Ontic Oren

Charlene Li @ Forrester has just posted a new report and blog entry on “Social Technographics”. The chart below may be worth the price of admission.

It turns out there are a lot of people in the world.

Duh. Anyway, it also turns out that info about those people is important, and being able to share it with coworkers even more so. Web 2.0 gods 37signals put out an amazing contact manager a month ago. Highrise is really the perfect solution for some of the things one of the small teams I’m working in tries to do – share some contacts, info on who they are, where we met them, and how we might engage in the future.

I love the fact that it isn’t the ultimate solution – no outlook plugins, no “live in your contact manager” philosophy like ACT, just a nice and focused approach to contacts.

Happy now Ken?

Technorati Tags: coolcompanies, word of mouth, web2.0

Any sun and mac people know the answer to this?

When I post in Ecto to my Sun blog, the blog entry shows up as pending for exactly 7 hours in the future. Clearly a timezone issue, but I sure can’t find where to fix this.

For those reading this at 4:40am PST – see!

Technorati Tags: ecto, lazyweb, mac, music

Last months HBR featured their annual “Breakthrough Ideas” section. 20 essays that will “satisfy our demainding readers’ appetite for provocative and important new ideas”. Ranging from nanotech to accounting, they are all at least worth reading. One in particular has really stood out though.

“The Accidental Influentials” by Duncan J Watts & Peter Dodds disputes the main premise of “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. The main point: the network must be ready for the changes to occur.

…Even the most influential members of a population simply don’t interact with that many others… if people in the network just two degrees removed from the initial influential prove resistance, the cascade of change won’t propagate…”

My favorite line:

…just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest.

So what does this mean? First, it’s important to recognize the limited impact of “influencers” (A-list bloggers) to a larger population. Word-of-mouth is king. Second, it’s actually possible that blogging somewhat pushes the bounds of this research, as it precisely provides a podium from which one person can reach many.

Technorati Tags: Business, HBR