I just appeared on an NBC affiliate in San Jose along with Guy Kawasaki and Dave McClure.   The Green Room and studio experience with those two was worth the price of admission.   The cameras …

The last time I saw Charlene Li was in the speaker’s lounge of the Web 2.0 conference. It was March 2008 and her defining book on social technologies, Groundswell, (co-authored with Josh Bernoff) was just being released. There have been tectonic shifts in our economy (and Charlene has moved from Forrester to found the Altimeter group) since then so I wanted to get her sense of the state of social media today.

Stimuluswatch.org allows citizens to see local government requests for stimulus-spending projects, add details, vote projects up or down and generally discuss the merit of each.  It is a great example of how the Internet lowers …

Roughly one year ago I was in conversation with the CEO of one of the largest online portals for Human Resources.  My pitch:  Human Resources should be leading the charge in helping businesses understand the …

I spent much of last week on assignment in Las Vegas at the FastForward ’09 conference. FastForward is devoted to Search (more on that in the next post – along with a mindbending, Minority Report style video on the future of search). One of the highlights of the conference was this interview with Clay Shirky. He is one of the most incisive and articulate thinkers regarding the impacts that technology is having on society and business.

As a rule the traditional organization has very few people dedicated to listening (Customer research) and a whole lot of people dedicated to talking (Marketing, Advertisting, PR, the communications dept., Events etc.).  What’s worse, the …

Generally speaking human beings consider possibility first and risk second… As a consequence we design for possibility and then retrofit for risk (if we are lucky). Drew Bartkiewicz of The Hartford has been considering data security and privacy in the age of social networks; an age marked by the explosion of personally identifiable information (PII) uploaded by users on blogs, video sites, social networks etc.

Web 2.0 hinges upon the notion that online users add value through (1) explicit co-creation;  think of Dell’s Ideastorm or Threadless, (2)  their behavior; think Amazon’s recommendations “people like you also bought…” or (3) the …

Imagine resellers, bloggers and trade press being able to host your videos, screencasts and demos on their own sites while you are  measuring response (engagement and demand).    Your company (especially those of you with reseller …

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.
Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure …