Reading :: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition)
By Joseph M. Williams

A short review. I still have the third edition of this book, which I used in a technical editing class (I think) in my MA program. It had a big impact on my writing style. The seventh edition is similarly illuminating, and it's also genuinely pleasurable to read.

On the other hand, Williams' own style is a bit talky for me. I lean toward much more spare prose, and I take a harder line against expletives. That hard line probably stems from my tech comm training and orientation.

In any case, a great book. I'm about to take a look at the short version, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition).

Reading :: The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive
By Peter F. Drucker

I've linked to the latest version of The Effective Executive on Amazon.com, but I reviewed the 1967 version. That's right, this version was written the same year Cream released Disraeli Gears and the same year Star Trek aired its most respected episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." I bring that up because, like those two examples, this version of The Effective Executive is firmly situated in its time, yet surprisingly relevant.

On one hand, The Effective Executive occupies a world in which the executive is always male and usually assisted by female secretaries as he steers the course of large manufacturing corporations. This world seems increasingly irrelevant in 2009. On the other hand, the executive is a prototype knowledge worker, someone who contributes to analyzing information and developing ideas - someone whose contributions cannot be easily monitored or counted in the sense that scientific management had enabled managers to monitor and count manufacturing output. Now that world is very relevant in 2009, and its problems are fresh and largely unsolved. The two world collide continually, as in this sentence early in the book: "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness." (p.4).

When you read this book, then, think of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which a spacegoing society uses what appear to us to be relatively backward computer and communications technology while managing casual space travel and faster-than-light jumps. Ignore the 1967-era language and examples, and you'll see a lot of contemporary, even forward-looking concepts. In fact, you may find that The Effective Executive is the Big Bang of popular management books. Here's Drucker's list of the five practices of the effective executive - along with more recent books that pick up and extend each practice.

1. "Effective executives know where their time goes." (p.23 and Chapter 2) - See David Allen's Getting Things Done


2. "Effective executives focus on outward contribution." (p.24 and Chapter 3) - Again, see David Allen's Getting Things Done


3. "Effective executives build on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do." (p.24 and Chapter 4). See Marcus Buckingham's Go Put Your Strengths to Work


4. "Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results." (p.24 and Chapter 5) - See Jim Collins' Good to Great.


5. "Effective executives ... know that [making effective decisions] is, above all, a matter of system - of the right steps in the right sequence" (p.24 and Chapter 6) - See any text on project management, especially Scott Berkun's The Art of Project Management.

In many ways, these other books have simply taken and developed the principles that The Effective Executive listed in 1967. Since knowledge work has spread much more widely, the book still seems fresh in parts in 2009, and maybe even more relevant. In particular, Drucker points out that "in a knowledge areas there are no superiors or subordinates ... yet organization requires a hierarchy," and in this contradiction, "the knowledge worker ... is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair" (p.173). And therefore "the position, function and fulfillment of the knowledge worker is the social question of the twentieth century" (p.173). Knowledge workers need not just economic rewards, but also achievement, fulfillment, and values (p.174). Still true, perhaps more so. Also true - more true than ever - is Drucker's assessment that education and effectiveness are the only competitive advantages that the United States possesses over other nations (p.5).

On the other hand, I don't think that Drucker in 1967 anticipated the effects of widespread knowledge work coupled with loose networked organizations. His focus is on the executive who can shape the organization around himself [sic] and who can strategically plan over decades of engagement. So in the end, The Effective Executive can only point us to further development and evaluation of its principles for the light networked organizations we are starting to see. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it.

Newspapers as nonprofits?

Don't hold your breath. The third paragraph is the important one:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Sekai Camera is coming to Android

Tonchidot unveiled Sekai Camera for iPhone last year, a social tagging application that uses the iPhone's camera to view the world with tags overlaid over the camera's image so that you can see how others have tagged your environment. It was a big hit. But it was only for the iPhone, and the iPhone doesn't have a way to detect where the camera's pointing, so the tags can't be associated with a specific orientation. You go to the tagged spot, then flick your finger to hunt through the tags associated with that spot.

