I'll start off here by introducing myself - I'm the new intern here at nGenera (which I'm pretty excited about). As you can see from my bio, a lot of my interests have to do with politics, so I thought that would be a good jumping-off point for my first blog posting on the website. So here it is! Please post below if you have any thoughts on it, I'd love to hear your opinions.

Reading the news this morning, I came across this story. As you've probably heard, the U.S. deadline to switch over to all-digital broadcast television is just over a month away, February 17^th. The problem, however, is that an estimated 7.7 million Americans haven't switched over from analog, and risk having their televisions go black.

The purpose of this switchover isn't to provide better quality television for couch potatoes. Switching over to all-digital broadcasting incurs lower energy costs than analog broadcasting. It also frees up analog airwaves for public safety use (which became a policy goal following 9/11), as well as increased usage by telecommunications companies.

I'll come back to this.

Also filling up headlines today was yesterday's speech from President Obama, wherein he called for swift congressional action to pass his still-emerging economic stimulus package, which could cost, over two years, up to a trillion dollars. That's $1 000 000 000 000 - lots of zeros, eh?

You'll notice I wrote still emerging in the above paragraph. That's because as of today, there's an incredible amount of debate as to how this money will be spent. Obviously, the usual suspects have lined up behind the usual causes - Republicans want tax cuts, Michigan wants support for the manufacturing industry, and most private sectors, from the airconditioning industry to the catfish farmers, have sent in their lobbyists.

My concern with this is that Americans will be facing an enormous public expenditure that's basically just patchwork. Infrastructure projects are merited in many cases, but the idea of solving this crisis simply by creating demand-side stimulus is flawed - they'd merely be putting bandaids over the fundamental problems that got us here in the first place.

As for my opinion, you have to keep in mind that I'm a NetGener. So I see a lot of merit in a more digitized economy (and government). If I was an American, I'd also, as a young person, fall within the demographic that's going to have to carry the federal debt in the decades to come, so I'd want to see money spent in ways that will improve the economy in the long-term.

Now, this brings me back to the top of this article - digitized television, the benefits of which I've listed above. I can support public funding on this because it's a good long-term investment. What else do I think is a good long-term investment? A national broadband policy to extend access across the whole country. Digitized medical records. More computers and internet access in schools. Most importantly, America needs more funding targeted at actually teaching people how to use these new technologies (which is the main roadblock in the digitized television initiative I touched on above).

Improving technology, digitizing the country and teaching people how to use these tools should be a crucial centrepiece in long-term economic planning. This would facilitate the movement of more Americans towards mass collaboration, and other Wikinomics principles, the merits of which can be found in any of the blogs you'll see on this site.

So if America is going to spend a trillion dollars on a stimulus package, let’s hope that Obama remembers these promises that he made back in November, andembraces a fewGov 2.0 and Wikinomics principles.

Much of the research I am doing for nGenera’s Marketing & Sales 2.0 program is focused on what we call prosumerism. While I’m sure some eyes will roll in reference to yet another buzzword, I find it to be a useful one. It describes the process by which customers are becoming actively involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they consume (i.e. producer + consumer = prosumer). Once you really start digging in, it is an extremely rich and interesting topic - but it can often get a little confusing.

Because of this when I speak about prosumerism, I like to start by looking at some questions around a very special Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert cartoons, as most people know, poke fun at society and particularly workplace culture, usually highlighting some absurdity that people can relate to. But in this case what I’m saying is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we can argue that companies need to start acting more like Dilbert cartoons, rather than less.

The reason I can say this (and long time wikinomics readers certainly already know this) is because last year, Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site - they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version, the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups and other things I’ll talk about later).To tie it back to the opening lingo, the site is now a prosumer platform.

I was participating in this quite a bit last year, so effectively Scott Adams and I were co-creating cartoons, such as this one:

Please, hold the applause… and the laughter is becoming overwhelming :).

Back to the story. So this looks like a cute, fun little example - what could the possible business implications be? Well, let’s start by looking at the perspective of Scott Adams and United Media - why would he/they do this? And would you do the same thing in their place? Would your company - and how would the decision get made?

Read the rest of this post here.

Last year I was blessed with the birth of my daughter (now 9 months old), and I wanted to come up with a special gift that both she, and her immediate family could enjoy for years. Given that I was working on some wikinomics-related research, I sat down to think about how I could put some of the principles into play to create a unique and interesting gift. What I came up with was a story book about the first two months of her life - and I thought I’d post the process here for others that might want to do the same. Here’s what I did - it’s fairly easy, and can be done at quite a reasonable cost.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings - but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

Read the rest of the post here.

Edge.org recently posted a collection of 151 thoughts from leading thinkers on the game-changing scientific ideas or developments they think will change everything within their lifetimes. Having co-authored a book about how mass collaboration will change everything I was particularly intrigued by their answers.

