|
Ownership, Sentiment and the World Wide Web
It seems to us that certain values may be shifting as the Web continues to thread itself
through our lives. There was a time when ownership of the physical thing seemed important. We can remember friends who put in a lot of time to assemble complete collections of their favorite TV programs.
Programming that VCR, and remembering to load those tapes and label the boxes... then they could gaze with fond contentment at their video library. Upstairs Downstairs, perhaps, or I Claudius. Or maybe Charlie's Angels.
Today, though, you can get the whole season with no effort at all, in a nicely boxed set with lots of extra goodies. You don't even need to buy it, since you can rent it from Netflix, or borrow
it from your local library. Soon you'll be able to stream it to the set whenever you like. Netflix already has hundreds of titles available that way, at no cost beyond a regular DVD membership.
Thanks to the Web, physical goods are becoming more and more replaceable. You can find just about anything you could possibly want, new or used, and have it in your hands within a day. Anything that can
be digitized (music, words, images, films) can be available on demand.
So the day may come when the only things worth owning will be the things that carry personal, sentimental value. It won't
matter so much that it's a Spode teacup, in a Berkshire pattern. What will matter is that this particular teacup was mom's favorite.
Talking Back at eBay
One of eBay's foundation elements is the system by which buyers and sellers rate each other. EBay is
an odd model for a marketplace, since it's a little unnatural to hand over cash for something you haven't seen to a person you haven't met. EBay has more than 82 million active users, though, so strange
or not, it's an idea that works. One reason could be that people believe eBay's rating system is telling them the truth. If a seller has a history of 5,000 transactions, and a 99% satisfaction rate, he
must be pretty good. It's called reputation management, and we've written about it before. It's at the
heart of lots of social networking systems.
Probably this week, eBay is making a change. Buyers will still be able to evaluate sellers, but sellers will be shut out of the conversation. It seems
the system has become a "retaliatory feedback loop," to quote a recent article in The Washington Post.
Buyers are afraid of getting zinged by sellers as payback for a negative rating, so they're just keeping their virtual mouths shut. EBay is reworking the whole architecture, with new fees, incentives and
process steps. It's also going to establish some oversight mechanisms of its own to target deadbeat buyers. But some sellers aren't happy about the changes, and are worried about losing the ability to
talk back to their customers.
That's because eBay is more than a marketplace, it's also a community. The rating system is not just a tool to identify problem buyers and sellers, it's a platform
for eBayer conversations. They want to keep talking, and like the interaction. How this all plays out will likely influence trust management systems in other community sites too, where the conversation
isn't mostly about commerce.
Meeting Adversity
Meetings are a fact of life, and given the rampant teaminess these days, you're probably going to more
meetings than ever. One survey found that professionals attend 61 meetings per month, even though they admit to daydreaming through those meetings 91% of the time. In fact, 39% admitted to having fallen
asleep while a meeting was in progress.
So if we all believe meetings are a waste of time, destroyers of productivity and black holes of boredom, why do we keep scheduling them? Perhaps we
genuinely like the idea of being part of a team, and can't credibly feel we are without the meeting ritual.
Driving a productive meeting is a lot harder than most people understand. You need to
establish trust among the participants, so you can have collaboration instead of competition. Meetings should be clearly focused on a short-term objective (the thing we need to decide today), or they'll
devolve into political maneuvering and shifting alliances. Meetings also have a social aspect that has nothing to do with productivity, and the primary value may really be derived from the few minutes of
shared time before things actually begin. That's a time when people can tell jokes, share some gossip, talk about their weekends and otherwise renew the social contract.
In a recent radio interview, Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg offered another idea about why meetings fill so many of our hours. As much as people hate them, maybe they hate working more.
One Family, One World
You might have missed it, but last Saturday was Pangea Day, a global community event intended to
bring the world together through film and another example of how Web technology is changing the human conversation.
Pangea Day's mission was to use film as a vehicle to focus on the common ground
people share, instead of the differences and conflicts that divide us. It featured a four-hour program that included 24 short films, broadcast in seven languages, going out over television, streaming on
the Internet and pumped to mobile telephones. The program also brought in live events from Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. There's a website, of course, and the content is still there for your viewing pleasure.
Last month,
we wrote about TED Talks, and Pangea Day has its roots there. Filmmaker Jehane Joujaim won the Ted Prize in 2006, and used her $100,000 grant to lay the groundwork for this event. (You can watch her acceptance speech at the site; it's quite something.) The hope is that people who were inspired by Pangea Day will continue to participate in community building, organize local events and find new ways to connect with each other. A documentary about the day is in development.
Unsubscribe | Change your profile
HOME | © COPYRIGHT 2008 KNOWLEDGE STREET LLC
|