Soon afterwards, T-Mobile's G1 was unveiled, and one of the first applications we could download was Wikitude, a sightseeing application that grabs your location (from GPS) and orientation (from the compass), then overlays the camera image with information about points of interest. For instance, if you're in my front lawn and you point your G1 south-southwest, the screen overlays the live image with points indicating the University of Texas and the Elisabet Ney Museum - and tells you how far away they are. Great for sightseeing and orienting oneself, but too large a scale for doing what Sekai Camera is trying to do. But notice that the orientation problem is solved due to the G1's internal camera.

This week MobileCrunch reports that Sekai Camera is releasing a version for Android - and it takes advantage of the internal compass. That's great. But - if the majority of tagging is done through the iPhone, I don't think that those tags will be captured with an orientation.

2009: Coworking's year of explosive growth?

Noting signals that coworking is gathering steam, Todd Sundsted predicts that coworking spaces will grow from 70 in 2008 to over 200 by the end of 2009. The reasons are two sides to the same coin: real estate is suddenly easier to negotiate and big companies are laying off.

"Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills"

... was a South by Southwest Interactive panel in which panelists discussed startups in Silicon Valley vs. Austin, Shanghai, and elsewhere. Austin Startup has a nice summary.

Coworking in Austin: Launchpad Coworking + Cafe

After the Future of Work Salon, Michael Funk of Launchpad Coworking + Cafe took some of us on a tour. Launchpad Coworking has been in the works for a while, but the current credit crunch has made it very difficult for this space to get finished out. It's about 90% done; most of the remaining work will involve finishing out the space - flooring, furniture, etc.

The three coworking spaces in Austin are aimed at very different demographics. Launchpad Coworking is aimed at a high-margin demographic: corporate accounts, for instance. And the environs reflect that. Launchpad is on the ground floor of 800 Brazos, with condos upstairs, and they expect that they will attract people who live downtown and work at Launchpad Coworking. They also expect to pick up some foot traffic: during open hours, an enormous door slides open to reveal a coffee bar with wifi - and beer and wine will be available.

At the coworking space, a concierge will watch over 30 desk spaces. Peripherals such as mice, monitors, and chargers will be available for checkout. The space will also include a server room, printer, fax, copier, whiteboard, and corkboard.

Launchpad Coworking will also include seven meeting rooms: a "treetop" or boutique meeting room accessible via a spiral staircase; three small meeting rooms; three large ones. Each meeting room has own fridge and "green" bottled water in addition to tables, chairs, and large flat-panel monitors. One meeting room is soundproofed; they envision supporting video and audio podcasting as well as voice-over work (easier than flying to LA).

Michael explained that community is not where you are, but who you're with. "You don't force community," he said. So how to facilitate a coworking community at a new space? Launchpad Coworking's approach is to create the right space, leading to an unforced community. They've been working for two years to develop the right space.

Despite the dismal credit environment, once they obtain funding, Launchpad Coworking estimates two months from funding to opening. I hope the funding comes through soon: Launchpad Coworking looks like a fantastic place to work, and it serves a very different segment from the other two coworking spaces in Austin.

For more on Launchpad Coworking, including their own pictures, see Launchpad Coworking's blog.

To see my own (poor) pictures of the space, see my photostream. And to see Launchpad Coworking on the map, see my map of alternative work spaces.

The Future of Work Salon: An account and some thoughts

The Shift101 Future of Work Salon was held March 6. Shift101 is a consultancy based in Australia, focusing on outworking solutions (teleworking, coworking, alt-work communications applications, etc.). Drew Jones and Todd Sundsted of NotAnMBA.com have recently joined Shift101 and are conducting salons in Austin, New York, and Sydney.

