My two cents: For platform owners such as Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft, the ‘art’ is to close the door only so much that the input-providing participants don’t feel uncomfortable squeezing through it, and keep providing stuff (apps and content), because the consuming participants will only start switching once they realize the restrictions applied lead to a perceived lack thereof. Angry nerds won’t fix it. Unless they invent a different thing that restarts the cycle.

What he meant to say with the headline quote was of course that the world needs his peers to enjoy the richness of online media, and he argued that the government needs to push for stricter copyright laws. Like what? Sanctioning free content because it’s harming his peers’ business? I’m sure he’d love that. It’s just that way of 19th century thinking that once you’ve set up your factory, it’s going to run forever and all the boss has to do is maximize profits. In addition, new industries would pop up and the one with more money would buy the other and so forth. And it all keeps growing and growing.

But as the post-industrial age has kicked in long ago, it should have become obvious that it doesn’t work like that any more. And it won’t help that your industry is not producing material goods but collecting and repacking information (or rather data, I can’t help but come back to my axiom again), because it’s still run like the old-fashioned factory. We don’t need factories any more, we’ve had them long enough.

What’s not working anymore is people who used to buy an issue of a magazine with at least 50% advertising in the real world, won’t do this online. They have the choice of getting their desired information one article at a time from the source they like best. With ads or without. Paid or for free. Yet publishers had a hard time adapting their question “How can I get as many people as possible to buy / subscribe to my magazine?” to “How can I offer the best content for an acceptable price?” (of course there’s also the industrial “How can I lower the quality without losing too much of the readership?”), but the new question is a different one.

This new question is “How does my stuff fit into the big picture?”. There are millions of outlets on the Web offering articles on the same topics as pay-for magazines, but for free. Not as consistent in terms of output volume and regularity, but often in terms of quality. This leads to my idea where commercial publishers seek the cooperation with authors who publish for free. The commercial publishers will then support the free authors by publishing their (commercial) articles on their (free authors’) website or blog, like guest articles (of course these article have to be paid for when someone wants to read them, and the free author whose site the thing is published on gets a small share), thus improving the experience for the audience.

Instead of trying to persuade the world to come to their place, publishers of every kind of media must start serving all the outlets out there (this is what Seth Godin refers to as curatorship). What publishers understood is they need to be on the shelf in as many stores as possible. Now, moving beyond physicality, the number and variety of stores is infinite. And infinity has always been a good prerequisite to make money for a long time to come. If you embrace it.

• There is no correlation between the amount or quality of data and the amount or quality of information. Example: “I don’t use a DSLR camera for filming because it’s not good enough.” This opinion (information, subjective) does not require anybody to know all the facts. Everybody has a different threshold when they feel having sufficient “information” (it’s data) to make a decision, change or define their worldview and tell themselves a story. The data which is not included in the story becomes irrelevant. Trying to persuade them differently is unlikely to yield success then.
• On Air Promotion trailers: The less data you need make the viewer feel informed, the better. The worst thing you can do is give the audience too much data. The factual data should no more than name and time of the show. Everything else better be a story people can connect to (and for this to happen, any emotional reaction is what you want, not only positive ones). Don’t give them data, because then they’ll start putting all the input into context themselves and stop listening. You don’t want that, of course. This applies to advertising in general as well.
• The previous part also applies to presentations. The purpose of a presentation is to give information by present data in a narrowed context. This means you (the presenter) need to boil down the data to a level as simple (yet still correct) as possible. Do not show complicated charts or graphs (and worse, reading them to the audience). What’s on the screen or whiteboard is only supplemental to your verbal argumentation. It is not the information.
• Do we really need compilations of references? At least their compiler should have the decency not to label it a “Guide” or similar. Because it’s not. It’s a directory, index, compilation, collection. Yeah I know. People love Guides and How-To’s. People love “not getting scammed” even more.
• We need to train and force ourselves to decide on the spot more often, because it is often that we do have enough data and information to decide on the spot, but we’ve so gotten into the habit of “digesting” and “sleeping over it” we’re just too slow.

Last week, German newspaper Die Zeit published an article citing a study among managers and their biggest issues on the job, resulting in ten rules a good manager, according to the paper, should follow. Let’s just say the author would have better read some books on the topic, yet he seemed to prefer the blather. But that’s not why I’m writing this.

The study revealed that one of the most pressing problems of managers is the amount of decisions, which requires a lot of information for each of them. Obvious. To decide, you need information. Now, what is information?

I like Fredmund Malik’s definition that information is knowledge that leads to action. Now, if you think about it for a few seconds, how much of the things that enter you brain in the course of a day do lead to action? Indeed, very little. What’s the overwhelming majority then? It’s data. When you look up the definition of data and information at Wikipedia it’s all there, though I don’t agree that a book with all data about Mt. Everest automatically becomes information. Data only becomes information when it is put in a context that leads to an action on your behalf.

