TheWayoftheWeb

I’ve been working my way through a backlog of books, and finally moved onto Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which is a look at those people who stand out for their achievements, whether online or in the sporting world, for example.

Malcolm Gladwell (pic by schipulites on Flickr - CC licence)

He explores the possible reasons that contribute to such success – for example, the age cut-off for selection into sporting programmes – and shows that being born in a certain month gives you an advantage which is then amplified by being selected into more intensive training. Or the fact that in addition to the talents of Bill Gates, the fact that he was probably the only 13-year-old with access to an advanced computer (at the time), meant that his success was one of timing and opportunity in addition to his own skill.

I can understand why Gladwell comes in for criticism – his anecdotal style can hide the fact that Outliers certainly uses a reasonable amount of data to back up his observations. And as a parent, the insight into what can contribute to scholarly success certainly caught my attention.

Funnily enough, I actually observed something similar (I suspect it’s still languishing on my Blogger account amongst some posts which didn’t automatically transfer here) about the sudden appearance of Web 2.0 business successes under 30.

The reason they were all around a similar age (aside from possible fraudulence), was the situation they were in – old enough to be ambitious and educated at a time when Web 2.0 technology came available, in places where they were able to find equally interested developers, not tied down to mortgages and commitments etc, and generally in a University setting where they either had the free time to experiment, or could find it by missing classes!

The one thing that’s possibly missing is a message to absorb and use what you can learn from Outliers whilst still remembering that exceptions occur and not using it as an excuse.

The other book I’ve finally found time to sit down and digest is David Cushman’s The Power of the Network.

David Cushman (pic by Stoweboyd - CC Licence)

I’m probably not in a position to critically review his work (Dave is a former boss, colleague and friend of mine), but I can certainly see why Chris Thorpe wrote about the power of print after reading it.

It’s a collection of material and white papers Dave has already published on his blog, FasterFuture, and as such it’s material I’m fairly familiar with – but the fact that he frames it with discussion of Moore, Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws means that it benefits from a little bit of time and attention – which is too easy to avoid doing when skimming through RSS feeds during a busy day. Plus, as Chris points out, having the extracts collected means that certain themes become more apparent through the material Dave has picked out.

Plus at 98 pages it’s the right length to communicate the ideas without dragging on, and being self-published via Lulu, it’s also ‘cost-effective’ at £4.98 for print and £0.49 for a digital download.

Just to finish off, one of the books I’m currently keen to get hold of is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis – which is available in print, but also as a video book if you’re in the U.S. You can watch a non-region specific excerpt below:

A small side street in Malmo, Sweden from my holiday...

Well, you’ll be glad to know I’m home and back online after my break, despite the fun on flying back to the UK during some strong winds – I’m sure at one point the plane was trying to land sideways!

I had a really good time introducing my son to his extended family, and having my first offline break of more than a couple of days in about as long as I can remember – I had the occasional twinge, but aside from uploading pictures to Flickr, I only logged in once to check my emails!

Instead I wrote down any ideas and inspiration in a storage device which I believe is called a ‘notebook’, made of paper, and using a stylus which dispensed ink onto the paper, thus preserving the content. And I even had the chance to releax and read something called a ‘book’.

In a rush for the plane, and experiencing physically shopping for something to read for the first time in ages, I ended up with Richard Branson’s Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur on a bit of a whim, and I’m glad I did. I’d never spent much time considering the Virgin brands until now, and it turns out they’re an excellent case study for many of the principles the social media world are espousing. And considering Brand has build 8 billion-dollar companies from scratch, there’s some pretty persuasive proof!

More from Malmo

And on the book topic, while I was out of the country, my former colleague Dave Cushman has published a collection of his white papers of social networking, media, and communities via Lulu, with any money going to charity. See more on The Power of the Network, here.

Anyhoo, the entire family is suffering with various strains of the traditional ‘return from holiday with an illness’ which seems to happen so much, including it’s most junior member. Plus I’ve got a few hundred emails to filter, 1000+ RSS items to clear, and various other things to update, upload and file – including some better sorting and tagging of my Flickr photos. I’ve finally invested in a Pro account, so I should really make more use of it. Maybe the final excuse I need to start upgrading my travelling kit with a smart phone with a decent camera?

