Process of Change

Worth hearing...

Bob — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:58:04 GMT

"The highest application of our mental body is when we use it to consciously navigate the focus of our attention. The highest application of our emotional body is when we use it to fuel the momentum of our intentions." Michael Brown

Movie Review: Youth Without Youth

Bob — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:44:33 GMT

Interesting what you get when you take the writing of Mircea Eliade, and the direction of Francis Ford Coppola. One IMDB reviewer offered these thoughts:

At times "Youth Without Youth" seems like a David Lynch film without the horror aspects. There are doppelgangers and people with supernatural powers. It is surreal and strange and some scenes do not make sense in their sequence but are important in the entirety of the film.

"Youth Without Youth" is not a film for everybody. In fact, most people will probably not like it. But if you are a person who is willing to think about a film and bring your own interpretation to what is happening, you might end up loving this film.

I can't say it better, so there it is. I enjoyed it.

Released: 2007

Go to IMDb page

Information © IMDb.com

Youth Without Youth

Tim Roth, Bruno Ganz, Marcel Iures, Alexandra Pirici, Zoltan Butuc, Mircea Albulescu,

Movie Review: My Effortless Brilliance

Bob — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:43:48 GMT

I decided to watch My Effortless Brilliance because the description suggested outdoor action -- ordinarily, I prefer mindless action, lots of explosions, some sex, and if FTL travel is involved, so much the better.

To be clear, the movie had none (or very little) of the silly wilderness urbanite action I was expecting. What it did have was amazing dialog and characters so real I felt like I was, perhaps without permission, peering into their personal lives.

My Effortless Brilliance

The good and bad of unplugging

Bob — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:58:57 GMT

Classmates.com is fascinating. New people, new problems to solve, and a opportunity so big it -- well, it's big. I've been so caught up in it, I've largely unplugged from every other connection. There's good and bad in that.

The good is this: unplug for a little while and when you come back you have what feels like a more objective view. The kool-aide wears off. You also see how much you haven't missed. For instance, I was sorry to see that my network registered no new or interesting social networking ideas. Some folks from Yahoo published some useful work on planning recognition systems, but it's hardly ground-breaking (in fact it seems to gloss over whole classes of rewards -- intimacy and exclusivity). It appears to me that the Facebook/MyYearbook/twitter/chocolate/vanilla daytime dramas have lulled the industry to sleep. Whatever.

The bad is that I've missed some of the genuinely interesting things my network produces. Alex, as usual, has come up with a gem of a book recommendation. He recommends I Am a Strange Loop.

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Read more about this title...

I just downloaded the Kindle Edition. (Yes, I love my Kindle -- love it.)

It's also become apparent that I'm not likely to find the time to solve my community server comments/spam issue. No comments sucks. So, it might be time for a change. This site will remain a repository for all of my posts, but I think I need another, more public, outlet. LiveJournal?

Social Bookmarking, I forgot, I just forgot.

Bob — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:07:50 GMT

I don't talk as much about social bookmarking as I used to. Even for me, it's in the shadow of those few lumbering social software giants. In my own defense, it really is hard to tear your attention away from the headlines -- to stop slurping the kool-aide-of-the-day. It's an artifact of the dark side of the social force.

Of course, I've never stopped bookmarking. I could no sooner do that than I could go without my browser. It's fully integrated and completely automatic. Still, just a couple of days ago, I received an email that reminded of how potent a tool it remains.

Here's the deal...

I received an email from a colleague. She'd uncovered a post, a little over a year old, called Community ROI. When I opened the page, I had to smile. Kathy Sierra. Been a while. Like almost every other post ever written for Creating Passionate Users, it contained some great advice.

I'm certain I'd read that post before. Positive, in fact. But I'd forgotten about it. I'd forgotten some of the advice it contained. I began to wonder what else I'd forgotten. So I visited one of my social bookmarking services (I use several), and began to browse my own collection.

Wow. I have to do that more often. Really.

It became clear that I retain only a fraction of what I read. And, that I don't always read everything I tag. Anyway, exploring my older tagged material was far more rewarding than I would have imagined. Aside from an engaging few hours of nostalgia, I (re)learned a thing or two I'll likely be putting into practice in the near future. Below are some of the pages I turned up. Be warned, my tastes are my own, your mileage may vary:

Sure, some of the information, and most of the opinions, were dated -- already. But there was much that was not. Perhaps more importantly, I think there are ideas throughout that were never even tried, or were surfaced poorly, or were just too far ahead of their time to succeed. Remember, a winning idea is rarely such due exclusively to properties of its own. Winning ideas have to be recognized as such by the people in the context in which they're offered. Seeds don't grow just anywhere.

