Global Neighborhoods TOC v.01

For you old timers who have followed this blog when Robert and I just started writing Naked Conversations, you may recall how we struggled over our Table of Contents (TOC). The TOC is a key component of what you send to the publisher in the hopes of getting an advance payment for writing a book.

For writers, the TOC is the road map to the book and determines what and who you will cover as well as what questions you will ask. For Naked, we wrote about 10 versions, before striking our deal with Wiley.  Then we discovered the one they had approved didn’t work when we tried writing it and so we did another one that came out okay in the end.

I’m nowhere near ready to write a final TOC for  Global Neighborhoods.  That ma not happen until next year after Rick Segal and I complete the series of travel chunks we have now decided to make, rather than do the formerly touted World Tour. The new way is less dramatic, but it allows us to spend more time meeting people and less time in airline security queues.

In any case, here is my first stab at a TOC.  Call it v.01.  Picture a big marble slab, to which I am hammering out my first chisel marks.  Last time reader input made Naked a much better book than it would have been if we had written in private.  I ask again for help from you members of our studio audience.

Please tell me what me all your thoughts. Give me some of that tough love for which the blogosphere has become so famous.

This is how the book looks with those first chisel marks taken.  Please note that nearly every bullet point will have cases studies to be added later. Also, please note, this is just the first of at least three parts. The outline, with the case studies is about 100-120 pages of the book. It’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Part One: What’s happening

1 The irrelevance of geography.

• Charlene Li says that the internet is making geography irrelevant
• Global Communities are forming around shared interests in everything from politics to technology to hummingbirds.
• Global Neighborhoods refer to the communities where we feel safe to hang out.
• Power is shifting from large central organizations to small, decentralized organizations.
• Users generating and sharing everything: digital media; open source code, etc.
• Most influential have become people most generous to communities rather than those with largest media budgets.

2. The business handicaps of “Big.”

• Big traditionally an asset in business and government. Power of incumbency.
• During times of rapid change such as these, large organizations simply cannot move with sufficient agility.
• Disintermediators--media, government, borders, regulatory laws, etc. becoming impotent —cannot command, control or worse, monetize
• People during deaf/blind to traditional communications efforts.
• Big companies accustomed to competing with big companies using big company tactics.
• Less adept at stopping “armies of ants,” loosely joined in connected world.

3. The exploding universe

• In tech sector, Silicon Valley has been center of the universe, but that universe is expanding at incredible rate.
• Tech startups in Ireland, Estonia, Italy, Ho Chi Minh City, Phuket, etc.
• Use internet to accelerate development, market, distribute, sell, cut deals, recruit people. Do work where its cheapest, etc.
• Barriers to starting borderless, social media company extremely low.

4. The lobster trap

• Barriers to entry are low but the barriers to exit are extremely high. It may be like Hotel California or a lobster trap.  Once you get in, you cannot get out.
• 1600 social media companies.  85% expect revenue from contextual advertising.
• Traditional media business model.  Free to use, ad or sponsorship supported
• 1600 companies, 85% hoping to be acquired by Google, Microsoft & Yahoo
• If this is the outcome as many people think it will be, has anything changed at all? Are we headed from decentralization back to recentralization?  If all the little companies either become big companies or get acquired by them what ultimately changes.

Please let me know your thoughts on any and every aspect of this. What is too obvious?  What am I missing? Can you give me some examples for each of these sections? I am also likely to insert a chapter on government and blogging, but need to do a little more research on the subject before I jump in.

Comments

[David Rogers]

Seems software focused, especially when you talk about the exploding universe and the lobster trap. Still seems like you talk from SV as the center of the universe.

My perspective (we all have our own, don't we) is as a small business that sells a hardgood. Agree with the irrelevance of geography and the virtues of being small. But how do I "create" a safe neighborhood of likeminded individuals that allows my business to prosper? I'm not seeing this in your v1 TOC...

That said, I do like the position that you have taken. I am just looking for the golden nugget that will take my chosen idea into a global neigborhood.

