CEO Bloggers' Club

Culture, language and thinking

I sometimes think that people in areas like Europe, where the mix – and sometimes clash – of multiple languages and cultures are a part of daily life, might think differently than people who dwell in more culturally homogeneous areas like the US.

Languages are not simply words, but reflections of world views. To understand and speak multiple languages requires an ability to think in multiple languages. This kind of fluency forces people to see and understand other perspectives.

In the US we don’t have that fluency. The Atlanticand Pacific oceans, plus the size of our continent, serve to isolate us culturally, and I think our relationship with the global community often suffers because of our failure to fully understand other points of view.

I would be interested in hearing other points of view on the subject. Agree? Disagree?

How Friendster Blew It

Scott Rafer hits it on the head:

If Jonathan had instead of found a way to accommodate hundreds of thousands passionate users who were doing a ton of free work on his behalf, I don’t think we would have ever heard of MySpace. The pets example is the clearest. In the Fakester purge, Friendster is reputed to have deleted 300,000 pet accounts. As a spoof, one of the funniest guys I know set up Dogster and Catster. It’s still funny but no longer just a joke. The two sites now have 150,000 active pet owners, a bunch of unregistered traffic, and a great little business that does whatever the heck pet owners want and gets paid nicely for it.

Jonathan [or whoever was making the decisions] wanted the site to be a dating site. However, the users wanted it to be a place where they could express their creativity and humor by creating fake accounts and other TOM foolery.

I was actually thinking about this yesterday, but from a feature standpoint. Friendster keeps adding stupid features like horoscopes and sending out lame emails that says, "We miss you. We have new features."

But, what myspace has that Friendster doesn't have (the last time I looked) is the ability to post html all over the place. People can customize their profile pages like it's geocities. They can leave comments and send bulletins in html. They can set up event invites and groups, etc, etc and do the same thing. It enables people to express their creativity or lack of it. (And to pimp their stuff.)

The lesson to be learned from all of this:

   Your users might find other uses for your creation. Let them run with it.

Thinking about Ethics and Transparency

I have been doing some more thinking about ethics and transparency, and I'd like to share some of my thoughts with you in the hope that you will respond with your ideas.  My basic premise is:

...that truth and transparency are, in fact, two very different things, and that transparency needs to be pulled apart from truth and examined on its own merits....

Wikipedia has a good working definition of transparency. Here’s the kicker: “In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics, sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.”

Let’s repeat: “Transparency is the opposite of privacy.” Of course, you can’t say that about truth, which drives home the difference between truth and transparency. Truth doesn’t require that “all information…is open and freely available.” It only requires that the information that is presented is honest and accurate. And that gap between the information that is presented and making all information available ... [has resulted in charges of unethical behavior].”

The conflation of truth and transparency is therefore a problem...

I think we need to define some basic guidelines of how to bridge that gap in the face of the new realities of participatory communications (consumer-generated media).  I'd like to hear from you as to what you think some of the challenges are and/or how you are trying to solve this.  Or, if you think I am totally off-base, please let me know why you think so.  I look forward to hearing from you; just leave your comments below or contact me at ealbrycht [at] gmail [dot] com.

One year !

Today is the first birthday of the CEO Bloggers' Club.

I launched this club last sumer without precisely knowing how it will grow and how many will join us, I have to say that I've been impressed by the result and the implication of some of the members that have been either regular authors or regular comentors, so thank you for that, you made it great !

How are we going to launch year 2 ? Well, there are some new things that I'd like to initiate and to do here with you. First of all, I won't stay anymore in the back office as moderator mainly, I am going to share here informations I'll find in the blogosphere and that I will find might be of interest to all of you, so I'll be a much more regular author.

As you probably seen, I added an EVDB calendar to show informations about event coming in the world and to which you might want to participate, an "event" list of several conferences also, please feel free to ping me if you learn about any other event that you'd like to see there.
Of course, I'd like to hear about event linked in a way or another to "online communication", social software, RSS, blogging, podcasting, communication...

There will be also in the very next weeks the launch of the CEO Podcast, a podcast in which will talk about all those new communications tools/channel/trends and provide pragmatical informations, thoughts, insights, your views on how they've impacted your companies or your dailies activities.

We are now more than 90 members around the world, this is a huge "case studies" resource, so I'll be happy to interview those of you who will be interested to share their "voice" here with us, some guests will also participated in this new podcast. The format will be 15-20 minutes max interviews, I hope will be able to make it lively. I already talked about this idea with some of you that are based closer to me, if you wan't to participate/open the CEO Podcast (the name might change, nothing fixed today, more an open idea), make any suggestion in the topics you'd like to see address, please, leave a comment or send me an email at guillaume (at) bloggingplanet (dot)com.

Most of us are now back from holiday in France, I hope you all had a great summer, I also send my thoughts to those of you that might have been affected by the ravages of hurricane Katrina those last days, this is the opportunity to let you know about this initiative focused on raising awareness of and funds for relief efforts to aid those affected.

I hope you'll enjoy Year II here with us.

Guillaume
Founder of the CEO Bloggers' Club

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