Amazon’s Business Model Innovation

I thought I’d experiment with a video blog entry. I’ve got no editing software here, so everything was straight to tape. Well, straight to bits. Anyway, if it seems to work ok I’ll scale it up! It runs for five minutes. Amazon & Business Model Design from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo. To summarise my main […]

Networks and the Information Glut

Everyone knows that we’re living in a time of unprecedented access to information, right? Personally, I’m always a bit skeptical of these grand narratives. To see why, watch this short video showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists: It’s great research that illustrates some important points: When we talk about ‘social networks’ […]

Digging In

I really don’t feel like writing a blog post today. It’s early in the morning. I didn’t get much sleep. I don’t have a cat on my lap. I have too many cats on my lap. I haven’t eaten yet. It’s raining. It’s too nice out to be inside. I don’t have anything to say. […]

What I’ve Discovered About Twitter

I first started thinking about using twitter during a very loosely organised but wildly interesting talk from Phil Long (@RadHertz) nearly two years ago now. In the course of a one hour talk that wasn’t called ‘Cool Stuff I’m Excited About’ but should have been, Phil told us about TED talks – showing us the […]

The Problem with Measuring Innovation

The problem with measuring innovation is that you can’t measure innovation. This makes it a difficult thing to manage. Now obviously, organisations figure out ways to measure how innovative they are – but they usually doing it by finding metrics that approximate some part of the innovation process. The fact that our metrics are all […]

How to Deal with Complexity

Is google making us stupid? No. We keep hearing the argument that relying on technology makes us less smart somehow. Plato was probably the first person to make this argument. His target? Writing – his argument was: So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you […]

news business model summary

The purpose of this particular post is to pull together links to all of the posts that I’ve done on the topic of new business models for journalism so that they are a bit easier to find. This is an important issue for news, but it illustrates a broader point. The key to adapting to […]

twitter and the blog

There’s been a bit going on in terms of our communication strategy recently, and I thought it might be worth giving a quick update on what’s happening. As a bonus, I’ll frame it by talking about how it fits with the idea of aggregate, filter & connect. Our objective in writing this blog is to […]

filtering when you’re small

In a strange confluence of events, yesterday I: wrote a post about filtering and connecting when you’re a small enterprise; then Clay Shirky wrote about almost exactly the same subject in a post on algorithmic authority; then I ended up talking about the same topic with Paul Moynagh from the innovation consulting group Tough Problem. […]

lumping helps learning by analogy

Seth Godin’s post today demonstrates one of the key benefits of being a lumper instead of a splitter – you can learn by analogy. Sure, the industries change, the goods/service ratio changes, regulation changes, names change. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. People are people, and basic needs and wants don’t vary so much. Put […]

connecting when you’re not aggregating

In a nice piece in the latest newsletter from edge.org, Annalena McAfee talks about the impacts of digital technologies on modern life (check out the whole piece – it’s quite good). Her first interesting contention is that she feels that younger people are more polite, and more engaged with adults than kids were when she […]

more on open education

Seb Schmoller has written a post discussing a call to action for creating the university of the future. It came out of a meeting held last month on the topic and it has five key points including: We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a […]