The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo.

Well, the content publishers are living that right now.  Books, movies, music, newspapers, magazines – they’re clinging to old models, which were highly profitable and carried great respect. But death, in the form of new media, self-publishing and streaming access, are tearing that old life apart, destroying it viciously. The longer they hold out and the more they try to fight it off, the uglier and more difficult their business is.

But if they’d only look at content distribution with fresh eyes, they’d realize there’s real money to be made in offering content that consumers want, how they want it. They have to find their core expertise and push that forward, letting the rest drop away. As Friedman describes in The World is Flat, IBM stopped making computers and became an enterprise computing service vendor. They couldn’t compete with parts aggregators (sound familiar?) and outsourced labor, so they stopped trying.  If book publishers want to keep themselves as the sole gateway to publishing, they’re dead. <cough>ebooks<cough>  But a million digital self-publishers could sure use their editing, marketing and publishing expertise, and they could even still be the curators of great literature, both digital and physical. Think Oprah’s Book Club in which they get a cut – as long as the cut is reasonable it’s a great deal for the authors, it’s money for them, and provides a recommended reading list for consumers. Everyone wins.

It could be a heavenly new world of content distribution. Sadly, today, it’s stuck in a nightmare where nobody wins (digital versions cost as much or more than paper versions, libraries can’t lend books more than 26 times, kindle books aren’t allowed to be loaned to friends, authors make a pittance while publishers and retailers duke it out for obscene profits on each book, making up for losses everywhere else, authors left to find their own path through self-publishing create works without professional editors and marketing guidance, etc).

Let the old go, Publishing Industry; embrace the light and let’s all live happily in the next world.  Whether easy way or hard way, that world is the future.

It’s way too soon to predict, but it feels like G+ has a fighting chance.  Clearly Google has learned some hard lessons from Buzz and Wave, and done things differently with G+.   It’s not thrust on us like Buzz, nor hiding in GeekTopia like Wave.  There are clear hooks for an ordinary (social) consumer, but also many tricks for the power user.  They’ve thrown a lot of functions into it – a Facebook-like ‘stream’, a group video chat (like skype but much less clunky), group text messaging, location check-ins, photo sharing…  They’ve tried hard to make all that simple and intuitive to use (with mixed success).  It’s got a ton of potential users all lined up (cough*gmail*cough).

It also has some significant obstacles to surmount.  Facebook has already won the day for social.  They may lose ground in the future, but today, they’re It.  Twitter is more vulnerable, but with significant investment in it, G+ will have to push uphill to gain any ground from their users.  Finally, I think there’s a lot of hate for Google succeeding in social.  They’ve flailed around, and consistently under-supported their past attempts, that anything big emerging from Mountain View these days incurs a healthy dose of skepticism and fear.  (“Hurt me twice, shame on me”)   It’s so easy to insert high school analogies – Apple is the cool kid with great clothes and a flashy car.  A little mean, but it’s hard not to forgive those dazzling eyes.  Google is the nerd; the one you turn to when you have a math or science question, but not who you expect to be in the Prom Court.  ”Are you kidding?” asks society, “there’s no way we’d trust our social lives to a bunch of nerds!”

We’ll see.  They’ve factored in every algorithm and pinned everything on the outcome like it’s the Science Fair Nationals, so maybe geek movie plots can happen in real life.  On many levels, I hope so.

Here’s what I think they’ve done really well with G+:

• Built a Facebook Stream without the advertising agenda.  They’re not trying to force us to make everything public.  Choosing who you share with is easy, quick and almost fun.
• It’s like a mashup of Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler – you can broadcast to the public (Twitter), or share things with your friends (FB), and the format can be micro, mini, or long (Tumbler).  All moods, one tool.
• It’s the comments, stupid.  All Hail the triumphant return of FriendFeed.  Twitter is now just frustrating to me – where are the conversations?  Someone makes a good point, and it dies there; no comments or threaded conversations.  Solo broadcasting is fine for the narcissists and marketers, but for most people the dialog is important.
• Made video chat with your friends easy and natural.  Skype is clunky.  Facetime is only Apple, and only one-to-one.  Want to hang out for a bit with far-away friends?  There’s a Circle for that…
• Great mobile integration.  Well, for Android.