Drew Jones invited me to serve on the respondent's panel, which also included Bruce Eric Anderson of Dell (who runs the Digital Nomads blog) and John Erik Metcalfe of Conjunctured. Todd Sundsted presented on behalf of Shift101.

We had a light crowd, but a good one: Representatives from Launchpad, Conjunctured, The Creative Space, and Dell - and the University of Texas, I suppose, since I was there.

The presentation
Drew opened the session by discussing trends they had seen. He sees shifts in performance management, security, flexibility, and work-life balance due to demographic changes: the rise of Gen Y and the approaching retirement of the Baby Boomers. Those shifts point to the increasing popularity of "outworking" as people move from the corporate environment to other spaces.

This trend is not exactly making the office obsolete. But a generational transition is the elephant in the room. As Drew pointed out, we have 70 million Gen Ys. Ten thousand Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day. The two trends constitute what Drew calls a "demographic transfusion." And Gen Y brings in different values: they want individual, meaningful work.

Todd followed up by starting the presentation, entitled "Bold Moves." The 2008-2009 recession, he said, can be the great business school of the modern era.

Todd noted several "forces" that characterize the current moment and the near future:

• Increasing unemployment
• Corporation natural selection wiping out companies
• Workforce will get both older and younger - deferred retirement - but then much younger.
• Huge chunk of Gen Y
• Laptops, wifi, secure networks -> mobility

These have consequences:

• Executive: compensation more tightly coupled to performance, especially long-term
• Results: focused environment -> advantages of full-time employee under scrutiny
• Companies must justify growth of staff size, addition of full-time employees. Must justify $ of desk, office for each employee. Real estate utilization is about 40% in an office.

In 10 years, Todd added, 50% of the workforce will be Gen Y.

Todd thinks we're facing a fundamental shift on the scale of the last century's shift toward scientific management. He expects 5-10 years of innovation in the next round of work. In particular, outworking will become not just tolerated but necessary, due to the costs of commuting coupled with costs associated with maintaining underutilized buildings.

At this point, John Erik added: His generation is used to measurement in terms of video games and grades. Now they want that feeling back. (I understand this to mean that he wants clear measures of achievement coupled with autonomy in maintaining that achievement.)

Todd added that new work will involve new management skills:

• Managing remote teams becomes a necessary skill.
• Managing multiple generations, perhaps up to 4 generations - never before.

So he predicts Bold Moves:

• Companies must get by with fewer, more productive employees
• Companies will exit lease obligations, reduce real estate expenses
• Companies will develop robust methodologies for managing employees and contingent workers
• More teams will be allowed and encouraged in outworking
• Performance-based management will replace subjective measures (e.g., face time)
• Effective corporate leaders must become masters at framing, defining distribution. Innovation -> growth.
• Companies must pay more attention to workspace design as a factor in recruitment, retention, and productivity

John Erik adds here that Conjunctured (the coworking space) is a "loss leader" for Conjunctured (the design firm). Conjunctured functions as a brand - a company with many possible employees working in the space - and John Erik functions as an account manager. Drew adds that such distributed organizations rely on trust and nimbleness, and speculates that peer-to-peer banking will be the next necessary step. Privately, I wonder: are such organizations necessarily business-to-business?

The dialogue
And at this point, I lost track. I presented some of my own work here on federations - if you went to ATTW or CCTE, or if you're going to IA09, I covered the same ground as here - and we talked about the differences and similarities between my Gen X participants and Gen Y participants. We also had some great discussion with Cody Marx Bailey and Roby Fitzhenry of The Creative Space, a College Station-based coworking space, about their different perspective on outworking. The most important takeaway was that Cody and Roby didn't worry at all about facework the way that my Gen X participants did: they said they were entirely transparent about their lives and work, and didn't want to work with clients who didn't respect that.

Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell then talked about Dell's efforts in this space. Dell is concerned with recruitment and retention of Gen Y, but also lost work time during the commute, carbon footprint, and similar factors. They believe that "digital nomads" will become more prevalent, particularly in some highly desirable knowledge leadership positions, and they want to make sure they can support such work and evolve with it. Bruce also brought a prerelease netbook that Dell will soon release. Nice machine.

My thoughts
I left the salon thinking that Shift101 and the respondents have done some good thinking. But many questions remain about the future of work. I see the following additional trends:

• Mobile work accelerates.For instance, I strongly suspect that in knowledge work sectors, the mobile phone, home broadband, and smaller prosumer computing will continue to enable and accelerate the trend of mobile work. (The three technological trends are collapsing, and I expect smartphones+peripherals to take over basic email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations in the next couple of years.)


• New standards develop for distributing work. As work becomes more mobile and distributed, I also expect to see much more outsourcing and attempts at modularization in the corporate sector. But that's a very complicated and messy proposition, and to make it work, we'll probably see a lot of sub rosa workarounds and growing pains. Trust and accountability must be distributed too, and those mechanisms will be hard to lay out and enforce across an increasing number of subcontractors. So we'll see a proliferation of answers to that problem, probably including (a) rebounds: bringing subcontracted services back in house; (b) trade standards: articulation and voluntary policing of trade guidelines; (c) APIs for making work transparent across elements of emerging federations; (d) redundant subcontracting, leaning toward spec work. It will take a while for these innovations to settle down.


• Social media become essential communication services. I further expect that the use of social media for b2b contacts will continue and increase. I won't be surprised to see not just b2b versions of popular services (e.g., the corporate services that mimic Twitter, currently cropping up) but also b2b features of existing services (e.g., b2b features built into Twitter or layered over the Twitter API). OpenSocial and others in this space will become increasingly important. So will web-based collaboration services, which will increasingly depend on corporate accounts for revenue.


• Your social graph becomes your resume. Social media and collaboration services will return value for these corporate accounts by suggesting subcontractors, a really critical aspect of distributed work. They will increasingly include reputation systems, which have mostly been applied to products and sellers, but will increasingly be applied to service providers and independent contractors. Reputation systems of some kind will have to perform the same service that merit reviews do within organizations.


• Strategic planning becomes very difficult, then very easy. Transitioning to radically distributed organizations means a period in which getting a strategic overview becomes very difficult. This, by the way, is something that has bothered me about Zuboff and Maxmin's envisioning of federations: since federations are essentially project-based, with the federation dispersing at the end of the project, time horizons are very short and the federation is essentially tactical and reactive. I don't know that the business community currently has the tools to perform strategic planning in such an environment. But as subcontractors begin generating relatively stable social graphs, I expect a new equilibrium to be developed, meaning that strategic planning will become much easier - particularly as gobs of data become more available and aggregated.

If these trends are on the money, short-term winners include Google and Facebook (who are pushing APIs to connect different social networks); broadband providers; and nimble organizations. Long-term, the more stable and rich social networks become more valuable. I envision the day when people's social graphs are traded in portfolios - though I don't endorse that move.

Anyway, the FoW panel was great. I don't think Shift101 has plans for another one in Austin soon, but if they do, I will encourage everyone I know to go!

A map of Austin alternative working spaces

So I've been visiting coworking spaces in Austin. At this point, I've visited Soma Vida, Conjunctured, and Launchpad Coworking. (For writeups, just check out the "coworking" label to the right.) I'll be visiting other places this spring and summer, including Jelly meetings at Cafe Caffeine and Cupprimo.

And as I do, I'll be updating this map of Austin alternative working spaces. Take a look - the differences among these spaces are fascinating. I've included links to the sites' URLs and to my own photos of the spaces.

And if you can think of other spaces - coworking spaces and Jelly spaces in particular - drop me a line at clay.spinuzzi@gmail.com.

