Winning by Sharing

The Right To Reject: General Election

We need a fundamental change in the electoral system so it includes a check box on the ballot paper, along with the list of the candidates that says:

 

Not good enough.  Go back and find some better candidates because most (but not all) of you are pretty crap.  

Here's why. Quoting Robert Lion, France, circa 2007

Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as themanufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place.Humanity's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having.

...and for our so called leaders;

Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better.

Do any of our leaders think this way?

Generation Stupid

On the subject of finding your passion Umair Haque of Harvard Business Review hits the nail on the head with this.

Here’s the deal.

Jobs. Careers. Homes. Stability. Healthcare. Money. Stability. Democracy. Civil rights. A planet. Freedom. Meaning. Purpose. Happiness.

FaceTinder. UberDrones. Watching people play videogames. Selfies. LOLcats. Friending. Tube videos. Free porn. Pawnshop reality TV. The Latest and Most Kardashian Kardashian. Butt implants. Scandal. Outrage. Titillation. Cosmeceuticals. Made-by-the-lowest-bidder-slave-labor-sweatshop-shit. #OMG. #WTF? #IDK.

What do you spend most of yourself on? Where do most of your passions live? What do you invest most of your attention, energy, and ideas in?

The stuff on the second list.

You are trading the stuff in the first list for the stuff in the second list.

If all your life amounts to is the pursuit of the Perfect Selfie, the Greatest High Score, the Largest Number of Mega Awesome Totally Fake Friends — congratulations! You’re a proud member of Generation Stupid.

Read the whole thing.

Watch his short interview about why trust is the killer app and the impact this could have on the long term viability of all 20th century organisations.

 

My wish for 2014. Greed as the basis of society loses all its appeal

Inspired by my good friend Frank Dunn, who says;

One of the key discoveries of this century is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities wherein survival is all about group or team effort.

....leading to a future of "Doing better with less"; 

Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as the manufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place. Humanity's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having.

...and for our so called leaders;

Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better.Robert Lion, France, circa 2007

Peace.

Related articles

The collaborative economy emerges

What is progress?

Are comments the new gold?

All that glitters is gold

I've always argued that comments on blog posts, news articles and discussion threads are a goldmine of information and in many cases provide much richer insights than the original post. Years ago when Scott Ritter (a US Marines intelligence analyst) was responsible for finding WMD in Iraq after the invasion he wrote an article about how as much as 70% of the content of secret US national intelligence estimates (NIE) are composed of information that's in the public domain.  CIA analysts conduct good old fashioned 'police work' by trawling newspapers, internet chat rooms, gossip columns, online communities from around the world by labouriously connecting the dots.  Only a small proportion of the content of NIEs contain information from spycraft sources and activities; satellites, intercepts, surveillance and so on.

Commenting is a science in its own right

The New York Times has been covering a number of new developments in commenting technology using YouTube as an example.

As anyone who has slogged through YouTube or an article about anything even remotely contentious online knows, commenters are often like the drunken uncle no one wants to invite to the house for Christmas, but he shows up anyway.

YouTube is addressing this very issue, see: YouTube Comments Will Soon Be Less Racist, Homophobic, and Confusing

Slashdot made a major breakthrough by finding a way for users to mderate each other when there can be hundreds or thousands of comments on a single post. A new service called Kinja is revolutionising content by making comments more prominent than posts.  Collective intelligence is all the rage as long as it can separate the signal from the noise.

Anger is more influential than joy

Clay Shirky, a leading social software scientist says people forward posts they like and comment on the ones they hate.  This seems to be true based on a recent study (PDF) by Chinese academics of Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.  Their research says that anger spreads faster than joy.  That's a shame but not surprising as we all know bad news sells more than good news.  Weibo has 500m users and generates 100m Tweets per day.

 

 

 

 

 

Related articles

YouTube to clean up comments

Gawker founder Nick Denton is still trying to reinvent reader comments - and it's working

Blog Post: Weibo is to Twitter as YouKu is to YouTube

What is social business?

The network is female

In general, my experience of participating in online communities over the last ten years is that despite the initial dominance of male members the posture, attitude and expression of these communities are predominantly female.  By this I mean people are genuinely welcoming, offer unsolicited benevolence, guidance and assistance and freely give the most valuable thing that anyone can give; their time.  This isn't normal for other types of patriarchal organisations.

Recent research by academics using large Facebook data sets concluded that both males and females direct 60% of their profile viewing activities to female users.

The network is most definitely female.

How do I build brand me?

Slides from the talk I gave at the BBC's Creative Diversity Network in December 2012 summarised in this page:

How do I build brand me? from Sei Mani

My wish in 2013: Greed as the basis of society loses its appeal

Inspired by my good friend Frank Dunn, who says;

One of the key discoveries of this century is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities wherein survival is all about group or team effort.

....leading to a future of "Doing better with less"; 

Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as the manufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place. Humanity's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having.

...and for our so called leaders;

Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better. Robert Lion, France, circa 2007

Peace.

Related articles

The collaborative economy emerges

What is progress?

How valuable is Twitter's heartbeat?

Amazing analysis of 500m Tweet by SGI Global in an attempt to monitor the heartbeat of a nation in real time in terms of their feelings and sentiment.  In this case, the outcome of their voting preferences in the US presidential election in 2012.

 

A customer manifesto for the 21st century

A friend of mine suggested this this quote might be from Mahatma Gandhi; I have my doubts!

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so."

Who ever said it understands the principles of The Cluetrain Manifesto.  Here are some choice samples from the 95 theses.

• To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
• But first, they must belong to a community.
• Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
• If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
• Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
• The community of discourse is the market.

Is social reading a reality?

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 28: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos holds the new Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire on September 28, 2011 in New York City. The Fire, which will be priced at $199, is an expanded version of the company’s Kindle e-reader that has 8GB of storage and WiFi. The Fire gives users access to streaming video, as well as e-books, apps and music, and has a Web browser. In addition to the Fire, Bezos introduced four new Kindles including a Kindle touch model. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

I've had my doubts about the whole idea of 'we read and comment on a book together' but Clay Shirky's recent article on how Kindle's annotation features are changing the way people think about this.  His questions; What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

Then I spotted this over at the Economist today:

Social Reading is switched off?  Haven't tried switching it on but maybe Clay Shirky has a point.