collectiveSome
Corporate Heresies, Technology Rants, Personal Observations


Monday, March 13, 2006  

wiki on a stick: TiddlyWiki

There's something intriguing here -- a simple tool (basically a single .html file you store on your computer and open with your browser) that creates the ability to organize small chunks of information you find useful.

Like many wiki-ish things, it seems to take pride in a funny name: "TiddleWiki."

From Wikipedia:

TiddlyWiki From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TiddlyWiki is a wiki-modeled client-side application written by Jeremy Ruston that is well suited for use as a personal notebook. It is a self-contained HTML file that includes CSS and JavaScript code. When it is downloaded to a user's PC, TiddlyWiki has the unusual ability, when brought up in some browsers, of being able to overwrite itself on the user's disk at the user's request. So following TiddlyWiki conventions, users can make a new entry, called a Tiddler, in their local copy of the TiddlyWiki file and save it for future reference by saving the TiddlyWiki file. Existing Tiddlers can also be modified or deleted in the same way.

TiddlyWiki is published by Osmosoft under a BSD open source license, which makes it freely available. Jeremy Ruston describes it as experimental, and in that spirit many people have used the original HTML file to create TiddlyWiki Adaptations. These fall under two general categories; those that retain the client-side write only feature, and those that add server-side file writing to make TiddlyWiki more like a true wiki. Links to both these kinds of Adaptations are put in the original TiddlyWiki file as they become known. TiddlyWiki Adaptations typically add features that were not originally envisioned by Ruston, and some of these features have been included in newer versions of TiddlyWiki.

A feature that sets TiddlyWiki apart from a standard wiki implementation is its content presentation.

Jeremy Ruston had this to say about it:

A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks (tiddlers), but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole. I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote its own distinctive WritingStyle. Although a TiddlyWiki is ideal for keeping notes, it can also be used as the foundation for a complete Web site. Its single file structure makes it easy to manage while providing an elegant Web experience.


External links

TiddlyWiki homepage:
http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

TiddlyWiki Tutorial:
http://www.blogjones.com/TiddlyWikiTutorial.html

posted by Tom | 2:12 PM


Sunday, January 22, 2006  

Thick or thin?


During World War II there were armies of engineers, cargo handlers and machinists who were regularly given the assignment of clearing a jungle, leveling a mile of terrain and building an all-weather airstrip.

And just as regularly, the assignment came with a deadline: two weeks.
Two weeks of amphetamine-loaded troops blasting palm trees out of the ground, two weeks of round-the-clock bulldozing, two weeks of worrying about random Japanese Zeros that would discover the site and strafe the ground with 50mm bullets.

During one of these pacific island 'builds,' so the story tells, it seems that the gasoline supply had been miscalculated and that every available drop had to be used for earthmoving equipment. Every drop meant that the gasoline fueled mess stoves wouldn't work.

Anyone who's father, whose uncle, who's grandfather ... served in that war knows about Spam: that curious pork-ish cube of material that's packed in equally curious gelatinous ... stuff. What it lacks in taste -- so the military rationale went -- it makes up in convenience. It's meat, it can be packed into sites by the ship full, and, of course, it never needs refrigeration.

What it DOES need, though, is some kind of cooking.

To get back to the story. It seems that there was one particularly laconic cook in one of the construction companies. Each day, three times a day, he'd stand behind the serving counter in the mess hall and ask each soldier the same two questions about his fried Spam. Thick or thin, and one slice or two.
As soon as the gasoline supplies were taken away from the mess hall - one would have thought there would be some kind of culinary adjustment.

Nope.

For the remaining week, three times a day, the fare was the same. Uncooked Spam.

One day it seems, one especially burly private calmly -- and with uncharacteristic politeness -- replied to the questions: "thick please - very thick... and yes, two of those large slices please."

He then proceeded to jump over the counter and beat the living BeGeezus out of the cook.

The next day, although the Spam remained uncooked, the cook himself -- sporting two black eyes a broken nose and two missing teeth -- had an additional question. "Would you like a pineapple ring on that slice?"

. . . .

I heard this story from a little old man who used to walk into my gym. The gym owner treated this old guy - with dimming sight and long-gone hearing - as though he was a dear relative.

"Dick" told us stories about watching Douglas McArthur in his famous 'wade ashore' press moment. About fantasies about dry socks. About welding quarter-inch thick steel plates to the bulldozers to keep the bullets away. About walking to work every day for 5 years after the war so he could save enough money for a car -- the car he thought he needed before he would propose to the woman who was his wife for over 60 years.


US Army Captain Richard N died ten days ago. He was 88 years old.
We'll miss him. We'll miss his kind.

posted by Tom | 10:45 AM


Saturday, January 14, 2006  

It's the people -- NOT the information !

We read breathless commentary about the power of information access -- that Wikipedia has become orders of magnitude larger than any encyclopedia in human history, that the reach of search engines and that the power of grass-root information tagging has placed us on the cusp of an evolutionary discontinuity.

Maybe its me. Maybe its the fact that I'm looking at behavior in Oakland and Berkeley California - neither, perhaps, being terribly representative of other places. Maybe its the fact that I'm more in tune with the needs of young students... and their not-so-young parents. But whatever the case, for several years now, I've had a sense that libraries are becomming real destinations and not just the place you run through to get the latest bestseller.

And then I notice an article in the currrent Christian Science Monitor that puts my observations in a broader context.

====

from the January 13, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0113/p09s02-coop.html

Libraries as places to linger and mingle
By Alex Wright

RICHMOND, VA. - Recent news of the massive book digitization efforts at the Library of Congress and other major libraries has renewed public interest in the long-standing dream of a universal digital library. Proponents argue that digitization will do more than just expand public access to books; it will change the shape of human knowledge itself. As digital books supplant physical ones, they argue, fusty old hierarchies like the Dewey Decimal System will give way to the liberating pixie dust of Google searches. Books will mingle with blogs. And we will all become, in effect, each other's librarians.

But if the shift from physical to digital books is so inevitable, then why did public libraries break attendance records last year? Why did publishers produce 300,000 printed, bound books in 2004 (up 14 percent from the year before)? Despite the enormous volume of information already available online, we seem to keep gravitating back to the physical world of books and libraries. All of which raises the question: Is a library really just a collection of books?