There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno's short piece really struck a cord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it's a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that seem destined to entirely overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno's premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an ideaa creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth's natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They replace optimism, openness and social cohesion as our dominant social operating principles. We will have reached the end of progress and then perhaps even the end of civilization.

The implication is that an end to optimism and a return to baser instincts would annihilate the conditions that make wikinomics possible–conditions such as high levels of social trust, a culture of openness and idea sharing, a deeply-ingrained sense of entrepreneurialism, not to mention a healthy dose of leisure time.

Here’s an excerpt from Eno:

Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960’s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point ‘up’. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part.

But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-cataclysm novel The Road. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandonedtheir payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandonednot enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

I think Eno provides us with some serious food for thought. We probably underestimate the importance of how much our collective faith in progress and ever-increasing prosperity has shaped the way the world has evolved, particularly over the last century. Now things have hardly turned out as well as they might have, but what might have happened if that broadly accepted notion that there will be continuous improvement in the human condition was rejected in favor of much more distopian worldview? And what about the future? There is no doubt in my mind that we will need new institutions for governance if the human species is to survive the 21st century. I still think wikinomics could be part of the solution-set. But what prospect will we have to build these institutions in an environment of scarcity, conflict and mistrust.

Thanks to much social research, we know quite a bit about how people's expectations of the future profoundly shape their behavior in the present. It's probably time to start thinking more about how people's behavior will change if and when our collective expectations of the future take a sharp turn for the worse. Will the spirit of wikinomics survive in harsher times? I don't know yet. But before the world ends I'm going to enjoy giving this more thought.

The World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai earlier this month was a new, unique gathering of the world’s leaders from academia, business, government and society. The Summit’s purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. The over-arching message that came from the many discussions: The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. As part of the proceeding delegates could record their thoughts on the most pressing issues of the day. I discussed why the Obama administration must embrace Government 2.0.

(note: you can see the original post here).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving - but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications - at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences - again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also used in the wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds post) with the first story in the book - GoldCorp. The gist was that the company ran a contest to find the best methods for identifying gold on their property, to great success. In theory, the methods they identified are probably the best for many such potential mines around the world. A logical extension would be that there are probably thousands upon thousands of people employed trying to discover ore deposits, that might very well now be redundant, if all similar companies adopted such approaches - transparency, information sharing, etc. - simultaneously. The old model, while less “efficient”, created more jobs.

So fine - one small subset of workers in the world potentially losing their jobs would barely cause a ripple in the global economy. But as you extend the principle of what made the GoldCorp story a success to other industries, such job loses can pile up. Other ideagoras (like Innocentive) would be an easy example, as companies start only paying for successful results (and a winner-takes-all economy takes hold) in R&D, while numerous people can no longer earn a living. But on a much larger scale, transparency and information sharing within the enterprise could make an extraordinary number of jobs redundant - jobs companies might be less resistant to cutting in the current economic climate than before. One easy example is “white collar grunt work” replaced by more effective, collaborative technologies - but there are many others.

And it of course doesn’t stop there. We’re already witnessing the demise of many newspapers, with the hyper-efficient Craigslist model being held responsible by many people. While I’m confident that the creation and dissemination of news will figure itself out again in the long run (and check out this excellent Clay Shirky interview for more thoughts on this), we’re seeing tremendous pressure on all creators of content tied to an advertising supported model. As the popularity of social media continues to increase, I expect that this trend will continue - and a lot of current jobs will be threatened.

I could go on, but I think you get my point by now. In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Given that the tagline of wikinomics is that mass collaboration changes everything, this dislocation could be on such a scale to make it a much tougher paradox to deal with. In such a case, the challenge is to ensure that the wave of innovation that can be unleashed through applying the wikinomics principles creates enough economic growth, and jobs, to compensate - and make sure the displaced workers can be re-trained to do them.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent the longest period of time in my adult life (travel vacation time excluded) without in-home PC Internet access, owing to an unpaid bill by my landlord and the near impossibility of getting a technician on-site during the holiday season.

At first I enjoyed the irony of the situation, but within a few days, I had grownquitetired of mytiny iPhone screen for Web access and I found myself needing to visit friends/family and Internet cafes, sometimes on more than once daily basis, to get my full Net fix. (The day before losing access, I had been at a client engagement, andhad been asked how I would feel as a Net Gener without Internet access. I proudly responded to the effect of I’m sure I’d be justfine. Little did I know…)

It wasa combination of factors that compounded to makemy situation more frustrating, including my being on vacation (so no office Internet), a lack of cable television (I don’t normally subscribe toTV - Net Gener, remember), and decreased access to offline news sources such as my local paper from the corner box, at which I found this sign:

(Sign reads: To Our Valued Customers: This vending machine will be removed from this location in the very near future. The closest location you can purchase a Toronto Star is:________)

From some of our previous Net Gen research, I knew that depriving a Net Generof their technology could present a very difficult situation, as the collage below from one of our in-home studies shows, but I had to this point managed to somehow “separate” myself from those Net Geners.

