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  Steve Spalding 10:34 pm on July 25, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: aggregation (2), flow, information (16)

  Internet people get fired up by really weird things.

  Social aggregation (Digg, Twitter, Facebook oh my!) is a slightly higher rent version of technical aggregation.

  Human beings are way better than computers at finding context, but are much, much worse than computers at sorting through giant, complex piles of complicated data. Honestly we have better things to do, like watch The Jersey Shore and cure Cancer.

  The result is that social aggregation gives you more meaningful information from a much smaller group of sources.

  You trade a little extra relevancy for a lot less diversity.

   

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  The age of the aggregator is ending

  Steve Spalding 10:32 pm on July 24, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: aggregation (2), flow

  I wonder how many letters I’m going to get from cheap, blunt instruments for this section.

  The age of the aggregator is ending.

  Before you get too excited, mega-aggregators like Google aren’t going anywhere, in fact I would put money down that we are only seeing the leading edge of what Mountain View, California has in store for us.

  What I am saying is that real, flesh and blood human beings don’t like non-contextual aggregation. We can’t put our heads around the idea that there are 100 billion pages and counting at our finger tips. We just don’t get it and probably never will.

  Don’t get me wrong, computers love these kind of data sets because they are really easy to deal with. All the programmer has to do is point a rather stupid spider at the Internet and tell it to keep chomping away until it runs out of places to go. This is programmatically elegant but conceptually flawed.

  At the end of the day, aggregation is a cheap, blunt instrument we have thrown at a complex problem and like all cheap, blunt instruments it is necessary but not sufficient.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:30 pm on July 24, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: change, flow, social media (4)

  Twitter makes it far too easy for me to write pithy soundbites.

  Two more from Twitter, while I have it open:

  Do you ever notice how the really interesting stuff always comes from, “Out of nowhere?”

  Disruptive change is exclusively about bending and breaking forms.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:28 pm on July 23, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow, risk (2), social media (4)

  The one where I start stealing things from my Twitter account

  How to be Good at Anything!

  Step one – Try a lot.

  Step two – Bleed a lot.

  Step three – Get very lucky.

  Not necessarily in that order.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:26 pm on July 22, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: biases (2), flow, marketing (9)

  Machiavellian marketing tip #2.

  Next to biases, the closest thing to a silver bullet a marketer can have is a profound understanding of self-interest.

  If you understand what makes us make all the little selfish decisions that we ignore every day of our lives, you can find a way to get your product into the hearts and minds of your users.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:24 pm on July 22, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow, information (16), intelligence

  One day I’ll do a lecture on the collective intelligence of a child’s Lego set. I expect a standing ovation on that day.

  There is a rather significant difference between “collective intelligence” and information contagion. The secret is the intelligence part. The world we’ve built out of matchsticks and Facebook is very, very good at generating the conditions for contagion but not so good at the sort of filtering and contextualization tasks that lead to intelligence.

  Never forget that the fact that we are obscenely well connected to just about every other human being on this planet doesn’t mean that we are using these connections to spread anything useful.

  Then again though. It also doesn’t mean that we aren’t.

   
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  Daily Show wisdom

  Steve Spalding 10:23 pm on July 21, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: biases (2), flow, marketing (9)

  Always be on the lookout for biases. Whether it is yours, your users or your societies. People feed on biases and they will devote vast blocks of their time to things that feed into them. This is probably some of the best and saddest information marketing advice I can give you.

   
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  Stoplight musings

  Steve Spalding 10:21 pm on July 21, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow, learning

  The best way to know that someone has something to teach you is that they never quite look like someone who has something to teach you.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:18 pm on July 21, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: extinction (2), flow, information (16)

  I am sure the dinosaurs figured they still had a few good years left in them.

  Here is a simple rule of business.

  If you increase supply while maintaining a constant demand, prices will drop. Eventually, if nothing stops this process, prices will drop to zero.

  If you are in the business of information creation, that is what is happening today. Right now. Yes, I am talking to you.

  Your current model is threatening to lead you towards extinction. Like the paper newspaper or the CD, information brokers of all variety, whether they call themselves artists or entrepreneur are standing at the edge of a cliff.

  If you choose to ignore this fact. If you don’t start looking now for ways to adapt. You are going to go right off the edge with them.

  I’m really sorry.

   
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  Steve Spalding 10:16 pm on July 20, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flow, working

  One day I am going to convince Borders to give me my own phone line, then I’ll never have to leave.

  Since this is the first one of these I have put together, I constantly find myself tooling around with the format. For example, at first I figured I would just keep writing until I got tired or my pen ran out of ink.

  If history has taught me anything though it’s that working without some kind of constraint isn’t really working at all. People need to give themselves some broad limitations to work within in order to have the structure they need to do something interesting, rather than speed skating towards whatever shiny new object happens to pop up in front of them.

  The constraint I choose for this project was time.

  I am giving myself ten days and a loose topic framework (information) and seeing what ends up coming out of it.

  This realization has been really good for me. Without it I figure I would have devoted way too much time discussing the relative merits of Barnes and Noble versus Borders.