Friday, March 04, 2005

Freedom Tower designers rely on software tools. Architects working on the plans for the Freedom Tower in New York are using online collaboration tools and design software to simplify the complex project. [Computerworld News] 7:49:38 PM    comment [] This one reminds me the differing mindsets of executives and policy makers. I was lucky enough to learn strategy from Mike Porter as he was writing Competitive Strategy. His course was the hottest course at the Harvard Business School. Several years later, I went back to Harvard to get my doctorate at the Business School. As part of that process I took the basic course in Industrial Economics from Richard Caves who was Porter's thesis advisor and learned that Porter was possibly even more clever than I already thought. Porter's fundamental insight was to take the academic research field of Industrial Economics and invert it. Industrial Economics studies the question of market failures. What conditions lead to markets that don't conform to the economic ideal of perfect competition? What conditions make monopolies and oligopolies likely? The economists study this area with an eye toward what public policies are useful and necessary to maintaining competition in its close to ideal form. Porter's genius was to see that an economists' market failure was a CEO's wet dream. Competitive strategy could be viewed as an effort to create market failures. This is what executives are trained to do and rewarded for. Absent the appropriate policy checks and balances, you end up with the world that the RIAA and MPAA hope to preserve. 3:33:12 PM    comment [] IBM developerWorks: Baby duck syndrome. The phenomenon of baby duck syndrome is well known -- it's what happens when users judge new and upcoming systems by comparing them with the first system they learned. This means that users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems. [Tomalak's Realm] 8:13:51 AM    comment [] Elgg and Apcala. A Social Software Weblog reader, Ben Werdmuller, writes: ”..One of the things being talked about in academia at the moment is how to use social software to assist learning in higher education. This goes beyond “e-portfolios”, which are more or less online CVs with embedded examples of work, to create a network of people who share reflections and objects in a learning environment. David Tosh and I wrote an academic paper last year (ed. note: I found links to two pdfs on Stephen’s Web) discussing something we called the “learning landscape”; essentially the above, with weblog components, file repositories, and so on, all linked together with tags. Click on the “music” tag and you see users interested in music, users who count music among their skills, users who have written weblog posts about music (and links to those specific posts), and available files relating to music. See Profiles where ‘interests’ includes ‘music’ for an idea, although it’s still a bit limited. So here’s where I really blow my own trumpet: Elgg has been up since November as a closed alpha, where we’ve been adding new features and fiddling around with it for a core usergroup of academics. On Friday we released Apcala, which is open to the public and runs on exactly the same software, which we will later make freely available. This one isn’t (just) for academia; we’re trying to create a community where anyone can come in and share whatever ideas and objects they like…” Weblogs, Inc. RSS feeds brought to you by Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities. [The Social Software Weblog] 8:02:34 AM    comment []

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