Do you like watching TED talks? Like listening to cutting edge ideas? Well the Canadian equivalent of TED is ideaCity.
This year it’s June 13, 14, 15 in Toronto: 50 speakers, 3 amazing parties & fascinating participants.
I have two half priced tickets. Every year a group of us by 12 tickets a year in [...]

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O reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O, gentle reader! You would find

A tale in everything.

- William Wordsworth

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Tablet PCs and smartphone sales are growing exponentially year over year and, as they incorporate more and better functionality into their core operations, other consumer electronic categories are in decline. The Apple iPad exploded on the scene in 2010, selling 15 million units. Sales grew 222 per cent in 2011, to 56.5 million units (estimate). [...]

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The widening “robocall scandal” is deeply disturbing — as is its media coverage.
The language we use to describe a situation, the words that a journalist uses in their coverage of an issue, literally frame the issue and how we think about it.
This isn’t a story about “dirty tricks,” it’s about election fraud. This isn’t “stupid,” [...]

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“Destructive criticism is the biggest single enemy of human potential. It is worse than cancer or heart disease. While those diseases can ultimately lead to the deterioration and death of an individual, destructive criticism kills the soul of the person but leaves the body walking around.” – Brian Tracy

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It is really interesting to watch first the Internet population’s ability to turn back SOPA through the strength of a collective response, and now to watch both the phenomenon of KONY2012 and, more interestingly, it’s backlash.

Part of me loves the way ideas can spread so effectively and so quickly on the Internet, and part of me is worried by it. In “real life” we have all sorts of social and practical constraints on our righteous indignation. On the web we don’t have such constraints.

We need to individually take responsibility for our power to amplify, or to ignore, each wave of ideas as they pass through the internet. We need to apply our own filters and make our own judgements as to the truth or otherwise of what we are passing on. As I wrote in my book we all have a volume control on mob rule and we need to learn to use it.

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Last week I took part in several events at Social Media Week London. It is an amazing event and kudos to Sam Michel and his team at Chinwag for helping make it happen.

I met loads of interesting people and had lots of interesting conversations but came away bemused by the amount of business there is doing something for people that I believe they should be doing for themselves. We have turned social media into a thing that can be bought and sold and are attempting to industrialise something that I believe is organic. Just turning it into a thing is problematic (thanks to Mark Foden for the word “thingification”) and I had a few rants about this throughout the week.

You can watch one below!

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Image by wstera on Flickr

Interesting watching the fuss about Sky News and now The BBC putting limits on how their journalists use Twitter to break stories. I have been talking about the growing tension between individual journalists’ brands and those of their employers for a long time. In fact three years ago I toyed with the idea of iTunes for journalism and used the above graphic on the story!

As Matthew Ingram, writing on Giga Om, says:

if a single tweet from someone on your staff gives away enough of the value of your story that you have to forbid it, you have a lot bigger problems than just breaking news on Twitter.

Increasingly, institutions hold smart people back.

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Robert Scoble has a bit of a rant today about the open web being dead and does a bit of trolling against Dave Winer and others who fight for open standards. He may be right. “Most people” may experience the web through closed systems like Facebook and Google+ rather than directly through blogs and RSS. Part of me feels that this is like AOL in the old days and that however attractive walled gardens may be in the short term the open web wins out in the long term. The other part of me wonders if it matters.

What is powerful about the web is our ability to find things and then indicate our feelings about them by linking to them. As David Weinberger says every link is an act of generosity. This may be a direct link from or blog or it may be a “like” in Facebook or a “plus” in Google+ – does it matter?

It matters when people start telling us what we can and can’t link to and that is the risk of proprietary systems. Much of the web is now “owned” by corporate interests and these, while they may provide most people with most of their experience of the web, will ultimately be eroded and replaced by the evolution of the web itself. I am reminded – yet again – of Bob Khan’s point that the hacker mentality will always stay ahead of those attracted to corporate or institutional thinking. Whatever the mass may do most of the time there will always be edglings and to claim that Facebook or Google have killed off the open web is naive.

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Banning social sites at work is for wimps – real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time.

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