Next Saturday morning, I'll dig a little deeper into what I used to know, or almost knew, or might have known, and see what other gems I can unearth. I may have to make a habit of it.

Should you find yourself mining your own collections, please feel free to share...

Toluu, now we're talkin useful, sort-of, maybe

Bob — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:05:39 GMT

TheNextWeb posted a good review of Toluu. Briefly, Toluu is about feed sharing.

Looks great. And frankly, I'm far more interested in these sorts of things than I am the "centralization of decentralized me" style services (I believe Solis might have said that first).

I haven't received an invite yet, so I don't know this first hand, but according to readwriteweb, "what you and your friends read and tag as favorites will help you discover new feeds that you may enjoy reading."

I can only wait and hope that Toluu recommendations are not based solely upon me and my friends. The reason, of course, is that I already have multiple communications channels engaged between myself and my friends/contacts. The old line “tell me something I don’t already know” applies.

However, if they’re going to find me people with similar interests that I don’t know, and then point me to things in those collections that I don’t already have, that would interest me a great deal.

Friendfeed or Socialthing or what

Bob — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:44:11 GMT

Friendfeed:

The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Friendfeed stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)

Socialthing:

The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Socialthing stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)

What:

What will these guys do to create sustainable differentiation?

FWIW, I'm experimenting with Friendfeed. You can find me at http://friendfeed.com/bobreb

Online Community Roundtable

Bob — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:53:03 GMT

http://redplasticmonkey.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/notes-from-the-online-community-roundtable-312-microsoft/

I have to agree with Bill, there were some smart people there, and the conversation was lively. We'll have to do it again sometime.

Some other links:

http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/03/13/notes-from-the-seattle-online-community-meetup/

http://teresacentric.com/2008/03/a-vertitable-online-community-smorgasbord/

Bridging the gap between possibility and practicality

Bob — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:27:03 GMT

I've been attracted recently to ideas that bridge the gap between possibility and short-term practicality. The game is managing the evolution of an innovation. It goes like this: first, what is this thing; second, how does it help me do what I already do; and third, what new things might I do with it. You can't jump from one to three. You have to go through the steps sequentially.

My favorite example goes like this: people at one time thought the best thing to do with a video recording device would be to take it to a live performance and situate it in the best seat in the house. The resulting recording would deliver to every viewer the perspective that could be had only by those few attending the live performance and seated in the most advantageous physical location. As a phase two conception, it makes perfect sense. You can almost hear the pundits: "now everyone gets the best seat in the house." We can only understand something using the conceptual tools we already possess. In this example, it wasn't immediately obvious that you could put the camera places where people couldn't sit at all, or that you could have multiple cameras, or film the event out of order, or in multiple locations, or add special effects, or any of the many things we associate with recorded content today. It's a classic phase two conception.

Today, in the online social space, we find the early majority figuring out phase one, and beginning the move to phase two. Consider that the phrase "social network", or maybe "social graph" is popularly understood as a collection of your friends and acquaintances. That's a very narrow perspective, but it is understandable when we consider the conceptual space the idea is entering. In time, on the other side of the hype curve, we'll grow out of it.

Anyway, one idea that I think bridges the gap is the social media release. It bridges the phase one to phase two gap for the PR and marketing professions. I've blogged about it before, because I think it's both practical and a great case study in the evolution of an idea. As it goes mainstream, rigor is added, and process evolves around it. The image here was taken from a deck created by Matt Herzberger and made available on Slideshare.

All hail the bridge builders...

Long distance meeting tools

Bob — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:42:02 GMT

I do a lot -- a very lot -- of work with teams whose members are not co-located. That's why I'm aways on the look out for new tools that might improve communications. Because it's usually development projects, the stakes are high -- miscommunication is costly.

Sarah Perez, of ReadWriteWeb, reported on Twiddla.com. It's an online multi-user whiteboarding tool. I gave it a quick spin and liked it a lot. Check it out:

Only weirdness I discovered was that I couldn't seem to change the drawing colors. The real test will come tomorrow when I spring it on a vendor I'm working with during our con call.

The Twine Drama continues

Bob — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:21:03 GMT

As anyone that knows me heard, I've become a believer that a social computing experience resting upon a semantic web style infrastructure (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.) has the potential to deliver an Internet first: a full featured information worker social computing experience -- a "web workers" dream come true.