Advocates of digital libraries often invoke the image of the Library at Alexandria as the archetypal universal library. This was, after all, the last time a civilization managed to gather all of its accumulated knowledge under one roof. But the real Alexandria was much more than a giant papyrus warehouse; it was more like a Greco-Roman think tank, built with great colonnades and wide open spaces designed to draw scholars together, giving them a place to work together, engage in dialogue and debate, and practice Aristotle's famous peripatetic method: meaning literally, to walk around. The 500,000-odd scrolls were certainly a big draw, but the library was more than a depository. It was a living, human institution.

The great monastic libraries of medieval Europe, contrary to the popular stereotype, were not silent study halls for cloistered monks. They were noisy places where scribes, bookbinders and other artisans collaborated to create the astonishing illuminated manuscripts that flourished in the age before Gutenberg. Some visitors called them "houses of mumblers" because the monks liked to recite their texts out loud while they copied them. These, too, were living places, devoted not just to book preservation but to bringing scholars together to work with each other in the three-dimensional world.

Even in the silent reading rooms of our modern libraries, a kind of quiet collaboration takes place among readers, librarians, and authors. There is a tacit sense of community, and a reassuring solidity in the shared physical space that seems to provide an antidote to the specter of loneliness. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the emergence of the Internet has coincided with a doubling of public library attendance?

The current vision of the digital library rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that the function of libraries is to connect solitary readers with isolated texts. If that were so, then we could easily replace our libraries with book scanners, search engines, and laptops. And if the shape of human knowledge really rests in the Dewey Decimal System, then, well, we are surely in trouble.

Technologists have an unfortunate tendency to view the world in mechanistic terms, as a set of problems waiting to be solved. As a result, they often fixate easily on the most obvious and reducible problems - like retrieving a book from the stacks - while discounting the subtler and qualitative dimensions of human experience. We need books, yes, but somehow we also seem to need physical places to read them, together. This is why a collection of digital books is no more a library than a stack of paintings is a museum.

• Alex Wright, a former Harvard librarian, is currently writing a book about the history of the information age.

posted by Tom | 6:45 PM


Wednesday, January 04, 2006  

A ten thousand year clock, a sensual bronze cam, and a Big idea



Now and then we are witnesses to heroic thinking. Thinking that gently (and not so gently) chides us for our fascination of the immediate, the current, the bright, the flashy. Thinking that reminds of us broad goals and higher aspirations.

The Long Now Foundation represents such a heroic effort. The Long Now is an effort to remind us of the importance of *truly* long-term thinking.

Here's an essay by one of the founding members of the foundation - Stewart Brand. Brand, as you know, has a delightfully non-linear history that includes a stint as one of the 1960's Merry Pranksters, a founder of the online community - the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL), originating editor of the Whole Earth Catalogs, author of several books - most recently, How Buildings Learn, and one of the principles of the scenario planning consultancy, Global Business Network.

In this essay, Stewart Brand talks about the need for, and the mechanism by which, The Long Now Foundation is attempting to encourage long term thinking.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Clock and Library Projects

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Hillis, who developed the 'massive parallel' architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, devised the mechanical design of the Clock and is now building the second prototype (the first prototype is on display in London at the Science Museum). The Clock's works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system which is so accurate and revolutionary that we have patented several of its elements. (With 32 bits of accuracy it has precision equal to one day in 20,000 years, and it self-corrects by 'phase-locking' to the noon Sun.) For the way the eventual Clock is experienced (its size, structure, etc.), we expect to keep proliferating design ideas for a while. In 01999 Long Now purchased part of a mountain in eastern Nevada whose high white limestone cliffs may make an ideal site for the ultimate 10,000-year Clock. In the meantime Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose continue to experiment with ever-larger prototype Clocks.

Long Now added a "Library" dimension with the realization of the need for content to go along with the long-term context provided by the Clock - a library of the deep future, for the deep future. In a sense every library is part of the 10,000-year Library, so Long Now is developing tools (such as the Rosetta Disk, The Long Viewer the Long Server) that may provide inspiration and utility to the whole community of librarians and archivists. The Long Bets project - whose purpose is improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable - is also Library-related.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

-Stewart Brand

Updated March of 02002
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



You can hold a scale model of one of the critical parts of this 10,000 year clock in your hand - the 'cam' by which the giant clock will mark the passage of centuries.

The scale model is a sculpture cast in solid brass and its been made possible by a deal between the Long Now Foundation and Levenger. Buy one and you're contributing to a cause that will outlive you, your great grandchildren, and several hundred human generations following them.



More information on Brand and the Time Cam:.. (http://www.levenger.com/POPUPS/HowTo.asp?PageID=5017)

posted by Tom | 7:08 PM


Monday, January 02, 2006  

megapixel display, zero-learning curve, and with a User Experience that can't be beat - the next generation of Personal Data Assistant

Here's something that's really caught my fancy.

For oh-so-long I've been suspicious of the Business Boys that huddle up in First Class as they engage in one of the few mano-a-mano conversations where 'winning' is done by showing how small one's thing is. Blackberries, PDAs, ultralight laptops, and now, 'pentops...' the specific tool doesn't matter. What DOES seem to matter is how current one's toy is.

None of which has much to do with whether these devices actually improve one's workaday productivity.

The Zenith (or, possibly Nadir) of all of this appeared the other day as I was waiting for a 'service representative' at my local Honda dealer. 'guy ahead of me was inquiring about replacement wiper blades for his car. The service rep patiently waited as tech-boy entered the EXACT part number into his PDA.

Clearly, this was an important part of the gentleman's personal database of critical factoids.

so... I started thinking about a little leather card holder I'd gotten years before - a little nothing of a thing that held a bunch of 3x5 note cards that I could carry 'round to scribble notes on.

AND, by an amazing stroke of intersecting factors, that same day I heard someone mention 'Hipster PDAs.'

Here's the story (as told by Wikipedia)






...


Hipster PDA
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search


The Hipster PDA is a paper-based personal organizer popularised, if not invented, by San Francisco writer Merlin Mann. Originally a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the increasing expense and complexity of personal digital assistants, the Hipster PDA (said to stand for 'Parietal Disgorgement Aid') simply comprises a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip. Following widespread coverage in the media and blogs, the Hipster PDA (abbreviated 'hPDA') has become a popular personal management tool particularly with geeks and followers of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology and users of the Fisher Space Pen.

