Disintermediation of the Interview and the Profusion of Media

A small article in the June 11th Newsweek previews an emerging trend in journalism: people who in the past would have been happy to be interviewed are less interested now. Sometimes much less interested.

Instead of telling their story through the medium of journalist, they can simply tell it themselves through any number of channels - via video on YouTube, or a blog, or FaceBook, or a web site, or a self-published book, or .... There are lots of ways to get a story out there, if you have a story to tell.

(Such as Hillary Clinton using a YouTube video to drive traffic to her campaign web site where you can listen to a rather insipid campaign song - oh, and donate money, if you want ....)

Key underlying trends include the profusion of net-enabled media, the erosion of 'traditional' media, and the emerging dynamics of knowledge aggregation on the web. All provide fertile ground for innovation, in a 'media market' where the definition of 'news' is evolving, driven largely by changes in the way people access it.

All of this adds another layer of complexity to the process of using media, but opens huge opportunities for those who aggregate media content, repackage it, and deliver into highly specialized markets.

Raydiance,Wikinomics principles in action

Not just because Scott, who is pictured above, is my son and the President of Raydiance, the story is a great multimedia read about the innovative technology of ultrashort pulse lasers and the software platform that Scott and Barry Schuler, Chairman of Raydiance are building.

Barry likens the opening of the Raydiance development platform to the way Microsoft Windows platform developers helped build Microsoft's huge ecosystem and a world dominant information industry leader.

Knowing both Barry and Scott, I have a firm belief that they are creating something truly revolutionary - at the intersection of software and nanotechnology. Raydiance may just be the Next Big Thing!

Although Raydiance was previously featured in a recent Business Week article, this WIRED piece shows how pictures help to tell the story more powerfully. The writer, Danny Dumas provides an expert insight into company and its technology and WIRED's use of visuals and great web design makes this one of my all-time favorite TI stories.

It also helps when you can tell family and friends people what your son does at work.

The Ultrashort Pulse Laser in Action

I have been leading workshops for the eLearning Forum on applying the main themes of the popular business book Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Thoughts Illustrated: Presentation Research -Discovery through Google Images

Raydiance is a perfect example of the wikinomics principles of mass collaboration and I will submit to the Wikinomics Playbook editorial board as a feature story in the Playbook to be published in September.

Innovation | Lessons from Apple | Economist.com

Innovation | Lessons from Apple | Economist.com: "This approach, known as “network innovation”, is not limited to electronics. It has also been embraced by companies such as Procter & Gamble, BT and several drugs giants, all of which have realised the power of admitting that not all good ideas start at home. Making network innovation work involves cultivating contacts with start-ups and academic researchers, constantly scouting for new ideas and ensuring that engineers do not fall prey to “not invented here” syndrome, which always values in-house ideas over those from outside."

Cathedral, Bazaar, and ... Wizards?

Check out this entry from Strategy + Business. It's an article by Nicholas Carr called The Ignorance of Crowds. It refers back to Eric Raymond's paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar where he talked about the use of distributed networks to help design and debug software like the Linux OS. Carr notes that after Raymond's article was published, everyone tried to get on board with the trend and apply the idea to a wide range of applications, from Wikipedia to shaping innovations into final products. I think the title of Carr's article is unfortunate because the real theme can be found in this paragraph:

If Raymond made a mistake in his paper, it was in drawing too sharp a distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar. They’re not two different and incompatible approaches to innovation. Their relationship is symbiotic. Without the cathedral, the bazaar model lacks focus and discipline.

A title more along these lines--accentuating the symbiosis--seems more accurate and more intriguing, although not as confrontational. I agree with the symbiosis conclusion and I also think that we're just beginning to understand how to use peer production. After millenniums of immersion in the cathedral/hierarchical system it may be just hard for us to wrap our minds around a different, counter-intuitive approach. I see the applications expanding over time.

But Carr makes another interesting observation. He indicates that every great idea has its source in some individual or small group of people--he calls them wizards and mages (wizard coined by Raymond in his paper). The role of the wizard is summarized here:

Matt Asay, a software executive with long experience in the open source movement, agrees. “All open source projects — without exception — are started by one or two people and…have a core development group of fewer than 15 developers,” he says. “The most you can hope for [from the broader set of contributors] is bug fixes.”

This may indeed be a law, but I think it's worth pushing. Maybe not in software development but in other areas where there is no single organization in charge. Health care is an example, where the establishment of standards is a task spread across dozens of organizations and even government intervention in a cathedral type of way is dicey. What we may wish to coax from these types of situations is an intermediate form along the continuum from cathedral to bazaar where pockets of wizards--some in cathedrals and others operating in more distributed-governance groups or independently--iterate the solution over time. It becomes a multiplayer game, whereas the creation of software like Linux is a "single player game" (or two player--man vs. code). Wizards take on the role of synthesis; bazaars can proliferate variety, conduct experiments and do rapid competitive sampling among various stakeholders; and cathedrals can manage the hard work of finishing products and managing the implementation and enforcement throughout their organizations.