As I've said before, the best bet to date appears to be Twine. But then Twine is still in closed beta, and I can't get in. Actually, that's the point of this post. You see, Nova Spivack, one of the men (maybe the man, but that's rarely the reality of it) behind Twine has suggested a way to the top of the beta invite list. Blog about Twine and you could move to the top of the list. Well, well. Done that before, and doing it here again. The request seems a bit over the top, but what the hell.

What should a service of this type do? It should provide me with unrestricted intellectual airspace. I, along with other people with related inclinations (I have learned recently to be suspicious of an unrestricted focus on peer relationships or any type) would be able to explore the web of people and ideas with a precision and fidelity hyperlinks and search algorithm's can't touch. Bring on the unknown unknows, and the serendipitous discovery -- I have desires that can only be met by ties of the weak kind.

We do get at a taste of that with services like Del.icio.us. Social bookmarking gets us part of the way there. But the social bookmarking services seem to have stopped innovating. It's almost like they've hit some sort of barrier and they've been either unable or unwilling to pass. Could it be one of conception?

And the big social networking services are heading in another direction altogether. I recently attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference and it's as if the players there believe there's only one social network per person -- the one called friends on Facebook -- and that no other valuable social graph does or can exist. Of course I'm overstating the situation. The smart ones know full well that every person is a part of many quite disparate networks. No doubt it's the potential commercial value associated with your "friends" networks and the mega millions engaged there (oh yeah, and the ability to actually address that market), that has them rapt.

And good for them. I wish them all the best. I have a ton of fun with Facebook. I just see the landscape differently. I believe the Facebook/Myspace/Bebo/etc. style services are among the first settlements to appear in the frontier and will not be the last; to me they are more a general consumer introduction to social computing rather than an end game. By way of contrast let me point out that I know the feeds in my RSS reader represent, and by a very wide margin, my most professionally valuable social network.

I can imagine what should come next, but I can't find much heading in that direction.

And then there's Twine.

Quotes and explanations

Bob — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:32:03 GMT

I've been quiet lately. Partly it's because I've so much work work to do, that it's impacted my free thinking time. On the other hand, I seem to have the opportunity to build some new and interesting things at work, so what's to really complain about?

I'll try to post some of my team's work regarding recognition/incentive systems in the next week or so. I'm hosting a Seattle Community Roundtable Wednesday night and I'll be presenting it anyway, so clearly it's not a secret. And it does remain highly debatable. I could use the feedback.

Here's something interesting I found:

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

Marshall McLuhan.

I can't tell you how much I buy that quote. I don't think it's fully appreciated. That might be a good thing.

I lifted the above quote from this slideshare presentation. There are a number of things worth reading -- worth seeing -- in it.

| View | Upload your own

Facebook will someday fade, will you?

Bob — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:53:00 GMT

Conceptually, I started down this road years ago. The term myspace, to me, was always something owned by the MySpace organization and was certainly not "my space". Alas, connecting personal internet properties of the blog/site kind such that the user can participate in any number of social engagements, perhaps even without leaving home, so to speak, remained only an idea for me. It looks like Chris Messina is one of several acting upon it.

I watched his video, and have been reading some (okay, much) of the commentary/discussion around the subject.

What interests me most here is the focus, and some of the assumptions. As for focus, it appears the idea of "friends" as the central element defining the social graph, remains. That is limiting progress towards my personal goal of a broadly accessible learning/knowledge focused social network experience. Anyone spending any time developing their "web worker" skills will know that strong tie relationships of the social networking "friends" kind have only limited value.

As for assumptions, one stands out in particular, though perhaps only for me and principally because I want to hear it. It seems that while most everyone is still paying homage to Facebook, an increasing number of people are coming to believe that it is not the last word.

I don't think the time is far off now when the majority realize that the only reasonable way of creating and maintaining an online presence, or persona, or multiple personas, will be on properties you own and control to the greatest extent possible. If all you do is rent space from MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of them, you're limiting yourself.

Why rent when you can buy? You can still visit the renters.

Free tools for students, I'm impressed with DreamSpark

Bob — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:07:32 GMT

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/2047/

email from bill also on January 17 2008

Bob — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:14:00 GMT

"...on Monday, Merck and Schering-Plough announced that Vytorin, which combines Zetia with Zocor, had failed to reduce the growth of fatty arterial plaque in a trial of 720 patients. In fact, patients taking Vytorin actually had more plaque growth than those who took Zocor alone.

