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Author: John McElhenney
New resource available for download:
Business and Community Presentation via Slideshare (SocialMediaCamp July 30, 2008)
jmacofearth I just invented the GreenLight only to find AFTER I built the presentation... that it is a crowded product space. Heh heh.
05:52 AM July 01, 2008
GreenLight Collaborative Space (protected membership)
available feeds
arriving @ patience : the blog
Global Social Media Conversations : the discussion
transmedia experiences: where wayfinding, retrieval, learning and decision making are indistinguishable. (the garden of forking paths -- article)
glocalization - there are all sorts of cultures that form from identities and communities of practice
Plussing
Taking your work a little farther. Going closer to an edge, whichever edge.
Is there anything you can't plus? Anything you can't make simpler, more luxurious, cheaper, more extreme? Anything you can't make more remarkable?
External forces are not what makes a company succeed or fail. It is
your passion, commitment and love for your idea that will make or break
a company. And just as in life, a successful company is not about the
destination, it is about the journey. // blueflavor blog
Alex Bosworth on Buzznet: "Plenty of room in the 300 billion advertising
industry for social networks, they just need to be more aggressive about grabbing their
share.
article: obsessing-over-lost-ideas - David Seah
I tend to have a lot of ideas, which is a kind way of saying that I’m easily distracted. The way I control this impulse is by recognizing that most ideas aren’t worth much
without the solid execution to bring them into reality. So when I talk
to someone about an idea, I will assess our ability to work together
with a set of rules like this:
- Do we have the skills?
- Do we have the time?
- Do we have the resources?
- Do we have the chemistry?
- Do we really have the motivation?
It’s amazing how many ideas don’t make the cut, if you’re being truly
honest. In a lot of cases, I’ll do something because I’m actually not
sure…in the process of doing, I’ll find out. Of course, I have to
disclose this fully to any involved parties, because otherwise the
second battery of tests will fail:
- Are we maintaining momentum?
- Are we setting our expectations correctly?
- Was our initial assessment accurate?
- Do we keep going?
Not many personal projects make it past the second battery either, at least in my limited experience. That’s why if you ever find someone to team up with that can repeatedly pass this test, you should make every effort to work together. You have found something magical.
Not many personal projects make it past the second battery either, at least in my limited experience. That’s why if you ever find someone to team up with that can repeatedly pass this test, you should make every effort to work together. You have found something magical.
The Long Tail:
Chris Anderson famously named the long tail -
the idea that in the internet era, success belongs to companies that
can address the end of the demand curve that is populated by millions
of low-volume products, rather than a small number of high-volume
products.
The Long Snout:
Rael Dornfest somewhat waggishly pointed out that there's an analogous
phenomenon on the front end of product creation, which he called "the
long snout." That is, there are millions of emergent products and
technologies that may or may not catch on (consider the fact that there
are over 100,000 projects on sourceforge alone), and that we needed a
lightweight way to document and present information about those
projects, so we could start publishing about them early on, and track
them up the development curve as well as the demand curve.
GTD: Getting Things Done
Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you're doing (and not doing) at any time. (p.16)
INBOX-ZERO (managing the incoming chaos of email)
- What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
- What action, if any, does this message require of me?
- What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?
So how does Get Things Done work? (from 43 folders)
- identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
- get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
- create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
- put your stuff in the right place, consistently
- do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
- iterate and refactor mercilessly
From the garden of forking paths
webstream / mindmap / web2mind
In his book Models of My Life, Herbert Simon, the polymath pioneer of artificial intelligence and decision theory, saw himself as the denizen of a maze:
I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life’s path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right. The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice.
This observation resonates with my own experience, though my maze is modeled in hypertext, an unpredictable string of nodes and links, connected only in my mind. After graduating from college with a degree in English literature, my subsequent unemployment afforded me the luxury to pursue interests in artificial intelligence, programming and the early computer bulletin boards of Compuserve and Prodigy, while actively searching for a future in career centers and public libraries.
info architecture / findability / flow / information anxiety
But eventually, I realized that to become a better information architect, I needed to venture beyond the box and follow the arrows. This realization translated into a boundary-spanning passion for findability that flies over the walls of engineering, marketing and design, and sails far beyond the safe harbor of the World Wide Web.
Ambient Findability The term ambient findability describes a world in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere and anytime. It’s not necessarily a goal, as this vision carries both promise and peril. And we’ll never reach the destination, since perfect findability is impossible. But we’re most assuredly headed in the right direction.Familiar lines blur in this future nearly present. Data becomes metadata as Amazon’s Search Inside the Book turns page into index. The territory becomes the map as Google Earth makes our reality virtual. In Weinberger’s words: Everything grows miscellaneous. And people are transformed into ubiquitous findable objects (UFOs), along with pets, products, possessions and places.
These UFOs, which Bruce Sterling labels spimes, are objects precisely located in space and time. They ingest their own metadata. They accumulate histories. They network with peers. They are scary, infinitely complex and almost inconceivable. But they are coming.
These are painful analogies born in the journey from past to present. They fail to anticipate the future.
Personally, I draw insight and inspiration from the words of Jorge Luis Borges, a blind Argentine librarian, who in 1941 wrote an amazing story (“The garden of forking paths”) about a book and labyrinth containing...
Project Manager/Producer Role Parallel: Because directing is
almost like an alchemy. There’re so many different
factors, so many different skills involved, the most important
being communication and some visual sense. // joss whedon on screenwriting and directing "firefly" and "serenity"
“an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times…all possibilities.”
// http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-06/morville.html (the garden of forking paths -- article)
The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation.
They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are
aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with
them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their
power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather
than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from
this embedded observation, producing a state of "flow" to use
Cziksentmihalyi's term. The designers love what they are doing and
infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of
doing design.
But if the goal is to build community social software, this is a
dreadful approach. You cannot segment the people who engage with the
users from those who build for them. You cannot test for community
practices by running user studies on individuals. You cannot populate a
community by marketing to people who have used similar software before.
You cannot boil down culture into static representation of people. You
must live the culture that you are creating.
Naming web 2.0
I learned that I'm not the only one who does not like the name "Web
2.0" that we are using for a new generation of interactive,
decentralized web-based services that promise to make the internet
better for the users, if not for large companies.
We both think that Web 2.0 sounds way too much like a product
upgrade, when in fact what is happening is more fundamental and much
larger than a feature-enhancement.
My old AF Team:
GWB "that got internet sites"
One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a
media, free media that's able to do what they want to do and I - you
ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter].
Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there's
blogs, there's internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate which
is literally changing the way people get their information and
so if you're concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of
the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and
just keep the word moving. from Wizbang
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