scoble, at Davos:

[From QIK | Streaming video right from your phone]

Danah Boyd is a researcher who studies teens ad their online interactions. See more on Danah at her website.

You can also read about her on Wikipedia