Bad news last week for SNOCAP. On the positive side, even a failed myspace initiative can register a lot of users. SNOCAP built a fair sized list – 80,000 bands and 175,000 consumers (unidentified overlap).

It sure would suck to be one of the folks that got cut. Sorry.

How will the market value SNOCAP’S remaining assets?

From Myspace’s perspective it’s also a significant loss. Key partner SNOCAP has lost credibility. Repositioning SNOCAP will require a major redesign. Replacing SNOCAP seems unlikely and probably not the best move. They’ve no doubt learned a lot from the SNOCAP crew and even more from user behavior. At what point will myspace decide that they don’t need SNOCAP?

[tags]SNOCAP, CAPS LOCK BRANDING, ACRONYM OR SHOUTING??[/tags]

January 2007, NPR’s All Things Considered discusses a National Academy of Sciences report on how budget cuts are affecting our nation’s ability to monitor climate changes.

It appears that the NPR story can be traced back to a confidential December 2006 document that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA delivered to the White House. That same document was leaked to the AP in June 2007 and the story was picked up by CBS, MSNBC, and other major outlets.

September 2007, Financial Times (sub. req’d) published an editorial on the topic, reporting from the perspective of Frank Nutter and the Reinsurance Association of America. It’s a strongly worded piece. Nutter:

“A cross-agency authority should be designated to promote a more cohesive vision for monitoring the earth, one that incorporates the needs of private-sector users.”

It’s good to see the professional risk management community taking a stand in support of better climate science.

[tags]Reinsurance Association of America, Frank Nutter, FT[/tags]

What happened to Merlin? Where did he go?

Last I knew he was with those dudes from Snocap…

There was a potentially interesting wave of hype last January when a new licensing company called Merlin struck a deal with Snocap. At the time I expressed curious skepticism over Merlin’s lack of a web presence. Other bloggers described Merlin as “an agency formed to represent the music industry’s independent artists”, the “first wave of the future”, and the end of “Copyright Apartheid” (huh?).

Bloggers. Anyway – the “pros” were hyping it too. There were stories on CNN Money (expired) and Yahoo news (expired), and this Reuters piece on CNET’s News.com (expired, thanks CNET for leaving a stub).

So where’s Merlin?

[tags]Merlin Licensing, the future of bad metaphors for music distribution[/tags]

Few days ago the SF Chronicle had a Sunday cover story about “neo-nomads” and shared workspaces. The “coworking” wiki and google group have been unusually active too.

What’s this mean for Plan Resonate? Right now, not much. The space on Alabama street isn’t open to the public. Sharing the space was a good experiment. There may be more of it in the future, possibly in a new location. Interim, I’ve decided to deflate the jumpy castle that we had set up in the courtyard.

Pretty interesting to see the Chron using nomadic language. Several years ago it seemed like there was a viable management strategy in the nomadic model. Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation has several attractive elements to it. It’s possible to adapt their rhizome model too, and I’ve seriously studied and experimented with how that might work for Plan Resonate. The results have been inconclusive.

Maybe nomadic thought works better as a fashion statement than as an intellectual framework? I’m not sure, and I’m sure not the first to suggest it. You can now amaze your anthro buddies by ordering this utterly conclusive D&G t-shirt at cafe press.

Selection from D&G’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980):

“Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as “monadic” but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.”

Some of it might be applicable – it’s very much open to your interpretation. At least it’s an interesting example of the intersection of pop culture and academia. Whether or not you think it’s trash, D&G still have a powerful brand. How many of their contemporaries have created as much of a cultural impact?
[tags]shared workspace, nomads, jumpy castle[/tags]

Had a great meeting today with undergrad SCNO students from my alma mater, Michigan State University. SCNO stands for Students Consulting for Nonprofit Organizations. SCNO has invited Plan Resonate and other management consulting firms to play a mentoring and advisory role on student led projects. I’m honored and excited to be involved.