Reading :: Go Put Your Strengths to Work

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
By Marcus Buckingham

Go Put Your Strengths to Work comes from the coauthor of First, Break all the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, neither of which I have read. I strongly suspect that they cover very similar ground, which can be summed in this passage:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence by studying failure. This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. (p.5)

That is, Go takes the position that studying failure teaches us a lot about failure, but not much about excellence. That, the author says, is like diagnosing health problems but never learning how to exercise (p.11). Rather, the author says, we should study our own strengths and figure out how to reconfigure our jobs, organizations, and lives to leverage them. The alternative is to spend our time working on our weaknesses - that is, to work on becoming uniformly mediocre rather than excellent in a few areas.

If this sounds a lot like Drucker, it should: Drucker made this argument long ago. But Buckingham develops a set of heuristics for helping individuals determine their strengths. ("What does one of your strengths actually feel like to you?" asks one heuristic, and answers it with a set of bullets, p.90). Buckingham exhorts us to take charge of our own time, to stop feeling like victims (p.208), and to make our work revolve around our strengths rather than conforming ourselves to the work we're presented. Yes, he makes it sound easy. But at the same time, he acknowledges that reconfiguring our jobs could be really hard to achieve, and he suggests several persuasive strategies for working through this reconfiguration with superiors and subordinates.

So does Go read like a squishy self-help book? Sure, in spots. But those books have their uses. The heuristics help to put this book ahead of others I've seen, and I think they could be really useful for people who are still trying to figure out their place.

Reading :: I'm Outta Here!

I'm outta here! How coworking is making the office obsolete
By Drew Jones, Todd Sundsted, and Tony Bacigalupo

I've mentioned my fascination with coworking and related outworking practices, but I've also complained that I can't find much in the way of serious publications about them. I'm Outta Here! is not exactly a scholarly publication, but as Drew Jones told me, it's a sort of downpayment on the more serious work his group has been developing. Their more conventional book should be out in April; this one is more like snapshots, pensees, "101 stories about coworking." And it's valuable in its own right: although it's not detailed, it captures the zeitgeist of coworking by collecting quotes and documents from a wide range of coworking sites across the world.

In telling these stories, I'm Outta Here! provides a first cut at the many motivations and opportunities represented by different coworking sites. As the authors explain in the Introduction, people work from home, motivated by flexibility, convenience, and autonomy. But working from home often means working alone, without "human interaction, support, structure, and often balance" (p.1). In the many stories they have collected from coworkers and proprietors of coworking spaces, they flesh out some of these many motivations and factors. The stories are human and the wide range of spaces is represented. Some of the history is told here too.

Most importantly for people who are interested in coworking, the book functions almost as a Rolodex of coworking spaces. The authors have visited many spaces and have included contact information of even more. So it shouldn't be a surprise that my copy is heavily annotated. I'll be going through that Rolodex this spring and summer as I continue to get my head around this phenomenon. If you're interested in doing the same, do pick up the book.

Reading :: Digital Korea

Digital Korea: Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home
By Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly

This book is being reviewed by Huatong Sun in my upcoming JBTC special issue on social software, so I won't provide a deep review here. It's an interesting book, though, more in terms of trends and implications than depth or analysis or data collection (most data comes from newspapers and trade sources). Like the authors' blog Communities Dominate Brands, Digital Korea provides an overview of how mobile and digital technologies are changing some basic aspects of how people interact - in this case, people in perhaps the most wired nation on the planet, South Korea.

"To be South Korean means to be connected," the authors state (p.5). Conscious of the high pace of digital change, the authors caution us that this 2007 text will be out of date by the time it hits print - and they note that the iPhone was just about to hit the market, to give you an idea of the changes involved - but they want to chronicle the trends that collectively characterize "the 'Connected Age,' the new wirelessly connected society which has moved beyond the 'Networked Age' of the 1990s" (p.5).