Despite those drawbacks, that trial, called Enhance, also showed that patients on Vytorin had lower LDL levels than those on Zocor alone. For the second time in just over a year, a clinical trial found that LDL reduction did not translate into measurable medical benefits."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/business/17drug.html?ref=health

[BL: lends credence to the argument that some have made to the effect that the reason some of these drugs work a little, such as Crestor, is that they are anti-oxidants as well has HMG-CO Reductase inhibitors. Certain polyphenols, such as pomegranate juice, have in fact been shown to actually reverse plaque buildup.]

email from bill January 17 2008

Bob — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:13:00 GMT

http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/full/23/5/501S

Statin medications inhibit the same rate-controlling enzymeof the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway that requires adequateMg for normal deactivation, regulation and control.
Both thehighly beneficial pleiotropic and adverse effects ofstatinsappear to be caused by the decrease in mevalonate (andperhapsother intermediaries in the cholesterol biosynthesispathway)rather than a lower LDL-C.
Statin drugs lower LDL-C levelsmore sharply than do Mg supplements,but Mg more reliably actsto improve all aspects of dyslipidemiaincluding raising HDL-Cand lowering triglycerides, and hasthe same pleiotropic effectsas statins without their adverseeffects.

A little inspiration I happened upon

Bob — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:08:37 GMT

Here are a few diagnostic questions. When you answer “yes” to any of these, remind yourself what your larger goals are to get out of the trenches, and shift from comparing yourself to your direct peers and compare yourself on a larger stage instead.

Is this work BIG, or is it a task? (Email is a task)?
Is this work MEANINGFUL, or is it time consuming?
Is this work POWERFUL, or is it what we’ve always done?
Am I GROWING, or am I at the top?
Am I STRIVING, or am I coasting?
Am I REACHING for more, or am I checking off a box?

Squint at the capitalized words and I think they might be a good measuring stick.

From a guy named Chris Brogan and post called Trenches and Ponds.

SMR -- Social Media Release

Bob — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:49:00 GMT

Interesting. Some adjustments are finally surfacing. My exposure to PR professionals to date has suggested to me that they were taking an evolutionary approach to understanding and reacting to the online social experience. That's understandable, but not necessarily the most accurate perspective.

Of course, I'm not referring to the people you'll come across in places like this or this. Those places make it look like there's broad industry experience and understanding of PR and marketing in the new world. I believe that would be your (and my own) confirmation bias at work.

This blog, however, is looking like one that is building some real bridges between new think and old think.

Saying things like this is likely to get traditional PR folks listening to you:

I use them in conjunction with traditional releases and they work extremely well. Personally, I prefer using a blog platform to create and distribute them.

A little compromise goes a long way.

The evolution of CRM

Bob — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:32:59 GMT

Interested in next generation CRM? Check out this thread.

I should probably point out that Fili and I are on the same team.

Web Workers, the new knowledge workers, internet jedi

Bob — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:24:23 GMT

I just finished Anne Truitt Zelenka's new book.

Connect!: Web Worker Daily's Guide to a New Way of Working
by Anne Truitt Zelenka

Read more about this title...

I enjoyed it. I learned a few new tricks. Not to mention that any author mentioning Smart World, A Whole New Mind, Flow, and Mindfulness, all in the same book has my attention.

The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy

Bob — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:34:27 GMT

I was asked recently how I evaluated alternative proposals. The question was asked in the context of social systems designs. And while there are a number of considerations that apply to social systems specifically, that in no way obviates the need for a fundamental understanding of the forces at play in your marketplace.

I won't even try to add value here. I think everyone should spend some time understanding at least this aspect of the work of Harvard's Michael E. Porter.

Recently the Harvard Business Review ran an article by Michael Porter. It included a pointer to a video of Porter describing his five forces that definitely worth watching.

SpaceTime

Bob — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:00:22 GMT

I had to check this out. After all, I've been suggesting that at the highest level what we're doing with the internet is creating a virtual version of the physical world. The differences, I suggest (and one of the spaces for innovation), are all about virtual space and time versus physical space and time and what you might be able to do in one that is impossible in the other.

Yes, and I admit to visiting the Star Trek exhibit in Las Vegas.

Anyway, check this out. It is creative. Warning: if you suffer motion sickness you might want to go slowly. I'm not kidding.

From the fringe

Bob — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:57:38 GMT

http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

Something creative

Bob — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 06:15:33 GMT

Thanks Fili, this was a great find.

http://www.dontclick.it/

There are always alternatives worth exploring.

