For Cities, Is Bigger Better?

Mhari Saito's article from NewsVOA.com describes an interesting application of Smallification:

The plan sounds simple, but Mayor Jay Williams says it's actually pretty radical. "I know for mayors, there are these magical round numbers," he says, "100,000 sounds great and somehow puts you in a different category, but why not be a city of 80 or 85,000 that offers a quality of life that allows you to compete?"

Outsourcing has brought greater efficiency to many companies by allowing them to concentrate on core capabilities. Similarly, there is mass migration underway among large corporations toward service-oriented architecture, a concept that deconstructs monolithic enterprise applications into smaller, stand-alone chunks of functionality. These chunks can be easily shared and reused across the enterprise to create "mash-up" applications.

The common theme here is the recognition that going smaller made more sense -- and ultimately more money -- in a networked, globalized marketplace. Mayor Williams' plans, as reported in Saito's article, reflect an understanding of the kind of evolution that large entities must undergo in order to survive the economic realities of a world that bears little resemblance to world that existed when the Rust Belt thrived

In a globalized, information-driven economy, where geographic location is irrelevant, quality of life is the only issue that really matters. When information workers can do their jobs anywhere, the decision about where to live will be based entirely on the livability of cities and individual communities. In that decision, size is little more than an aesthetic consideration.

Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on Brewed Fresh Daily for the pointer to the NewsVOA.com article.

Why SOA -- or something like it -- is important

Lev Gonick is the VP of Information Services for Case Western Reserve University and serves on the board of the OneCleveland initiative.

In a recent blog post on the the future of my favorite Rust Belt city, Gonick offers this assessment of how the digital world we thought we knew is in the midst of a massive upheaval:

For this generation, empowered by pervasive access, the internet has moved beyond a network of computers. It is, not to sound a cliché, a network of people. All over the world, more than 1 billion people are becoming empowered consumers, co-creating, collaborating, communicating and creating a global web 2.0. It took 15 years to reach the first billion internet users. The next billion to be connected to the Net will take only half as long and the impact will be powerful. Are we ready? This is a generation for whom email is passé, creating web pages are what your mother or father did, dial up is the equivalent for them as the horse and buggy for people of my generation. There are nearly 100,000 podcasts in iTunes. YouTube has over 100 million videos watched daily representing more than 60% of all videos watched on line. There are more than 60 million blogs with over 1.3 million entries and another 100,000 new bloggers being added to the rank of the self authoring voices on the web. Myspace has over 100 million accounts, and Flickr, the web 2.0 community's archive of community photographs has more than 4 million users.

The word "agility" gets tossed around so much in the discussion of SOA that it has lost its meaning. That's too bad, since the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be an ever more important survival skill for any business. Anyone with a stake in the development and application of software will do well to keep that in mind. Maintaining the status quo is a tar pit.

Can the music industry sue its way to profit? - Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently ran a fascinating op-ed series that pitted Radio and Internet Newsletter publisher Kurt Hansen against Jay Rosenthal, a partner with the Washington DC law firm Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, an attorney for the Recording Artists' Coalition, and a member of the board for SoundExchange.

The final installment in the series, Can the music industry sue its way to profit?, deals with the pending massive increase in royalties to be levied on Internet broadcasters. Rosenthal's latest contribution includes this glaring example of the industry's obstinate refusal to acknowledge its utter cluelessness and obsolescence:

And now the question is why we don't allow webcasters to do the same thing as Napster and Grokster, but without protest. We should just back off. We should allow them to use the music without payment, perhaps calling it a form of "fair use" or rationalize it as promotion—which will surely result in an explosion of music sales or increased touring revenue or loads of merchandise sales or whatever.

The entire series is well worth reading.

Give that man/woman a cigar!

Someone using the nickname Windbag posted an excellent and insightful comment in response to Children of the Web, from BusinessWeek.com. Here's an excerpt from that comment:

"The internet, agent of universalization, can just as easily be a tool of differentiation and individuation. The trick here will be to recognize that the new local will not necessarily be geographic. We see this already at the political level, where international Islamic communities of various stripes are building homes on the net. The same is happening in nonpolitical areas. The next commercial marketing wave will recognize and exploit these new communities."

Hell yes.

Marketing Cleveland from the Bottom Up

Ed Morrison, weighing in on a discussion on Brewed Fresh Daily of efforts to market the city of Cleveland, offers this:

Efforts at sloganeering (mainline or guerrilla) waste time and money. In this age of transparency, authenticity is the only approach that works. So build a buzz about being an older industrial city willing to re-imagine itself by actually doing it.

Damn skippy!

Brewed Fresh Daily, and the blogs of so many in the BFD circle, have long been a part of an authentic, transparent, and passionate grassroots effort that continues to build buzz about Cleveland -- from the bottom up. The street-level events coverage, restaurant tips and reviews, and overall level of discourse -- political, cultural, and otherwise -- says a hell of a lot more about what's good and cool and truly interesting about Cleveland than any of the formalized, formulaic marketing campaigns I've witnessed in my 53 years in this town.

Does that mean there shouldn't also be mainstream campaigns? Of course not. But the real Cleveland emerges only in the aggregate of all of the various perspectives. No slogan will ever capture or communicate that emerging image.