• Technology Review: Market Watch: Convergence Is King – On in a series of articles Tech Review has on "The Future of Media". Convergence marches on. A great summary quote from the article: "The key technical characteristic of what works is the ability to facilitate consumers' desire to read, watch, or listen to any content they want, anywhere, anytime."
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python – An educational diversion for the budding computer programmers in your family!

• Disney’s Going Digital: Buy Once, Watch Anywhere – The slow boat of convergence is picking up speed.
• U.S. Navy CIO: Social Media Should Be Part of Military IT Standard – U.S. Navy CIO Rob Carey wrote that social media is a resource for the American military that should be used to build trust and collaborate, both within and outside the organization.
• How the Internet is Changing the Way We Will Watch TV: Scientific American – The slow boat of convergence continues to chug along…
• Gartner: Loosen up on Social Networks, Security | Deep Tech – CNET News – The reality of enabling social networks marches on. From the article: "…corporate computing departments shouldn't block social networking and security shouldn't completely lock down communications with the outside world. And even if information technology authorities wanted to shut down such activity, they couldn't. "

• I Know It When I See It : Andrew McAfee’s Blog – Great post from Andy's new blog helps define what Enterprise 2.0 looks like.
• How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic – ReadWriteWeb –
• Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Yet another sign that the days of physical media are numbered as more people get their entertainment content delivered direct from the cloud.

• Social Media Marketing – Who, What, When, Where, Why and How? – Mike Fruchter puts together a great list of things you should be asking yourself as you begin your trek into social media marketing.
• Will YourEnterprise 2.0 even make sense in 2009? – Venkatesh Rao has some spot-on predictions of how changing consumer behavior, 2.0 technologies, and the recession will create a "perfect storm" that forces the hand of traditional businesses in 2009.
• The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World – WSJ.com – WSJ article provides a sound basic understanding of social marketing strategies. Business is slowly learning to join the conversation that the Cluetrain Manifesto told them about eight years ago.

• The Partnership for 21st Century Skills – Home – For the K-12 set: A wonderful site advocating the improvement of our education system to include 21st-century skills. From the site: "The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a unified, collective vision for 21st century learning that can be used to strengthen American education." They hit the nail on the head by stressing Creativity and Innovation Skills; Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills, and Communication and Collaboration Skills.
• Moving towards the 2.0 “movie-going” experience – Ian Da Silva poses a thoughtful question about the future of movie distribution. This parallels many of the "converged" purchase models that I have discussed with my media clients. It will be interesting to see how long it is before you purchase your ticket at a theater and are given the option to pay an extra fee to download the video when it is released online…

• enterprise 2.0 … it’s this simple, see « pm blog – Mazy Hedayat posts a deliciously complex and confusing diagram that summarizes all the moving parts of Enterprise 2.0. A bit tough to read or use for learning, but it is a great summary…
• Why Companies Need Web 2.0 – Forbes.com – No new news here, but Mike Schaffner summarizes how "Web 2.0" (cringe) technologies must be adopted by companies to remain competitive.
• Tear down the broadcast towers – BuzzMachine » Blog Archive – Jeff Jarvis posits on how Web video and radio "could" make broadcast obsolete. Best part of the post is the comments. The way we consume media is changing dramatically and it will impact how we use media to teach.
• Grockit – About Us – Learning 2.0 – From the site: "Grockit is Learning 2.0. Grockit is about questioning together. To this end, we are developing an online learning game where people can teach each other." I look forward to seeing the game!

• The Future of Media >> TV Gets More Social – Perhaps we can move beyond the boob tube: "New technologies focusing on the convergence of TV and community continue to turn watching TV into a social activity."
• OLPC XO Laptop 2.0 Has Dual Touchscreens, Looks Amazing and Future-y – OK – Great. But how will this new design hold up in a developing nation environment? I wonder if OLPC has lost focus from its primary misson..
• Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool (AFP) by AFP: Yahoo! Tech – The cultural tides are changing to embrace Web 2.0: "Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors"
• Unplugging Conferences (Techlearning blog) – Steve Hargadon shares his twelve (OK – thirteen) "Ideas for enhancing or creating self-organized meetings". Unconfrences are (potentially) a great opportunity to recreate Web spontaneity and dynamic learning in a live setting.

