also, a visualization analysis of Obama's speech at Neoformix.
There is a lot of interest today in the speech delivered last night by Barack Obama where he accepted the Democratic Party nomination as their candidate. I'll leave the political analysis to others more qualified than I but I thought it might be interesting to have a look at it through the lense of some of my text analysis tools. I've decided to compare it with the 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address delivered by Obama.
The speech visualization
Please visit Neoformix web site to see the entire article and visualizations that includes a interactive document comparison..
Image via WikipediaIn the chaotic times of uncertainty children look for a father figure and who is the best father figure of all 'The Almighty God". So we are going through a revivalist wave again where logical reasoning is abandoned for emotional security.
There is really nothing wrong in people having a belief system. After all mythical mind needs myths and stories to create a brain based emotional world. It kind of provides an anchor to the emotional stability. That is well and good but the trouble comes when every body gets in the business of telling others that they alone hold the keys to the "Magic Kingdom".
I think only one who does hold the keys to the magic kingdom is ouromniscient "Disney" no one else (no pun intended here). They protect it through copyrights and patent laws. In that respect they legally do hold the keys to "Magic Kingdom" by charging a decent fee to enter it at 'Disney World".
Bill Maher's movie documents the trend of religious revivalism by providing many examples where well known people profess to make decisions based upon religious thinking.
Here is a preview of the movie
and
and
These videos provide partial answer to the question people always ask
Question: "What is the Truth"
Answer : "The ideas that won the popularity contest of the day"
This also provides an explanation of why snake charmers always do the best. After all it is the reptilian part of the human brain that makes people take actions not the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Who knows it best to manipulate the reptilian brain: A snake charmer after all. So throw away all knowledge and logic and reasoning learn to be a snake charmer.
The talk by the creator of "Ruby on Rail" on to create profitable business online. He is trying to bring common sense to the business web.
The second ineteresting thing about this talk is the way the sharing widget is created. It is a combination of presentation slides with the presenters video. The viewer can annonate the video. The company Omnisio who developed the technology to create and share this type of presentations is purchased by Google. They are adding the annotation capability to the Youtube videos.
I hope Google opens the technology to others soon enough for creating this type of presentations. That will be a big improvement in sharing the live presentations.
Image via WikipediaThe digital media consists of the following elements
Text/Hyperlinks
Images/Pictures
Audio/animation/video
Interactivity
The web pages are created by using various combination of these four element. It is fairly easy to include the first two elements on a single web page and share those web pages by placing on a web server.
Until recently tools to add the last elements on a web page were expensive to buy and they were difficult to learn. Things are improving in this respect and here is one example where it shows how easy it is to create and share dynamic presentations through web services like slideshare.
This slidecast shows how to use a series of pictures and add sound to it to create a dynamic presentation that can be shared through free web service provide by slideshare.
Image by BBQ Junkie via Flickr Blogging offers an easy way to publish and allow the reader to interact with the author of the blog through comments. This was an improvement over the web sites that were primarily brochure wares.
Since blogging emerged as a publishing platform many new ways of interacting has gained traction.
and micro blogging such as twitter, life streaming through Frienfeed and semantic bookmarking through Twine have also become popular. This provides a wide array of choices to the users of the web. A very informative called conversation prism is introduced by Brain Solis to describe the new media landscape.
In this arrangement blogging becomes one of the tools along with so many other tools that promote the participation and sharing among web users. These tools are easier to use and allow informal conversation among the participants. They provide much more flexibility of expression and equality among participants. Also, blogs are becoming more like traditional media where the popularity of blogs follow the well known power law in which few blogs get majority of the readers attention. Very similar to 20/80 rule like the traditional news and media organizations. Web promised to bring more participation and equality of participation not morph into another reincarnation of traditional media. If that is the case why do we need another competing media. From economical point of view it is inefficient use of resources.
The fastest growing platform on the web right now is social networking with web sites such as Myspace, Facebook and many others. They allow much more informal interaction among participants and in many ways make it easier to create user profiles and let member use other features offered by these social networking web sites. The main problem is that they are mostly walled gardens and the user are mostly at the mercy of the owners of these platforms.
There are other options like Ning, Elegg and PeopleAggregator that allow users to create their own social networks. Interesting thing is that all these platforms are moving in the same direction when it comes to offering the features. The list of the features offered by these social networking software platforms could be long but it follows the same trend that is
User Profiles, management of user profiles
Communication tools such as IM, Chat and e-mail
Blogging capability through notes
Social Media capablities through images and videos
Forums and discussions
Application that can be added with ease within the user profile
Lifestreaming through live feeds etc.
