Perry

Hewitt

Tag: quotation

  • Crowdfunding models in media

    Small business lending statistics take no account of Kickstarter and crowdfunding; [Andrew] Sullivan’s experiment with The Dish has so startled traditional media that people are only beginning to understand how potent, powerful and perfect a model it might be – that is, when people pay something for content they value because they understand that everything costs something.

    – Zachary Karabell in The Atlantic on The Kickstarter Economy How Technology Turns Us All into Bankers. Perhaps “backers” is a better term than “bankers” – the new transparency into the layers of businesses allows people to see and determine for themselves where the value lies, and put their money there.

  • Social sector must embrace risk

    For social impact organizations to scale in the same way entrepreneurial tech companies do, investors need to increase their tolerance for non-moral failure. They need to foster a culture of innovation and risk-taking. … Most importantly we have to stop pumping support into struggling ventures because we are afraid to see them fail and be prepared to back again those who have learned from their failures. Smart people are more willing to attempt disruptive change when they know their value will not be destroyed if it doesn’t pan out.

    – Sir Ronald Cohen and William A. Sahlman in HBR blogs on the importance of building a tolerance for failure and risk-taking in social enterprise. Two related thoughts:

    • The corollary piece of advice is to start small – venture capital has ample homerun cushion to pay for all those strike outs and singles. Small, iterative projects that succeed or fail advance learning in the organization and promote risk-taking without betting the store.
    • Being willing to stop doing something marginal is far more difficult to do than walking away from an absolute failure. The former is an important skill to cultivate – smart people with high aspirations and a lack of tolerance for “just OK” in an area where “great” is well within reach.

  • The inevitability of big data hacks

    Geeks often talk about “layer 8.” When an IT operator sighs resignedly that it’s a layer 8 problem, she means it’s a human’s fault. It’s where humanity’s rubber meets technology’s road. And big data is interesting precisely because it’s the layer 8 protocol. It’s got great power, demands great responsibility, and portends great risk unless we do it right. And just like the layers beneath it, it’s going to get good, then bad, then stable.

     

    Other layers of the protocol stack have come under assault by spammers, hackers, and activists. There’s no reason to think layer 8 won’t as well. And just as hackers find a clever exploit to intercept and spike an SSL session, or trick an app server into running arbitrary code, so they’ll find an exploit for big data.

    — Alistair Croll in Stacks get hacked: The inevitable rise of data warfare. Croll points out that with each new technology, there’s an evolution from good to bad to stable — and we should expect that same trajectory with big data.

    Interesting to think about how large-scale exploits to corrupt the data about everything from public opinion on an issue to real estate attributes could have massive effects on decisions and markets.

  • Who gets to define geek culture?

    …But I am suggesting that the mean-spiritedness of geek culture—a mean-spiritedness that is often, but by no means always, directed at women—is not an accident. A culture that values knowledge and access above all things is going to be a culture dedicated to hierarchy and to power—to defining who is in and who is out. Such defining involves, and is meant to involve, a good deal of antagonism, score-settling, back-biting, and cruelty. There’s not much point in defining yourself as the knower if you cannot define others as those who do not know.

    —  Noah Berlatsky explains in The Atlantic why Fake Geek Girls’ Paranoia is About Male Insecurity, Not Female Duplicity

    There’s a lot of discussion lately about the idiot nerd girl meme (see original meme and a great subversion here). Some of this is routine insider/outsider tension — who’s in the know and fluent in the jargon, and who’s just posing — and some of it’s still the gender wars in full effect.

     

  • Survival traits for 2013: agility and adaptation

    “I don’t believe in futurists that much anymore – they are usually wrong,” he [Ito] says, responding to a label that is often applied to him. “I’m calling myself a ‘nowist,’ and I’m trying to figure out how to build up the ability to react to anything. In other words, I want to create a certain agility. The biggest liability for companies now is having too many assets; you need to learn how to be fluid and agile.

     

    ‘It’s kind of a spiritual thing,” he continues. “You want to have your peripherals wide open and adapt as quickly as you can. I think that will be an important survival trait of people and companies in the future.”

    – Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab on trends to watch in 2013.

    I couldn’t agree more. Your organizational goals and digital strategy need to be declarative and not reactive – but peripheral vision, fluidity, and agility are vital for success in a rapidly changing digital environment. Without understanding the speed and direction of the changes around you, it’s easy to bury yourself in a five-year-plan to nowhere.

  • Context is everything: preview button

    “The fact that we can even offer a ‘preview’ shows how tight the association is between content  management and delivery….The existence of a preview button reinforces the notion that the desktop website is the “real” website and mobile is a satellite, an afterthought.”

    – Karen McGrane, in Content Strategy for Mobile

  • How class, poverty, and higher ed connect

    The story of their lost footing is also the story of something larger — the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions. Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.

    — Disheartening and thoughtful piece in the New York Times on the complex interrelationships of poverty, class, and family ties, and how these all affect higher eduation achievement among low-income students.

  • Creating a network for women entrepreneurs

    …women-owned firms employ just 6% of the U.S. workforce and contribute just 4% of all business revenues. Women might be making overall progress in the rate at which they are launching new ventures, but are failing to launch and build high-growth ventures.

    — Jennifer McFadden, who proposes radically transparent networks as one possible solution to the high-growth venture gap

  • The Tempest, digital humanities edition

    We didn’t want this to be the authoritative version of the play to be admired or read in solitude; we want it to be a generative version of the play, one which sparks innovation and creates new knowledge.

    – Prof Elliot Visconsi, talking about his new iPad app supporting a social reading and learning experience of The Tempest

  • How universality benefits the web profession

    We’ve spent two decades talking about a web that’s inclusive and flexible. We’ve devoted countless hours to creating spaces where conversations and relationships can thrive. The longer we tolerate a community that excludes others, the more we, as an industry, are defined by exclusion—and the further away we remain from the universality we’ve worked so hard to build.

    – Sara Wachter-Boettcher in A List Apart on cultivating diversity and respect in the web profession