Amitai Givertz’s Blogversity Blog

Courtesy of Chris Brogan:

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook

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I guess these days I am easily distracted as evidenced by this post, one thing leading to another…

On researching cognitive bias I came across Enemies of Reason by Professor Richard Dawkins. The program originally aired on Channel 4. This discovery coincided with my browsing around on YouTube this time researching, um, YouTube. As a result I now know how to create a playlist and have the series of five YouTube clips roll in one continuous play. Another coincidence perhaps, but this could be what I was looking for for another project of mine. My God, that’s it! Eureka!

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It has been a good many years since I first got my hands on a copy of Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur by Gifford Pinchot. Few books have had such a lasting impression on me. I have kept a copy close to hand in every office I’ve worked in since 1986.

If I had a dollar for every time I quoted from the book: “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” or warned a friend, “You don’t want to trigger the ‘corporate immune system,’ Bud,” I would be quite a few dollars better off than I am this morning. Of course, it would hardly be as I had billed it then, free advice!

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I came across this helpful guide some time ago. It resurfaced today:

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[Can't see the presentation? Click here to view on SlideShare]

The sweet irony of unrequited love for my efforts to understand the recursive nature of blogs has not reached the point at which I realize my efforts might be better spent researching something else. 

One of the benefits of chasing your tail is that in the process there is so much interesting stuff to discover and think about, all wonderful distractions from the bitter irony that if I am ever successful in my quest I’ll finish up kissing my ass good-bye.

And so I discovered Dr. Richard Barbrook who recently published what looks like a smashing book, Imaginary Futures.  I am setting this aside to study more closely because the thesis is fascinating and there is something about the overall feel of the thing that resonates with me, something retro maybe?

Here is the professor in his own words…

…and the text to study. Also, Sarah Snider’s review in Culture Wars, perhaps a better place to start.

As I begin to look at SlideShare for all its virtues as a medium to both communicate and optimize content I am reminded that everything we publish brands us. The challenge then is to create content that is at least as good as the best.

Daggit! I’ve really got my work cut out…

You wouldn’t know it from my posting frequency but I have been quite busy in my research. In an effort to develop an understanding for the recursive nature of blogging and its value, and reconcile Pierre Proudhon’s notion that “property is theft” with the persistent nuisance of walled gardens — or is it the perennial nuisance of persistent identity? — I am in danger of missing out on the increasingly popular YouTube gimme-juice phenomenon. Phew!

I came across this example from Cisco which illustrates the point — take your pick from any one of those above:

Ah, the human condition and the human network are becoming indistinguishable. What a bummer.

Since I started posting on my Recruitomatic blog about a year ago I have linked back to Ebbe Munk’s The Technostructure versus Morgan’s Metaphors a few times. In my opinion, it is an excellent work:

This is a study of the technostructure as described by J.K. Galbraith and Henry Mintzberg. Their notion of the technostructure is compared to Gareth Morgan’s eight metaphors in “Images of Organization” to see if Morgan’s metaphors can provide new aspects of the technostructure…

In 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State. In the book he analyzed his new finding The Technostructure as a part of his description of modern economic life. He defines the technostructure as the leadership of the modern industrial enterprise. He found that it is the complex of specialists and technicians that exercise the decisive power.

In 1983 Henry Mintzberg published both Structure in Fives and Power In and Around Organizations, which among other topics describe the technostructure as taking part in the management and development of individual organizations.

In 1986 Gareth Morgan published Images of Organization where he is using various metaphors to scrutinize our perceptions of organization. The book does not treat the notion of the technostructure as such. Second edition was published 1997.

Since my introduction to Gareth Morgan’s book in 1988 — golly Olly, I’m getting old — it has been a recurring reference for my research and a helpful tool for reconciling some of my experiences in, and at, work. To the extent that have returned over and over to a new reading of Morgan’s metaphor’s I have hardly read John Kenneth Gailbrath or Henry Mitzberg. Ebbe Munk’s reasearch — which is not recent — has rekindled a desire to revisit them more often. And I will.

Ah, metaphors…here’s another that goes with Morgan’s Psychic Prisoner Metaphor - enjoy!

Dion Hinchcliffe posts Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst and raises some interesting points that serve to remind me that this has to be one of the most extraordinary periods of history to be a change agent or involved in business with an All-things 2.0 orientation.

However, I have yet to find something equally substantive to read that addresses the more fundamental issues of how to create an environment in which Web 2.0 applications and social media can be adopted when the underlying management style, corporate thinking, vested interests and technology are typically All-things 1.0. Perhaps I should look harder.

Tom Davenport who is referenced in Dion Hinchcliffe’s post writes in Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations on Harvard Business Online. He suggests that organizational hierarchies and the centralization of power within larger bureaucracies will thwart the aspirations of advocates who would advance the agenda for a flattening of traditional models but offers no thoughts on how to reverse this dystopian — and likely accurate — view of the future. Rather Tom Davenport asks, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a way to create more democratic organizations?”

Well, to my own question — how to facilitate adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in the face of prevailing convention — and Tom Davenport’s tease regarding the creation of democratic organizations, quite frankly, I don’t know. I do think social media enables a vanguard of activists — agent provocateurs, intraprenuers and “radical transparencists” — to force rapid and irreversible change by deploying technology and widgets and things to oblige accountability, transparency, authenticity and responsibility.

The question then is, how many are there willing to lay it on the line for an ideal which may never profit them directly? For sure, they will more likely be crucified than promoted to positions of “power” and influence. Historically, the vanguard and avant-garde have been the culture catalysts but rarely the beneficiaries of social change.

I don’t see social media and mashups in of themselves changing that much about how corporate culture is catalyzed, do you? Maybe it will take an Army of Davids and then some. Or is that wishful thinking too?

The Theory of Attenuation

I came across this post, The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging by Brian Clark who writes Copyblogger. I can honestly say that I must have read hundreds of posts and articles that similarly advise tenderfoots like me how to tiptoe through the tulips. But this one is the one I will reference as I move forward, at least for now.

Why?

Not because it is better than everything else I’ve read, although I like it best. Not because it’s short and sweet. After all, there is the The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging for that. And, not because these five things…

• The Law of Value
• The Law of Headlines and Hooks
• The Law of “How To”
• The Law of the List, and
• The Law of the Story

…are unduplicated pearls of wisdom, they are not. So, why?

When you consider the awful noise to signal ratio of blogging I think it might be just as well to tune into one thing that resonates clearly and stay tuned. Too often, at least as it seems to me, in the quest to find the best information or resource out there we forget it’s not the information or resource that is of any use, but the use we put that information or resource to that makes one man’s post another man’s…er, post? Dammit! So much for “The Law of Value!”

Interestingly, I came across The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging two clicks away from The Enormous Linkbait List published on cornwallseo.com proving once again, in researching blogging best-practice – at least as far as I’m concerned – less is more, even when it’s enormous.