Notes from the Road

I just returned from three interesting days in Tempe, Arizona, at the Frost and Sullivan Sales and Marketing MindXchange. This is a highly interactive event – workshops, facilitated discussions, and a lot of networking.

I was somewhat skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a good thing for several reasons:

1. The quality of the participants was high. From many different branches of marketing, and many different kinds of businesses, so diverse experiences and challenges.
2. The interactivity – which meant we could benefit from all the experiences of the different people.
3. Some great speakers – the two best in my view were Martha Rogers (of 1:1 Marketing fame) and Vincent Cho from Intuit, who gave an excellent presentation on the implications of the new Internet technologies on sales and marketing.

The result of these was good networking. Frost and Sullivan also did a great job of keeping the whole thing informal – no ties (well, hardly any), and a very casual atmosphere throughout.

So if you’re in marketing and are interested in getting a broader picture of what’s going on in a range of different markets – this is not a bad way to do it.

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Ray Kurtzweil is not only a respected technologist and innovator, he is also known as something of a futurist. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, argues that technology will radically change our experience of living, and will fix a lot of the things that eventually kill us. There’s a summary of some of the main points here.

It occurs to me that there’s a connection to something the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin said many years ago – that there’s educational evolution as well as physical evolution. When we learn new things, we are irrevocably changed. The connection is that Kurtzweil is reminding us that technology, which is the result of knowledge, and therefore inextricably linked to education, evolves faster than we do biologically. Our bodies will be overtaken developmentally by machines. This is unavoidable.

The challenge for all of us is to make the absolute best of this that we can. To be responsible, forward-looking, and to express our care for the future of our world in the way we harness the potential of our technology-rich future.

At www.notesfromtheroad.com (he got the URL before me!) you will find a great site that’s described thus:

Notes from the Road is a project in experimental travel writing – it is about subjective travel; the kind of real world of random things and real people.

The author is Erik Gauger, and I’m impressed with his photos and descriptions of some very interesting journeys. This is the kind of thing the web is great for – a fascinating personal story told with artistry and good observation. His pictures are wonderful and contribute immeasurably to the overall package.

 Have a look!

There are lots of definitions, but I think the most useful aspect of Web 2.0 is the way these technologies connect individuals. I saw a statistic the other day suggesting that 60% of online news content is now published by individuals, rather than networks and portals.

That’s a huge change.

Web 2.0 is based on the realization that even if the answer you want is not online, someone who knows the answer is online. The social networking and folksonomy sites are as much about people as content. Through them you can find out who is thinking what, and decide for yourself who you want to talk to.

When I wanted to learn how to integrate photos with my blog, I didn’t find the answer I wanted on the web – but I found some people who had solved the same problem, and by interacting with their blogs and discussion groups, I found the information I needed. When I finished my work, I let them see it, and we all derived some small pleasure from seeing progress.

So this is why I think Web 2.0 is so interesting – it’s the way it connects people with people, rather than just connecting people with information.

I had the chance to attend a panel discussion in London this week – at the Serpentine Gallery, in the inflatable bubble building.

The topic was Web 2.0 – the set of techniques upon which this site is based. The meeting was sponsored by Banner – a UK agency that’s part of the WPP group.

It was interesting because it shows how much the web has changed. We are no longer satisfied by pushing HTML out at our audience – we crave interactivity, and the ability to connect with real people through their web presence.

Banner published a set of pictures on flickr here, and a video on YouTube with a snippet of an observation I made in the discussion here.

Web 2.0 may be important enough to start another Internet bubble – this time funded by advertising and fuelled by consumer and business participation.

It’s frustrating that the public don’t seem to have enough information to make a good judgement. I’ve heard about statistically improbable differences between exit polls and the returned vote count, but here is the most detailed and damning discussion of the topic I’ve ever seen – reported in Rolling Stone in June.

The article by Robert F Kennedy Jr. presents data indicating that a variety of mechanisms were used to disenfranchise voters in Ohio – and it indicates that the errors almost exclusively favoured the Republicans at the expense of the Democrats.

I wish I really knew. It’s not much of a democracy if we tolerate this kind of thing.

The world is changing fast, and it’s tough to keep up. www.netvibes.com is one of the great tools I’ve found recently. They let you create a custom home page on the web that contains lots of feeds from the sites that interest you, of course along with the ubiquitous and de rigeur Google search bar.

RSS feeds are the way to keep up with the news – and with NetVibes you can build your own real-time newspaper. There’s lots of information around on what RSS is and how to use it: here’s one from CNET.

You can also use NetVibes to watch your Google Mail.

President Bush is at it again. Not surprising, of course, he needs to defend his choices even if they were wrong ones. The latest example of faith leaping headlong over logic was from his 9/11 speeches reported here.

“We will not leave [Iraq] until this work is done. Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,” Mr. Bush said. “They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.”

The illogic is the idea that war in Iraq brings peace to the US. This is such patent nonsense it’s hard to credit it even being said.  Not only is the war in Iraq hardening Islamic hearts towards America (and Britain, among others), it’s also failing to create peace in that country, let alone ours. And Iraq is not in fact the only, or the main place where Al Quaeda is active. The focus on Iraq smacks of a personal vendetta. If peace and safety for Americans is really the goal, let’s see a much more balanced approach:

• defend against terror wherever it’s found
• build alliances to increase communication and understanding
• use aid as a compassionate tool to reduce inequality across the globe
• don’t use the terror word as a label for people we don’t like – keep it for those who truly fit the bill.

This controversial piece was written to try to counteract the black-and-white, good and evil, freedom versus terrorist rhetoric that abounded following the 9/11 attacks. Now several years on, I think it still has merit. We see the US and other governments spending enormous resources on war, creating enormous pain and division, while there are many humanitarian causes that would not only have benefited directly from those funds, but that would go some way to building bridges between East and West, Christian and Moslem. It is deeply disappointing that fear and anger continue to prevail, where in truth compassion – and compassionate action – seems much more likely to create sustainable progress.

Attending Aurora Theater’s marvelous “Saint Joan” last week in Berkeley, I was struck by the parallels between the life of this fifteenth century warrior and our current nemesis in Afghanistan. Joan of Arc was a religious extremist who believed that God gave her precise instructions, independent of the advice of the established church or civil government. She also spoke of “France” and “England” in a day when both land masses were ruled in haphazard fashion by feudal lords. Continue Reading »

This was written for a US publication called “Spinsheet” that serves the yachting community. Following the attacks on New York and Washington, the paper asked readers to contribute their thoughts. With September 11th approaching again, I thought it was worth reprinting. Here’s what I wrote.

Sailing connects me with the planet, and with all the peoples of the world. It is easy to forget in these difficult times that the US is not the center of the universe, and that we are not the only people to have suffered a terrorist attack or to have lost innocent citizens in recent years. Yet every time we climb into a boat, and head away from the dock, we are physically connected, through the seas that surround the globe, to our fellow-travelers across the world. Continue Reading »