To think, feelings of despair and desolation, just from being removed from your technology…How strange, I thought. Little did I know…myseparation from immediate Internet access set me up for quite a range of emotions, froman occasionalsense of reliefand freedomthat came from being “disconnected”, to the more frequent feelings of anxiety that were caused by not knowingwhat was going on, in real-time. What world events were taking placethat I should be up to speed on? What if someone was trying to get a hold of me?How would I watch my ailing Raptors go on a multiple game losing streak?

I knew the Internet played an important role in my life, but I didn’t realize how important it was to my daily routine, even when not working,until it was no longer readily available. I’m now back at work, and have had my homeInternet access restored, but what a couple of weeks it has been.

I’m curious to hear reactions our readers might have from their own disconnected experiences. Have you been disconnected, orintentionally disconnected for an extended period of time?Howdid you feel? Has anyonevacationedat a “phone and Blackberry-free zone” to escape the “always-on”?

Since I was converted to the dark side and became a mac user, I’ve tried as best as I can to avoid becoming one of those annoying mac fans, but when I saw this report from the good folks at the Onion News Network posted this story yesterday, well, let’s just say I’ve already pre-ordered five:

Well, we're one week into 2009, are you still flossing daily?

Here at the Wikinomics blog, we can give you some help when it comes to succeeding with some of the more popular resolutions, at least from a geek point of view:

1. I'm going to get more organized.

This one's easy. Visit lifehacker. It's loaded with tons of apps and tips including this one which protects you from nasty applications adding themselves to your start-up tray. Hey, Weatherbug…go away, I have a window in my office. Here's one that helps you organize your gift wrapping. Lots of stuff here for Gmail, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.

2. I'm going to read more books.

Here are the Amazon.com editor's picks for best books of 2008 as well as the top ten from the New York Times Book Review.

3. I'm going to learn a new language.

Ok, this one is mocked at Stuff White People Like, but it's a perennial favourite. You might think The Rosetta Stone packages look cool…they're in all my magazines and at the airport, but golly, it's expensive. Is there a better way? Damn straight…search the podcast language instruction on iTunes. There are a bunch of free lessons available. If you go to the French Ecole, tell them Bonjour for me.

4. I'm going to get in shape.

Hey, Tubby…before you join a gym, remember that the regulars don't like newcomers walking on the treadmills enjoying a high-calorie smoothie. Complete the program at hundredpushups.com first. If it's all good, join the gym in March.

5. I'm so sick of my music. I need to upgrade.

Maybe. But, then again, there may be more hidden gems there than you thought. Activate Genius in iTunes. Pick a song in your library that you like, then hit the Genius icon. It will make you a new playlist. If Mr. Roboto is on said playlist, start over.

6. I'm going to cook more at home.

Tell you what. I love epicurious. Go by the fork ratings, and check out the suggestions in the comments section. I go on about that here.

7. I'm probably not going to do any of that stuff. Instead, I'll flake out on the couch and eat Cheetos.

OK, well, then watch some new movies. Have you seen all the top films ranked by the users of the Internet Movie Database? Here's one at #4 that I haven't seen, although it stars Clint Eastwood who was in Million Dollar Baby with Morgan Freeman who was in Outbreak with Donald Sutherland who was in Animal House with Kevin Bacon.

But, if all else fails and you need to get rid of the Cheetos, here are some tips on flossing.

I'm generally disappointed by business books, and for that matter non-fiction books in general. It's rare to get a fresh idea, let alone one that is argued well. I've followed Mathew Bishop's work (he is New York bureau chief of The Economist) over the years and confess to some skepticism when I saw he had co-authored a book (with Michael Green, an international development expert) entitled: Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. When I look at the many problems confronting the world today it seems to me that the rich, more than any other group, have messed it up. And what a mess it is.

However, Philanthrocapitalism is a great book, and I can't think of any category of educated person who should not read it. The authors argue that philanthropists can be critical to helping solve society's large problems because of their unique perspective.

Philanthrocapitalists are “hyperagents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else. They do not face elections every few years, like politicians, or suffer the tyranny of shareholder demands for ever-increasing quarterly profits, like CEOs of most public companies. Nor do they have to devote vast amounts of time and resources to raising money, like most heads of NGOs. That frees them to think long-term, to go against conventional wisdom, to take up ideas too risky for government, to deploy substantial resources quickly when the situation demands itabove all, to try something new.

The authors clear away much of the mud on the windshield when it comes to social investing, venture philanthropy, philanthropreneurship, social innovation, social entrepreneurship and the like. Every chapter is packed with interesting stories about the players who are making this happen, leveraging their wealth to improve the state of the world. I learned about the ecosystems of social investing, and was stunned to discover how business principles were being transferred so successfully.

