Recently in General Category

I send out an extremely irregular email to keep people posted on what's up in my world and the most prominent content I'm creating. I thought I might as well post it on my blog as well...

What's happening in the living networks
June 2009

---

This is a quite extraordinary year for me. It's now been 15 months since I've sent out a 'newsletter', so this email is a bit of an update on what's going on in my world, which makes it quite a long email.... The most important of all this is the birth of my daughter Phoebe on 7 June, packed into a time of great change and development in my work, writing and businesses.

I believe that 2009 is the turning of an epoch. Linear shifts are giving way to exponential change as we call into question existing structures. The key theme for me is divergence: there is a rapidly growing gap between those thriving and those struggling. These are very, very exciting times.

In this update I provide links to some of the more interesting content we have generated over the last period. The best way to keep up with what I'm doing and finding interesting are my Trends in the Living Networks blog or my Twitter updates.

In this update:

---

- I morph into futurist and entrepreneur
- Launch of leading events firm The Insight Exchange
- Implementing Enterprise 2.0: New book and consulting work
- Recent keynotes in Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, Sydney, Perth etc.: videos and presentations
- Future of Influence Summit coming soon!
- Relaunch of Advanced Human Technologies
- Media coverage: New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, SBS, SkyNews etc.
- Most popular blog posts: influence framework, future of finance, Twitter and media, organizational change etc.
- Phoebe Dawson is born

[NOTE:] You have to be viewing the full article for the internal links above to work

This evening I spoke at the Upsides of Downturns event at Creative Sydney. The Creative Sydney festival is intended to celebrate the creative wealth and diversity of the city, which is far deeper than most people appreciate and absolutely world-class. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to any of the other events, but I heard some great things about what has been happening through the festival.

I’ll post separately on what I spoke about – below are the unedited notes I took during the presentations and discussion. There were some great ideas put forward, with the most prominent theme of the evening how more and cheaper space in and around city centers can support creative connection and communities. There are clear lessons for urban planning and driving creative cities.

Andrew Ramadge, News.com.au
Challenge of the death of newspapers. The upside is that young journalists are experimenting and trying new things.

Hello to the world from Phoebe Dawson! One more perfect instance of the daily miracle of life...

She was born 7 June 2009 at 12:44pm, and weighed 3.85kg (10% more than Leda at birth), looks gorgeous, and is bright and healthy. Both Phoebe and Victoria are doing well.

Leda is very excited about baby sister! Daddy and Leda are back at home and baby sister and Mummy will come home soon.

Mythologists will note the connection between Leda and Phoebe.

We intend to all get away on a little holiday soon to have a bit of a relax if we can, then the rest of a busy year beckons…

Over the last month - in between all the other things I do - I have delivered five keynotes in San Francisco, Perth, Sydney, and Abu Dhabi, which has meant an average of over 2 hours each day on airplanes. This morning this sequence of keynotes ended, and I now have a bit of a break from speaking commitments.

One of the things that will be taking a lot of my time and attention is the arrival of my second child in the next week or two. Moving from a family of three to one of four is a big thing - I expect! Soon after we'll head off for a holiday in Fiji to get over all the excitement and have a rest.

Other than that in coming months there will be lots of business building, including working on the Future of Influence Summit and related content, creating some new web properties, and putting energy into developing a couple of the companies in our group. Hopefully I will be able to keep up a reasonable pace of blogging along the way, at very least by spinning off part of the content from our reports and research...

Yesterday evening water got cut off to our house, and then the electricity went out. There were sounds of roadwork outside, so I presumed that as had happened before they were digging up pipes in the road and hadn't bothered to let us know.

In the morning my wife Victoria got up and then rushed back in the bedroom saying I had to get up and look. I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed and beheld a big hole in the ground in front of our house. A landslide had taken away part of the road and a couple of cars with it. The photo below (click for large version) is taken from our balcony.

We in fact have the absolute best view of this in the city, as we live in the penthouse of the tallest building around, right in front of the hole. Exclusive access to TV crew available by bid in sealed envelope (or email).

At last!!! It is literally over five years now that I have been wanting to revamp the website for my core company Advanced Human Technologies. In the meantime we have created many new websites, but the size of the task of reworking my original website, combined with the reality of an always-overfull list of pressing priorities, meant that it never quite made it to the top of the agenda. Click on the image to see the new website.

As announced a few hours ago on Twitter, Beth Etling and I have today launched a new events company, The Insight Exchange.

It’s a major step for both of us. I’ve been organizing events in various forms for the last dozen years, and started doing it more seriously three years ago, when Future Exploration Network launched the Future of Media Summit. Since then Future Exploration Network has organized the Future of Media Summit annually – which is a major production since it’s run simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco – and we’ve also set up and run for the last two years both Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum and Web 2.0 in Australia.

Following our extremely popular Trend Blend 2007 and Trend Blend 2008 trend maps comes…. Trend Blend 2009!

Created by Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, also of NowandNext.com, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead.

Click on the map to download the pdf (810KB)

To pick out just a few noteworthy elements of the trend map:

CORE THEMES include:
Uncertainy
Ageing
Global Connectivity
Anxiety
Power Shift Eastwards

SUBJECT THEMES include:
SOCIETY: Search for control, enoughism
TECHNOLOGY: Simplicity, Telepresence, Gesture based computing
ECONOMY: De-leveraging, 2-speed economies, Shorter product lifecycles
ENVIRONMENT: Bio fuel backlash, Negawatts, Nuclear power
POLITICS: Virtual protests, Globalisation in retreat, Immigration backlash
BUSINESS: Networked risk, Transparency, Asset price uncertainty
FAMILY: Debt stress, Allowable luxuries, Middle class unrest
MEDIA: Flight to quality, Facebook fatigue, Skimming, Micro boredom

POSSIBLE RED HERRINGS include:
Climate change crisis
Fall of US Empire
Nuclear power
Device convergence

GLOBAL RISKS include:
Major Internet failure
Influenza pandemic
Major earthquake in economic centre
Obesity
Electricity shortages
People taking trend maps too seriously

As usual, this is released on a Creative Commons license, so feel free to play with it, adapt it, and improve it!

Wishing everyone a fabulous 2009 – be sure to take advantage of these upcoming trends!

In 1996, when I left the world of corporate employment to do my own thing, I soon realized that not only do you not have anyone organizing a Christmas party for you, you may have no-one or very few people to party with.

So together with some of my self-employed and entrepreneurial friends, we decided to have our Christmas party together. This year is the 10th anniversary of the self-employed and entrepreneurs Xmas drinks.

It just seems like a really obvious thing to do, and every year it’s been a fabulous event, with a stack of great people turning up and celebrating. It’s primarily intended for the self-employed, entrepreneurs, and those working for micro-businesses, but absolutely everyone is welcome to turn up and join the festivities. Open to all.

Date: 16 December
Time: From 6pm
Where: Centennial Hotel (front bar), 88 Oxford Street, Woollahra
Drinks and food available for purchase at the bar.

You can RSVP on the Facebook site for the party (and see photos of who’s coming), or just see you there!

Every year I say that next year I’ll do something bigger, and maybe get sponsors to provide some food and drinks, but I always get busy. Hopefully next year I’ll get my act together on this…

Blogging is both rewarding and frustrating. I can get my thoughts out as they emerge and get immediate feedback and engagement. But it is always hard to find the time to blog. I would love to blog more, but client deadlines, event organization, hiring staff, and far more end up being higher priority. Someone asked me recently if I thought of myself primarily as a blogger. Since I usually manage from one to a few posts a week, far from it. It’s something I try to fit in to a very packed schedule. It's now well over a week since my last blog post, and it's very frustrating given there's so much I want to write about.

I always have a backlog of at least 20 blog posts I want to write, including drawing on recent media interviews, content generated during events, book chapters from Living Networks, speeches I deliver, specific topics I’m developing, and far more. On top of that, I like to get engaged in current blog discussions on a timely basis when they’re of special interest. As such the frequent requests I get from PR and other people to cover things extremely rarely cut through.