The other mentor firms are:

• IBM Global Services
• Accenture
• Hitachi Consulting
• Mckinsey & Company
• Spartan Internet Consulting

It feels great to have this connection with the students in East Lansing and it’ll be fun to support their work on meaningful projects. A group of us are engaged in some food system development work on behalf of the Greater Lansing Food Bank’s Community Garden Project.[tags]Michigan State University, Greater Lansing Food Bank[/tags]

Mankiw’s blog has a link to a NY Times article on prediction markets. More interesting, in my opinion, is his link to an impressive piece of prediction markets research and analysis by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2004).

Who wants to predict how much time they’ll spend in 2007 digging through archived material from the Journal of Economic Perspectives?

[tags]prediction markets[/tags]

Here’s a picture of blogger Nick Aster. You’re looking his reflection in a Madrid storefront window.

Nick has been writing about sustainable management for years; at Treehugger.com, TriplePundit.com, and others. Treehugger is one of the top 50 widest read blogs in the world. They focus on sexy design as seen from a global and well informed perspective.

TriplePundit is a community of business school students discussing the technicalities of effective sustainable management. Nick and I met at Presidio School of Management, a few short years ago, back when it wasn’t so clear that mainstream America was ever going to care about sustainable management.

Nick wrote yesterday:

“I’ve been absolutely amazed at the amount of coverage “Green” is getting in business publications lately.”

It’s unreal. Sustainable management is a hot story for serious minded management publications like the Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Wired, and Fast Company. Public awareness has traveled so far in such a relatively short period of time.

One interesting component in the recent media wave is that people are doing a good job refocusing what are often relatively old ideas. There are new technologies to talk about – and new movies. Perhaps more importantly there are new media channels to help spread the word. From what I can tell most of the ideas have been around. This is a positive sign.

People are now widely beginning to interpret and respond to signals that have been discussed since the 1950′s. The breadth and depth of historic thought on these issues seems to have recently coalesced into a dominant theme that impacts all aspects of public discourse.

Good design can’t exist without a comprehensive consideration of context and life cycle analysis.

Good management techniques help an organization improve profitability, stability, and community engagement while responding to diverse internal and external risks.

Good science is undeniably influenced by many interdisciplinary factors. Sustainability has claimed a legitimate and irreplaceable domain as one of those factors.

This is an exciting moment and something a lot of people have been working toward for a long time. I’ll give the words a break for now. Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has similar thoughts and kindly shared this quote from Bruce Sterling:

“When the Davos Economic Forum steals your clothes, there’s no reason left to wear them any more. We are winning.”

Not bad.

[tags]Sustainability, sustainable management, tipping point[/tags]

Spamming is cost effective. You don’t have to know anything about running a spam operation to draw that conclusion. Check your inbox. Spam works.

Unfortunately some organizations use spam techniques without any appreciation of what it is they’re actually doing. Either that, or they’re pretending they don’t know and hoping you’ll pretend you don’t care. They use the names of real people, real people leading organizations that you might otherwise actively support. These are organizations that desperately want and need your support. The crazy part is that they let their desperation interfere with their ability to communicate effectively.

When they spam they’re reaching out to everyone they know and saying:

“Hey, we’re building a community of people who read and respond to spam!”

“Hey, don’t you want to join/associate/meetup with all the other spam interactives in your area!”

Most organizations don’t want to send that type of message.
[tags]spam interactives, database marketing, community engagement[/tags]

Couple months back I posted an idea related to data center cogeneration. It was part of the IBM innovation jam. Some people have come here looking for more information. I’m not an expert. If you are searching for that type of info, here are a few resources that might help you along.

First is an interesting forum thread about managing themodynamics in computers. I liked the suggestion that product designers might consider using the vertical plane of a laptop screen for heat dissapation. This seems like a likely future scenario, especially if designers could develop an approach that incorporated the CPU into the area behind the screen. There are pro’s and con’s to this approach, and computer designers ought to comment on the thread I linked to.