Advocates of the hPDA claim that it is a cheap, lightweight, free-form organiser which doesn't need batteries and is unlikely to be stolen. Critics cite the lack of integration with desktop PC productivity software and point out that there is no easy way to back up the often critical information stored in an hPDA.

Although it began as a joke, or perhaps a statement about technology fetishism, the Hipster PDA has rapidly gained a population of serious users, with hundreds posting pictures of their customised hPDAs on photo sharing sites and exchanging tips on Internet mailing lists. Enthusiasts also design and share index card-size printable templates for storing contacts, to-do lists, calendars, notes, project plans, and so on.

The Hipster PDA (perhaps so named because it is a pocket device, or as an allusion to hipster culture) has become something of an Internet phenomenon, gaining popularity primarily among young, technology-literate people especially IT workers. It represents a 'back-to-basics' or Zen attitude to personal management.

posted by Tom | 5:12 PM


Sunday, November 13, 2005  

if you go out in the woods today...

It comes upon you like a freight train at a railway crossing. Before you know it, workaday thoughts are driven from your mind as the world is replaced by the flashing of crossing lights, the clanging of alarms, and the monstrous thunder of several thousand tons of rolling stock twenty feet from your car's hood.

What came upon me was a Papa Bear reaction.

When I picked up my 8 year-old from school the other day I noticed tears in her eyes. After a bit of gentle prodding I discovered that three of her closest friends were so angry with her that they'd pledged never to play with her again. I discovered the source of the anger: they'd been told that my daughter had committed some awful breach of the rules of an imaginary game they'd been playing. I discovered that the person who informed them was a classmate who's always had -- in the minds of several parents in our children's school -- the real potential of becoming a classic Mean Girl.

To draw a fuller image of this 3rd grade proto-Alpha could include talking about reprimands for dragging non-swimming classmates into the deep end of the pool, or about parent-teacher meetings called to discuss anti social behavior. That said, being a candidate for growing into a truly nasty child is one thing. Transferring this diffused hostility to the friends of my daughter -- something else indeed.

A senior teacher noticed my daughter's distress that afternoon, figured out who was involved and immediately called a 'talk it out' session between all the kids. It was the teacher, my daughter the ringleader the three others -- and me. Kids being kids, we heard mostly denials and claims of innocence. Most amazingly though, was the reaction of the girl who'd started this. This 8-yr-old became the object of pointed and only slightly veiled accusatory questions from a teacher and from a parent. One would have thought a third grader would have at least feigned seriousness or respect. Instead, her reaction to being questioned on why she'd been bullying was met by as much disinterest as though we were asking about the weather.

As I listened to the story again and as I observed the girl's lack of affect, I became enraged.

It was a deep, pre-human, consuming rage and all I wanted to do was to shield my daughter from what my higher brain was conjuring up as a creature from hell.

Mercifully, cognition trumped brain stem hormones.

In the next 24 hours, I did all the sensible things -- basically reminding and notifying the teachers and the involved parents that the school has a zero tolerance policy about bullying. And that, by the way, dad was pretty cramped by this as well...

What I learned that day was the seemingly limitless well of emotion that can be tapped when it comes to one's child.

Do what you will to my possessions or to me and you can expect a properly Episcopalian measured response. Hurt my child and be reminded that the woods, so full of surprises, are never far away.

posted by Tom | 10:04 PM


Monday, October 10, 2005  

BIG BLUE IS GLAD YOU'RE GOING GREY .

FINANCIAL TIMES

An article from the Financial Times reminded me of one of my soapboxes - that there's a demographic sea change afoot, that companies need to be aware that they cannot simply hope it's a passing worry, and that there are probably all manner of things (and business opportunities) circling 'round this issues.



>By Alison Maitland
>Published: September 28 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 28 2005 03:00
>>

The grey hairs are rapidly showing in the oil and gas industry in Europe and the US. At an estimated average age of 49, half the workforce is expected to retire in the next five to 10 years. The US nursing and teaching professions face a similar demographic crunch, as do aerospace and utilities companies.

These sectors are experiencing labour shortages as younger people balk at heavy manual work, unsociable hours and "unsexy" skills such as engineering. Employers are being forced both to find imaginative recruitment solutions and to consider how to hang on to mature workers for longer.

It is into this tricky territory that IBM, the world's largest technology company, is stepping with the launch today of consulting services to help companies prepare for the potential loss of skills as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement.

IBM says it is offering a comprehensive package that includes analysis of companies' workforce demographics and skills, job modification and training of older employees to maintain productivity and methods to capture their knowledge and pass it to the next generation, possibly through modern apprenticeships.

"The ageing population will be one of the major social and business issues of the 21st century," says Mary Sue Rogers, head of IBM's 3,500-strong human capital management consulting group that will provide the new services. The company is responding to requests for help from clients, especially in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy.

Niche consultants and human resources specialists such as Mercer and Hewitt Associates are already active in the field. Angela Watson, worldwide partner of Mercer, says: "There has been a bit of a push from the marketplace in terms of addressing critical skill shortages re-lated to age and experience."

But global consulting companies have not moved in with innovative services, say independent experts. Deborah Russell, head of economic security at the American Association of Retired Persons, points out that many employers have not yet woken up to the demographic shifts that may confront them within a decade.

"I can't say there are droves of consulting firms advising employers about ageing workforce issues as yet," says Ms Russell. "We are always looking . . . because we see the value of working with big consulting firms. Employers still view the AARP as advocates - so of course we are going to say positive things about older workers. Consulting firms bring credibility."

As this is an emerging market, estimates of its potential size are hard to come by. Ms Rogers expects to have a better idea in the next six to 12 months: "We'll see this market mature and change over the next five years and we want to be in there at the beginning."

There are pointers, however, in population projections. In five years' time, for example, nearly 30 per cent of the Japanese population will be over 60, up from 17 per cent in 1990, according to US Census Bureau data. Around 26 per cent of Italians and Germans will be over 60, up from 21 and 20 per cent respectively in the early 1990s.

There is also survey evidence that many people expect to work beyond traditional retirement age but in a more flexible way, posing challenges for employers in reshaping jobs to attract or keep them. A new survey for IBM of 1,000 American workers aged 45 to 65 shows that half plan to work beyond 65 because they need the income or want to stay active. Two-thirds think their experience is transferable to other sectors.