Social system design part 1: defining terms

Bob — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:53:02 GMT

Before the holidays I made the following promise:

However, to put all of this in context, I've decided to share the planning process itself -- how we think about planning social computing initiatives. It's my hope that clarifies how we make investment decisions and gives anyone interested in doing so an opportunity to point out any flawed assumptions that have crept into our thinking, and suggest improvements. I see that happening in several installments, each one building upon the last:

Defining terms: community/social software/social computing
Detailing association/relationship types and the development of strategy
The foundations of online social interaction and the development of tactics
The role of guiding principles in an ongoing creative development process
The roadmap

I suspect we'll get to each of these over the next three to four weeks.

The post received quite a few views, but no comments. I've been mulling over the meaning of that. And mulling. And mulling. And still mulling. In the meantime, I've decided to forge ahead.

Defining terms. Terms, ahhh, a favorite subject of mine. You see, according to the Insights Discovery System I'm predominately blue with yellow running a close second. (The Insights Discovery System program is one of those things companies do from time to time for a host of reasons including, but not limited to, team building, personal discovery and exploration of self, interpersonal awareness, and spending money. We all put up with it because we have to, and it's usually amusing, if a bit long winded. Here's an example of the kind of report you get after you take their test the graphic was pulled from that pdf.)

Anyway, us blues often insist that we have some agreement on terms. That requires a special effort and is not always a popular use of meeting time. Red's in particular often lack the patience for that sort of thing.

Defining community should be easy right? And it is, sort of. It's a "how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go" sort of thing. Community, and the phrase social network, each have a lot of layers. The wikipedia definitions continue to be refined. They've been edited a couple dozen times so far this month.

Here's the table on contents for the Wikipedia entry for community:

To be clear, I like the entry. It provides an interdisciplinary view of the subject and makes it clear that there's more depth and breadth than your membership in Facebook might suggest. However, I like to start simple, and simple is tough to tease out of that treatment.

And the plot thickens. It turns out that there's another entry on wikipedia that might meet our needs better. Wikipedia offers a second entry dedicated to virtual community. Here's the table of contents for that entry:

This one is not quite as long, and a lot more fun. Consider this quote: "Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks." Or this, "The agglomeration of all online communities is sometimes called the metaverse." Wow. Here we are, right this very instant, in the midst of socio-technical change and with full membership in the metaverse. I should add that to my LinkIn profile.

Along with that excited commentary, however, are a number of gems:

"A virtual community is a social network with a common interest, idea, task or goal that interact in a virtual society across time, geographical and organizational boundaries..."
"Virtual communities depend upon social interaction and exchange between users online."

Gems? Yes, because they're simple. You may have great depth in your understanding, but you must also start with simple definitions -- however superficial -- if you intend to get any conversation started. With that in mind, I would simplify further and say that at root a community is a group of people with a common interest and shared activity. It doesn't matter whether they're grouped online or offline, or what the interest is, as long as it results in related, and relating, activities.

On to "Social Network". In popular parlance, the phrase social network and community appear to be synonymous.

Technically, there is a distinction (and Wikipedia, in their definition of social network clearly warns us not to confuse the two). A social network is the structure underlying the community -- the web of relationship or association. Social network analysis is the process of describing and understanding the relationships between the related entities -- not necessarily human individuals (just as community, more broadly defined, does not require people -- though that is an assumption I've made herein to save space).

Here's an observation that makes the distinction: it is possible to be a member of someone's social network and not know it. It commonly occurs. My RSS reader represents one of my most prized and certainly most professionally valuable social networks. It's not, however, a community. Personally, I experience the sensation of dissonance at the idea that I could be an unwitting member of some community. Community membership connotes (at least) knowledge of that fact, though I've been known to ignore that distinction myself. Therefore, a community is a type of social network (web of relationship) where the members are cognizant of membership.

Consider this question: will community form around the OfficeLive Workspace product itself? I suspect that a community of experts in the technology will form. I hope it does. In fact I'll be continuously evolving the community site to support that goal. However, they will very likely represent only a tiny percentage of the overall population of workspace users. Any other communities? Again, I surely hope so and will be designing and redesigning services to support that end. But I don't think all, or even most of those communities will center on the product itself. Heresy, I'm sure, but the more likely outcome is that communities will form around the activities the technology supports, rather than the technology itself.

Will social networks form around the technology? The answer is yes if I have anything to say about it. You see, support is one of the reasons for the existence of http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com. And social networks may be a more important concept than community when we're considering support scenarios specifically, or information worker scenarios generally. I've written about that before, and likely will again -- just not right now.

So, with community and social network defined, are we ready to go determine strategy? Not yet, but at least we can begin talking sensibly about the subject. The next job is to define the nature of the relationships or associations that are most likely to best support the activities in question.