[P]hilanthrocapitalists are developing a new (if familiar-sounding) language to describe their business like approach. Their philanthropy is “strategic,” “market conscious,” “impact oriented,” “knowledge based,” often “high engagement,” and always driven by the goal of maximizing leverage of the donor’s money. Seeing themselves as social investors, not traditional donors, some of them engage in “venture philanthropy.” As entrepreneurial “philanthropreneurs,” they love to back social entrepreneurs who offer innovative solutions to society’s problems.

For some time there has been the expression among the Corporate Social Responsibility community You do well by doing good. I don't think this has been true. Many companies have done well by being awful - by having terrible labor practices, bad products bolstered by good advertising, externalizing costs (such as industrial emissions) on society and the like. However increasingly in the age of transparency everyone is being held to higher standards. And a new generation of people with wealth are beginning to understand that you can't succeed in a world that is failing.

My hope is that wealthy people will read this book and follow the lead of their most progressive peers. How ironic, should the rich actually end up being key to making this smaller world a better and more sustainable one?

There is a long-held belief in professional sports that the best athletes often make the worst coaches. The reason for this is simple - elite performers often have a natural ability to perform that there lesser counterparts do not possess, and in turn they are unable to really understand how to coach and develop their less talented peers. In turn, it is often the mediocre players (those that had to get every last ounce of output from their limited ability in order to forge a career), or even those who are never able to go pro, that are more suited for coaching - because they really understand what the majority of players need in order to succeed, and what makes them click.

What got me thinking about this is that a lot of people are wondering what 2009 holds for social media, and Twitter in particular. Over the last year or so Twitter has exploded in popularity, and had over 3 million active accounts in late 2008. Within this group are numerous social media experts that have emerged as leaders, and they are remarkable on many levels. It is not uncommon for them to have thousands of followers, follow thousands of others, be active every few minutes from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, and seamless integrate it with their other social media activities throughout the day. For those looking in from the outside, it can truly be a dizzying amount of activity.

Looking out over the next year, many people are trying to guess how popular Twitter will become - for example, Sean Moffitt has put the over/under for users at the end of 2009 at 25 million. If usage gets into this ballpark, I think it's fair to say the platform is moving beyond the mavens and the connectors into the mainstream. But my question is whether how these people use the platform will be different, and how applicable the lessons from the leading twitter users will be.

I personally think the how will be quite different, and it sort of connects back to the athlete analogy. As Twitter usage expands, more and more of the people engaging with it won't see participating in constant conversations throughout the day as natural or maybe even useful. And they'd certainly be overwhelmed with the prospect of trying to track thousands of different streams of information. There are two groups that I'm particularly interested in on this front:

1. Introvert thinkers. As Tracey commented on my related August 8th post (Social Media for the anti-social), Twitter is particularly attractive to those that like to think out loud. Many other people aren't like that - they like to close themselves off from the world to do their thinking, and then re-connect when they believe they have something to say, and tend to generally move a little slower than the mavens of the twitter world. I think I fall mostly in this category, and have found it leads me (I believe) to use Twitter a little differently than many of the power users. I find the most value from search.twitter.com, where I seek out links to blog posts and other more detailed analysis of issues I am interested in. For the most part, I find the conversational tweets from even the people I follow, many of whom I find to be quite brilliant, relatively useless for how I work. Though I am changing a bit on this front, I can't ever see a day where I'm 1/10th as active as the most engaged Twitter users.

2. Non-Web Workers. I don't really like this name for the group, but it represents the mass of people who aren't tethered to a computer (or other internet enabled device) all day. Some of these people are knowledge workers of some sort, and many others are not - and there connection to the WWW may be limited to a couple of times a day, and their free time after work. I would speculate that some of my thoughts about introverted thinkers might go a step further here - they might not be looking for conversations at all. What they might be looking for, however, are valuable links to content, information, and services relevant to them - making Twitter a little more of a broadcast platform than many people currently consider it to be. There are already hints of this - for example, Al Gore has 23,158 followers, and follows exactly one other Twitter account (Current TV, which he is a part of).

Now again much if this is just speculation, but the underlying belief is that the next stage of growth for Twitter will involve a mass of people that might use the service entirely different than their predecessors, many of whom (from my experience) focus on it's value as a conversational medium. Those that are currently most active and in tune with the site are extremely well-positioned to monitor any evolving trends here, and offer valuable advice for individuals and companies seeking to get the most out of the platform. However, I suspect that some of these leaders may fall into the trap of believing everyone should use the platform like they do - and in the process show how sometimes the most proficient social media users (think: best athletes) can make the worst instructors (think: coaches).

(Note: you can also find this post on my website, which will be located at www.denisbhancock.com once some hosting issues get sorted out)