The experience of employers in countries with fast-ageing populations such as Finland and Australia shows that successful recruitment and retention of mature workers requires sensitive management and culture change, areas in which occupational health and psychology play an important role.

IBM plans to use "cultural anthropologists" and social scientists to help clients understand the impact of an ageing workforce. But its new service draws heavily on its existing strengths in IT and outsourcing. "The solutions are going to be increasingly process and technology-driven," says IBM. The taxonomy of [companies'] population is data-driven. Capturing knowledge is in many ways IT-driven."

IBM cites the transformation of its own internal travel expenses process from a paper-based system to an online tool. It says the 3,000 processing staff, many of whom are babyboomers, have been transformed into consultants, selling the application to other companies. "They went from being an internal cost centre to an external billable resource."

posted by Tom | 8:30 AM


Saturday, September 10, 2005  

Project BackPack and SeedWiki

Saturday 10 September 2005
Berkeley, CA

----------------

Last week, three school-age sisters in a Washington DC suburb watched the televised stream of images of Katrina refugee families. They wanted to know how they could help their peers, the children in their age-groups now in temporary shelters, far from their destroyed homes and forever away from possessions that helped frame their lives. These sisters talked to their father about an idea: the idea was to send children the thing every kid has - a backpack of things ranging from clothes and small toys to school supplies.

Project Backpack - a relief effort for the children of Katrina, was born from this simple idea and helped along with a handful of emails to fellow parents in that suburb. Within a few days hundreds of children and their parents were filling backpacks and preparing them for shipment to refugee sites in Texas. Three days later, participants numbered in the thousands. A public radio news piece about these children helping children fed the strength of the effort. People from all 50 states emailed they wanted to help. From a goal of 1000 backpacks, over 5000 were collected in the first week and shipped to kids who need them.

What we are seeing is an amazing example of grass roots activism that emerges with remarkably little organizational support.

Support has come from another approach.

From the earliest days of the effort, the girls' father -- Steve Kantor -- used a kind of software that's only recently attracted any press attention. What Mr. Kantor used is something called a wiki.

Wikis are best thought of as a set of tools you use to build the kind of web site you need. They offer a collection of features that remind us of email, online meeting software, web- and desktop- publishing, databases, web portals, and social networking sites. In the case of Project Backpack, what was needed and what was quickly built was an interactive online 'place.'

Project Backpack selected an online environment named SeedWiki -- a product created and supported by a small eponymous Berkeley, California, company.

While it's impossible for anyone involved with this software genre to claim a long history, SeedWiki makes a convincing argument for its veteran status from having offered this tool for almost four years. SeedWiki has been a pioneer in creating easy-to-use online environments and it has led the nascent wiki industry in offering free and universal access to its services. Project Backpack is one of hundreds of organizations and work groups that use SeedWiki's hosting service.

In the first few days of the Project Backpack wiki, nearly 11,000 visitors have had the ability to read and contribute practical information and new ideas to the effort. This is more than a democratization of input: it is nothing less than accepting the reality that groups can collectively steer an organization. It is, as the wiki community often states, a reality where 'Everyone is smarter than any-one.'

The mushrooming success the Project Backpack is in no small way a by-product of the fact that site visitors from across the country have created links to more information about contacts and distribution centers. They have suggested other relief agencies that can work alongside this effort. And they have created new logos and brochures for volunteers to use as they help gather and ship these precious new possessions to the children of Katrina.

Steve Kantor says this best:

Project backpack took off because SeedWiki provided a tool to create something where no one was in charge but everyone was in charge.

----------------


For more information about Project Backpack:
project wiki -- http://projectbackpack.seedwiki.com
Steve Kantor: father and project director -- steve.kantor@gmail.com

For more information about SeedWiki:
company site -- http://seedwiki.com
Tom Portante: -- tomportante@gmail.com

posted by Tom | 6:29 PM


Monday, July 18, 2005  

this is just a test






posted by Tom | 10:35 PM


Sunday, July 17, 2005  


the latest - (and best?) effort at creating a useful artifact

Here's the thing ... you want the ability to grab a few minutes of fiddle practise at those little chunks of time that go by waiting for something else: waiting for the Thai food to arrive at the door, waiting for the electric kettle to boil the water for coffee, waiting for - all kinds of stuff. Time you could be working on a new song, an old technique, or a few bars of something you heard and you think you'd like to copy.

Leaving the fiddle in its protective case is the safest thing to do. 'problem is - walking to the closet, hauling out the case, and unbuckle-ing and unzipping it takes just that LITTLE bit if mental energy that you often think, "oh, uh, maybe next time."

So? My idea was to create a safe (strong and earthquake proof) wall holder for my fiddle. It had to be easy to make. It had to hold the fiddle far enough away from the wall that I could leave the chin rest on the instrument, and, of course, it needed a way to hold the bow as well.

The couple of commercial products did the job extremely well - but they didn't look like things I really wanted to look at on my wall.

What I've built is a very simple tool. It's made of redwood and red oak, eighth-inch steel rods and medical quality black latex tubing. In a kind of neurotic worry about this thing letting go of my fiddle, I 'field tested' the holder by bolting the thing to a wall in the garage and hanging three 10-lb bags of flour from it for a week. I suppose I _could_ have backed the car into that wall to see how the holder dealt with quakes ...

Simple. Functional. Strong. Pleasing to look at.

Vetruvius would have been proud ---

posted by Tom | 8:39 PM


Tuesday, June 28, 2005  

Playing for the soul

Two days and a year ago I remember a very long night. It was the evening following a grievously sad afternoon phone call from my sister. It was a night where I felt irretrievably alone in the world - where the only thing that I allowed to touch my soul was a long session of fiddle playing. Two days and a year later -- the fiddle was once again the connection to that solitude and while the songs have changed, the memories haven't. The sorrow of loss doesn't lessen as much as it pays visits less often. Sometimes those visits are a reminder of the depth of loss and the scope of one's ability to love. My fiddle playing invited that sorrow to come back today. It was a good visit.

posted by Tom | 8:24 PM


Monday, June 20, 2005  

your chance to help create one of the earliest general guides to wikis !
---------------------------------------------------------------------


Everyone -- the old saying goes -- is smarter than any one.

If that is indeed the case -- ' chances are good that bringing a lot of people to the table will help produce a well-rounded introduction to this genre of software -- wikis. And if we do it right, the end product of our work, be it a book, a series of published white papers, or a collection of colloquia presentations, will be an important business contribution.

