Some Random Connections
Sometimes when you start reading one thing it ends up taking you to new places and spaces. Here's some stream of consciousness connections from earlier today:
Beth Kanter starts blogging about her tag cloud and links off to Sam Lawrence. He's done a deep dive into some popular blogs and the result is a post called "10 Thought Leaders, Boiled Down" that is an interesting read. "People" and "Work" are the two big macro words that emerge from across all these blogs. One of the bloggers that Sam looks into is Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft tech evangelist who just started a new gig at Fast Company. Scoble has been blogging a lot about Silverlight, and he mentions that Microsoft and Nokia are working together to get Silverlight on the Finnish company's phones. Blackbaud has been doing some things with Silverlight (think Adobe Flash on HGH) and hopefully in a future blog post I can share some examples coming soon to Blackbaud NetCommunity. Mark Johnston threw in a comment about the iPhone's lack of support for Flash and adds his $0.02 that Steve Jobs might add Silverlight if the performance issues with Flash can't get worked out. All my Apple products are misbehaving lately so I guess this is another reason to wait on the iPhone.
Seth Godin has been jamming a lot lately about the music industry and points to Kevin Kelly's post about "1,000 True Fans", which looks at The Long Tail theory from a different perspective. Long Tail theory guy Chris Anderson has a great new article in Wired this month called "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business" that is worth reading. I had stopped reading Wired back in the 90s when it got tired, but began picking it up again a year ago when they did a major redesign of the magazine. Chris also has a great blog where he writes about the FREE article and how they did a 6,000 word preview of the book, which doesn't come out until 2009. The mind-bender is that the ideas in the article and the future book have actually been getting a test drive on Chris' blog for a while now. This is something you see a lot more of these days. I think it was David Weinberger who was one of the first to do it with Small Pieces Loosely Joined a few years ago. David is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto and I got to know him and Doc Searls pretty well a few years ago. Doc is now a fellow at the at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and is working on Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). His latest blog entry has Doc pondering how he'd do in a class about The Cluetrain Manifesto. Markets are still conversations.