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The next boom starts in ... 2014? I don't normally share or post my speeches - I prefer to just talk rather than read - but I wrote my speech last night for a dinner presentation and thought I would share with you a shorter version here.  The speech disappointed a few folks as it forecast two years of flat or negative growth to 2011, three years of slow growth to 2014, and then another boom period from 2014 onwards.  They wanted the boom forecast to be more like 2010 (a year away?) but hey, I could paint nice rosy pictures to make you all feel happy, but what the heck, I'd just be lying.

Having Conquered Flickr & Yahoo, "The Newsfeed" Is Now the Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time

The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth? Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Today one of the biggest photo sharing websites and the biggest news and email portal in the world both fell under the spell of the Newsfeed.

Gary: “Am I participating in this conference by asking this question”,

The speaker then went onto to say academics have to draw a line in the sand between involvement those who may change the title of a podcast they downloaded for example and those who submit truly original content. Afterwards I said why do you have to draw a line when we are talking about ‘degrees’ of participation? He said academics like defined lines and specificity to be able to hang theories on - yet none showed any kind of digram or quantification of those lines. So here is my ‘line’ in the sand stating that participation in society, politics, online social networks etc: is not either on or off it is a continuum of degrees of influence. It is an analog and not a digital 0 or 1 as the academics represented seem to propose.

Gary: “Then why are those who comment, rate, share, recommend, mash-up not considered participants in online social networks?”

The arrival of sustainable sustainability?

A little late I know, but just before the end of the year, we were fortunate enough to be a part of the Sustainable Life Media conference in Miami.  As is often the case, the event was full of interesting people extolling the virtues of more sustainable practices - from large MNC’s such as J&J through to some fantastically nimble social start-ups. But more than that, there was a real sense of change in the air. A sense that for the first time we were looking at making businesses sustainable, rather than bringing sustainability into business. In other words, for the first time I sensed that sustainability was being recognised as a key piece of DNA architecture for business, rather than some fan-fared adjunct.The ramifications of this are profound: for a start, this is what Peter Salmon from Moxie (who I had the pleasure to share a plenary session with) has labelled Sustainability 2.0. Or even 3.0. It also suggests an exciting trend that sees sustainability becoming near-impossible to focus on within the firm. That is not to say that it is absent, but rather just invisible.  Or rather, inherent. We are constantly hearing clients and colleagues citing an economic downturn as the worst possible time to embark on initiatives under the sustainability banner. But to make this criticism is to make the mistake that sustainability remains an annexe to the firm - an incidental anecdote to be told when appropriate.

This is most certainly wrong; instead, sustainability offers the best chance for firms to remain in business, as they redefine boundaries of influence and re-stock reserves of trust.This sounds absurd, but for too long, I really do not think the majority of firms have actually viewed sustainability as being linked in any way to their…..well, sustainability. And as such, it has been a nice-to-have appendage.So maybe this is now changing? Maybe Sustainability 2.0 and the crushing re-evaluation of business in the current climate marks the arrival of sustainable sustainability?  Based on the clear exodus of freshly-empowered CMOs and CEOs from large MNCs at the Miami conference, keen to demonstrate their new-found independence via boutique consulting efforts and old business cards with biro’d new titles and cell phone numbers, it seems so. Which also means sustainability could be finally becoming less about guilt, burden and ‘doing what’s right’ and much more about opportunity, energy and doing what’s exciting. Which would be very exciting indeed.G  

The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard Part 1: Why the Music Industry is (Really) Broken ‘The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing’ – Cory Doctorow Every major label 's setting up an iTunes these days. They're all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, 'born to lose, and destined to fail'. Why? The music industry doesn't understand the microeconomics of it's own business. If it did, it would see that it's business model is not just misguided, but broken- because, DRM or not, the implicit contract it signs with listeners is being broken in both directions. I reached this conclusion because, as I was scoping BoingBoing one day, I read Cory's statement, and it struck me as exactly right. For many people, digital music's more about risk than it is about music itself. Not legal risk - but transactional risk, the kind of risk you take when you buy a used car. Now, this statement has deep economic meaning. I'd like to explain why.