There's a huge market potential of readers who would value a gentle introduction to wikis. They include business- and IT- professionals who track and evaluate new technologies, project managers, members of skunk works in larger companies, and Jack-of-all-Trades in smaller organizations

here's how you can help create this:

* look at this outline draft
* add to it
* create links to important ideas (either links to URLs or to pages you wish to create)
* annotate what's already here
* contribute to the 'discussion' below

Please join me and lend your hand in creating this important body of work -- Tom Portante

The Simplest Tool - wikis as web-machines

posted by Tom | 3:32 PM


Sunday, June 05, 2005  

Send in the anthropologists !!

There's a soapbox I climb aboard from time to time: the idea that there's simply *got* to be an advantage in helping companies determine what their _real_ day-to-day business needs are *and* matching those needs to appropriate tools and technologies.

Big Vendors -- be they in hardware, software, or professional services, all say this is exactly what they already do. Having been on the trigger side of some of these, my recollection is that targeted companies are presented with different variants of a sales theme -- but what ends up being sold is remarkably similar across different company sizes and industries.

There are ways around this charade. One is doing something very simple: if you want to sell products and services to a specific company, you assign someone (or someone-s) to spend time within that target company. You ask them to watch and listen what people actually do on a day to day basis. And what you learn from these on-site observers helps you -- the vendor -- create products and services that are truely useful.

You bring in people trained to do this sort of thing. You bring in social anthropologists.

A recent Fortune magazine article points to how companies are refining their wares to small-and-medium business, using anthropologists.

posted by Tom | 6:55 PM


Sunday, May 29, 2005  

a story larger than the Nokia - its about simplicity

A year ago the New York Times published an essay - by Jessie Scanlon - and it focused on MIT's John Maeda's quest for a better way to create things we all use.

Since then, MIT has created a project, called, well, The Simplicity Project. MIT Link: http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/

and, the essay...


ESSAY; A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple

By JESSIE SCANLON
Published: May 20, 2004

''WHAT'S that movie where the guy says, 'Plastics -- there's a great future in plastics'?'' John Maeda asks me. Before waiting for me to say ''The Graduate,'' he adds, ''I feel like that guy.''

If he were truly the Mr. McGuire of the 21st century, he'd be touting Google or biometrics, but I see the parallel. Dr. Maeda, an associate professor of design and computation at the M.I.T. Media Lab and an award-winning graphic designer, has spent eight months putting forward his own one-word vision of the future: simplicity.

There is too much needless complexity in the world, he argues. Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has taken a wrong turn. In 20 years we've gone from the simplicity of MacPaint to Photoshop. While the first fostered a creative explosion, the second gave birth to an industry of how-to books and classes. And such complexity is commonplace, Dr. Maeda says. Despite the lip service paid to ''ease of use,'' ''plug and play,'' and ''one-click shopping,'' simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, he adds, and it is time to break free from technology's intimidating complexity.

This was the argument Dr. Maeda made last August when he called to tell me about the Simplicity Design Workshop, an initiative that would bring working designers to the Media Lab to collaborate with researchers. He had signed on Bill Moggridge of the design consultancy Ideo, Alexander Gelman of the New York-based graphics studio Design Machine, and Charlie Lazor from the hip Minneapolis furniture company Blu Dot as fellows for the first year of the program. He wanted me to be the design-writing fellow -- someone to shadow and chronicle the workshop proceedings.

Simplicity is hardly a new idea. ''Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,'' Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying. His actual wording was a tad more convoluted, but in any case, few in Silicon Valley heeded his advice. Conventional wisdom held that to sell the latest version or next generation of a product, you had to add new functions. ''That's not the only thing driving the industry,'' says Walter Bender, the executive director of the Media Lab. ''But I don't think I've ever seen a piece of commercial software where the next version is simpler rather than more complex.''

The Windows operating system is a case in point. According to Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at the software consultant Cigital, the 2000 version of Windows had 20 million lines of source code. XP, released in 2001, had 40 million -- a doubling in less than two years. Critics of such complexity have offered myriad solutions. Writing about the ''threshold of frustration,'' Bill Buxton, a former chief scientist at the graphics software maker Alias who now runs a consulting firm, called for engineers to focus less on technology and more on who, what, when, where, why -- that is, how it's being used. He promotes the idea of information appliances, or machines tailored to a specific task, rather than general-use PC's. Others have criticized the industry for an obsession with beauty and technology at the expense of user-centered design.

Dr. Maeda says the solution is not better design or better technology but a better partnership between the two. Hence the Simplicity Design Workshop, which could leverage the lab's understanding of emerging technologies and the real-world experience of the designers into a series of concrete, well tested principles.

In January Mr. Moggridge of Ideo met with a Media Lab group led by Cynthia Breazeal, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences, to try to define simplicity. It was easy to embrace the concept, with its connotations of beauty and elegance and its promise of a better way, but what did it mean in practical terms?

They considered examples of simplicity: the iPod for its minimalist form and intuitive interface; Google for its straightforward, no-fuss approach to searching; the Screwpull wine-bottle opener for its mechanical elegance; Apple Keynote (rival to PowerPoint) for its subtle pop-up indicators that help you align and position elements like a pro. (Not to mention the Citroën 2CV for its, well, social engineering: a high roof to accommodate the hats of French farmers, and other details that helped the car blend seamlessly into its drivers' lives.)

The brainstorm suggested crucial elements: transparency, aesthetic appeal, restraint, just-in-time information. ''We started with the big picture: what does simplicity mean in the context of our work?'' said Dr. Breazeal, a pioneer of social robotics whose current project is building a learning companion robot called RoCo. ''But the real value is to see how Bill approaches the problem of design.''

''Our interaction with Bill introduced us to alternative techniques,'' she said. ''For instance, he shared Ideo's brainstorming cards, which will be a wonderful tool for thinking about how to incorporate human-interaction issues into the early stages of design.''

In a second collaboration, Mr. Gelman of Design Machine teamed up with a group developing OpenAtelier, a Web-based collection of software tools for drawing, painting, photography, video and text-editing. Specifically, he designed a series of interfaces that, through simple changes in the size of the icons or in the use of boxes to delineate options, were geared toward different users: adults, children, the elderly.

