Change or Die, Books vs. E-Books

In 2006, John Updike spoke at the Book Expo event in Washington, DC warning booksellers they were going to be threatened by a "liquid book" and stating "books are intrinsic to our human identity." Welcome Kindle, Sony Reader, and iPad.

Newspapers and music companies have already transitioned from print and CDs to online media. And now publishers are being forced to "change or die" according to The Digital Emperor Has No Clothes.

But, are we ready to give up books? Our generation is stuck between the age without Web 2.0 and the age where Web 2.0 controls people's lives. Although the idea of having instant access to thousands of books, newspapers, and music all in the same place is appealing; I still like being able to hold a book and flip the pages.

Any one else out there going to miss good old paperback books?

Sharing Everything - Open Innovation

Open Innovation

Opposed to companies having private research laboratories (closed innovation), there has been a shift towards companies sharing or licensing research (open innovation). Below is a diagram of closed innovation, on the top, versus open innovation, on the bottom.

Open innovation allows companies to bring technology to the market faster, provides feedback from a variety of consumers, and overall creates a win-win situation for everyone.

So why is this just starting now?

Technology, especially social networking, has made it beneficial for companies to work together rather than against each other. We have already seen this shift between generations; in school we constantly work on group projects, whereas the generation before is use to individual work.

Are we going to experience a complete shift to sharing everything online? If so, is that a good thing?

We Are Family - Social Networking Analysis

"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" and "The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop" both discuss social networking analysis.

Businesses today are creating extensive diagrams, graphs, and charts to describe the different roles employees play in informal networks. The main categories of employees are central connectors, boundary spanners, information brokers, and peripheral specialists.

To simplify the four main roles, lets take a look at AU. AU is the company and the different school are the different divisions. The central connector is the friend that knows everyone and everything going on, the boundary spanner is the friend who is in one school but still spends time with friends in other schools, the information brokers the friend who is always trying to get all the friends from different schools together, and peripheral specialists the friend to go to from each school if you have a specific question relating to their school.

Looking at it this way, most of us have been doing social networking analysis for years. Now companies are paying consultants and specialists thousands of dollars to analyze companies to create more efficient informal networks for more efficient flow of social capital. I could do that.


"Six Myths About Informal Networks - And How to Overcome Them" http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/myths.pdf
"The People that Make Organizations Go - Or Stop"
http://itec335.wdfiles.com/local--files/reading-capital/people.pdf

First Blog

For ITEC-335, Social Networking in Business at American University, everyone in the class has created a blog. Every week we will post our thoughts relevant to the topics and reading from class. We are linking with others in our class to create a blog circle and will comment on their blogs as part of our weekly assignments.

Today, we have created our blogs, made our first post, and linked with the other students in our Blog Circle.

"On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.”