Speaking of which (iOS Apps), this decision has got to be messing with Apple.  Keep G+ app off iPhones?  (Screw the main competitor Google) Or let it through?  (Screw the new competitor Facebook)  Google…Facebook.  Google…Facebook…  Argghh!!

There are certainly flaws (it’s an early beta), and things they didn’t quite hit.  To really succeed, they’ll need to have some way to push posts to Twitter and Facebook (and I’m holding my breath until they grant access for that…).  So far it’s a limited trial of like-minded people, so it feels friendly.  No spam yet.

[Update: just saw this great post on Tips for Using G+]

But I have to say, my fingers are crossed on this one.  I really hope it succeeds, if only to give the Social Monopolies some competition.

from xkcd

Or perhaps I want to keep track of 6 important account codes, or document instructions for something that I know well, but my coworkers are fuzzy on.  I need to be able to write it up, store it safely, and forget about it.  When it comes up again, I’d need to find it quickly and easily.  Not only that, but maybe I learn the basics, and a coworker gets more details later, or realizes my documentation needs editing.

“What is this magic!” you demand in amazement.  Well, step right up folks, because it’s called the wiki.

“Oh no,” you grimace, “blech.”  Well, ok, when wikipedia made them famous they were ugly as sin, required coding to use, and had a User Interface only an engineer could love.  I’m happy to report they’ve come a long way, baby.

We use one today in our office, and while they’re still a little ugly, they’re really simple to use, have an enterprise-y social network feel to them, and are very stable and cheap to run.  We use Confluence, a product of Atlassian.   For ten users or less it’s only $10/year, and all the money goes to charity.  For larger groups it costs more, but the plans are very reasonable and the software is really solid.  [Update: and now they'll host your wiki in the cloud for the same $10!]

This allows everyone in my office to document things, tag it with labels that describe the type of info on the page, save it and forget it.  Anyone who wants to can open it, access the info, edit the page, attach files to it, add external links, embed images, video or sound.  We can all find any page by a quick search for keywords, or by the tags we’ve grouped things in.

There’s a standard text editor (no coding!), social features to share pages with coworkers or work-groups, the ability to “follow” a topic as edits happen, or review changes over time and revert to previous versions, and it’s accessed through a standard browser.  Easy, almost fun, and useful.

No more saving notes to yourself in network folders, or scribbled away in files – just post it, tag it, save it and forget it.  As your organization builds up this internal “knowledge base”, it’s like having your very own Help Desk, and everyone has contributed slowly over time, so the burden of creation and updating is shared by everyone.  It helps ease transitions when staff turns over, and cuts out wasted time from re-creating wheels.  Give it a try!

I also have a fascination (obsession) with emerging tech trends – especially tools that help me do my job.  Better ways to communicate, gather, analyze and display data, collaborate long-distance and get work done from anywhere.  There’s this world where the future is happening now, and people are moving mountains with a handful of free tools.

But these two sectors…might as well be two different planets.  There are thousands of tools and resources, incredible innovation in getting things done, rapid evolution on spreading your message (marketing)…yet very few people seem to have heard of them outside the tech sector.

I find myself with a foot in both worlds, continually shuttling information and ideas from the tech planet to the ‘organization’ planet.  In countless committees and meetings I’ve raised my hand and suggested, “I think there’s an easier way to do this…”  Colleagues pull me aside at conferences, “Can you tell me more about that thing you mentioned..?” Or asked me to mentor them in learning about and adopting emerging tools.  I’ve volunteered to help some of my favorite organizations through this stuff, but as life gets busier and money becomes scarcer (did I mention I have children? , it occurs to me that I should probably start putting my passion to work…

So I’ve set up this little hut on the internet, and am stringing rope through my sign so I can hang it out front.  If you’re interested in learning more about tools, services, and best practices that can really elevate your good work, then drop me a line.  You’ll find numerous ways to contact me on the sidebar.  If you enjoy the posts here, please leave a comment or two! I look forward to the conversation.

John