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2007年7月20日 星期五

變魔術:我的部落格真能印鈔嗎?你又知道亞歷山大大帝?

讀這篇摘要,覺得簡直是外星人來騙小朋友的(除了賣弄幾個英文字眼):出版這種書表示我們blogging 落後世界5年嗎?

新書快遞》我的部落格印鈔機


What’s Online

Can Green Make Green?


Published: July 21, 2007

APPARENTLY like everyone else, we are going green!” wrote Om Malik this week, pretty much owning up to his lack of enthusiasm for the new blog his company introduced, Earth2Tech.


The blog is “devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else,” he explained on his main technology-business blog, GigaOM (gigaom.com). Earth2Tech, he wrote, examines the clean-tech start-ups that are mushrooming in Silicon Valley and around the world, as well as the environmental initiatives of big companies like Google and Wal-Mart.

“It took a bit to convince Om to go GigaGreen,” the site’s editor, Katie Fehrenbacher, wrote in her introductory post (earth2tech.com). She said that the clean-tech boom — fueled in part by the money and marketing prowess of venture capitalists like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla — could turn out to be not much more than a faddish investment vehicle.

“It might be a bubble,” she wrote. “We’re agnostic. As always, through bubble or boom we’ll keep the same GigaOM skepticism on this new site.”

So far, the blog bears that out. The site has had headlines like “Soy Biodiesel I.P.O.’s, a Risky Diet” and “Ethanol is not the answer, report says.”

While it is true that, as Ms. Fehrenbacher wrote, “green-focused Web sites are getting about as trendy as celebutante D.U.I.’s,” it is also true that very few of them focus on the business of green. The most popular of them, like TreeHugger.com and Grist.org, are run by environmentalists and aimed mainly at eco-conscious consumers.

By contrast, Earth2Tech examines “the intersections between the tech industry, the business of green, and start-ups that will use technology and innovation to combat climate change,” Ms. Fehrenbacher wrote.

Although the site “may not attract much excitement from its creator, it’s sure to pull in those green ad dollars,” wrote Owen Thomas on the Silicon Valley gossip site ValleyWag (valleywag.com). Maybe, but it has not happened yet. The ads seem to be from the same technology companies that sponsor GigaOM, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and AT&T’s wireless business.

New Media, New Methods Web sites like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” must be frustrating for big media companies that are trying to make money from Web publishing.

The site (icanhascheezburger.com) is nothing more than funny captions with pictures of animals, but it pulls in enough money that its owner was able to quit his job as a software developer. Eric Nakagawa, who started the site in January, says that he sells ads for $500 to $4,000 a week and that he makes about $5,600 a month for himself.

To be sure, few such blogs make that kind of money. Cheezburger’s success is a combination of luck and smarts, John Tozzi of BusinessWeek.com explains. But that it can happen at all is a testament to how the economics of Web publishing have changed.

Mr. Tozzi gives several more examples, including the quirky technology blog Boing Boing (boingboing.net); Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com), which offers political news and analysis; and the wildly popular PerezHilton.com, a celebrity-gossip blog. “I Can Has Cheezburger?” is the unlikeliest success story of the bunch, but the traffic and revenue numbers BusinessWeek attaches to each of them are surprising —from $5,300 for Kottke.org, a design blog, to $200,000 for TechCrunch, a technology blog (techcrunch.com).

There are caveats: The revenue figures are either self-reported or estimated by BusinessWeek.com based on reported traffic numbers that can be nearly impossible to pin down.

Context Is Everything “The fight against cancer isn’t hopeless,” reads a London billboard. Directly under it is a billboard advertising Rothmans cigarettes. That and 14 other examples of “unfortunately placed” ads can be found at Oddee.com. The Web, with its attempts to match ads with content, is well represented. A Yahoo News article about the possibility that drinking coffee can lead to a heart attack is shown next to an ad for Folgers. DAN MITCHELL

Complete links are at nytimes.com/business.
E-mail: whatsonline@nytimes.com.




第二本想像力過份單純而發達之作品摘要


書名:創造問題的藝術──向亞歷山大學領導
作者:藍斯.科克
出版:商周

重塑情境,就是改變眾所注目或眾人認為重要的東西。定義問題和定義問題的方式,都極為重要。

例如,把不可解的難題轉化為可解決的,我們所處的世界也隨之有了根本的改變。

我相信領導者最重要的工作,就是為自己的組織創造現實。要怎麼做呢?最根本的方法,就是點出並重塑組織面臨的問題。

例如,妥善聲明遠景(顧客至上、品質至上,或是員工至上)便是簡單的重塑,可以轉化組織──若顧客、供應商與員工在該項聲明發布後,行為有所改變。(hc按: 變魔術嗎?)

重塑會發生,是因為領導者發布聲明或是將其付諸實施,現實因而轉變。若宣告「品質至上」,價值鏈、公會、股東和顧客受到牽動的部分,和主張「顧客至上」時所產生的現實轉變,一定有所不同。

亞歷山大大帝有時以創造另一個問題的方式重塑問題。他解決「創造出」的新問題時,原本「不可解」的問題不是變得無關、微不足道到不值得解決,就是變得有討論空間。這個過程,我稱之為「問題換置」,這或許可說是本書中最重要的領導秘訣。

如同我們在歷史分析中所見,亞歷山大大帝並不把他所處的環境視為限制,不認為自己必須遷就環境。他重塑眼前問題,將之轉為可取代的問題,接下來,解決重塑 後的問題。通常,解決之道在於重新定義情勢,然後根據新建構出的現實採取行動。經過改造,變得可解決的問題,也就是原本問題的解決之道。有時候,只要告訴 大家異於他們所信的東西就夠了。


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