Things worth reading for February 2nd through February 3rd:
Is Your Calendar Managing You? – Ron Ashkenas – Harvard Business Review – Speaking of feeling overwhelmed… “Collectively, the demands we face at work are daunting and require constant juggling and trade-offs. For senior people much of this juggling is done by an executive assistant and/or chief of staff, while middle or junior managers do it themselves, often with the assistance of electronic scheduling that automatically puts meetings on the calendar. Unfortunately, neither method substitutes for thoughtful prioritization by the manager herself. Without such prioritization, the outcome is often a schedule that bounces managers from meeting to meeting, trip to trip, and requirement to requirement — without a sense of how to add the most value.”
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: “Deep Media,” Transmedia, What’s the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part Two) – Part II of Henry’s fascinating conversation with Frank. Don’t miss this. Snippet: “What’s happened in the meantime is that we’ve had ten years to figure out what the Net is really about. It’s not about publishing, it’s about participating. It’s about immersiveness. It’s about redefining our relationship to entertainment and marketing and each other. People need time to absorb that. Stuff is coming at us at amazing speed, but that doesn’t make us any faster at knowing what to make of it. We think we’re living on Internet time, but the Internet is in no hurry to reveal its secrets.”
Single-Tasking is the New Black — digital minimalism – Feel overwhelmed constantly? Take a look at Adam’s tips for happiness and focus… but you’ll have to make time to read them!
What Is Facebook, Really? – Jeffrey F. Rayport – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review – Brilliant analysis of the impact of Facebook by Dr. Rayport– this snippet is just a taste of the riches that lie within: “First, Facebook is not really a website anymore. Rather, it’s a vast, branded utility. It’s like another World Wide Web, but with a profit motive. It’s a kind of Wikipedia, but built on a corporate, not a cooperative, model. As a communications technology, it has radically changed the ways we connect with one another…. It serves one in four of every display ad on the Web. It accounts for nearly 10 percent of total time spent online by U.S. Web users (just ahead of Google). It has more than 600 million users. It’s like a new global telephone network, except that, rather than carry voice and data, its “content” is personal profiles and connections; rich media; real-time messaging; and an endless array of features, functions, and third-party apps.”
Verizon’s iPhone Doesn’t Drop Calls – NYTimes.com – David Pogue’s elegant and dead-on review of the new Verizon iPhone 4– and why anybody wouldn’t wait until the iPhone 5 comes out over the summer is beyond me.
LEAKED: AOL’s Master Plan – Business Insider leaked a complex PPT outlining AOL’s strategy and it’s both fascinating and chilling. While a brilliant, effective and compelling business strategy, it’s heartless on the content side. Unless I’m missing something big, I sure wouldn’t want to work in that editorial team. Nowhere in this document is there a sense of editorial MISSION. It takes all the robotic qualities of Google and excises the “organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible” raison d’etre. The other thing the AOL strat doc isn’t is journalism– nowhere is there a sense of making the world a better place by shining a light on the best and worst that humanity can do. This is just TMZ on a grander scale, and having just re-read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” 25 years later, I shudder to think that this is what has happened to the company that started out to bring the world online and closer together.
A Devaluation of “Friends” May Be Driving Trust in Thought Leaders – Steve Rubel – Terrific post by Steve Rubel, and I’d love to see this data correlated against other reseach. eMarketer– are you listening? Snippet: “The takeaway: to stand out in a very cluttered media world, organizations must increasingly activate their internal subject matter experts as thought leaders and do so across several spheres of media – traditional (WSJ, CNN, etc.), Internet upstarts (eg Business Insider, Politico), corporate/owned platforms and social.”
Why 2011 Will Be Do-or-Die for TV – NYTimes.com – “As pundits debate the SNL Kagen report that estimated over 300,000 people canceled their cable subscription in 2010, the bigger concern is the Credit Suisse survey that estimated that 30% of Netflix subscribers aged 18-24 are using Netflix in lieu of cable. Think about the ramifications. We saw a similar trend in the music biz when college students were the primary audience for Napster. Like a generation of people who abandoned $16 CDs, these young Netflix subscribers might never use cable. For the cable industry, they are the new lost generation”
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