Björn Jeffery

I never thought I’d be impressed by Ace of Base, but I must say they’re on to something. It’s refreshing to hear a major band move away from the traditional business model in order to make more money – not less.

Far too often in surroundings like this, people drop buzzwords like it’s social media bingo. They do it because that’s what people want to hear. And there is a belief that just using social software or adding social functionality will make a big difference in what ever business they are in. This is obviously not the case, but it makes all of us within the bubble feel good.

This type of reasoning will never convince anyone in traditional business. That’s why we need Ace of Base-type of arguments. We’re letting people be a part of our product because it will make us more money. That why. It may be interesting, it may be in line with the trends, but we’re doing it for cash.

Next year will be all about this type of reasoning. Not only in the music business, but overall. That might be one of the few things that are good about this whole state of affairs.

There’s a wide range of things being discussed on stage at the moment. I’m hearing a theme of methodology, as that’s the way I’m inclined to think. How you can spot trends on a macro level, and how find specific interesting projects. A few thoughts:

Morten Lund spoke of risk. Risk equals return and risk equals impact, he said. In choosing these projects you shouldn’t over-strategize (management consultants got a serious bashing, specifically McKinsey) but instead trust your gut feeling. There’s a lot to be said about when the gut feeling is right and not, and how it differs depending on person, but let’s leave that for a moment.

Over to Joi Ito. He had an interesting introduction about communication layers and what happend when disruption entered on each layer. But at the end of the talk, he said that trends and innovation is found in the crossroads of technology evolution and the behaviour of young people. Short, but concise.

So, with these statments in mind, how to find trends and the next thing? First, research tech and consumer behaviour and then distill the projects by gut feeling. That would mean finding by process, refining by feeling. I instinctively think that the opposite would be equally interesting – finding by feeling, and refining by process.

Either way you go, it’s interesting that something as abstract as gut feeling comes up a key success factor (McKinsey word!) when knowing what’s next.

I’m at SIME08 and will be blogging now and then. No attempts to live blog, but we’ll see how it goes during the day. Check out the backchannel here.

Just in case you forgot (we are going back to 2006, after all). Henrik wrote about it a year earlier than me even.

John Koten, Mansueto ventures:

“Social publishing,” or aggregation, is what pays, Koten says. And in recessionary times, that’s obviously more crucial. Koten: “Having regularly updated, fresh content is different than having people who are trying to break stories five or six times a day.

And it’s still true.

I often wonder why so many traditional media companies have missed The Technical Divide, and why the internet changes everything. It’s a million dollar (in lost advertising revenue 😉 question.

I think a part of the problem is not understanding the separation of content and distribution. They used to be tightly interlinked – news (content) through newspapers (distribution), tv-shows (content) and channels (distribution). From that perspective it would make sense to apply the same logic to media on the internet.

But the internet is not a medium – it is a carrier of media. The content is not connected to the distribution in the same way as it used to be. Therefore, producing content that is meant to be exclusive for any one specific channel/space/area is not understanding how the internet fundamentally works.

Proprietary thinking is therefore something of the past. And that’s why business models built on proprietary content will always stop short of what they could have been.

This is not a political blog, but the video clip below is not politics either. It is a profound, and what appears to be sincere, tale of worry about the next few years in America if this coming election doesn’t go the way that it should. It touched me it the same way that this did.

These are rough times. I visited ETRE08 and everyone there was noticeably moved about the current state of affairs (except maybe Tim Draper who sang a different tune, literally). Sure, a few of them worked for investment banks and were probably more worried about their penthouse down-payments more than anything else – but still. Even there, amongst the IT-Davos-esque crowd, something seemed to have changed.

What we need at a time like this is clarity, responsibility and genuine long term thinking. Strategy, if you will. Whether we work for Goldman Sachs, are the former US Secretary of State or – like most people that read this blog – work with the web in some way, it doesn’t matter. We should all address our respective issues with these parameters in mind. I’m glad that a man with such a questionable track record has decided to do so now, at least.

If you weren’t at Reboot this year, or even if you were – don’t miss this. I had the privilege of meeting JP in London a while back and I think his view on internet life is amazingly interesting and inspiring.

Will it work? I don’t know. But it’s definitely an interesting concept if nothing else.

Tonchidot via Weconverse.

Without going into lengthy detail about it, there has been a lot of rumblings about laws and restrictions in Sweden lately. I can only add my thoughts on why issues of this kind are turning up more and more often.

I think it’s simply a fact of people not understanding the internet.

The internet has been an intricate part of many peoples lives for a long time. Now, we seem to have reached some sort of tipping point where it can’t be ignored in any social circles any more. People always fear want they don’t understand. This is no different.

Perhaps us living online have been bad at communicating outside our own? It’s considerably easier to complain when people don’t understand than to try and make them understand in the first place. That being said, not understanding is no excuse to be ignorant.

Imagine having a discussion about the industrial revolution and not understanding the concept of electricity.

Competence: the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually

Talent: a person who possesses unusual innate ability in some field or activity

Most companies look for a competent work force. Thus, most companies don’t possess unusual abilities.