One of the hardest times is travel periods, when I get intensely stimulated, but find almost no time to write, with email and current projects filling all available gaps between meetings and client work. I just got back to Sydney this morning after a few days in LA and Silicon Valley, and while there is much that happened on the trip I’d love to write about, including my client project on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, meeting Khris Loux of the extremely interesting JS-Kit, some very stimulating discussions with a strategy executive from a major handset manufacturer, catching up with Chris Saad of DataPortability and Faraday Media, and much more, the reality is probably just a fraction of this will get written up on this blog.

Two months ago Wikio launched a ranking mechanism for the top blogs in the world, appearing to use a more sophisticated algorithm than the incumbent leading blog search engine Technorati. In the latest monthly reclassification by Wikio, Trends in the Living Networks has been ranked #27 of all business blogs. In part the high ranking is due to the fact that there are relatively few blogs about business, with technology and politics the dominant subjects. In fact the blog is ranked #761 out of all blogs for this month, still not bad considering I don’t get to post on here nearly as much as I’d like – a few posts weekly recently. However I intend to start posting quite a lot more as our research for this year's Future of Media Summit gets under way. Thanks for being a reader!

We are currently hiring a new finance/ admin person. One of the impacts of online job classifieds is that it is far easier to apply, and so you get far more applications than when people had to write and post a letter. For another position we're advertising, for an Extremely talented office/ events/ digital media assistant, we've received over 150 applications in the last five days - a few very good, and many just not worth looking at.

However there are occasional compensations for the work of going through many resumes. One application for the finance/ admin position included the following in her career history:

XXXXXXX Finance Service in China (a professional financial consulting company, handling tax dodging sensibly and regular accounting operating for clients)

As an accounting clerk/ admin officer

Ahem.

These things always take longer than we’d like. But finally the new Future Exploration Network website is up! There are some new features to the site that I’ll point out in subsequent posts, and a couple of final tweaks yet to make. Please let us know in the comments here or by email if there’s anything that doesn’t work properly or you have any suggestions – thanks!

This year looks set to be a very interesting - perhaps transitional – period for my organizations Future Exploration Network and Advanced Human Technologies. While they currently function as highly virtual firms with only a small core team, they may start to grow more as we do larger projects and also get involved in some online ventures. Our strategy is to largely hire people in part-time roles, which gives us access to a whole pool of students, parents, enterpreneurs, and deviants who find it hard to get stimulating and challenging work within their constraints, and keeps us fluid and flexible.

We’ll be advertising a couple more roles in the next little while. For now please pass on this ad to anyone who you think might be interested – thanks!

Extremely Talented Office/ Events/ Digital Media Assistant – Part-Time

Media | Internet | Strategy| Events | Future : Work in a boutique international firm in a highly diverse role including administration and using your talents

Tomorrow we leave on a little over two weeks holidays – it’s a good time of year to get away, so we always take the opportunity. The last three years Victoria and I have taken our New Year’s holiday in various Asian countries – Vietnam and Laos, Thailand, and Japan. The last was with our lovely daughter Leda, who was four months old at the time, but not too young to acquire a taste for Japanese cuisine and esthetique.

This year we’re heading to the North Coast of Australia’s New South Wales. We’ve made no bookings for accommodation or anything else, so it will be a very laid-back affair as we wander around and probably hang out for a while in the hippie hinterland rather than cosmopolitan Byron Bay. My wife Victoria will paint and design, and I may make some progress on my novel set in the near future (realistically a few years away from publication yet). Leda will no doubt make some friends and enjoy being out of the city for a change.

I’ll report back on any startling encounters or insights when I'm back, but there’s unlikely to be anything as futuristic as Leda’s encounter with a robot in Akihabara, and more likely I'll just experience a very pleasant stilling of the mind before I throw myself into 2008, which promises to an extremely fun and exciting year.

Have a fabulous New Year!