Neil Perkin

The function and role of Product Management is increasingly becoming a really pivotal one in many digitally facing organisations. Having been aware of it's increasing popularity amongst media owner organisations, the growing importance of Product Management into a much broader spectrum of businesses and sectors became clear when I was researching organisational structures and resourcing for Digital Marketing on behalf of the smart folk at Econsultancy late last year. From the subsequent project on The Progression Of Agency Value that I also did for Econsultancy earlier this year, it's clear that there is also some fascinating take-outs here for agencies.

I wrote about Enrico Dini a couple of years ago. Enrico has developed a 3D printing technology large enough to print buildings. Yes, buildings. It uses sand combined with an inorganic binder to print structures in stone with no human intervention. Constructions which are strong, cheap, environmentally-friendly, and rather amazing.

The BBC have just released some interesting research around participation online. The findings (the result of a "large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today") have raised a little controversy since they seem to indicate that the long-term model or view of participation online, the 1,9,90 rule, is outmoded.

Over the past few months I've been working with the smart folk at Econsultancy on a project (in partnership with Adobe) to better understand the impact of digital technologies on agencies. A big reason for doing this is that, inspite of there being much chatter in the blogosphere on the future of agencies and the agency model, there seems to be a paucity of good research on how agencies are adapting to the many challenges brought by the rapidly changing communications environment.

There's a lot to take from this wonderful TED talk by the multi-oscar winning writer and director Andrew Stanton, who was Pixar's ninth employee and whose credits include Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

The use of algorithms is, I think, one of the big three big elements of content curation. There were two interesting posts that I happened across on the subject yesterday.

"Brainstorming groups produce more ideas than an individual but fewer and poorer quality ideas than from individuals working separately. In other words, brainstorms dilute the sum of individual efforts." Diehl and Stroebe 1991

A few years back I crowdsourced a presentation - curating a bunch of individual slides contributed by the readers of this blog into a talk about community that I then gave at a conference. It was a wonderfully positive (albeit a little risky) experience.

A lovely short video here from the guys at Percolate featuring some of their favourite curators (including Swissmiss, Maria Popova, Anthony De Rosa) ruminating on the subject. Says Noah Brier: