分享我的历程·互联网·创业

专注才能成功

最近反复谈到的一个话题，就是专注。在企业经营中，尤其是草创初期，只有专注于一点，集中自己所有的资源和优势，才能取得突破，在市场上脱颖而出，建立起微弱的领先优势。患得患失地什么都想做，不肯有所放弃的话，最终很可能是一事无成。这里面的道理大家都非常清楚，但是处在那个位置上，要作出这样困难的决定，就不是那么容易了。

让我们更专注一点，再艰难，也能走出一条路来。

感谢朋友，关注用户

网站推出以后，在朋友和以前的同事间介绍了一下。大家都过来捧场，并给了我不少反馈意见。首先对大家的关心和帮助，在此表示万分感谢。 根据目前的反馈来看，网站的设计不是十分理想。版块安排，提供的功能，以及内容的准备，都有一定的问题。不得不承认，作为一个男性，我对女性互联网用户的理解还远远不够。我们会尽快对此作出修正，并且尽量把用户想像得更简单一些。 我们会不断地作出改进和完善我们的网站，再次感谢大家的关心和厚爱。

近了，来了

昨天大家都工作到半夜3点多，总算把整个网站的样子都做好了。等星期一再检查一下，小帆船就要驶向大海了。虽然丑小鸭起步有点摇摇晃晃，样子也不怎样好看，但是相信有一天我们会变成展翅任翱翔的天鹅的。

期待中度过了这个星期天。

逼近上线

经过大家几个星期来的艰苦努力，我们的网站将在下个星期正式上线。这几天在赶工，作最后的页面调整，内容充实等工作。希望到时候能给大家一点点惊喜吧。

继续努力。

电子生态系统的十大真相

今天看到一篇好的文章，先贴这里了，等有空了再翻译出来吧。在大的潮流和总体框架思维上，它是具有纲领意义的，当然在一些细节执行层面上，可能作者的实际经验和思考深度还有所欠缺。不过这无损这篇文章的宏观思维价值。

电子生态系统的十大真相

下面这篇东西是应《世界经济论坛》之邀所作，作为Davos的2007年年会日程准备工作的一部分，谈一下电子生态系统来。非常感谢对于本篇的任何能扩展，改善和修正这里观点的评论。

10. 图片为王。数量惊人的口语化的内容，越来越多地被认为是一种噪音。我们正在进入一个拼贴画的新时代，而浏览者们的大脑是拼贴的艺术家。事实上除了大字标题和第一印象的总结以外，满眼的冗长。

优化过的图片所具有的美感逐步变成突破这种杂乱的强有力的工具。不管是私营企业还是上市公司，操纵图片来传递语义或信号都变得越来越复杂。高分辩率和便携性将变成主流。非常有趣的是，与此同时图片的标记和搜索会具有侧面的影响力。

9. 歌曲是年轻人的精神资产。他们在歌曲上树立起他们的个人形象，并感觉他们对歌曲拥有某种合同无法解释的权利。分享歌曲和歌曲列表成为一种自由交流的方式。与之相反的是，影片根本无法拥有这种内在的吸引力和影响力。

对那些不会自己创造太多内容的消费者来说，编辑和发送音乐变成了一种可行的模式。各种如MySpace, UTube那样的工具和平台压缩、重构和重新展示变成可能。

8. 无所遁形。对于把人们的不人道行为公之于众是好事。但是对于鼓吹隐私权的人来说则并不太妙。期望毫无指挥控制能力的安全部门能应对潮起潮落一般的巨量的自发的混沌系统是不现实的。

下一代的安全会建立在人和个人身份，而不是数据或公共机构的基础上。移动能力将加剧这项挑战。

7. 维基规则和“源自大众”是有效的！把任务外包给例如开源软件那样自我组织的志愿者社区，被证明是获取集体智慧和全球经验的有力手段。令人惊异的是，这种方法并不像普通媒体那样对于谣言缺乏免疫力。