I’ll start going through ideas, news, and picking out some of the most relevant Branson examples over the next couple of days as I get back up to speed. And in the meantime I’ll be continuing to learn how hard it is to administer a syringe full of medicine into a baby’s mouth without seeing the contents end up everywhere but inside the baby!

And now one last pic to retain the feeling of relaxtion you get in a small town in Sweden when everyone else is at work – and it’s not exactly busy during rush hour!

While the chaps over at Friendfeed might be proposing we augment RSS with Simple Update Protocol, there’s  a slightly more basic (from my side) bit of syndicated going on, which I’m calling ‘SRSBS’ (Someone Really Simple Being Syndicated).

What this means is that I’m now one of the bloggers being syndicated onto the Socially Minded group blog. And interestingly, the idea is to group together all of the social media/technology types in the charming county of Cambridgeshire – tying together similar ideas, but also forming a loose collective to be able to meet in real life and share ideas.

Aside from myself, there’s also Matthew Brazil of 6Consulting, my Bauer Media colleague David Cushman, Alan Moore of Communities Dominate Brands fame, and Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets. Plus two resident bloggers outside of Cambridgeshire, Gennefer Snowfield, and  Ian Hendry.

More Cambridgeshire people are welcome – and in fact it’s already led me to discover one of the contacts I keep meaning to meet in London actually commutes from within about 15 miles of my house! Matthew Brazil is coordinating everything, so he’s your man to be added.

I think I’m the only person on the list special enough to have two blogs on the list – this place, and 140char.com. I just hope people don’t stop coming to visit my natural environment and contributing to the millions * I earn from Adsense

*millions may be a lie to portray myself as a rich, successful make money blogger. I may, in fact, not actually make very much at all. But that’s not really the point of this blog…

My Bauer Media colleague Dave Cushman has raised some interesting questions in an excellent blog post: 17 lessons for the new marketing.

Hopefully he’ll forgive me for pointing out that as an ex sub-editor and production editor, blogging has had an effect on his spelling! Unless assetts is a clever pun!

He raises important questions about the purpose and value of content in the modern world. One which is navigated via Google, RSS, social networks, and chat. One in which it’s possible to find almost any information/content for free if you have the time. And Bill Drummond’s 17 project is definitely a good trigger for thinking about new ways to consider content.

I do disagree that having an almost infinite amount of music means it loses value – in terms of interest, and whether participating always gives rise to a richer experience than being part of an audience – even of one. As a musician, I’ve had some appalling times trying to play with groups of people – and I’ve had some superb times listening to recordings alone or with friends. And sites like Last.fm allow me to listen to far more music than I’d have encountered via broadcast media.

And in the modern world, long dead musicians are being remixed, reproduced, and mashed into new symphonies by people who weren’t even alive for the original recordings. It’s not about retreading the path of the minstrel back to the dark ages by dismissing recordings, but embracing the new ways of continues creation for a piece of content by new artists and new technologies.

Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons – and one which necessitates the move from broadcast. That of constant change. What may work for me at one moment can change within seconds, and the only person who will know that change has happened will be me. And that constant change is only made possible by broadcast technology (ever wondered by uploads are so much slower than downloads?) being re-purposed by the end user in the same way as radio gave rise to pirate stations, and video and digital TV gave rise to lo-fi film-making.

What we’re both striving for is a new outlook and way of doing things to ensure future relevance and success. David sums it up with his opening question for editorial/media types:

What do you do if you don’t have any content?

And points out how that leads to the likes of Google, Youtube, Wikipedia and Twitter. Interestingly only one of them is an undisputed financial success, but in terms of content, they have an almost infinite amount and yet create nothing except the context in which to access it all.

When asked about resourcing levels, I once heard someone say ‘Content will take care of itself’. I don’t believe that’s true. What I believe is that ‘Content will be created by itself – and it’s our opportunity to take care of it’. And that means the creation experience, the publishing experience, the marketing experience and the live experience. All things that traditional media companies have experience of doing, and  could now begin to perform as a service, rather than an end in itself. After all, as David would say, we’re in an era of unfinished symphonies.

(And I’ve since learned that it applies to Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy:

“The percussion loop is the “belly break” sampled from a Bob James‘ cover of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” which was also used by Run DMC on ‘Peter Piper’. The voice at the beginning of the song is a sample of John McLaughlin“. – from Wikipedia.