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Where We Are Headed |
barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
12/7/2008
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I have been thinking a lot recently about some of the phenomena that
are described and associated with Web 2.0 technologies and the economic
forces behind them. In her book “Web
2.0: A Strategy Guide”, Amy Shuen does a great job surveying
various features and capabilities found in Web 2.0 companies as well as
explaining how these are driven from an economic perspective, sometimes
in ways that are essentially redefining economics, or at least
permanently changing the landscape.
For example, she discusses how financial analysts calculate the value
of Web 2.0 companies using different kinds of metrics than than non-Web
2.0 companies. She explains that financial valuations of Web 2.0
companies are no longer calculated based on earnings multiples but on
new models that were originally designe ...
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As I Sit Here Floating Gently in the Sky |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's creative blog
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By barton on
11/29/2008
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This is genre of blog entry I rarely indulge in: the revealing
disclosure. But I have been silent for more than a year on
this blog, and some explanation is in order.
As
I sit here floating gently in the sky, just making landfall to North
America, my fingers are “itchy” to type these words. I have not felt
this in a long while and have been waiting for this feeling for a long
time.
I am flying back to San Francisco from Berlin, watching
the longest sunset one can possibly imagine, one that reeks of
California even from here on the Northeastern tip of Canada. The flame
red hue banding the edge of the hemisphere I now speed toward, speckled
with cloud, dotted with overtones of purple and yellow, diffuses into
an innocuous baby blue. And it is getting lighter, as if morning is
coming, though I know I am merely crossing the wake of coming nightfall.
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Rethinking Ourselves |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
11/23/2008
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This interesting
overview from Dr. Michael Wesch, a digital ethnographer at
Kansas State University, presents some of the fundamental forces at
play in "Web 2.0" technologies. In addition to explaining the
technology, this video makes the crucial observation that people, not
technology, are the drivers, enabled by the technology (see Engelbart).
Wesch concludes his video by reminding us that Web 2.0 is causing us
(among other things) to rethink copyright, authorship, identity,
ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love,
family, and ourselves. Thanks to Amy Shuen in her book "Web
2.0: A Strategy Guide" for this helpful reference.
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Luminous Group and Microsoft's BizSpark |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
11/8/2008
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We're very excited to have been asked to be part of Microsoft's BizSpark
program for startups, making it easier than ever for privately-held
software development startups in business for less than 3 years and
have less than US $1 million in revenues to obtain full access to
Microsoft tools and technologies such as Team
Foundation Server and SharePoint.
We've known for some time that while these products help teams work
better, they are often cost-prohibitive, especially for startups who
are just starting out.
That's why we are so excited about BizSpark.
As a network partner, Luminous Group are able to sponsor young startups
for this program and give them ful ...
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Agile Open California Wrapup |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
10/18/2008
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We sponsored the Agile Open California conference for the second consecutive year and the event was held last week. It is a really stimulating, interesting and non-traditional conference. For example, there is no conference agenda. Instead, it follows the open-space model for self-organization, where people put sessions on a centralized board in real time, and people show up at the events that are of interest to them. I find the format to be very dynamic and engaging, allowing for the ideas in one session to literally give birth to other sessions which follow.
If you are interested in learning more about Agile practices or have already adopted them and are looking to c ...
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Collaborative Systems as Cultural Constructions |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
9/7/2008
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Many companies are unaware how their culture creates material effects within the organization. Social conflict and the deployment of new technologies can produce positive changes within an organization by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models.
Culture, those patterns of human activity and symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance, is not generally included as part of the design and deployment process when a company goes forward with a new technology. Many significant deployment failures are attributable to cultural issues (Lorenzi
&
Riley,
2003)(Yeo,
2002).
While we do not normally think of computer systems as part of our culture, the manner, dress, language, belief systems, and norms of behavior found within an organization clearly extend beyond the boundary of a computational system, especially one that is collaborative. People define the essential meaning and structure of these systems. This is why w ...
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Patterns of thought in software adoption |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's business and technical blog
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By barton on
4/16/2008
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We've been doing a lot recently supporting teams in deploying and / or
upgrading to Team
Foundation Server 2008. It's been a very interesting and
enlightening period of our work at Luminous because it is field testing
and reinforcing some of the fundamental ideas we have held
about the underlying patterns of thought people experience when
adopting software.
Software adoption is a complex cultural process that is often relegated
to a functional discipline that is ill-equipped to address the
organizational and cultural requirements that support
successful adoption. Adoption is not simply putting someone
new in front of someone. Optimally it addresses the notion of enhancing
the capability of the individual, which inherently is about changing
the way people think about the world and their relationship to it.
Software adoption always occurs as some substep to a larger p ...
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There's no stopping it now... |
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barton's aggregated blog
barton's creative blog
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By barton on
9/22/2007
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The past couple of weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of activity
for me. It is an irony that in the release of Don’t Stop
it feels to me as if more obstacles have come up in its release than
any other. I am keenly aware that I was perhaps the greatest obstacle
and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the amazing and supportive
team of collaborators & music industry people who have worked
tirelessly to help move this project forward to its ultimate release to
you, the world-at-large. I always want everything to be so perfect, and
this song has been a great lesson in letting go (a lesson I am
constantly learning). I am so lucky to work with such talented people -
the remix artists on this release are all so different and each has
something unique to say in their interpretation of Don’t Stop.
Jaimy, Josh Harris, and Manny Ward - thank you for working with ...
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