The principle seemed to be macro-personalization -- the equivalent of this newspaper's special Large Type Weekly edition for the sight-impaired -- rather than the micro-personalization offered by a My Yahoo page. It's easy to see the potential for, say, type-enlarged TurboTax forms for aging boomers.

From the first year's efforts, some tenets of simplicity have emerged:

1.Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.

2.Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.

3.Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.

4.Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.

Beyond principles, the project seems to have coalesced around specific emerging technologies that promise to be the pillars of simplicity. The first is visualization and the need for tools to display complex information in a meaningful way.

''Think of the sophistication of interacting with today's video games compared to working with an Excel spreadsheet,'' Dr. Maeda says. ''We need to bring dynamic, immersive, engaging visuals to a whole range of information-display problems, from handling messages in your e-mail in-box to mapping the genome.''

Another important research area is ambient intelligence. Wi-Fi, radio-frequency identification, and other wireless developments will allow people to obtain and transmit digital information through ordinary objects and surfaces. The mouse and keyboard won't be our only bridge to the digital world.

A third arm of research focuses on making computers smarter. One method, a new branch of artificial intelligence, aims to give computers common sense in the form of a vast database of mundane truths about the world (the sky is blue, coffee wakes you up). A second approach, affective computing, gathers information about the state of the user through a range of sensors, enabling the computer to adapt by, say, holding delivery of all but high-priority e-mail when it detects stress.

As the first year of the workshop ends, the most obvious conclusion is that it has barely scratched the surface. With every Consumer Electronics Show, we seem to wade deeper into the ''paradox of the digital age,'' in the words of the computer scientist and design critic Donald Norman: the very technologies that we hope will simplify life ultimately complicate it. But there is hope. As Mr. Moggridge says, ''Technology is the villain, as well as the exciting opportunity.''



posted by Tom | 1:52 PM


Friday, May 27, 2005  

Forget about slicing, dicing, chopping, mixing and grating: Introducing the Nokia 770



A hundred years ago the Sears & Roebuck catalog offered Americans an amazing new device: A Home Motor.

By way of driveshafts, snaking cables, and step-up and step-down gears, Early Adopter homemakers of the day could power dough kneading devices, nut-grinders, rug beaters, pants stretchers and chimney-sweepers. It was a startlingly original idea - each home could have its own electric motor that would make so, so many things possible.

As we know, the world never evolved in that direction. While all-purpose devices have continued to attract large followings (witness the current Home Shopping network on TV), market success has typically gone to products that do only a very few things - very well.

Despite the wild success of limited function gadgets (just HOW popular is the Palm Pilot?) it often looks like purveyors of hi-tech haven't quite caught up with this broader trend.

I've been reading the instant reviews of a product Nokia is on the verge of going to market with. It's called the Nokia 770, and it appears to be a paper-back book sized, Linux-driven and Wi-Fi enabled device that you use to gain access to the Web anytime you find yourself in a broadcasting Hot Spot. It has a display screen that's actually large enough to browse sites with and there's an on-screen keyboard that one use to tap out email.

And, it seems, that's about it...

Reviews have been pretty harsh on this thing: most (not all -- to be fair...) of the commentators are saying, in effect, "well, that's nice but it SHOULD have had a cell-phone, a camera and a powerful PDA built in."

It will be interesting to see how Nokia's attempt at Going Simple will play out.

PC-Magazine's Review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1820232,00.asp

InfoSync World Review:
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5991.html

Nokia press info:
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,75023,00.html

posted by Tom | 1:34 PM


Friday, May 06, 2005  

supply and demand in a world of archived art

You can imagine a company that acts as a broker between small or medium-sized museums and a demand for short-term possession of pieces of art.

Talk to museum curators; they'll often tell you they have far more work stored in archives than is possible to display. Sometimes what's stored in the vaults are secondary - relative to specific shows - pieces of work. For example, in a local museum's recent display of maps of California made by the gold-miners of the 1840s and 50s, for every map displayed there were hundreds of less significant pieces: maps of what would later become small towns, diaries and letters of the '49-ers,' newspapers and saloon artifacts...

While a great deal of what's archived by museums has been donated by foundations and trusts with specific directions on how or whether material can be shown, a much larger percentage of stored material is without such constraints. In the case of the local museum's collections of Gold Rush memorabilia, almost all could be displayed pretty much anywhere. In this specific case, the local museum could also consider selling off some of its duplicate pieces.

Museums would typically love to be able to share some of their material with larger audiences. They'd also like to recoup some of the costs involved in keeping large art archives.

On the other side of the equation is the demand for art -- at the right price. Corporations decorate their halls with art: their headquarter lobbies are places demonstrating committment to the arts. Hi-end decorators often use rented artwork in showrooms of their work. Real estate companies 'stage' residential houses: at the multimillion dollar level of home, one could easily see the value of including memorable art.

What's missing is a unified marketplace where buyers (or - rentors) can view a large selection of what's available.

UberArt.net is doing this in Australia.

My hunch is that it can be done here.

posted by Tom | 6:38 PM


Wednesday, May 04, 2005  

A lead article in the current issue of FastCompany starts with this sentence:

In an economy where style is king, we all need to start thinking and acting more like design.


(http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/93/design.html - From: Issue 93 | April 2005 | Page 68 By: Bill Breen Photographs by: Derek Shapton)

Bill Breen's FastCompany article reminded me of a soapbox I've been standing on for a while. For more years than I'd like to admit, I've been urging button-down business leaders to look towards a somewhat unorthodox source of perspectives -- the world of design.

This is hardly a new suggestion. Nearly twelve years ago Mitch Kapor fired a broadside against the vast majority of companies creating software tools. He indicted complacent software engineers who gave us boringly interchangeable products. Tools that were confusing to understand and egregiously complex to use. Tools that failed to give even the smallest bit of delight that could make us fans of these products.

At the time, he argued for the creation of a new profession -- that of Software Designer. Kapor likened the focus of this new calling to the ancient profession of architecture. Both are design professions that straddle two worlds -- the world of engineering requirements and creating tools -- and the world of people and human processes.



Design -- and a broader applicability

We need to expand Kapor's suggestion: great broad swaths of contemporary business need to consider the importance of design principles. Kapor's railings against workman-like software are the same kind of critiques given by a growing number of people, targeting an even larger range business endeavours.

We need to lobby for the creation and acceptance of yet another profession: that of Business Designer.