Today I had the great pleasure of presenting a session on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 at MIX08 Italy in Milan. I was there as a guest of our strategic partner in Italy and Germany, Reply. The day was kicked off with a keynote by Microsofy CEO, Steve Ballmer (see videos here). There are other posts about his comments on Yahoo! So I thought I would just share some of my thoughts on the other parts of his talk (and the follow-up Q&A).

Content + Community + Commerce was the mantra for the talk. This seems to be there way of recognizing that software is not the main driver in IT any longer. Now it is all about getting people what they want (content) in a social experience of their choosing (community) and, of course figuring out how to monetize that (commerce) so you can stay in business. The one thing that struck me from the talk was that the only monetization model he talked about was advertising. While I’m sure they are considering service subscription models as well, he didn’t mention it. During Q&A the theme came up again when he said the reason they were after Yahoo! was that they were a advertising and marketing platform that was already at “critical mass.”

Software + Services is the solutions theme for Microsoft. This is there take on how they will help us serve the C+C+C from above. Despite Ray Ozzie’s release of Live Mesh and some observations that MS finally sees that software is dead, Steve stressed the continued importance of software. He described how software will evolve in an environment that wisely balances desktop, Web, enterprise, and devices. Seems to me the “software vs. services” debate is semantic posturing. In either case we will still need engineers writing code that moves bits.

“Consumer, consumers, consumers.” That quote and his discussion of consumers was the only part Steve’s talk that made me cringe and think they still don’t get it. In this day and age, no business should look at their users/customers as consumers. I agree with Matt Jones’s definition of consumers. The people who use our products are our partners, not mindless consumers. Empowering people to partner with us to make our products better is at the heart of Web 2.0. If Microsoft does not get this, they are going to have a tough row to hoe.

Looking foward five years. Finally, perhaps the most animated and interesting part of his talk were his visions of the future of computing. They really were about services (supported by software) that reflected the pending convergence in media and technology. To paraphrase badly, he told a brief story envisioning a future when he is golf watching “TV” and shouts “Hey Bill, did you see Tiger sink that putt”. His intelligent “TV” would recognize that Steve wanted to say that to Bill Gates and would instantly find if Bill Gates was available for Steve. Bill’s “cell phone” would let Bill (sitting on a beach somewhere) know that there was a message from Steve and play the audio of Steve’s comment as well as the video of Tiger’s putt. Steve would respond, “that was nice – what kind of ball is he using?” Steve would rewind the video, zoom in on the ball, click it and get instant information about it and a link to buy it. He would tell Bill the brand and order two boxes for them. This was just one example of his crystal ball gazing – he also discussed ePaper and projectable surfaces.

Overall, his talk was interesting but didn’t break any new earth. But it did make me wear a tie. I try to avoid wearing a tie like I try to avoid root canal surgery. When I asked my Reply hosts if a tie was required for my presentation, the response was something along the lines of, “we know Americans don’t really wear ties – let’s wait and see what Steve does…” So, I was counting on Steve to go tieless. Wisely, he chose to show respect for the host culture and he wore a tie. So, I followed suite.  The most difficult part of the whole day was remembering how to tie my tie…

These are my links for April 22nd through April 23rd:

• Blog Learning : eLearning Technology – Tony's take on the power of blogs as a learning tool. True for established bloggers with the time/incentive to blog and who build up a network of cohorts. But for the average Joe's blogs give reflection opportunities – valuable, but not unigue to blogs.
• Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Torture by Information Overload – This comes up more and more in the questions at the events I deliver. People are increasingly concerned about the productivity impacts of Web 2.0 platforms. If your employee Twitters all day, does her performance improve?
• Whitepapers – Building a collaborative workplace – Anecdote lays out a series of steps for developing your organization's collaboration capability and includes a simple test of your current collaboration capability.
• The Future of Technology: Total Convergence and the “Media Explosion” – Interesting bit of crystal ball gazing about how we will consume media in the future. Lots of interesting extrapolation possibilities about how we may consume knowledge and learning as well!