维基模式正在变成一种事实上的全球性的私营企业内的集合模式。它对于上市企业似乎也产生了同样的效果：维基化，维基健康医疗系统，维基灾难恢复工作。我们将会从拟子的力量或缺乏头绪中得到经验和教训。

6. 游戏说明一切。未来几个世纪的人类学家可以不用再挖掘水成岩层了。他们只需要找到能让他们玩“魔兽世界”的游戏机，或者回放一个虚拟人物在游戏“第二次人生”中的历史就可以了。所有现代文化中的语汇都会在这个或那个虚拟世界中被使用到。而货币兑换开始将这个世界和现实的那个联系起来。

更多的电子生活中的虚拟交互将会对自我感觉和社区规范产生不可估量的影响。从以往来看，现实生活决定了规范，而虚拟世界会反映出这些，但未来反向作用也会越来越可能。游戏将变成探索生活方式的实验室，而这以往都是由文学戏剧所扮演的角色。

5. 服务取代产品。在电子世界里，比特替代了原子，产品被重新认为是服务。这其实就是谷歌对微软产生的威胁。

服务型的公司还没有完全认识到这点。为了便于把他们和传统的组织思维联系起来，他们倾向于把他们的努力称为产品，极大地曲解了他们的本质，并导致公司不能正确理解消费者体验，需求和价值的全部。

4. 万物皆媒体。广告不会为任何东西付钱，但是任何东西都有可能被用来做广告。这意味着至少可以通过免费的摧毁性的创新来越过某种技术接受的生命周期。

如果电子服务都是由广告来提供资金的话，那么消费最终会变成一种模式。随着时间的推移，人们和文化会对此厌烦，而由大众提供的内容将因为把人们从频繁地被广告骚扰中解脱而成为新的流行。

3. 外包和离岸是不可避免的。工作的数字化把世界变得更加扁平。在互联网的世界里，随着工作本身被数字化，你将很难对某个市场进行保护。这在短期内会极大地重构发达经济体们。长远来看，这将会是解决全球贫穷及其孪生兄弟恐怖主义的唯一有效的工具。

为跨越地域合企业边界的流程提供透明度和控制的工具和组织将会越来越重要。所有的东西最终可以通过某个服务标准协议和一系列确保执行的机制来解决。

2. 符号化的竞争创造了竞争优势。像某个漫画家的著名诠释那样，在网上没人知道你是一条狗。所有他们对你的印象是你对语言和符号操纵的结果。

这给与文学艺术教育很大的宽慰。数字世界将从作为工程技术现象的开始阶段走向文化现象的新阶段。拟子，品牌，声誉，理想－最终都会寻找其最有力的符号代言人。

1. 无处不在的纷扰让内心平静变得更重要。数字系统在不受限制和约束地侵入我们生活的每个角落，使我们得个人和社会价值观念产生困惑。由此产生的异化令我们开始寻求真实的个人精神体验。

随着符号操纵变得越来越透明，它引起了人们对他所关联的任何组织的不信任，而依赖于信仰的传统宗教会因此被数字沟通所破坏。于是，冥思，瑜伽和其他不借助外力的精神体验变得越来越有吸引力。

Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem

This piece follows up a request from the World Economic Forum for thoughts about the Digital Ecosystem, in preparation for framing the 2007 agenda at Davos.  I would really appreciate any comments that would expand, improve, or correct these lines of thought.

10. Images are king.  Verbal content, by virtue of its sheer volume, is increasingly perceived as noise.  We are entering a new era of collage, where the mind of the viewer is the assembling artist.  Verbalization happens post facto, the residue of headline skimming and subconscious synthesis.

The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter.  Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors.  High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.

9. Songs are the spiritual property of the young. They construct their identities around them and feel they own the rights to them in a way that no economic contract could interpret. Sharing songs and sets of songs is a type of free speech.  By contrast, films have nowhere near this visceral appeal and matter much less.

Operating on songs is the paradigm for the new creative consumer who will not create content so much as modify it and send it along.  Tools and sites that let people extract, reframe, and re-present will be core enablers, a la MySpace, UTube, and the like.