Our deployed technologies are more often wearisome than helpful. Our company's services and offerings are more confusing than delightful. And even our vaunted and admired styles of management lead to undercurrents of Dilbert cynicism among our employees.

Mitch Kapor's article points us towards a solution. It's a two-millenia-old solution worth re-visiting.

Two thousand years ago the Roman architect, Vetruvius, outlined the essence of good design. Good design, he argued, resides at the intersection of three principles. A good design needs to solve a problem; well-designed 'things' need to be robust. A good design needs to stand the test of time; that is, it needs to be sufficiently malleable in the hands of different people. And finally, a good design needs to give us delight, it needs to touch our hearts, it needs to give us pleasure.

Good design, in words that almost never appear in contemporary business literature, engages different parts of our human psyche.

It's this engagement, this sustained quality of human attention, that I argue is at the heart of a solution.



"un-packing" human attention -- and business consequences

Several years ago, I helped convene a small meeting in to talk about a directly related set of topics. Our round-table discussion, "The Economics of Attention" began with the following question: "How might business -- its organizational types, its products and services, and its enabling technologies -- be changed if we had a better understanding of human attention?"

During that meeting a nationally renowned designer - John Rheinfrank - shared some of his insights into the attention-practitioner's art. He described how a handful of elements combine to form a model of human attention. A model -- I'd wager -- quite different from ideas most of us brought to that conversation.

Rheinfrank talked about the centrality of observation for the design process: to learn how people actually use a product -- not how they describe using it. While his examples were from the world of product design (photocopiers and consumer point-and-shoot cameras) his principles have much broader applicability.



John Rheinfrank's design principles of engagement

1. Connection: Are your company's products and services, its technologies or even its organizational goals "reachable?" Can your customers -- or clients -- get to those offerings? Can your employees get to them? Or, and you need to ask yourself this often, is there something or someone gating that crucial access?

2. Attraction: Do your company's products and services, its technologies and even its organizational goals "beckon" to people. Are your customers or clients "wowed" or astounded by your offerings, are your employees?

3. Orientation: Does your company's "X" (fill in the words from above) guide people -- customers, suppliers, employees -- through what's possible. Is there a mapping of what they can expect? (As an example to yourself: step through some commonplace business events: how customers or suppliers negotiate various activities with your company, or with how a brand-new employee sees your organization. Having done that: how clear is the roadmap for these activities?)

4. Appropriate Experience: Does your company's "X" offer a range of involvement appropriate to what's needed. Appropriate engagement, over the period of time that the 'X' is being used/consumed is the key here. Is there enough challenge, is there a reward, does the activity 'make sense?'

5. Extension: Rheinfrank talked about 'skilling tools.' In contrast to the 'push-here-dummy' approach to the current generation of cameras, better products, better services, (better "Xs") would grow with the consumer. An example: Technology assessment might consider this criteria -- giving the nod to tools that not only offer a simple way to get something done but still offer interested consumers ways to 'get better' at their tasks.

6. Retention: How do we get the consumers of our "Xs" to *be* fans? How do we build loyalty? How do we get people to 'learn better,' and to remember to apply what they've learned to their jobs, their customers, their clients?

7. Social Reputation: This is where product (service, offering, and tool -- your company's "X") reputation is shared and where there are increasing returns. You spend a little more to make fans of your "X" and *they* tell their friends, who then want the experience... and the gyre widens.


These approaches can be applied to examining what our businesses offer.

Two days ago I was asked to look at a business proposal for a company that wants to create a marketplace for archived art collections. Yes - there are criteria like market sizes, competitor analyses, demographic projections, and regulatory environments that will play a role in how I evaluate this proposal.

But - and because of the reminder in this month's FastCompany article - I'll be taking a clue from John Rheinfrank's principles as I try to figure out if its a winning idea.

I suspect my evaluation will be the better for it...



----------------------------
again: the URL to the article:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/93/design.html

From: Issue 93 | April 2005 | Page 68 By: Bill Breen Photographs by: Derek Shapton

----------------------------



The Business of Design

In an economy where style is king, we all need to start thinking and acting more like design.

Quick, what's your IQ? No, not your intelligence quotient -- your imagination quotient. In this turbulent, get-real economy, the advantage goes to those who can outimagine and outcreate their competitors. So says Roger Martin, who has devoted his professional life to the study of competition -- first as a director at Monitor Co., the Boston-based consultancy, and now as dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Martin believes that the North American economy is radically transforming. As the production of goods and services increasingly becomes routinized, the cost advantages across a growing array of industries accrue to China and India. Scale alone is not enough to thrive in a world where markets are rapidly globalizing; incremental improvement won't deliver a decent ROI. Our companies will continue to prosper only if they push to the higher ground of innovating and creating "elegant, refined products and services" -- which might well be produced elsewhere.

The upshot, says Martin, is nothing less than the emergence of the design economy -- the successor to the information economy, and, before it, the service and manufacturing economies. And that shift, he argues, has profound implications for every business leader and manager among us: "Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers."

In a global economy, elegant design is becoming a critical competitive advantage. Trouble is, most business folks don't think like designers.

In a recent interview in Toronto, Martin asserted that real value creation now comes from using the designer's foremost competitive weapon, his imagination, to peer into a mystery -- a problem that we recognize but don't understand -- and to devise a rough solution that explains it. "For any company that chooses to innovate, the foremost challenge is this," Martin says. "Are you willing to step back and ask, 'What's the problem we're trying to solve?' Well, that's what designers do: They take on a mystery, some abstract challenge, and they try to create a solution."

The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem "so it isn't a mystery anymore; it's something they've done 12 times before," Martin says. Most don't avail themselves of the designer's tools -- they don't think like designers -- and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

And that, Martin claims, means traditional organizations must reinvent themselves to perform more like design shops. In this new world, there are fewer fixed, permanent assignments. Instead, work flows from project to project, and people organize their lives around their projects, just as in a design shop. Accenture, for example, is more efficient in part because it's a project-based organization -- it doesn't staff up for things that aren't projects, and it doesn't allow projects to become permanent.

Design-influenced companies also understand their customers at a profound level and mobilize around that insight. The Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts' detailed study of customers led it to conclude that it could win by offering first-class service, and so it invested enormously in recruitment and training. The chain visualized the desired outcome -- "make people feel great" -- and reinvented itself to deliver an exceptional "user" experience.

