Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Social Media Solutions
Heidi Allen

Social Media Usage Policies: Less Lawyering, More Encouraging - Conversation Starter - ... - 4 views

  •  
    Social media policies from Harvard Business Publishing
Heidi Allen

Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted? - 2 views

  • And, at the end of the day, you’ll still be paying far more per word for news than TechCrunch, and the quality of your product will be no more competitive.
  • Five years ago, most newspaper editors would have laughed at the idea that blogs might one day offer serious competition. The minicomputer companies laughed at the early personal computers. New technologies often don’t look very good in their early stages, and that means a straightup comparison of new to old is little help in recognizing impending dispruption.
  • That’s a problem, though, because the best time to recognize disruption is in its early stages.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need (say, news), but whose organizational architecture is radically different to the conventional approach. That means many people outside the old industry (and thus not suffering from the blinders of an immune response) are willing to bet large sums of their own money on a new way of doing things. That’s exactly what we saw in the period 2000-2005, with organizations like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Talking Points Memo, and many others. Most such startups die. That’s okay: it’s how the new industry learns what organizational architectures work, and what don’t. But if even a few of the startups do okay, then the old players are in trouble, because the startups have far more room for improvement.
  • Today, scientific publishers are production companies, specializing in services like editorial, copyediting, and, in some cases, sales and marketing. My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies [4]. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.
  • This flourishing ecosystem of startups is just one sign that scientific publishing is moving from being a production industry to a technology industry. A second sign of this move is that the nature of information is changing. Until the late 20th century, information was a static entity. The natural way for publishers in all media to add value was through production and distribution, and so they employed people skilled in those tasks, and in supporting tasks like sales and marketing. But the cost of distributing information has now dropped almost to zero, and production and content costs have also dropped radically [5]. At the same time, the world’s information is now rapidly being put into a single, active network, where it can wake up and come alive. The result is that the people who add the most value to information are no longer the people who do production and distribution. Instead, it’s the technology people, the programmers.
  •  
    The second half of this article is particluarly relevant
« First ‹ Previous 241 - 251 of 251
Showing 20 items per page