The simplicity of this design change is that using the vertical surface makes it easier for heat to rise and enter the surrounding airstream. It suggests that perhaps data center racks would benefit from physical reconfiguration to allow for better thermal management. Have they been designed this way already? Are they being designed to channel the heat to a specific location, or only “away from hot spots”? It seems like designers could aid the process by thinking about the next steps in the thermodynamic management chain.

I had the chance to explore this option recently as it relates to a power supply in a PV solar manufacturing site. The design of the system called for a power supply system to be located in a basement room, and the unanticipated amount of waste heat was causing problems for the designers. The concept now being considered is how components in the power supply can be designed to (A) reduce waste heat, (B) enable better heat dissipation, and (C) provide design features that facilitate waste heat management. The management concept is the part I’m most interested in now.

I’m beginning to understand now how a power supply transformer can be designed to channel and thereby better manage waste heat. It starts at the selection of raw materials, and extends beyond the transformer itself. I’d like to understand if similar thinking can be applied to server racks. Ideally there could be a system to manage waste heat at the processor level, server level, server rack level, room level, until it arrives at the heat exchanger or generator.

SearchDataCenter.com compiles information related to “The New Data Center: Strategies for Today and Tomorrow”. A search of their site for “cogeneration” yielded this 2005 article about cooling technologies by Luke Meredith. They suggest cogeneration as an option to reduce net energy expense by selling any excess power back to the local utility.

Quote from IT consultant Bob McFarlane:

“Overdone air conditioning in an attempt to cool isolated hot spots, by throwing air into a room, is an extremely inefficient and costly way of not accomplishing your goal, because in most cases it simply doesn’t work.”

The article goes on to discuss liquid cooling, fan boosting, and other technologies to mitigate server hot spots. These technologies tend to be optimized to move heat from one area (CPU) to another (heat exchanger). How would the design of these technologies change if the goal was not to dissapate the heat into the air, but to harness the heat energy into some type of power generator? Read the rest of this entry »

Giovanni Rodriguez:

“A leader among peers must join her peers and act in a way that – to borrow a time-tested business cliché, coined well before this uncertain era – adds value.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“But, prince, if you knew, if only you knew how hard it is to get money nowadays! How is one to get it, allow me to ask you? The answer is always the same: ‘Bring gold or diamonds and we’ll give you something for them.’ That’s just what I haven’t got. Can you fancy that? I lost my temper at last, after waiting and waiting. ‘Will you give me something for emeralds?’ said I. ‘Yes, for emeralds too,” said he.”

Matthew Lesko:

“Billions Of Dollars Are Given Out Every Year To Ordinary Citizens!!! Find Out How You Can Get Your Share!!”

The Rodriguez post is here as a recommendation. “The Idiot” link is here for context. The Lesko link is meant to illustrate that it’s not only gold, diamonds, and emeralds that sell.

Rodriguez’s post is a great overview of the leadership challenge as seen from the eyes of corporate social media strategists. In the past I’ve referred to it as distributed strategy making. He’s more specific. He calls it peer production, adjudication, communication, storage/retrival, and aggregation.

There are people who would like to dumb down the blogosphere. I appreciate that Rodriguez is not leading us in that direction. The market rewards a lot of different types of behavior. Select your peer group, get to know your community, and figure out some way to make an interesting if not meaningful contribution.

On a somewhat unrelated tangent, I’m impressed by the SEO people who’ve figured out to how to get the Farmer Brothers site into the google top slot. Same with the guys who helped Lesko tie down “question mark suits”. It must have been a tough struggle against the joker crowd.

On a somewhat related tangent, there’s something counterproductive and anti-intellectual about ivy league Russian lit bashing, but let ‘er rip, you know I won’t sweat it for a minute. Everybody needs a windmill, and everybody loves a train.

[tags]Peer Value, Russian lit, Pattern Language, The Idiot, The Joker, Free Money[/tags]