Paywall at NY Times not working

Looks like the pay to view on the internet model being trialed by the NY Times is not working. If a flagship masthead such as the Times can't get people to pay to view then what hope do the rags have? Interesting to see how Murdoch will accept this, or deny and force the rest of the news empire behind paywalls. Even the most brain dead advertising exec must be questioning the value of advertising on a falling readership. Is the end for paywalls on newspapers or is it the end for newspapers? Perhaps just for the large newspaper barons.

Trust Your Employees (Or Fire Them)

Great article by David Meerman Scott
about companies that block facebook and other social sites.

...If I managed a hedge fund, I’d sell short a basket of stocks of companies that block social media such as YouTube and Facebook and buy stock in the companies that encourage employee use of these new tools.

Here are some of the reasons given by people explaining why their companies block access to social media sites:

• It is a drain to productivity, because people using social media sites and those participating on forums, chat rooms, and blogs are not doing "real work."

• It is a security issue within the company computer systems (because people are logging on to sites outside the corporate firewall).

• People may harm the company brand should employees reveal too much information (gasp! these sites are open access so anyone can see anything).

• It is a bandwidth issue (companies would need to purchase a more robust internet service infrastructure).

I think the big issue here is really one of trust, and the things listed by company representatives as dangers are just excuses. Ultimately, I think the HR and legal people at companies are naïve and scared about what their corporate charges might do in the wide world of the web. Since the HR and legal people don’t really understand social media themselves (and don’t use it for business in their jobs), they just slap on controls.

If you trust your employees, they might surprise you with the ways they promote your business on social media sites. But if you don’t trust them, you end up with only the corporate dregs who don’t mind working in an organization that won’t let them communicate with others in the ways that people are using today, such as social networking, video sharing, blogs, forums, and the like.

full article here

Prospect Theory

Simply put - while they are risk-averse over prospects involving gains, people become risk-loving over prospects involving losses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory

http://www.econport.org/econport/request?page=man_ru_advanced_prospect

Browser Stats

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

Nine Ways to Disengage your Employees

Original article written by Eric Eggertson .

Want your best and brightest to flee? Want rumors and grumbling at all-time highs? Want lower productivity and increased sick time and stress leaves?

1) Use bloated, imprecise language to make sure your business goals and strategies remain a secret to your employees, suppliers and clients. See The Gobbledegook Manifesto, and do the reverse of what’s suggested.

2) Demand regular, lengthy meetings for every department, work unit and project team. have lengthy regular meetings

that repeat many of the same things that have no relevance to individual employees. Provide no training, mentoring or reinforcement of effective meeting techniques. Avoid effective meetings by not referring to Manager Tools.

3) Lock down access to instant messaging, Facebook, personal e-mail and other ways for people to stay in touch with colleagues and family members, even though employees are putting in unpaid overtime on project work and travel. Make sure everyone, including the media, knows this is because you don’t trust your employees. The foolish arguments against blocking can be seen at the Stop Blocking blog.

4) Assign credit for major accomplishments to one executive. Explore opportunities for this corporate leader to be profiled in major publications, explaining how their go-go management style single-handedly resulted in a new product launch. Make sure employees from these projects get a copy of the media coverage, with a memo reinforcing the executive’s brilliant leadership.

5) Announce a new way of doing things every six months, tied to a management trend the human resources manager or the COO saw at a conference. Hire expensive outside consultants to “drive change” into the organization. This works best if employees can see the consultants trade in their old cars for Hummers and BMW convertibles partway through the change process. If you can’t decide on a bold new change initiative, just pick one from the list at random.

6) Make a big show of management’s openness, transparency and trustworthiness at a company-wide Trust Exercise. Next week, introduce efficiency measures that remove senior management meeting records from the intranet.

7) Show that your organization “gets” social media by launching a CEO podcast, as a companion to their dormant blog. Post the first one at a launch event. Post the second one three months later. Don’t post a third one.

8) Live the corporate values and walk the talk, but reward managers who cut corners and undercut other parts of the organization.

9) Systematize employee recognition, setting quotas for praise. Model the desired behavior by praising work units that weren’t involved in a project. Encourage Management by Walking Around, in which high-level managers dispense recognition randomly.

The rise of the spatial earth

Last century there was a dream of the spatial earth, described by Al Gores famous speech. Well google might have made it come closer, with 60% of google map hits now via the API.


http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

And another example of how copyright can not only hinder progress but be dangerous.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Vic-Govt-limited-Google-s-bushfire-map/0,130061791,339294916,00.htm

Innovation blockers

What stops innovation?

Many organisations harbour systemic cultural problems which act as innovation blockers, these may include :

• Pervasive risk aversion
  
• ill‑designed and non‑inclusive workplaces
  
• focus on the short‑term at the expense of the longer term development of capabilities
  
• lack of continuing investment in people

.



http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview/Pages/home.aspx