The authors identify several factors. For instance, "Generation-C" (the "community" generation) is constantly connected through mobile phones, particularly text messages; a third of SK students sent over 100 text messages per day in 2006 (p.17). Mobile phones are "umbilical cords" that bind youth, allow them to consult each other immediately before and after purchases, and link them constantly - they even take phones to bed and sleep with them (not on the bedside table as we aging Gen Xers do). They haggle with five car dealers simultaneously over SMS (p.19). As the authors state in a section title, "Adults don't get it" (p.21). (Incidentally, perhaps Twitter has taken off for adults recently in part because it folds SMS into a more familiar, less immediate medium?) Texting is preferred over email, which is characterized as communication for the boss (p.22). The mobile phone "is seen as a major element in the definition of a young person's emerging persona" (p.23).

Since youth overwhelmingly own mobile phones in SK, the authors state, they will not answer the home's landline. By definition, the call isn't for them, and they don't see a reason to take messages (p.25). In a related trend, the authors quote Mizuko Ito's research of Japanese youth, in which she notes that "it is common to send text messages before phone calls, to 'schedule' the time for a voice call" (p.30). (I thought this was brilliant, and I wish more people would do it.)

Paying for goods and services by mobile phone is common in SK, and this means that the mobile phone is the first credit instrument (p.31). Mobile phones also introduce youth to other adult practices, for instance, through simulated boy/girlfriends so that youth can learn social mores involved with dating (p.52), dancing classes delivered over the phone, and phone-based karaoke.

Moving along, the authors note that mobile-delivered full-length television programs were common in SK in 2007, making TV-watching mobile but also intensely personal (p.78). MMORPGs were common as well. Digitally delivered music outsold physically delivered music by a wide margin, with mobile phones and MMORPGs being the main delivery networks.

Digital Korea is an interesting read, although it's not a scholarly text and doesn't really pretend to be. It does get fairly breathless, and I had trouble figuring out how broad-based some of the conclusions were. It also tends to paint a very rosy picture of SK's governmental decisions and involvement; see Castells for a more critical view. But if you want a bloggish overview of different technologies and their potential to remake how we live and work, pick up this book.

"What Makes a Digital Nomad?"

An intriguing whitepaper whose crowdsourcing was orchestrated by Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell. Looks fascinating, but I'll have to print it out to read it properly.

CCCC2009 theming contest: Congratulations and certificate

Some of you may remember that I ran a theming contest for CCCC2009 last year. CCCC's call for papers was about to come out, and I had found previous years' themes ("Making Waves"; "Taking it to the Streets") to be maddeningly vague and insufficiently creative. So I called for people to tweet their suggestions for CCCC2009 conference themes.

The results were creative and outrageous. I had trouble picking a winner, but in the end my committee (which had a total of one member) selected what we thought best epitomized a conference theme. James Ford, a grad student at UC-Santa Barbara (and, coincidentally, one of my former MA students at Texas Tech) came up with the winning entry.

I plan to present him with a certificate. But I also wanted to share it with the world. So here it is. Brilliant work, James. I foresee a bright future for you as a conference committee member.

"This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work."

Manuel Castells argues in The Power of Identity that since democracy is now mediated through electronic media, to gain a groundswell of the vote, parties veer toward the political center. In the absence of sharp policy differences, scandal becomes the mode of differentiation.

We've seen our share of scandal in the last several electoral cycles, and certainly in the last one, in which thinly-sourced charges of racism, sexism, and even false pregnancy were leveled. Writing for The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini argues that Republicans have fallen behind in the muckraking as left-leaning bloggers work on "taking out" rising Republican stars before they can aspire to national office. And lest we misunderstand him, he sets us straight:

In case you're expecting me to bemoan this as the birth of left-wing hack journalism, that's where I part company. This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work. The real threat here is not what all of you were booing in Tucker Carlson's speech at CPAC. The New York Times is merely marketing refined gasoline at the pump. The place where it's being drilled, refined, and transported is in the blogosphere, where the likes of Daily Kos and TPM [Talking Points Memo] tease out initial leads that are too hot for the NYT.