[Scott Fisher]

Papers like this one (http://www.dtc.umn.edu/%7Eodlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf) by Odlyzko and Tilly look at calculations of network utility and actually point out that there are "Gravity laws" that value locality over distance in some cases. It seems to me that people have been touting irrelevance of geography for some time, but in real life the relevance or irrelevance is heavily dependant on context and what needs to be expressed and get done.

There are all kinds of studies of CMC that point out differences between mediated and face to face communication (which I don't have detailed information handy, but generally conflict often is higher and certain types of tasks are more difficult and take longer).

I'd be interested in seeing a more balanced discussion of distance instead of simply saying "distance and geography are obsolete. " Maybe this is planned, but just isn't reflected in the short outline.

[Sterling Camden]

If you're really looking for some of that "tough love", especially I expect on the irrelevance of geography and the barriers to entry, I'd solicit Shelley Powers' thoughts. Maybe the Technorati genie will bring her here with this magic spell: http://bbgun.burningbird.net/

[Jeremiah]

1) Clarifaction?
"Users generating and sharing everything: digital media; open source code, etc."

Users are not sharing code, they are sharing data, media, and ideas. Web applications are sharing code.

2) What about mobile devices? how is this connecting folks?

3) Not all communities are online (third world countries)
Does this apply to them? I'd guess not.

My cousin called me out big time a few weekends ago:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/08/21/internet-usage-in-third-world-countries/

4) Individuals are taking fame on the internet, a personal persona is more real than a larger company 'brand' image. (Scoble vs Microsoft)

[Ged]

The Irrelevance of Geography

- True, but thats the power of the Internet, and has been so since MTV and CNN have been beaming their content into homes
- What is interesting is the way that cultures have fragmented and become differentiated, for instance look at the muslim world

- Just because geography has become irrelevant doesn't mean that an American PoV and American English is the lingua franca of the world: think the BBC and Aljazeera which both have a world audience but do not have same world view as CNN
The business handicaps of big

Big
- Lets not also forget the problems of small organisations. For most small businesses be it a plumber in London or a farmer in Kenya the technology that is making the most different to their lives is the mobile phone. Internet computing isn't that important to them, let alone blogging and other forms of peer to peer comms

- Another classic example of where small falls down is rise of services that offer bloggers money for positive posts and the lack of separation between commercial and editorial teams commercial micro-publishers, whereas when you look at the recent Larry Siegler episode you can see the value of the checks and balances in the fourth estate

- Whilst many people like to be entrepreneurs Big often attracts the biggest share of talent, these people have a lot of good content and analysis floating around in their heads. This gives Big a greater pool of content providers to draw on

The exploding universe
- People dream of being the next Google from all over the world but Ireland and Estonia cannot match the natural environmental and cultural advantages that Silicon Valley enjoys. Thats the reason why companies like Yahoo! and Google have been harvesting many of the technically clever people in the UK that would otherwise found start ups. Often companies from outside Silicon Valley are newsworthy because of their outside status

The Lobster Trap
- Surely you mean Bubble 2.0. Most of the symptoms described have been occuring in the tech sector for the past two decades.

[Carter Harkins]

I wonder how much of this emerging "Third Space" of social media mirrors the physical communities in which we live. An historic perspective on a large city that once was a small town would probably reveal similar attitudes about what some thought was an appropriate size and others no doubt didn't care for, and for yet others, sounded like a nightmare scenario.

In bygone days, the books being written about the changes coming to communities centered around the Interstate, not the Internet, and those in control who moved forward with plans to bring the the highway to town did so out of a belief that the town's inhabitants would benefit from the connectedness such a road would provide, and those that didn't see the value most likely left for sleepy places that still had wooden sidewalks and packed-dirt Main Streets.

I would love to see a balance in the discussion borne of historic reflection and juxtaposition. I think we might find that much of what is happening online has happened in real space before. This doesn't de-legitimize the discussion; rather it could deepen the understanding of what is taking place, or perhaps even lend accuracy to predictions of the impact such changes are having.