8. There is no place to hide.  This is good for exposing the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.  It is bad for the privacy advocates.  It is meaningless for the security forces as no command-and-control big brother can keep up with the sheer volume of self-organizing chaotic systems in flux.

Next-generation security will organize around the person and the personal identity instead of the data and the institution.  Mobility will only complicate this challenge.

7. Wikis rule and “crowd-sourcing” works! Outsourcing tasks to a self-organizing community of volunteers, a la open source software, is proving to be a powerful tactic for tapping into the collective wisdom and experience of the planet.  Surprisingly, this mechanism is nowhere near as susceptible to demagoguery as edited media.

The wiki model is becoming a de facto collaboration paradigm within private enterprises with global reach.  It seems likely to spawn comparable efforts in the public sector: a wiki-versity, a wike-health-care-system, a wiki-disaster-recovery-effort.  We will get object lessons in the power of memes (or the lack thereof).

6. Games tell all.  Anthropologists of future centuries can be spared digging through layers of sedimentary rock. Instead they will just need to find game machines that let them play World of Warcraft or play back the history of an avatar in Second Life.  All the metaphors of contemporary culture are being acted out in one or another corner of this virtual universe.  And currency exchanges are beginning to link this universe to the physical one.

The emphasis on symbolic interactions in a digital lifestyle will have unpredictable effects on self-perception and social norms. Historically the real world has set the norms and the digital world reflected them, but the obverse can be expected to be true going forward.  Games can become living laboratories to explore strategies for living, a role played by literature and drama in ages past.

5. Services displace products.  In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services.  This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.

4. Everything is media.  While advertising will not pay for everything, everything will become a potential opportunity to advertise.  This means that at least some technology adoption life cycles can be short-circuited by providing the disruptive innovation for free.

If advertising is the default funder of digital offers, then consumption is the ultimate paradigm.  Over time people and cultures will weary of this, and socially constructed content will become more pervasive as an escape from constantly being pitched.

3. Outsourcing and offshoring are inevitable. Digitization of work is profoundly world-flattening.  In an Internet-enabled world, as work itself becomes digitized, markets cannot be protected.  This will be hugely dislocating to the developed economies in the short term.   Longer term, it will be the single most effective tool to combat global poverty and its cousin terrorism.

Instrumentation and institutions that create visibility and control over processes that span geographical and enterprise boundaries will become increasingly powerful.  Everything will ultimately resolve to a Service Level Agreement and a series of compliance-assuring mechanisms.

2. Symbolic competence creates competitive advantage. On the web, as one cartoonist famously noted, no one knows you are a dog.  All they experience about you is a function of your ability to manipulate vocabulary and symbols.

This puts liberal arts education in high relief.  The digital world will move from being an engineering phenomenon to a cultural one. Memes, brands, reputations, causes—all will seek to recruit the most powerful symbolists to their ends.

1. Omnipresent distractions increase the need for inner peace. Digital systems intrude into every aspect of life and, unrestricted and unbalanced, can overwhelm our perception of personal and social values.  The resulting alienation will lead to a search for direct personal spiritual experience.

Traditional religion, with its reliance on belief, will be undermined by digital communications, for as symbolic manipulations becomes increasingly transparent, it creates distrust in any institution that engages in it.  In this context, meditation, yoga, and other forms on non-mediated spiritual experience will become increasingly attractive.

This piece follows up a request from the World Economic Forum for thoughts about the Digital Ecosystem, in preparation for framing the 2007 agenda at Davos.  I would really appreciate any comments that would expand, improve, or correct these lines of thought.

10. Images are king.  Verbal content, by virtue of its sheer volume, is increasingly perceived as noise.  We are entering a new era of collage, where the mind of the viewer is the assembling artist.  Verbalization happens post facto, the residue of headline skimming and subconscious synthesis.

The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter.  Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors.  High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.

9. Songs are the spiritual property of the young. They construct their identities around them and feel they own the rights to them in a way that no economic contract could interpret. Sharing songs and sets of songs is a type of free speech.  By contrast, films have nowhere near this visceral appeal and matter much less.

