breadcrumbs

Everybody Into The News Pool

For the past several months I've been following Dan Gillmor's excellent blog and have been looking forward to a book I knew he was writing about the impact of weblogs on traditional journalism. Gillmor is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and a great online source of info about technology and news. Well, now his book, We, The Media, is out. I've just read the intro, but it looks like a great examination of how weblogs are blurring the lines between author and audience and are starting to give large media companies a run for their money. Gillmor argues that the days when news was a lecture are over. It needs to be more of a conversation, he suggests. This is the same conclusion the authors of the excellent The Cluetrain Manifesto came to when they were discussing corporate external communication. It's a powerful lesson so few companies and media outlets seem to get, or want to get. Their loss. BTW, of course, the book has its own blog.

Prize Find

Just finished Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Apart from the "burning down the house" messages about marketing, what I really admire about Godin is his writing style. It's direct, funny and to-the-point. In Free Prize Inside, he argues that companies should spend less on marketing mediocre products and more on making them great. Part of that greatness, he says, often comes from the features that are beside the point - great design, terrific service, social conscience - things that may have nothing to do with the Powerbook, hotel stay or face cream you're buying, but are the real reason you pick one product or service over another. I also enjoyed an earlier Godin book, The Big Red Fez, one of the easiest-to-read books on web usability you'll find anywhere.

Crowded Wisdom

I'm currently reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Suroweicki. Basically, Suroweicki argues, that given the right conditions, a collective can make better decisions than even the smartest individual. One of these conditions is that, early in the deliberation process, individuals within a crowd must be isolated, so that their individual, but often incomplete, knowledge isn't tainted by the ideas of others. This is an important idea, and one I'm wrestling with as I help companies create online communities with my company, w8nc inc. The challenge is how to keep the individuals separated at first.