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Business Practice
Joost’s Deal Plans Hidden in PDF Presentation
Submitted by Mark Celsor on Fri, 2007-05-18 16:12. Business Practice | TechnologyEveryone's been talking about the high profile, internet video startup Joost since they rounded up $45 million in funding recently. With all that money, you may be wondering what they are planning. Fortunately... a technical blunder has revealed many of their business plans including a list of all the big deals that they are trying to close in the next couple of months.
Read the full story from Mashable: Joost’s Deal Plans Hidden in PDF Presentation
Fair Process and the Digg Revolt
Submitted by Josh Ross on Thu, 2007-05-03 10:14. Business Practice | Community | web 2.0I am enjoying the debate regarding Digg’s decision to follow legal advice and pull code from its site (and then back down after a user revolt). The issue in a nutshell (and from this Chronicle article ) is this:
"The news site, Digg.com, removed a number of links to stories its users had posted that detailed a secret computer code that allows movies and television shows on high-definition DVDs to be copied. It took the action after an entertainment industry trade group complained. The site's readers, who collectively pick and choose which stories are displayed most prominently on Digg, rebelled against the perceived censorship by repeatedly reposting the code in question."
Poor Digg then relented by saying they would leave the posts and deal with the consequences. Many articles have used this as another angle on why communities can’t police themselves etc. which in my opinion totally misses the point. The point is that Digg never made its dilemma a topic for community discussion.
One of the nicer responses I have seen comes from the blog Satisfaction where Thor writes,
“The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. Debate would have ensued, but everyone would have felt like they were part of Digg’s ultimate decision, even if that was deletion of the code. More than anything, passionate users want to be heard.”
Amen. This harkens to a simple concept known as “Fair Process”. HBR published a piece ten years ago titled “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy” that essentially states what is common sense; people want to understand the process by which decisions are arrived at and feel that those processes are fair and transparent. What is remarkable is that the study found that the process is more important than the decision… In other words, it is generally more important to people that the process is fair and transparent than that whether the outcome favors them.
Digg has totally missed the point and taken this as some call to arms for the freedom of information and fighting "the man" – when in my opinion, this is about the lack of transparency in their own business decision-making.
"The news site, Digg.com, removed a number of links to stories its users had posted that detailed a secret computer code that allows movies and television shows on high-definition DVDs to be copied. It took the action after an entertainment industry trade group complained. The site's readers, who collectively pick and choose which stories are displayed most prominently on Digg, rebelled against the perceived censorship by repeatedly reposting the code in question."
Poor Digg then relented by saying they would leave the posts and deal with the consequences. Many articles have used this as another angle on why communities can’t police themselves etc. which in my opinion totally misses the point. The point is that Digg never made its dilemma a topic for community discussion.
One of the nicer responses I have seen comes from the blog Satisfaction where Thor writes,
“The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. Debate would have ensued, but everyone would have felt like they were part of Digg’s ultimate decision, even if that was deletion of the code. More than anything, passionate users want to be heard.”
Amen. This harkens to a simple concept known as “Fair Process”. HBR published a piece ten years ago titled “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy” that essentially states what is common sense; people want to understand the process by which decisions are arrived at and feel that those processes are fair and transparent. What is remarkable is that the study found that the process is more important than the decision… In other words, it is generally more important to people that the process is fair and transparent than that whether the outcome favors them.
Digg has totally missed the point and taken this as some call to arms for the freedom of information and fighting "the man" – when in my opinion, this is about the lack of transparency in their own business decision-making.
