Facebook and Radical Transparency – A Rant
Via Andrew Boyd on Facebook.

Given my recent annoyance with Facebook forcing me to share it or lose it, I am not surprised.

This definitely goes against what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent Time magazine article “What people want isn’t complete privacy … It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”

With the Internet, …

This is a quick snip snip of the choicest bits, the bits that stood out for me as I was reading this article, “Nice and nasty does it: Shirky the ‘net guru’ on what the future holds” by Decca Aitkenhead in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

The business model of the traditional …

Mass media (TV, radio) was set up primarily to enable the mass marketing of mass produced, mass branded good to the public. The entertainment content came second.

Consequently, we have been trained to expect the content for free, as long as we put up with the advertising. Paying purely for content (and hopefully without the ads) in the form of subscription TV is a fairly recent innovation.

Contrast this with …

Times Online article Living without money

A German woman has lived 13 years without money. She set up a successful “Tauschring — a sort of swap shop — a place where people can exchange their skills or possessions for other skills and possessions…”

As one of the comments (Marco V) pointed out, bartering “may even bring a community feel back to the country.”

Many small and …

The average age is 35 years
40% of all gamers are women
99% of teenage boys play games
94% of teenage girls play games
$9.5billion annual revenue

Source: Entertainment Software Association
Via Animating Human Rights: Games, Animation and Multimedia.

(Thanks for the link Bob.)

I have often talked about the concept of doing pro-bono work for not-for-profit community organisations as a way of learning the art of innovation. Amongst other challenges and opportunities, many not-for-profits operate with fewer resources which force outside-the-box thinking so as to achieve more with less.

This is also true for emerging markets, or “blank slate” markets (Infosys COO S.D. “Shibu” Shibulal). Blank because there are less (or …

From Kate Carruthers’ blog:

MBAs, ethics, pledges and virginity – “as those young people mature and obtain hostages to fortune, how will they resist the forces of conformity in the workplace? How will they resist those little daily compromises that can culminate in real evil?”

Live local love continues – “The really amazing thing is how willing people are to share information, share goods, and …

The McNuggetini is … “A McDonald’s chocolate milkshake with vanilla vodka, rimmed with BBQ sauce and garnished with a chicken McNugget.” (From This Is Why You Are Fat.)

This reminded me of several conversations I have had recently re building something from existing stuff. Several friends have coincidentally came up with ideas for using the internet to publicise/galvanise action around causes. They …

So much of our day to day communications is based on the assumption that most of us within a community operate on the same wavelength. And that we operate within the same cultural context. We latch on to keywords, key visual and aural cues, and our brains fill in the rest.

In the globalised world where communication boundaries are unclear, where communities can span the globe and cross multiple …

My friend Carolyn Lee came up with a brilliant personal weight loss campaign. This is what she had to say about it:

A couple of years ago I went hard and lost 15kg. Unfortunately thanks to kilo creep, about 7 of those have snuck back on over the last year and a half.

I had a brainwave to motivate myself to lose the weight once …