Operating on songs is the paradigm for the new creative consumer who will not create content so much as modify it and send it along.  Tools and sites that let people extract, reframe, and re-present will be core enablers, a la MySpace, UTube, and the like.

8. There is no place to hide.  This is good for exposing the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.  It is bad for the privacy advocates.  It is meaningless for the security forces as no command-and-control big brother can keep up with the sheer volume of self-organizing chaotic systems in flux.

Next-generation security will organize around the person and the personal identity instead of the data and the institution.  Mobility will only complicate this challenge.

7. Wikis rule and “crowd-sourcing” works! Outsourcing tasks to a self-organizing community of volunteers, a la open source software, is proving to be a powerful tactic for tapping into the collective wisdom and experience of the planet.  Surprisingly, this mechanism is nowhere near as susceptible to demagoguery as edited media.

The wiki model is becoming a de facto collaboration paradigm within private enterprises with global reach.  It seems likely to spawn comparable efforts in the public sector: a wiki-versity, a wike-health-care-system, a wiki-disaster-recovery-effort.  We will get object lessons in the power of memes (or the lack thereof).

6. Games tell all.  Anthropologists of future centuries can be spared digging through layers of sedimentary rock. Instead they will just need to find game machines that let them play World of Warcraft or play back the history of an avatar in Second Life.  All the metaphors of contemporary culture are being acted out in one or another corner of this virtual universe.  And currency exchanges are beginning to link this universe to the physical one.

The emphasis on symbolic interactions in a digital lifestyle will have unpredictable effects on self-perception and social norms. Historically the real world has set the norms and the digital world reflected them, but the obverse can be expected to be true going forward.  Games can become living laboratories to explore strategies for living, a role played by literature and drama in ages past.

5. Services displace products.  In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services.  This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.

4. Everything is media.  While advertising will not pay for everything, everything will become a potential opportunity to advertise.  This means that at least some technology adoption life cycles can be short-circuited by providing the disruptive innovation for free.

If advertising is the default funder of digital offers, then consumption is the ultimate paradigm.  Over time people and cultures will weary of this, and socially constructed content will become more pervasive as an escape from constantly being pitched.

3. Outsourcing and offshoring are inevitable. Digitization of work is profoundly world-flattening.  In an Internet-enabled world, as work itself becomes digitized, markets cannot be protected.  This will be hugely dislocating to the developed economies in the short term.   Longer term, it will be the single most effective tool to combat global poverty and its cousin terrorism.

Instrumentation and institutions that create visibility and control over processes that span geographical and enterprise boundaries will become increasingly powerful.  Everything will ultimately resolve to a Service Level Agreement and a series of compliance-assuring mechanisms.

2. Symbolic competence creates competitive advantage. On the web, as one cartoonist famously noted, no one knows you are a dog.  All they experience about you is a function of your ability to manipulate vocabulary and symbols.

This puts liberal arts education in high relief.  The digital world will move from being an engineering phenomenon to a cultural one. Memes, brands, reputations, causes—all will seek to recruit the most powerful symbolists to their ends.

1. Omnipresent distractions increase the need for inner peace. Digital systems intrude into every aspect of life and, unrestricted and unbalanced, can overwhelm our perception of personal and social values.  The resulting alienation will lead to a search for direct personal spiritual experience.

Traditional religion, with its reliance on belief, will be undermined by digital communications, for as symbolic manipulations becomes increasingly transparent, it creates distrust in any institution that engages in it.  In this context, meditation, yoga, and other forms on non-mediated spiritual experience will become increasingly attractive.

