garykoelling

The MIT Sloan School of Management has posted a review / preview of an upcoming book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester called 'Groundswell .' The book and preview use the work Steve Bendt and I have done on BlueShirt Nation, the Best Buy social networking application we've been working on for the last year and half, as one case study on how companies can use social technology internally.

Forrester Analyst and author of the upcoming book 'Groundswell ,' Charlene Li, talks about the ladder of participation on the social web at a Forrester Conference in Chicago Oct 10-12, 2007.

They are Inactives (not there yet but on their way), Spectators (all the info feeds my passion), Joiners (my friends are doing it so why not me too?), Collectors (making the lists for others - the hot group for the next 24 months, imho), Critics (i love it or hate it and I'll tell you), Creators (i blog because i have something to share). From top to bottom they represent an inverse pyramid in their numbers.

  Nicholas Negroponte came out today and turned us upside down. Instead of follwing the theme, he flipped it and to great effect. He showed us the powernot of humanizing technology but of  humanizing humans. Technology is only human if it is useful, if it is relevant. If it stimulates thinking about thinking, thinking about what it means to be human.

Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab have 'changed the game' with laptop.org and the One Laptop per Child movement. The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Day One of humanizing the digital experience.

So I realized, first of all, we've forgotten how to be human. The keynote speakers, Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald's and Michelle Peluso, the CEO of Travelocity, each stood before a packed and rapt crowd in a gorgeuos grand room of the Palmer House Hilton for the better part of 45 minutes and masturbated themselves to webgasm about strategies and tactics that smelled suspiciously like 2003. Ideas bearing no resemblance to the "web two dot oh" Michelle Peluso kept referring to. Now don't get me wrong, I love McDonald's, very tasty, and I use travelocity, I think they've got one of the better travel agent 2.0 sites out there. But it's not new.. And it's no more "human" than it was three years ago despite their roaming gnome , who, if Peluso is to be believed, should be running for Senate next month.So where's the humanity? I was off to a bad start.

October 24, 2006

I'll be at the Forrester Consumer Forum called Humanizing the Digital Experience tuesday and wedsnesday. If there's anything interesting, i'll post it.

From the brochure: Cheap devices and the mainstream adoption of broadband and wireless networks make technology a more accessible, everyday part of people's lives. Just a few cases in point: More than half of online US households use broadband today; sales of camera phones will bypass digital cameras within three years; and sub-$100 PCs are bringing technology to global masses. At the same time, people are exerting more control over digital experiences by generating their own content and connecting with others online — witness the double-digit growth of social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. These empowered consumers expect technology to conform to — not dictate — their needs and behaviors. Thus, they have zero tolerance for clumsy, cold, and confusing digital experiences. At this Event, leading Forrester analysts will present research on how brands are humanizing the digital experience, and industry executives will share their companies' best practices for creating inviting and intuitive multichannel experiences.