Alchemy of Change

Engagement is what brings tasks and relationships together. Engagement is the process of building relationships with people and putting those relationships to work to accomplish some goal.

There’s a difference between working on something and getting feedback, and working on something to get feedback. One is learning; the other, a form of craving.

"Information networker" describes a group of people whose work centers on creating and connecting information. Today the lines between information creation and distribution have blurred. Twitter is a social network application used by information networkers to distribute ideas and build their influence online. In using Twitter for this purpose, information networkers also happen to build a very valuable real time information network that's used by a much larger pool of people.

Keep stretching, keep learning. Otherwise, “what you know” becomes “you know what”…

Twitter is not a social network. It's a "real-time information network" and once you see it that way, its competitive edges look a lot closer to Google than Facebook. Facebook is a social network utility, while Twitter is a social network application with real-time information as its end goal.

Benoit Mandelbrot is no longer with us. This man, who introduced the world to fractals, has had a huge impact on the way I see the world. We owe a huge debt to him. The world will be digesting his insights for many years to come. Thank you, Dr. Mandelbrot. You will be missed.

Last weekend, my wife and I, and several million of our closest friends, went to see The Social Network. When we got home, my wife was seriously talking about getting off Facebook because she couldn’t reconcile the idea of using a service developed by the kind of people portrayed in the movie. Who knows how accurate the movie really is, but ...

When it comes to social change, the problem with online social networking tools has less to do with the tools themselves - and more to do with how organizations fail to connect their social network organizing with their efforts to deepen their relationships with people. A healthy mix of weak-tie and strong-tie connections and the processes for moving people from the former to the latter is the essence of the Engagement Pyramid and it’s what Malcolm Gladwell is missing in his critique of social networking tools.

An interesting coincidence. Google and The Economist each just decided to do something about the censorship they face in various countries. Though these companies are obviously quite different from each other, they both have an annoying habit of exposing embarrassing information that some rulers would prefer their people not see. Some of the reasons for the censorship may be legitimate ...

Chris Anderson’s concept of the "Long Tail" offers an interesting analogy to what I'll call the "Local Tail" - which is how the mobile web connects people back with the places they live.