Looking at all the bits and pieces we’re dealing with daily that way, it’s plain to see why making decisions is such a massive time-consuming process. It’s not information we’re dealing with on the input side, it’s data that we must put in perspective, be it an analytics report, a movie clip, the latest news. It’s not that we (as humans) were producing ever more information, we’re just producing ever more data which in turn we must filter out to obtain information.

Now, is what I’ve been writing about in these few lines data or information to you? Since we will keep producing ever more data, the ability to distill data to information will become key to future success for anyone, because all success depends on the ability to make decisions. This necessity requires not only organizations of every kind to teach their employees how to get better at this, it also requires schools to switch from teaching young people to learn everything from a limited resource (i.e., a school book) to learning the process of filtering out the irrelevant data from an unlimited resource (i.e., the Internet). For the careful reader, the previous sentence has turned data into information. Thank you for reading.

There are a number of music collaboration platforms on the web already, but most of them don’t seem to be very productive, because all projects are open-end, there’s no deadline, no need to ship. Hence engagement soon drops after the initial euphoria. I think making music is more fun when it happens quickly and spontaneously, as well as under a time constraint, something you can see in the many remix contests that only allow participants to work on their remix for a few days or even a few hours.

So here’s the beef:
A collaborative music platform where there’s just a limited amount of time to finish a song. Not measured in real-word time, but in project-time. Huh? Very simple. A song has to be finished in, say, 12 hours. For instance, a guitarist starts a new project by uploading a riff. Someone downloads the music file and adds a bass part. The timespan until the new file is uploaded again will be added to this project, so when the bass player needs 90 minutes to contribute her part, there’s 10 hours 30 minutes left to finish the song. To spice it up even further, the whole thing does not happen in linear fashion, there can be multiple forks or branches per project. Again, huh? Well, say there are two bass players and each has a different idea (likely to happen), there will be two branches on each of which the project can be continued, each with its own timeline. Combine that with 3 different lyrics, 5 vocalists, one drummer, you might end up with 30 results based on the original part.

I’d be extremely happy to see someone turn this into reality. Got questions? Just drop me a line.

But that’s not what we need. To make it really clear: We need to spread ideas that have not been approved yet. Not only is this when innovation happens, it’s also where the money is made.

The idea to this post came to me when I read some of the comments on Peter Jackson’s Facebook Page after his last update (before they exceeded 100). There was quite a number of people half-heartedly applying as actors for the Hobbit shoot, like “Check out my page and contact my agent.” and I felt like is this how you say “Look me up, I’m on this new thing, it’s called Internet! Can you believe it?!?!” in 2011? Like any other person, or I dare say more than any other person on this planet, he won’t have the time. None of us has.

So please…  even if you (secretly) are Peter Jackson, don’t ask anyone to “come and get it” unless they know (and most people don’t, so there’s a paradox at work here) that you’re the best (if not only) person in the world to deliver this kind of thing. Until then, you’ll have to keep sending your colleterals, applications in whatever form, whatever. Thank you.

• Mass-produced products: This is everything made “in a factory” in a standardized process which leads to (almost perfectly) identical copies distributed to all retailers.
• Unique products: These are products that are made “by hand” specifically for you and only you, unique.

The difference between the two is like buying a shoe in a shoe store or from a shoe maker. The first is a finished, tangible, testable, take-it-or-leave-it product. The second is not really a product because it doesn’t exist yet, it’s a service.

The problem is we as consumers buy 99.9% off-the-shelf stuff, and thanks to the Internet this side of the market has become very transparent. Whatever we want, we type it into the search field and within seconds we know about price and availability. And because we do it all the time we have come to believe that this holds true for any product. Which is not the case, of course. How do you compare products that have no been made yet? Obviously you can’t, and the only thing you can do is make guesses by talking to the manufacturers to see how you like them, or talk to people who have bought something there.

So when people are hesitant when it comes to buying products that are not comparable, one of the better things to do when you’re the one making these products is facilitating the exchange of user experience, creating a community of fans and curious people, a go-to place. Do not leave them lost. Help them make a decision they are happy with, whether it’s in your favour or not.

The problem companies with an industrial background now are facing is this is not a repetitive process, something you can manufacture cheaply and sell for a lot. It’s a process which requires you to care about one single topic more than everyone else so you become the go-to person (or company), and you have to accept that you probably can’t repeat this in another area, because you have to sift ever more, so your own time gets ever more scarce as well. But you only have to have a following in one area of demand to have enough leverage to monetize on it.

So here is the wrap-up of the whole axiom: