I had signed up to the idea before I bought the book but, even so, Wikinomics written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, is a fascinating read.   They suggest that the new culture of mass collaboration will re-order the power base of the world, and as large a claim as it, I actually believe them.

It is all underpinned by the way in which technology now allows individuals to communicate to each other en-mass, not just one or two at a time like a telephone conversation, or like a dozen people at a meeting for example.  The result is that people organise themselves into massive communities with considerable power, enough to undermine the gargantuan corporate companies that have assimilated tremendous power in recent decades.   Thank god is all I can say!  - if you’ve ever seen the Pixar film Wal-E then you can probably see where all that was heading!

There are examples of how the power base is shifting already: In the record industry peer to peer sharing transformed the industry, recorded companies like Sony, Time Warner and EMI were brought to their knees because millions of people decided to work together, and in the process the power shifted from the corporate, to the listener and the musician.  Wikipedia has revolutionised publishing, and Opensource software projects like Linux or Wordpress (this website is a Wordpress website hosted on Linux servers) are both taking lumps out of the corporate giants like Microsoft and Apple.  And this is really just the start of it…

I was sifting through a backlog in Google Reader this morning when this image, taken by Chip Carey, popped up on Dougald MacDonald’s Mountain World Blog.  It’s John Trudgen, who was multi-time heavyweight ski champion through the 1970s.

Dougald comments: ‘this is one of the most inspiring ski photos I’ve ever seen‘, and I tend to agree.   I can’t imagine the heavyweight  ski championships are like the heavyweight boxing championships in terms of recognition and rewards.  I mention this because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivations.  It seems that it’s one thing to push yourself when you know you will get a lot of recognition from it – say for example an Olympic medal – but it’s another entirely when any recognition will be negligible.

To me it seems these stories are almost more interesting, inspiring and admirable.  Some people need to battle through their entire lives just to survive.

Pics from a recent trip to Tiree.  I posted in greater detail on the High-8 site

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while.  I think it’s exceptional in lots of ways. [click out to full screen for best effect]

” In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet). ”

After several years deliberating backwards and forwards, a nudge from Father-of-Schmo finally got us in gear to pull a new website together for MK Whistles.  I was amazed by the speed with which it came together, something which could be attributed to the strength of the Wordpress platform.  You may not have heard of Wordpress before, but if you surf the internet at all you’ve almost certainly come across it, if perhaps unknowingly.  Wordpress basically makes it possible for the layman to publish to the internet without much technical knowledge at all.    It’s speed of development has been frightening, largely because it’s been run as an Open-Source project – with a worldwide community of people all working on and sharing their developments.  Collaborative Open source methods of working have a huge future.

For the purposes of this project it meant that we managed to get the website up and running pretty efficiently.  Check it out if you get a chance >>

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With the news, before Christmas, that America is going to commit 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, it’s easy to pass over this piece of information without considering much more than politics behind the headline.  Since the invasion in 2001, notably now over 8 years ago, the news from ‘on the ground’ in Afghanistan has dwindled to a distant murmour.   There are still undoubtedly people out there recording it for us to see, but the story isn’t getting through.  It wasn’t until I saw the photo exhibition on this website, that I started to get any kind of idea what it must be like, and even then, watching this at home can’t possibly come anywhere close to what ’s it’s going to to be like for those 30,000 soldiers, or any of the other people involved with that war.