Small is the Next Big Thing

The wisdom of clouds

Leading blog search-engine Technorati has just re-designed its home page. Founder and CEO Dave Sifry explains that the new layout is based on “using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves”.

The geography of passion

The internet is a different kind of social space in which our common interests are the things that connect us rather than physical proximity. Online it’s less important where we are or where we come from but what we care about. We might call this the ‘geography of passion’.

links for 2007-05-04

• CouchSurfing
  An interesting example of the internet’s geography of passion. A hybrid physical/virtual community where people track down likeminded individuals across the world, creating greater common understanding through cultural exchange in the process.
  (tags: community collaboration)

Built to shrink

Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and a number of other firms are currently fighting it out to buy Dutch banking group ABN Amro for around £45 billion.

A virtual world

Long-held precepts of Big and Small have been at the heart of conventional business wisdom since the industrial revolution.

Positive feedback loop?

A draft book introduction can now be downloaded here. (Many thanks to Naresh Ramchandani for the PDF cover idea, John Dutton for the photo, and Dan Norris for the design and layout).

What's the big idea?

Businesses should have a defining core idea, a purpose, an ideology, a raison d’être. There’s a lot of evidence to show that the ones that do out-perform the ones that don’t.

Chaos theory

Harvard evolutionary psychologist Professor Stephen Pinker has carried out a historical body count through the millennia to prove we live in a progressively less violent and safer world. If you thought that barbarism, cruelty and horror were alive and well, in his essay “A History of Violence” Pinker argues the opposite: “something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler."

Small pixels, big picture

Two weeks ago, a department store in Manhattan gave a crude preview of what retail experience might look like when information and communication flows through the physical objects all around us.

The democratization of philanthropy

Among the many fascinating talks at TED 2007, Katherine Fulton, president of social consulting firm Monitor Institute, gave an overview of what she called “The democratization of philanthropy”.

Her talk confirmed that some key Small-Big trends are not just fundamentally altering traditional commerce but making an equally significant impact on the business of non-profits...