Categories
Design Education Globalization Google Network OpenSource Rich media Technology

Social media by the numbers

Categories
Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Network OpenSource Reading Technology TED

Latest read: The Starfish and the Spider

Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider reminded me of his very insightful presentation at the 2007 The Next Web Conference about organizations. Two types will define or break you in a Web2.0 world.
the starfish and the spiderAn enjoyable, easy read that further suggests leaderless organizations can fuel dramatic change within organization large and small.

Beckstrom, who just spoke at the 2008 TED conference presents content supporting how organizations can flourish when tightly controlled groups embrace the starfish effect.

He notes how Al-qaeda has embraced this type of leaderless organization and it becomes very obvious to any reader the last five years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This book actually complimented my previous read, The Wisdom of Crowds (review here).

The Starfish and the Spider follows the successful work of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything because both draw upon the power in today’s globalized world to share knowledge — via OpenSource to engage Web2.0 enterprise solutions and corporate blogs to think and more importantly, act independently.

Book website Link

Categories
Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Reading

Latest read: The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds proves useful in understanding the impact (both positive and negative) regarding knowledge of isolated individuals vs. collective intelligence that shapes business, economies, societies and nations.

Surowiecki opens the book with a great example of the surprising “wisdom” possessed by groups of people. The book is a easy, enjoyable read.

As much as I enjoyed the learning I was somewhat more interested in learning the faults of crowds…specifically his analysis of NASA and the Columbia tragedy. To some extent the exact same lessons can be lifted from NASA and applied to Watergate, the highly intelligent crowd in the White House of Nixon’s inner circle.

The NASA “crowd” knew the danger yet did not as a group act to save the lives of their astronauts. In this lesson, I’m not convinced of the blanket approach to the wisdom of crowds. But Surowiecki is able to relay a number of cases in which this applies in business and societies.

The ability of crowds to outsmart a individual experts on any given topic ultimately supports the strength of communities, but as noted above even groups of specialists with graduate degrees have the ability to ignore their collective wisdom.