Tag: User-generated content

Green Fields are gone

The camera panned jerkily (watch You Tube) as the Four Brothers sang away their classic hit, Green Fields.

The comments section was led by “I miss my papa, this was one of his favorites”.

The Greatest Generation, and now the Boomer Generation, are slowly but surely fading away. Gone with them are the many lessons and exhibition A-Z on leadership (WW’s), on innovation (Elvis), and on ethics (Woodward-Bernstein). Next Gen, however, gives us new platforms (digital) and new media (text and tweet). They are more racially tolerant (geek is geek), and digital media perhaps contribute to present declining crime rate and growing  gaming industry.

Mecca to them is CES now underway in Las Vegas. Everybody’s an Inspector Gadget. In “From Russia with Love“, Sean Connery was shown a high-tech brief case after receiving his mission to Istanbul. It was a concealed Swiss knife. To open the case, he needs to turn the two knobs half way (quite laughable even by those days’ standards).

Green Fields may sound like farm boys’ ballad, Yellow Submarine , an Industrial utopia, but Digital Generation has yet given us a defining theme (Detroit 2.0?). With User Generated Content (from 1 Billion and counting Facebook fans) and Earth growing population (7 Billion), Next Gen needs its theme song.

I understand the need to stand out, hence personal branding.

I understand the need to be relevant and collaborative .

And most of all, the need to innovate before Green Fields are gone. “I only know, there’s nothing here for me……”  Well, there have been floods in Chile, Haiti, and Australia.

Watch out world! There is nothing Buddhistic about living in harmony with living things. Or else, with biblical-size flooding, the Noah’s Ark in a Kentucky theme park might be real specie-saving act.

A billion bucks!

Twittering to the tune of a billion bucks?

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc20090924_956402.htm?campaign_id=related_AK

And the deficit changed slightly to the tune of 1.29 trillion bucks.

Since when we are anesthetized to these huge dollar figures?

But I must give it to the Lab geeks who came up with new inventions: copying over the distance (fax), texting over the phone (SMS), Voice over IP (Skype) and Facebook/Twitter (user-generated content).

During the Tiananmen Square incident, protesters tried to send and receive fax documents.

And last summer, in Iran, people twittered. Signs of the time.

Tech and social change.

And the Beatles albums got remastered.

“All we are saying, is ‘give Peace a chance'” (Lennon Legend).

It’s not that we are lacking the means for social discourse but we certainly lack the will.

Tribal societies just hunt for enough food (no Frigidaire) and the rest of the night, gather around

the fire, to hear the Chief telling his folklores.

Definitely those fairy tales lasted longer than 140 characters. And I bet you any of the people in that community could recite those tales from memory, their version of soundbites . But they wanted to hear it again and again from the Chief. It’s assuring, like a child who needs to be tugged in . Somehow, in the darkness of night, they believe tomorrow will be the same, safe and secure.

Well, today, you can’t even walk out of a check out line without double-checking your receipts (because the line items

might have been charged with the older and higher prices by the computer, while the sign advertised a lower amount).

Supply chain, bar code, algorithm fluctuation (just like airline price change).

We have mutated way past the smokestack era. And it depends on what your view of the future is,

a Billion bucks for Twitter might be too low an evaluation. You see, it’s the Southwest Airlines model for Narrow-Casting. Citizen news, where it happens, while it is happening. No microwave (truck) nor microphone to make news.

Just twitter. I am sure YouTube will soon limit their video length to accommodate the Network effect (more video, the higher value of the network).

We, worker bees, buzzing and pollinating  user-generated content, 140 characters at a time, to a tune of a Billion bucks. By the time the bottom billion joined in, a billion bucks will have been too low an evaluation.

Whoops! I have just passed 400 words. Old school! Forgive me. My first tech sales was a fax machine, then “brick” phones with separate batteries. And way back then, the Chief used to ramble on way past bed-time. What’s the hurry? Isn’t information (hence knowledge) supposed to be infinite. I got it. We are still operating on old assumptions of network and spectrum scarcity. A agricultural-based Malthusian view  as applied to the information age.  When Twitter gets properly IPO’ed, it might have enough cash in their war-chest to increase data rate to 150 characters. I will then be much happier.