The joke here is that the right is supposed to have an apparatus that does exactly what TPM does on the left.

The problem with legitimizing scandal as a tactic for decapitating political parties, of course, is that it discourages normal, well-adjusted personalities from running for national office.

Question and answer: Will phones be the new laptops?

Mark Cuban asks if phones will replace laptops, and speculates on how this might be possible: wireless keyboards and monitors designed to interact with the little processor on your phone.

Of course, this is not an entirely new direction, and it makes total sense for those who mostly use their computers for communication, office software, and web surfing. (It makes less sense for resource-intensive applications.) Indications are that the phone and desktop will continue to converge, especially given that Nokia's dipping its toe into the laptop business. Android is also migrating to netbooks. Look for more of this in 2009-2010.

Interactive Austin 2009

I'm excited to be speaking at Interactive Austin 2009, a conference whose goal is "to explore how social media enhances business and marketing strategies and adds to the bottom line." Austin's social media community is vibrant, and I think this event is going to showcase that fact nicely.

If you're in Austin or plan to be, please do check it out. Monday, April 27, Norris Business Center. I think it's going to be a blast.

I'm Outta Here - is here

The book I'm Outta Here, about coworking, is now for sale at Lulu.com.

Crowdsourcing for tips

A few minutes ago, Twitter informed me that someone named bountystorms had begun following me. I clicked through to the stream, then to the listed website, BountyStorms.com.

The basic idea behind BountyStorms should seem half-familiar to anyone reading my Twitter feed or blog. When I wanted a good popular-oriented name for my new project, I crowdsourced it: I gave my followers the parameters, then invited them to submit their own ideas. I didn't come up with this idea, but I've found it to be really handy for generating ideas than I never would have produced on my own.

BountyStorms is a site for submitting ideas to be crowdsourced. Unlike run-of-the-mill crowdsourcing, though, BountyStorms involves paying a cash prize for the winning idea. That is, it connects a network of BountyStorms readers with people who need a service - and are willing to pay (paltry) cash for it. Skimming the site, I see requests for "Product name for a leading edge energy appliance" ($20), "Creative Ideas for Valentines" ($5), and "Catchy title for Work Life Balance/Resilience workshop ..." ($20). Some of these problems are traditionally those of PR or marketing firms, while others are more along the lines of self-help.

Will the service take off? This is the sort of service that could take advantage of stray minutes in people's lives. If it can attract enough clever readers, it might become useful. So far, though, the number of people weighing in on each idea is fairly small.

Thoughts on how the economic downturn will reshape the world

We're all talking about the impact of this economic precipice, right? Instead of venturing my own analysis, let me point to two analyses that are very different but have similarities.

One is Richard Florida's analysis in the Atlantic, entitled "How the Crash will Reshape America." Many in my Twitter stream have pointed it out. Florida sets up his argument this way:

In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn’t quite right, and doesn’t accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years.

In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more.

Florida goes on to argue that we'll see some real impact shear at the level of region and city, not nation, and that the disadvantaged will be those regions and cities that lack dense social connections. That doesn't do justice to Florida's argument, but I want to note that this analysis is at least somewhat consistent with Castells' argument.

The other analysis comes from a paper that David Ronfeldt posted, along with its responses. Ronfeldt dusted off and reframed a paper from a few years ago, suggesting that we start thinking in terms of the "network-state." In the comments, one person suggests that we're on the cusp of radical decentralization in favor of rhizomatic constructions - and that the result will be less effective asymmetric warfare (e.g., terrorism) since the disappearance of state centers will mean lessened asymmetry. Another points to the response of the P2P Foundation, which pushes farther along the lines of "peer-governed civil-society networks," which are described as "the great innovation of the last decade."