Basically, rather than typing things into an email we are saying ‘here is something really interesting, go find it over there’. True, there is a persistence in wiki content, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that the content is still buried and not being found naturally, hence the emails to tell people where the content is. This seems like a poor way to manage the knowledge of the organisation. Or is it just me wanting a more categorised, organised approach to knowledge management because of my left brain thinking?

By the way, I should point out that I think wiki’s are a great step in the right direction, please don’t think I am against them. It is that the content isn’t being found that concerns me.

• Physical CD sales feel from 41% to 32%
• Paid music downloads went 7% to 9%
• P2P downloads went from 14% to 19%
• Burning a CD from your friend 21% to 19%
• Ripping a CD from your friend 17% to 19%

The most interesting piece about this for me was that all stats for physical media fell (sharply) by 11%. Unfortunately for the music industry this was only matched by and increase of 2% in paid music downloads. I have been unable to find a good estimate on the size of the music market in 2006 and 2007, but it would interesting to see if it fell by 9%. Certainly this industry is one where digital is having a profound impact and it’s financial model is struggling to cope. The question that remains to be seen is whether it will be us, the consumer, who pays in the long run or the profit margins of corporations.

My money is on the corporations suffering. As the revenue that these corporations can bring a band drop, so the options of doing things like distributing your music via social networks increases. After all, the music I listen to has always been significantly defined by the people that I know. And the majority of money that an artist sees comes from playing live, not music sales.

THAT IS HUGE.

Currently, Australia spends about 9% of it’s advertising dollars online (if memory serve correctly predicted to rise to about 13% this year), with the majority of the rest going to TV. So, we are spending our advertising dollars in a media space that is getting less consumption, in a less engaging way, isn’t that just crazy?

For me it shows that we, the digital industry, haven’t done enough to persuade our clients that we can:

• Be more engaging with a potential customer than someone just sitting on a couch pressing buttons on a TV remote (or off making a cup of team, or fast forwardig through the ads on their PVR, etc)
• Understand and communicate brand messages to customers effectively

Our clients aren’t going ‘lets spend all this money on TV to make me look good’ (well, we hope they aren’t!), they are doing it because they have been persuaded that using that medium will achieve their objectives (cut through, reach, etc, etc). It’s time for us to show clients we can achieve their objectives as well.

Yes, the way we will achieve it might be different, but we need to help our clients make the jump.

It is one thing to do a one of hit to offset the agency’s carbon footprint, but the sentiment of being carbon neutral is about looking at the environmental impact of company in which we work and the lives that we live. As such, if I am really serious about reducing the environmental impact of the life I lead and the company I work in the task is never finished in the sense that we can’t ever again say “this has been done, now move on”. Instead it is about creating a way of living, a culture if you like, of thinking about the environmental impact of what we do.

So, I haven’t made things simpler. Indeed I am making this post as a personal statement to try and make this cultural shift in my thinking. I have no idea where this journey ends, but I know that it starts here.

The first step we have identified is to do a carbon footprint analysis of the business. Does it end here? No. But watch this space to hear about where we go. I hope I can over the months post about our journey to creating a more sustainable business.

But I want your help. What do you think we should do? One great suggestion was that every project we propose to a client should carry the option to offset the carbon footprint of that project. What do you think we should try to do? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

And like all good leaders Richard Brandson, Larry Page and Sergey Brin will lead the way by being among some of the first to go.

What I want to know is how they will get their emails when they are there. You see, the problem is that the delay between here and Mars is around 8 minutes at the speed of light (from memory, it is a while since I did High School physics). So, Internet Protocols, which rely on sending small packets of data and getting a ‘received, those one’s, send some more’ back is going to be REALLY slow (worse than the bad days of 2800 modems, for those of you that remember that!). A few people have been working on the problem, NASA being one of them.

O, and before I forget, probably the most immediately interesting piece is actually the coming together of these two massive brands. While this is something that has happened a fair bit in Australia in the past, it is still quite a new concept elsewhere in the world. Is this a sign of things to come?
P.S. If you haven’t worked it out, the Virgle things is actually an April fools joke that is doing the rounds.

I would suggest that the move by Yahoo! has more to do with annoying Microsoft who recently made a bid for the company of $45 billon (only to have it rejected as undervaluing Yahoo!, but that is another post all in itself!) than anything else. However, it now means that the only two social networks of any significance not signed up to Open Social are Windows Live and Facebook.

If nothing else, it certainly seems that all the big internet players are squaring up around this one issue. I just hope the result is better, more integrated services with users privacy protected. Although I am not holding my breath.

This stagnation ties with the anecdotal experience of various friends who all tell me that they are now bored of Facebook, while still not quite being able to stop logging on to check if anyone has done anything interesting. And into this messy situation comes Open Social. So, with an evening free I set out to find out if this really could be a category saver. And what did I find? Well, the jury is definitely out.

Here’s the problem: we all know that maintaining multiple online personas in different social networking sites is a pain. Personally I have Linked In, Facebooked up and WordPressed my words (plus I have my own website, but not sure if that counts any more!). And getting the information / updates to the right set of people at the right time takes far too long. So, for another social networking entrant there is simply no point being yet another place where I have to keep my data up to date. However, Google at this stage don’t seem to have the answer. They seem to believe that the problem is that application writers who develop apps for social network platforms don’t like spending their time building on different API’s on each site. And they are right. So, Open Social aims to create a common set of API’s that any social networking site can sign up to and then applications written in that framework will work on the site.

Great.

Really.

However, it doesn’t actually help me, the end user. Or does it?

I came across a great little app earlier in the week call OutSync. It basically matches up my contacts in outlook with my Facebook friends and where there is a match downloads their Facebook photo to their contact data. Then, when I sync my mobile with outlook all of a sudden every time a friend phones I now get their picture. This functionality has been in phones for ages but I have never had the time to actually assign photo’s to my friends numbers. This app has done it for me and I love it. They say in the next release it will be able to sync birthday reminders into outlooks calendars.

Now, if as a result of Open Social being widely accepted we end up with applications that keep everything in sync for me, making sure that my photo’s in Facebook match the ones in my Flickr account, my WordPress entries can be found on my Linked In profile, etc, then I think we could see real category growth once more, although undoubtedly there would be significant fragmentation. However, before we all get excited about apps that mean when a friend changes their email address all they need to do is change it on an Open Social site and your contact data on your phone is updated, there is one very big issue to resolve: privacy.

For all this data to be shared in a way that prevents identity theft and users to remain in control while not making the preferences section of any site unbearably complicated is going to be a tough challenge. Just go ask the federated identity crowd who have been grappling with this issue for much of this decade without yet achieving a system everyone signs up to. Although Google might have the answer there as well, if a Google account becomes the foundation for Open Social’s intersite authentication…