社区的法制

今天看见一个老朋友在他的博客评述麦子的社区(5):圣人不死，大盗不止，提出了和麦子的无为而治截然不同的法制概念，有感而发，在这里罗嗦几句。

麦子一文的意思大概是推崇Flickr的将心比心，己所不欲，勿施于人的社区建设理念，觉得管理者不要制定一大堆管理条例，到处跳出来说三道四。什么时候管得不婆妈了，用户自然会无趣地回到正规上来的。容忍混沌也是他思想的另一说法。

庄表伟一文的意思则主张在虚拟社会实行法制化，来培育法制意识。理由是网上一切皆有记录，比较容易贯彻实施。

就我个人近10年的网络社区和互联网从业经验，感觉上述两种意见都略带偏激，其实这个问题也是可以用儒家思想的内圣外王来应对的。内圣外王之道以格物致知，诚意正心，修身为内圣之业，以齐家治国平天下为外王之业。在这里，所谓内圣者，就是对一小撮破坏、挑战大家普遍认同的道德规范和行为准则（不一定要多少多少条条框框的那种）的人，还是要有积极的措施来防范和应对，并坚决打击，或者说就是练好内功。而所谓外王者，则意指应从积极正面的方向鼓励大家善待他人，积极把人性美好的一面展现出来，而不是摆一副社区警察的面孔到处干涉，也可以说是树立积极健康的形象吧。要搞好社区，内圣外王缺一不可。

至于如何应对虚拟网络上的各种问题呢，本质上无非在尽可能不影响正常用户的前提下，给坏人做坏事制造更高的门槛。至于如何实施，则根据各社区不同的特点来制定。什么是大多数正常用户的常规操作，什么是坏人坏事，什么是尽可能不影响，度在哪里，是很难有统一标准的。

最近研究社区比较多，偶有所得，涂鸦两笔，希望能抛砖引玉。

社区还是商业模式

今天早上面试一个程序员，谈到了洪波的文章：MySpace泡沫。因为我也订阅了他的Blog，昨天也看到了这篇文章。总体感觉只是谈到了一个现象，但是很多不知所以的人看了以后，曲解成为做社区就是学MySpace，人家Keso都批判一窝风在中国学MySpace了，所以你们还凑什么热闹。我感觉不得不说两句了，但是洪波的博客的留言回复功能一直出错，只好在自己这里讲了。

其实不管什么社区，社区只是人们聚集在一起的一种形式，关键问题还在于为社会创造了什么价值，这种价值有没有商业化的空间，并由此为股东创造价值。脱离这些，谈所谓的什么中国的MySpace模式是很空洞的。MySpace只是一个形，不是内在的神。

所以大家谈这个问题，不要总是停留在表面，也不要一知半解就以为领会了最新的权威思想了。社区是一个工具，关键开你用来做什么了，有没有创造新的价值。

欢迎大家拍砖。

要不要做流氓

最近和人几次谈到了这个话题，关于在中国怎样做低成本营销。不可避免滴谈到了流氓软件这个热门话题。现在社会舆论对流氓软件及其制造者是令人不可思议地宽容和理解。远的不说，看最近淘宝的声明几乎没有引起任何反响就可知一二了。还有一些风险投资公司对这种做法持“符合中国特色，不这样干不聪明，不行”观点，真是让人看不懂。这个世界真的变得如此之快，我们都落伍了嘛？

今天通过RSS读到了这两篇文章，看来还是有和我同道的人啊。

推荐大家看一下下面两篇文章：
无聊布棉的海龟比土鳖更懂流氓
老冒的信任的成本

需要找Flash动画制作人员

这两天网站的工作如火如荼，已经进入到界面程序整合阶段了。程序员的招聘还在艰难地进行中，还需要找一到两个Flash动画制作人员。现在这些人都挺不好找啊。早知道当年我坚持把Flash做下去了，现在都从当年俺用的Flash3长到Flash8了。可惜俺一点艺术细胞都没有。

速度

这两天思路明确，齐心协力，效率不错啊。大部分页面的效果都已经出来了，html代码也在紧锣密鼓中。技术平台选择还在最后确定中，下面就是大量开发工作了。

在开发间隙中，打算让设计师把一些基础的工作做一下，譬如页面设计规范啊什么的。另外CSS的优化，导航的js制作也是在下一段时间要完成的工作。乘这个当口，我们需要把下一阶段的产品结构考虑清楚，再投入力量进行下一个产品的设计。

看着网站慢慢开始有具体的界面表现出来了，心里特别高兴啊。希望能一直保持这样的高效和推进速度。