I'm halfway thru the book right now and can only say that it's one of the better business books I've read. Of course, I'm a big fan of decentralization so that shouldn't come as a surprise. Once I finish I'll have more thoughts but as a teaser, here's an interview with Tom Peters and Rod Beckstrom, one of the co-authors.
Let's look at the spider first, since we're most familiar with them: body in the middle, four legs on each side, a cute little head on top. If we cut off the leg of an adult spider, we usually get a crippled, seven-legged spider. On the other hand, if we cut off the head of a spider, it dies. The reason it dies is that it has a centralized physiology, and it cannot live without its central nervous system. It has a command-and-control hierarchy within it that's driven by that brain. When I was in business school studying organizations, they had pretty clear organizational structures. There was usually a senior hierarchy: a CEO, chairman, or Board of Directors at the top and layers of hierarchy below. We've been looking at businesses as spiders, having intelligence like spiders, and being organized and coordinated like spiders. Now let's contrast it with the starfish for a moment. When we see a starfish on the beach, most of them have five legs. Some species actually have up to 50. When we cut a leg off, (or an arm as it's referred to in the starfish), that arm can grow back. What's amazing is that in some species, such as the blue linckia, found on the cover of our book, if you cut off all five legs near the center, each arm can re-grow an entire creature, an entire new starfish. You can actually chop a starfish into five pieces and produce five new starfish. These remarkable powers of regeneration, durability, and resistance to attack are due to the fundamental architecture of the starfish. The starfish is a decentralized organism. It's actually more like a community of five different arms rather than one centralized creature. It does not have a centralized brain; it has a decentralized neuron-network. It does not have a centralized stomach; the slit under each arm of a starfish is the stomach within each arm. Each arm has the critical organs required for survival.
Technorati Tags: starfish+and+spider, decentralized+networks
I finished Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code over the weekend. The following of a project from almost inception to two years later gave an excellent overview of the problems any ambitious project can face.
I think I'm going to give the book out for gifts throughout the year because it will help people understand what I do a bit better.
At lunch today, I read a new paper from Microsoft Research about creating smarter blogrolls. While it seems that blogrolls have fallen a bit out of favor by most bloggers, I do think there are some very good ideas in the paper.
Currently, Reader, our RSS aggregator uses the river-of-news approach to showing what's going on within your feeds. It also has a side panel with the names of the blogs that have been updated along with the number of new posts. I could easily see additional information being presented which would have possible topics of these posts. Since we crawl the feeds, we have access to the text and we should utilize it more to help folks quickly scan for possible interesting topics.
Technorati Tags:
social+search, smarter+blogrolls, microsoft+research
I started and finished Made to Stick yesterday. Definitely a book to read if you are interested in how some ideas survive while others fade away. The basic template for an idea to last is for it to fit within the Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Story acronym (SUCCES).
Here's an example, Google's Don't be evil mantra. It's definitely simple and focused, also unexpected since what corporation would ever say something like that. Concrete? Hmm, not really since evil is such an abstract term. Credible? Sure, two grad students from Stanford. Emotional? Not really I don't believe. Story? I'm sure there is one but I can't remember it. So, even though it doesn't fulfill all the criteria, it's still an idea that has stuck around.
Though, Google doesn't really focus on it. The media does though and sometimes that's just as important. Of course, because this idea has stuck around, Google now has to face questions about it whenever they make a decision. That is the possible downside of having your idea stick.
At any rate, it's a great book and one I highly recommend.
Technorati Tags:
made+to+stick, dont+be+evil, google, ideas
Interview with Larry Cornett, Director of User Experience Design at Yahoo
More Smart Answers from Ask.com
Poor indexing of blogs hurting Yahoo and Microsoft search?
Interview with Justin Osmer from Microsoft Live Search
Technorati Tags:
search
I've been hearing more about Stikkit lately. Basically it allows you create smart post-it notes. They can parse various things in the note to allow for collaboration and productivity.
Merlin Mann gives a great introduction and overview, showing all the ways a Stikkit can help keep you on track.
There is also now an API which gives me something else to investigate.
More about Stikkit from Stowe Boyd
Technorati Tags:
stikkit, stikkit+api
I should have mentioned this earlier but my proposal was accepted for XTech 2007. I'm very excited because I've never had a talk accepted as well as the conference is in Paris in May and I've never been off the continent. So that should be amazing.
I'd definitely like to thank Edd Dumbill who chairs the conference for all the work he's been doing for it.
The theme of the conference is The Ubiquitous Web and my proposal is about how search is affected by an always-on connection. As I get closer to submitting my paper and preparing the talk itself, I'll have more to say about it.
Technorati Tags:
xtech, xtech2007, the+ubiquitous+web, searching+the+now
UPDATE: More thoughts from TechCrunch about why this hype now when they are still a year away from launch. Perhaps they are looking for a buyout with Yahoo! being the number one contender. Also, the comments are very interesting especially with the comparison between Powerset and Riya.
The next Google Killer has come out of hiding a bit with the media blitz of Powerset. Here are some varying takes on the company and their chances of unseating Google as the king of search:
Personally, I like Don Dodge's take the best because he takes a different view of what you need to do beat Google and how Powerset could do that.
At any rate, Powerset's a company to watch because of their technology and because of the people working there, including a former co-worker, Josh Susser.
Technorati Tags:
search, google+killer, powerset, nlp, natural+language+search
I couldn't agree more with Joe about software development. It isn't just about building some thing, it's about the knowledge you gain by putting pieces together in new and different ways.
Some additional thoughts from Bill Higgins and John Panzer.
Doug Kaye shows how he is using the various pieces of Amazon's Web Services to build out an application. It really is impressive.
I think I need to find some reasons to use S3 and the Queue service.
Looks like he's also written a book about Web Services. Some sample chapters are available.
Technorati Tags:
s3, simplequeueservice
I pass this post along without comment...
Now, I do understand the point behind standards, and why businesses should pay (some) attention to them. As Shaman notes though, too many outfits go overboard, and empower standards groups beyond all reason. The first question you need to ask yourself is this: Is this helping the customer (internal or external) get their solution sooner? If the answer is no, then you probably have a problem on your hands.