August 2004 Archives

In Network-Centric Thinking: The Internet's Challenge to Ego-Centric Institutions , a PlaNetwork article, Jed Miller and Rob Stewart advocate "network-centric" organizations, and tell the parabol of a planet far away wracked with environmental devastation where no ruling organization wants to admit doing anything bad

There were people who everyone trusted to work on the problem, but instead of looking for solutions, they spent most of the time competing with each other. Some of them wanted money. Some of them wanted attention. Some of them weren't sure what exactly they wanted. But they all wanted one thing most of all – they wanted to be the one who got the credit for trying to save the world

the people who should have been helping decided that if the end really was near, it was important to have a race to see who could get noticed the most before the end came. In fact, on the day before the last day, instead of working on the problem, each group held a press conference. You see, with the world ending and all, there was only going to be one more newspaper, and each group wanted to get the very first quote in the very last newspaper.

At last weblogs make the headlines of the Figaro, a major French daily newspaper. A very good article indeed, that we owe, at least partly to Loïc Lemeur. On the other hand, unfortunately, an online survey on the Journal du Net launched at the same time shows that the majority of French people still think that weblogs are worthless ("ne présentent aucun intérêt")

Strangely, it makes me think of the famous French Guard of Monty Python's Holy Grail.