My crack squad of monkey researchers comes through again with a few interesting links:
- Blogs, Media, and Business Strategy: David Foster draws parallels between business strategy, media bias, and blogs:
The authors argue that disruptive innovations–those destined to change the structure of an industry–tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents. They provide examples in industries ranging from steel to semiconductors. In steel, for instance, the challenger technology was “mini-mills” using electric arc furnaces to melt scrap. At first, the steel produced in these mills wasn’t as good as the steel produced with the incumbent technology, the gigantic integrated steel plants, so they focused on an unglamorous and relatively low-margin market: reinforcing bar (rebar). Big-steel executives could afford to disregard the mini-mills and to focus on higher-end business.
I would bet that the comments made by some big-steel execs about their mini-mill counterparts were quite similar in tone to the comment recently made by a CBS exec about bloggers in their pajamas.
- Andy Cline and Jay Manifold announce a new joint venture called 411blog.net, a resource whereby “a symbiotic relationship between blogging and traditional forms of journalism can be deliberately cultivated.”
- Belmont Club has some excellent information regarding how the process of mapping social networks and understanding their properties can be used to take down terrorist networks.
- Kevin Murphy notes the surprising similarities between musicals and action movies.