Kudos

After trying out blogspot for 2 months I have decided to move to a privately owned domain.

So, you can find me from now on at:

Shamshins.caprica.co.il (which I own).

The look and feel will change as I have opted to use WordPress. I will enable forwarding, though I really can’t tell how effective it will be.

If you have subscribed to my blog via FeedBurner, you shouldn’t feel a difference as the service hides this move.

See you on Caprica.co.il!

…Is curiosity.

If you like signing up to Internet based services, like me, you must know the risk you’re taking by submitting your email address over and over. Here are a few services you might appreciate:

1. Guerrilla Mail – creates temporary Email addresses that last for 15 minutes and then go silently into the night. It’s entirely web based and requires no registration. You just hit a button and the system generates a new Email address for you to use.
2. Spam Gourmet – allows you to create an account which hides your real Email address. If you need to use a temporary address, you provide someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com where ‘someword‘ is a random word you haven’t used before and ‘X’ is the number of emails to accept before stopping the forwarding to your box. When you need a new address, just change ‘someword‘ and decide what X should be. ‘user’ is your user name (requires registration).

If you need more options, try reading this article, about 8 more disposable Email services.

This is a great example of the innovative vs. lookalike startups I was referring to in my last two posts.

And if you trust the service you’re signing up to, give them your real address. These guys are working hard to bring us on board and deserve some slack.

I’ve read lately that retail chain Best Buy is far into a new pilot program where employees get to work whenever they want. They can come and go as they please, as long as their targets and task deadlines are met. There is a hidden bonus here (aside from boosting employee engagement) – targets and tasks need to be thoroughly defined and tracked for the program to work. Both managers and employees have a good incentive to work those parameters out.

The pilot is being expanded from HQ staff to the retail floor. The assumption is that today’s workers can manage their own time, coordinating shifts with fellow employees and working together to meet store targets.

I find the experiment to be very interesting in a Web 2.0 kind of way. What Best Buy is basically doing is to shift power to the worker down the chain. That’s exactly what W2.0 does for the internet user. It shifts power down the chain, making each person a contributor.

Because of this conceptual similarity, I’m wondering how Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0, to be exact) can facilitate this transition at Best Buy. The article didn’t include any data on the kind of IT in place to support this shift in employment dynamics, but it stands to reason that such infrastructure is required.

Furthermore, the assumption that employees have the responsibility and capability to manage themselves as contributors is very exciting to me. Is this shift in mentality that characterizes today’s younger employee the result of growing up into a social internet? Or is the social internet a result of these attitude changes, and if so what caused them in the first place?

Seems there’s uproar on account of the AAP suing Google for scanning books from libraries. Publishers insist on an opt-in approach, while Google insists that scanning and indexing is fair use, and that publishers can opt out.

Those who are for Google’s approach comment that due to costs most of the work created during the 20th century is not undergoing digitization and that Google’s project will help reduce the amount of creative work that is lost (considering whatever is not on the net is ignored by a majority of the population in this day and age).

Those who are against say that Google is consistently violating copyright and thus undermining incentives to create.

Tim O’reilly has a great post on the matter, where he defends Google and crushes the opposition with some very good arguments. As O’reilly notes, there are 32,000,000 books out of print, existing only in libraries. Digitizing those books and making them available on the web can only create demand (which will put money into the hands of publishers and authors – assuming the authors are not dead).

Trying to stop this project is just another stupid (yes, plain stupid) move by blind bureaucrats that are always 5 steps behind the obvious evolution of society. It truly pisses me off.

However, copyright and economics are not the real issue here. Seeing as every single creation today is originally created in digital form this is a problem that will cancel itself out very quickly. In the coming centuries billions upon billions of creations will come to life. All of them will be catalogued and indexed in digital form (or whatever future technology is used by then). The 20th century’s legacy will be but a fraction of that work.

We should be talking about the responsibility to preserve our creations for future generations.

I’ve read an article on Ynet that describes the future of jobs, as resulting of Web 2.0. I have a strong disagreement with parts of that article.

To those of us that don’t read Hebrew, here is a summarized translation of what was written:

In the late 90’s decision makers failed to predict the growth in demand for employees of the new generation; programmers, ERP implementers, knowledge managers and others. As a result, public professional education lagged behind market demand.

Today, Web 2.0 is again causing radical changes to the job landscape. People are talking about Second life marketing experts, PHP ninjas, Interface hackers, open source programmers and others.

Early retirement will befall CSRs (who will be replaced by the users themselves, as creators of support knowledge), brand developers (because the ‘long tail’ enforces a move from brands to tags) and we’ll see demand for Crowdsourcers, You Tube/flicker training experts etc.

Researches beginning in the 80’s show a decline in “traditional” industries, and a switch to advanced industries such as telecom and software. Traditional industries will need to incorporate knowledge workers into their production cycles if they wish to survive.

Globalization dictates that today’s third-world countries (such as India and china) will be the producers and service providers while first-world countries will specialize in high-end R&D, marketing and design. So, as a self proclaimed first-world country we need to invest heavily in the skill sets that will enable our workforce to integrate into the above mentioned first-world niches.

Phew, breathe out.

I don’t have a fundamental argument with the writer or the trends he describes. However, I have a strong disagreement with the totality in which he describes the coming changes. I resent a vocabulary of revolution and advise that we adopt a vocabulary of evolution.

It is quite plausible that viral marketing will be another tool to be used by a marketing manager. But the role of ‘marketing manager’ as we know it today will not vanish.

I agree that wikis and blogs are invaluable tools for customer care, but call centers are far from fading into the night.

It just might be that a company will reach a strategic decision to contribute some of its intellectual property to the open source community, but that does not mean you need an “open source programmer“. What you need is a programmer who can submit and collaborate with the open source community; a skill set that can be acquired within a week.

Current employees need not fear the revolution, but rather need to evolve along with the market and the advances in technology and society. The need to evolve is not new. People who work in high-tech learn new technology all the time. So do doctors. So do marketing people. So does almost everyone, with the rate of learning depending on his line of work.

Do we need to have our public education system adapt? Of course; our teachers are no different from marketing managers. If they don’t adapt they will become non-relevant. That is not to say that others will not fill the gap. It only means that the public system will become irrelevant as it was during the first bubble where we saw a proliferation of private institutes such as John Bryce college and Sivan (incidentally, I taught courses at John Bryce at the time).

‘Interface hacker’, or ‘PHP ninja’ are just goofy ways to carry a message across as to the skills and attitude required of the candidate. There is nothing “new” about those jobs. A good programmer is a good programmer. If she doesn’t know everything required for a specific task, she’ll sit and read a book, get some guidance – and do her job.

First and foremost, Web 2.0 is an emergent system. Emergent systems are by definition impossible to predict. Not a single soul managed to predict where Web 2.0 was going, and not a single soul will be able to predict where it will head. All we can say on Web 2.0 is that within it are created new systems that are better as more people use them.

It is the revolutionary (bon) tone that unleashes the demon of hype. Hype begets loss of rationality and loss of rationality begets a bubble. We really don’t need another bubble.

I call to the stop of the dreamy eyed prophets; they are scaring all the sheep.