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Trends in the Living Networks

Ross Dawson's Trends in the Living Networks blog offers high-level commentary on developments in our intensely networked world, and how it is coming to life. The blog is primarily intended for a general business audience, in identifying critical technology, social, and business trends and their implications.

7 Shifts: The Future of Social Media and Internal CommunicationsAugust 31

Melcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.

I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you're interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.

The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.

Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.

1. Organisations will diverge widely in how they communicate.
The most important implication of the rise of social me

Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping pointAugust 30

Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.

Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.

Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.

While Flipboard also offers various topic filters, the most interesting aspect of the app is that it can select news items based on what is shared by your Facebook friends and who you follow on Twitter.

I showed video below at the iPad Strategy Workshop I ran last week at the Newspaper Publishers Association conference in Sydney to explain the idea of social filtering.

Visualization of top iPad News apps in AustraliaAugust 27

As part of our ongoing research into iPad and media, and also to provide some insights for the audience of the iPad Strategy Workshop we ran at Newspaper Publishers Association, we created a visualization of the top 30 paid and free iPad apps in Australia, as of 24 August 2010.

Click on the image for full-size pdf

The chart shows in the left hand column free apps, and on the right hand side paid apps, each ranked from #1 to #30 in order of popularity on iTunes. The following bar shows the price (for paid), the user rating on iTunes, and the size of the download in MB. The horizontal axis for paid apps indicates price.

The color code shows the type of app, bringing to attention a number of interesting features, for example that aggregators are very popular in paid apps, and that broadcast and newspapers dominate in free apps.

Also see:
Infographic: The NewsScape - 8 sources of value creation in a post-channel media world
Launch of iPad Media Strategy framework

Presentation from iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers AssociationAugust 27

The iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum was a big success. In a large room laid out for 120 there was just standing room by the time it started, with great content and a highly engaged audience.

The Twitter stream for #iPadStrat gives a pretty fair overview of proceedings, though there were just a small minority of people on Twitter in a room full of newspaper publishers.

Here are the slides from opening presentation, as promised:

iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum

View more presentations from rossdawson.

Also see:
Launch of iPad Media Strategy framework
Visualization of top iPad News apps in Australia
Infographic: The NewsScape - 8 sources of value creation in a post-channel media world

Launch of iPad Media Strategy frameworkAugust 27

This morning I ran the iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum in Sydney. To provide a framework for discussion at the workshop (and also as part of our ongoing research into effective approaches to the iPad for media and news organizations) I created a visual framework of key strategic issues, as below.

Click on image for full-size pdf

I will delve into these strategic issues in later posts.

This is a Beta v1 version, so as always, please give feedback on how to make it more useful, including anything that's missing or things that could be put better.

Also see:
Infographic: The NewsScape - 8 sources of value creation in a post-channel media world
Visualization of top iPad News apps in Australia
Presentation from iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association