Picture credit: alicepopkorn

Back at the turn of the century, though, E was predominant as the prefix for what was supposed to be new and exciting.

Of course, e-mail led the way and everyone [large and small] was soon desperate to do e-commerce and e-business. The letter e quickly became prepended to all manner of business terms, logos and taglines.

Then came the iPod and its stable-mate the iPhone. Very soon Apple will release the iPad, which will probably have no less an impact than its predecessors.

The success of the Apple iProducts has spawned a plethora of i-too nomenclature, supplanting the earlier e prefix,  in the hope that purchasers may make associations between aspirant products and proven winners.

The paradox though is that in the commercial world it’s difficult to apply the lower case iFad to the key term: Intellectual Property, which is all about capitals.

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Picture credit: castaway in Scotland Now

It’s a very difficult situation for him, because he was using YouTube as the sole repository of his video output. So without his account, he has lost access to a back-catalogue of valuable stuff.

I am sure that Google and Youtube are within their rights and I can’t really comment on the details of the case.

But setting aside the nature of the disputed copyright violation content for a moment, there are a couple of observations that might be drawn as lessons for others:

Firstly, the YouTube “Three Strikes” policy seems to have been invoked without a prior warning.

Secondly, committing clearly valuable content (unique business video creations) to a non-contractual provider in the cloud, without backup provision, is a clear risk – albeit a risk that many of us routinely ignore, either wittingly or unwittingly.

Mark has my commiserations for his predicament and I do hope he can reach a settlement with Google/ YouTube, even if they only re-instate his account on a “final warning” basis.

Of course the real lesson is: what Google giveth, Google may taketh away.

You may also like to read:

• Groupthink: the danger of compromise
• managing by gimmick
• Corporate Trust versus Social Media

Picture credit: Arty Smokes

So was she a playgroup assistant, or a renowned artist? I will never know.

But it made me think how quickly we can jump to conclusions from first appearances – and how fertile our imagination can be, if we give it some space.

our brains are quick to jump to conclusions but our minds are more imaginative when we give them some thinking space.

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Picture credit: JohnLeGear

I watched an intense conversation on Twitter the other day, between two people who had quite different concepts of whereness.

“Jack” believed that his whereness depended exclusively on his current physical location/ geography, whereas “Jill” believed that her whereness at any moment was simply a function of her current connectivity/ point(s) of engagement.

For sure, for a variety of political, economic and commercial reasons, the earth is not yet a completely level playing field. But it is a lot flatter than it used to be and that means that many of us have developed very different personal allegiances since the popularisation of the web.

For many people this is a natural state of affairs and they have no qualms about steadily extending their reach into new realms of transglobal conversation; others though still cling to the comfortable metaphor of the physical world, even when using advanced communications technology to smash geographical boundaries.

Quite simply I believe that  ”where I’m at” always describes a state of mind (or whereness) coupled to various communitities, mostly of like-minded individuals.

For me, this state of whereness bears little allegiance to the physical globe, which for centuries has been a very powerful mental model instilled into generations of children to give them an understanding of where they ‘fit’ into the world.

As a psychological construct, I am not sure that the traditional globe will fulfil that role for much longer, as successive generations inherit peer-to-peer communications as their natural way of life.

Perhaps our sense of whereness needs a new abstraction to replace the globe with a new map that reflects our ‘place’ in the world more appropriately.

Here is  such an example:

Picture credit: anne helmond

Of course the physical globe  [for all intents and purposes] does not share the dynamic fluidity of the online world – but I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a dynamic mapping function to help us navigate our way through the ever-changing online world. Indeed this is probably a fairly trivial task for a competent programmer. Such dynamic whereness maps would also help us to manage effectively the challenges of our nowness!

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