A North Carolina dad, Tommy Jordan, reached his wits end on Wednesday after his 15-year daughter posted a rant on her Facebook page, a video “disrespectful” to her parents. He pulled out a pistol and shot her laptop dead. And he videoed it, then shared that video with the world.

That is your laptop. This is my .45.

His monologue — where he reads what he says his daughter wrote on her Facebook page — includes some profanity and what I think of as a litany of teen-age whininess (based on my listening to adult friends and relatives as well as nieces). Titled Facebook Parenting: For the Troubled Teen, the video  has 3.7 million views as of this writing (125,486 likes, 9,392 dislikes):

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The data points sound horrifying:

• 46 percent of American children enter kindergarten lacking the basic language skills they need to learn to read
• 61 percent of low-income children have no children’s books in their homes

The verbs convey urgency (currency is an intentional affect, as the factoids are used for fundraising, establishing organizational mandates) and imply that the data are current. But are the data points true, for any definition of “truth”?

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Whether you are working on a website, mobile app or a physical product (like a better mousetrap!), incorporating personas into your design process makes it easier to keep a customer (user-centered) focus.

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How can businesses tap into the collective wisdom of the crowd? Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explored mass collaboration in Wikinomics as well as Macrowikinomics. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li focused on how digital social technologies facilitate consumer-corporate collaboration in their book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Social Technologies.

A undated research paper (2011?) from Carnegie Mellon [1] analyzes participation at IdeaStorm.com (@IdeaStorm), launched by Dell in 2007 as a way to tap suggestions (“idea generation”) from its customers.

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The Goodreads/Amazon story is a great example of why concentrated economic (market) power is not in the consumer’s long-run best interest.

In this case, Amazon wants to protect its bundled product, the Kindle. The Kindle is to Amazon as Office or MSIE are to Microsoft, extensions of an infrastructure franchise. Over at Google, it’s two pronged: Google+ and Android. At Apple, it’s the iTunes ecosystem.

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