WNYC and NPR (On The Media) just posted a podcast of the new business book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. If you still are trying to understand the power of new collaboration tools, take a few minutes and listen to this podcast. The author, Clay Shirky, gives some excellent real world examples.
If you found this podcast of interest, link to my entire collection of Innovation and Networked Economy Podcasts.
Like many blog owners, I like to analyze my statistics. I have registered this blog with Google such that I may use their suite of Webmaster Tools which allows me to obtain detailed spider and search query data. Determing underlying trends (i.e. data mining) helps me better understand my user community. I often use these same techniques at work to develop better services which add increased value for both end users and senior management.
Thus, I thought folks might be intersted in a sample. Here are two sets of data in which the constraints are identical except for the user community (India or the United States). You may run any given Google query by clicking upon the appropriate link. Given how the amount of engineering performed by Indian companies for American based companies has increased dramatically over the past few years, I found this comparison intrigueing. I ask myself … Are there similarities between the two user groups? differences? what is the significance of my findings, if any?
Here is the data. While I’ll let you draw most of your own conclusions, I did immediately notice a few items. Both groups were interested in the podcast, The Age of Speed. However, the Indian community seemed to be more interested in finding collaboration sites (wikis) and eBooks. One final note, this blog receives about 625 page views per day, or 19,375 page views for the month of January. Thus, in terms of statistics, the data is significant.
Beginning of Data
Note: the position column refers to where my blog appeared in the search results
Top Google Search Queries
The top 20 queries in which your site (i.e. this blog) appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search
End of Data
When I first started with my present company, over 23 years ago, I became the Apple IIe expert. This required me to learn CPM/DOS, Visicalc, and beware of bending fragile hardware connectors. In a few years the IBM compatible PC came along, and I needed to learn Assembly code for installing hard drives. While these technical changes were occurring my company was exiting the mainframe computer business, entering into the internet era, and merging with another large Fortune 200 company. The one constant was change on both the technology and corporate culture fronts. I remember the day an email was sent to all research labs employees instructing us not to use the words "red" or "blue" while referring to our former companies. Obviously there was not a corporate vendetta against these two colors. My company was trying to change, and it was difficult (still is).
If you’ve had any similar experiences, browse on over to the Lean Blog and listen to the first of a three part series of interviews with author and professor Jeffrey Liker (University of Michigan) who just published: Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way. His book is all about the necessity of change and culture in building lean organizations.
As lean operations are imperative to successful engineering design and operations, I will add this series to both my engineering podcast search engine and engineering learning wiki (podcast page).
.
The college search process is winding to a close. What started with my initial post … The Search for the Perfect Engineering School … and continued with such great entries as "Milepost 214 or Two Nerds in Iowa" and "College Consultants for Your Kids" … will be completed in a few weeks. Erik (my son) was accepted at every school but Olin. Thus, as a family we are very happy with the results. I think I know Erik’s top choice, but I’ll let him reveal that decision personally (guest post) in the near future. (view all posts in this series: a college search from a parent’s perspective)
Sunday afternoon we attended a reception for admitted students to Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, and tonight it’s off to the Valparaiso Pizza Party! We are lucky in that both events are not very far from our home in suburban Minneapolis. Many of the kids at the Rose-Hulman event had driven in from Iowa, Wisconsin or the Dakotas.
Okay, so why the particular post title: "Be a Nerd … Make a Difference"? A few minutes ago I received an email from a co-worker who reminded me about the work we’ve done to encourage kids to consider the sciences. Suddenly I realized, as a coach of a First Lego Robotics Team for six years, I had made a difference. As each young man graduates this Spring, they all will enter engineering schools. Although not all the college decisions have been made, these boys will attend some of America’s top universities.
And to think it all started with Legos ……….
This Fall my Legos quest will continue in the mountains of southern China near the Vietnamese border!
.
It’s Saturday … and one should not work to hard … thus … Cow Videos a la YouTube!
