Wired: Collectivist Versus Individualist Societies and the Individual

An interesting article in Wired on collectivist versus individualist societies and how they treat the individual.

Where Solo Is Sociable (Momus)

<snip>A single person with a free evening in a Japanese city could go to one of these restaurants, a pachinko arcade, a public bath-house, a manga cafe, a cosplay maid cafe, a karaoke bar and other (shadier) places and feel like they were participating socially without being in a couple.

In the West, it seems to me, that isn’t as easy. And that seems counter-intuitive: Shouldn’t individualist societies cater better to the needs of individuals, and collectivist societies cater worse to them? How come it seems to be the other way around?

If the premise is true, then surely some entrepreneur can come up with a way to make more individual friendly establishments in the west.  Incentives…..

Office Move Reminds me of Kitty Genovese

The image on the left is of Kitty Genevese from this article on Wikipedia.  I was rereading parts of different books that discussed the bystander effect.

We just moved into a new office, which is cool, but everyone assumes "someone else" sees a given need and surely THEY will fix them.  Two people within the organization are clearly demonstrating civil courage – which if anything causes them to be blamed even more while others continue to say nothing.

Granted, our situation is far less tragic than Kitty’s, but the bystander effect remains in effect.  Even with great people.

Social Software is Bigger than Search

"Social Software is Bigger than Search" is something we say around the office a lot when discussing Tendenci.  So I really liked this quote sourced from  Bubble Generation (via Eric "Mr. Snarky" Rice)

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that’s
structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer
dynamics.

Web 2.0 can’t live up to its game-changing potential until and
unless the geeks step outside and think outside their own box of geekery.

and later in the post

…why are these issues so difficult for the geeks to grapple with?

My
answer: because for geeks, marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil.

A long time ago I met with a VC on a different project and everything went great.  Until the question of "how are you going to market the product" and my answer was (seriously) "I am going to hire a marketing manager."  Straight faced.  I said that.  For the record – that is officially the WRONG ANSWER.

So ironically if you read the bubble generation post, it was a question by a VC that led me to focus on marketing first.  To obsess on the client’s success.  Using technology yes, but the tech serves the marketing and the sociology.  And the truth is after a while programming isn’t so tough and humans remain interestingly complex creatures worthy of study. So it all works. Sort of.

Speaking at PRSA Southwest District Conference Mar 2-3, 2006

I will be speaking on “Trends in Public Relations Technology: Harnessing the Chaos to Encourage Collaboration and Engagement” later this week at PRSA’s Southwest District Conference in Fort Worth Texas (reg here).  I will be joining Scott Baradell, President, Idea Grove and Jennifer Peper, Vice President, Aristotle.net, Inc. 

Not sure if I’ll have time to make it to Billy Bob’s or the botanical gardens, but I will be there in spirit while talking Public Relations and Tech at the conference.

2006 PRSA Southwest District Conference – New Technologies Panel

Ed Schipul CEO, Schipul – The Web Marketing Company


Fri 3-Mar-06 9:00 AM to Fri 3-Mar-06 10:15 AM

The image at the top?  That is an actual photo of me joining a panel at a recent event.  Really! Or maybe it comes from the Fort Worth convention and visitors bureau site.  You decide. <g>

Google.org to Build Infectious Disease Early Warning Systems

Rachel Weidinger of San Fran, a NWNB (Nerd With No Blog <grin>), sent me a link to this article on Google.org in Wired.

Brilliant’s Wish: Disease Alerts
Google’s newly appointed philanthropy chief is rallying industry support for an ambitious plan to create a global early-warning system to identify and prevent the spread of infectious diseases and other disasters.

It is possible that Rachel W is psychic, or that I babble about similar stuff, or perhaps she read my very first blog post ever which was on the need for emergency rss.  In fact what tipped me over the edge from being a NWNB myself was Katrina and the response here in Houston.

Yes I am definitely a proud capitalist.  Blame the person who gave me Atlas Shrugged.  But as far as putting action behind talk, since Katrina Tendenci (our software) has evolved to include a first responders module for organization response, a emergency social services module to manage intake at collection centers in a distributed environment and we will soon launch the CAPS module beta.  CAPS stands for Common Alerting Protocol (v1.1 link) and is the OASIS alert standard.  The OASIS News RSS Feed is here to keep up on some of the nerdy stuff related to emergency response (and hopefully prevention!)