Ultimately what we see is the re-conceiving of the role of the firm. Traditionally the role of the firm has been to increase the efficiency of transaction costs, whereas we see more and more that the firm has to provide opportunities for capability building of the people within the firm. If the firm cannot do that, people will leave and seek out environments that can help them accelerate capability building better. It’s a very different way of thinking about what the firm needs to provide to its employees, and the role of the employees within the firm.

Read it all :

Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown

What is trackback?

A friend of mine just asked me this question. So as I’ve spent 10 writing a quick description in an email, I might as well post it here.

The original idea of trackback is to help find out who links to you.

Your blog publishes a URL which I can “ping”, ie. which alerts your blog to the fact that I have a post on mine that links to it.

Trackback is a kind of automation of the practice of posting a comment on someone’s blog saying “You’re wrong. And I responded over at …. ”

Normally, the blog which receives the trackback shows a short snippet of the responding post.

I think it’s still heavily used, but might be falling out fashion due

to the blog search engines. If I respond to you on my blog I still

need to find your trackback URL and ping it, often manually. OTOH, as you’re already probably using Technorati etc. to find people who link to you anyway, maybe I don’t need to bother.

I could be wrong about this. And trackback is possibly still playing an important (and increasingly popular) part in the ecosystem. I have no statistics to back me up. It’s just that people aren’t “talking” about trackback much … OTOH maybe it just works 🙂