Being even more intrigued by the HBR IdeaCast I mentioned in the previous post, I ordered Wikinomics from the net. It started off interestingly describing how a very traditional and secretive industry, mining, has used mass collaboration to find gold in old mines. I’m all for this and believe companies can do a lot more in this area – it’s just a matter of will and vision. Wikinomics has a website where they continue the discussion.

I also found another interesting book called Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It’s sort of on the same lines as Wikinomics but more from the managerial point of view. I’ll post some reviews once I’m done.

There’s a short, but informative podcast on Harvard Business Review IdeaCast on Wikinomics, the new book authored by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It’s about 20 minutes long but has a lot of interesting inside into the mass collaboration that the masses can provide corporations working in both more traditional industries as well as those working directly with the web. Strongly suggested.

There’s a good report from Feedburner published recently on the RSS subscriptions market. I love when companies open up their statistics this much and share the data with everyone. Interesting to notice that there’s still quite a bit of vacuum in the market. When Google entered the market with their Google Reader it showed a 56% increase in RSS subscriptions, according to Feedburner.

This is the question I asked my self when I wanted to start this blog. Not that long ago actually – yesterday to be precise. The reason being quite practical – I want to collect links and ideas and discuss them with a bunch of people and through that clarify my own thoughts in the industry. I currently work at a Finnish internet company creating and capitalising on gaming communities online. It’s hard work, but interesting and challenging. While many theories in academia are logical to form and create – it’s a totally different thing to put them into practice.

Why the name then? I’m a big fan of Seth Godin, his writings and his blog. This is my way of thanking him for the inspiration. I could of course write in my mother tongue, Finnish, but it would narrow the discussion to a group of people which I personally didn’t see worthwhile as empowering groups of people, building communities is certainly not only a national phenomenon taking place in Finland.

To sum up the beginning and mission of this blog, I think Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes quote does it best here;
“It’s a magical world ‘ol buddy. Let’s go exploring!”

There isn’t a better way to start a new blog by posting a video of a web community panel hosted by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Ventures. Very interesting stuff, especially the emphasis on the product. The participants in this panel are:

1. Akash Garg of hi5
2. Sean Suhl of Suicide Girls
3. Max Levchin of Slide
4. James Hong of HotorNot
5. Markus Frind of PlentyofFish
6. Drew Curtis of Fark

Enjoy!

(via How to Change the World)