It seems to me that all of the social networks are adding more and more features to look more and more alike.
What does it all have to do with blogging? The blogging software is also evolving. The blogger platform from Google already allows to add widgets and with Google's friend connect in beta a blog can be transformed into a small social network very similar to what Mybloglog is already offering. The recent release of Typepad Pro goes even further and offers pretty much all the essential capabilities that a social networking platform offers minus lifestreaming that people may be able add in the future through simple browser plugins currently in beta.
Here is the figure that shows the capabilities of their newly release blogging platform
The Pro part of the software platform is essentially all the capabilities that one will find in a social networking platform.
Does this all mean that in the future the blogs will evolve and will become web sites that will essentially be a mini social networking web sites? It seems that way if this trend is any indication of the future.
The availability of inexpensive devices to capture and edit images and videos will make it easier to create user generated visual content. This has already created huge image banks at Flickr web site and according to the compete web analytics Youtube ranks #6 most visited site on the Internet with 62 million unique users per month. The rise of Youtube within few short years shows that video as a medium is more expressive and attracts more attention compared to text based write ups.
Does this mean that future blogs will be created using a hybrid of text,images,videos and interactivity as media? Again it seems that way if we follow the trend.
This however will create a serious generation gap between older people who practiced writing and prefer text and younger people who will prefer images, audio and video as a medium of expression.
Rumor has it that Google phone based upon the Androidopen source operating system may become available in September through t-mobile.
I will keep my fingers crossed because I have a Nokia S60 series phone from them I was thinking to cancel their service and get an iPhone. I will wait and see how this rumor pans out. If not there is always iPhone to switch.
Here is a grainy video that shows a prototype of such a phone.
Image via WikipediaThis video shows sitar maestro Ravi Shanker from India and Yehudi Menuhin an accomplished violinist playing together. The best part of the clip starts at around 3:30 minute mark when both of them start playing together.
A clip from 'Music Of Man' presented by Yehudi Menuhin. Got in mid 80s from a not too good source so picture grainy. Nick
Image via WikipediaRight now we are going through another burst of bubble caused by the sub prime lending by the most conservative institution of the Industry the banks. They were supposed to be the institutions that people can trust and place their life savings with them. The CEO's from banking industry are considered the pillars of the society. So what happened? It all can not simply be explained away by blaming it on the excessive greed of bankers. Something more deeper malaise at work here. As usual the tax payers will be paying for the bill that the bank failure will create. Another news recently was that GM lost close to 16 billion dollars. These are staggering numbers. Any other business with that kind of losses will have closed by now. Again some thing missing from the explanation provided by the mainstream presses for the loss.
It all shows that managing business has become very complex affair. People are expecting too much from the miracle worker CEO's who are consistently failing to deliver what they promise. As a result they have perfected the art of creating smoke screens. All of them need PR departments to avoid answers to hard questions. At the same time they will not let go their monolithic, hierarchical style of management. None of them are willing to learn how to manage complexity. Any time a problem comes around immediately a new administrative position is created to deal with the problem leading to creating even more complexity without any solution to the original problem.
Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review explaining edge economy and how Obama used the principles of Edge economy to win the democratic nomination. Even companies like Google are using the principle of "Edge Economy" effectively to win against well entrenched competitor such as Microsoft.
In this video he talks about the shrinking brand and how Google can become a brand name without investing lot of money in marketing and advertising.
Managing technology and technology related businesses is complex because of the need of large amount of information that is needed to manage knowledge workers. IBM for most part followed the old hierarchical style of management to serve the businesses who followed the same style of management. The next version of tech company who became prominent is Microsoft and had one technologist(Bill gates) and one marketer(Steve Ballmer) at the top. Even Apple had the duo of Steve and Steve. One Engineer and one marketer. Now if we look at the top echelon of Google it is a troika and all three top people have background in Engineering. Does that mean that in the future the high tech companies will be run by techies? A management focused on outcomes and delivering it not on empire building and obfuscation.
Image by Alpha Auer, aka. Elif Ayiter via FlickrSlideshare presentations on "Social Media". It shows the growth in Social media and provides details of the various components that constitute what is currently known as "Social Media".
"Social Media" offers another channel for social marketers. It depends on a large extent on "User Generated Content" in the form of blog posts, images on Flickr and videos on Youtube. Also, many social networking platforms such as LinkedIN, facebook and Myspace. Social Bookmarking websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon and reddit also allow users to share information in the form of bookmarks. Semantic version of the social bookmarking is possible as websites such as Twine.
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