Organizations that embrace a design-based strategy also employ the practice of rapid prototyping. Whereas conventional companies won't bring a product to market until it's "just right," the design shop is unafraid to move when the product is unfinished but "good enough." Designers learn by doing: They identify weaknesses and make midflight corrections along the way.

Design's powerful impact on business strategy will require a whole new way of thinking. Martin asserts that traditional companies "reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be)." Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach -- abductive thinking -- which Martin defines as "suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it." Instead of acting on what's certain, designers bet on what's probable. Companies such as Apple act like design shops by saying, "If everything must be proven, we'll never make the likes of an iPod."

Martin believes that business schools are also out of position for the emerging design-based economy. In his view, even the degree -- a master's of business administration -- is problematic. "We're telling students that the big bucks are made by administering linear improvements -- getting better and better at doing essentially the same thing," he says. "But the real challenge lies in getting better and better at a different thing: devising clever solutions to wickedly difficult problems."

That view has led Martin and a handful of other pioneers to lead a groundbreaking effort to redesign business education itself. In a first step, Rotman has allied with the Ontario College of Art & Design to launch a series of joint courses. The Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design recently launched a nine-month-long executive master's degree program in design methods. And Stanford University has committed $35 million to launch its "d.school," where people from large companies and startups alike will come to learn design thinking. "We want to produce T-shaped thinkers," says David Kelley, the chairman of Ideo and founder of the d.school. "That means combining analytical thinking -- the vertical leg of the T -- with horizontal thinking: intuitive, experimental, and empathetic."

And that's only the beginning. Rotman, the Institute of Design, and the d.school are in the early stages of mapping out a new discipline, "business design," which will seek to yoke business schools' rigor, practicality, and business relevance with design schools' creative problem solving and intensive understanding of the customer. The goal is to create a new generation of design- and business-based talent factories that will help fuel the North American economy as it undergoes its next great transformation.

----------------------------

Bill Breen is Fast Company's senior projects editor. He is based in Boston.

posted by Tom | 9:37 AM


Tuesday, April 26, 2005  

On a good day, you go to bed having been forced to give up a critical chunk of conventional wisdom...

And on a great day, you have to give up on multiple chunks of "what everyone KNOWS is right..."

This isn't about wikis, or blogs, or - really - any one technology. It's about remembering that we are often so quick to take a straight edge to what's come before and plot out the most likely future. It's about the often unspoken assumption that "yes, in the past others were - sadly - mistaken but THIS TIME, well, we're pretty confident we've *got it right.*"

Stewart Brand is one of the best thinkers around. He's written a piece in the May issue of Technology Review. It's an argument that makes us question conventional wisdom about population trajectories, about cities and hinterlands, about GMOs and about nuclear reactors.

I'd argue there's a tie-in to the subject of my wikisquared-dot-com site.

Knowledge-Managment, Expertise management, Social Networking, Blogging (and that awful neologism, the blogosphere), Collabortion Studies ... are all 'stuck' in some kind of organisational neutral gear. Maybe what's needed is a whole new way to think about how people work together.

If great big clusters of Received Widsom can be questioned, surely we can apply original thinking to the issues of our own work places.



Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: May 2005

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1

---

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie­ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.

Take population growth. ...


...see article...

posted by Tom | 12:39 AM


Monday, April 11, 2005  

a wholly new place


A few days ago I acquired a fiddle - and a bow - that together exceed the value of anything in my existence short of an overpriced home in the Oakland Hills.

When you buy a violin, you don't go into a store and plunk down some money for "that one, over there, near the window." Actually choosing which violin and which bow is an amazingly intimate and personal activity.

You're led to a room, a practice room, where a table has been set with five or six violins. You close the door and you play a set of music on each instrument. You listen for tone, for richness or thinness. You listen for a lilt that comes from who-knows-where. You feel how easy it is to play. And you do this for all five or six.

And then you do it again. This time, if you're lucky, you get to eliminate one or two from the table. In my case, one sounded too 'boomy,' the other, 'muddy.' Two more violins are brought in and you start the comparison process.

My fiddle teacher was there in the room with me. At some point, the 'short list' had been whittled down to three and she asked me to step outside, to close the flamed-maple door of the practice room, and simply listen to her play the three instruments.

At long last, there was one that seemed to speak to me - especially me. It's a violin that makes sound that can reach in and touch my heart.

And if the violin is the sound of your heart - the bow is the breath that gives it life.

The whole process is repeated with bows.

In the case of bows, you are not only listening to tones you're producing, you're also applying different finger positions to hold the bow -- to feel its balance, to feel how it gives weight to certain strings.

It was hours- and parking tickets later that my teacher and I felt that we'd done the deed well. She went on to a performance she was giving and I carried my musical instrument to my car as gently as I ever carried my newborn daughter.

There are days you remember for a lifetime. I suspect this is one of them.

posted by Tom | 1:09 PM


Tuesday, March 29, 2005  

I've heard about taking a measure to one's life, but this...

Not long ago an old friend and I were talking about the remarkable insight we'd had about the passage of time: that it's happening to *us* as well.

He asked, "so Tom, how old are we these days?"

"Early 50's," I said, not being quite sure if this old pal was younger or older.

"So how long do you figure we'll live?" he asked.

"Oh, I dunno, 80 - maybe 85," I replied.

My friend pulled out a tape measurer. (he's an architect, I guess this is something they typically have in their pockets)

Zzipppp... Out it rolls, six feet, seven feet, seven feet and a bit. 85 inches.

Ah .. a year an inch...

"Well look at this," my friend said.

Pointing to the first foot or so, "let's see, we learned to walk, to talk, to do well in school."

Pointing to an area around the second foot, "ah, all those years of undergrad and grad school."

Third foot, fourth foot. "Good and bad points in our careers. Children. Peridontal stuff. Finding it a little harder to get up after someone in a basketball pickup game pounds us to the floor..."

And then to the mid 50-some inches.

"there's only a couple of feet left my friend."

Somehow those remaining 30-some inches seemed r e a l l y brief.




posted by Tom | 9:58 PM


Friday, March 04, 2005  

California as an island: storytelling with business in mind

Two hundred and fifty years ago cartographers tended to draw the western coast of North America pretty much like this:



------
When you look at the left-most side of the map, the coastline is materially correct. Where the maps go terribly wrong, of course, is a little further east.

The Story:

"Getting it First" -- like so much of competitive life -- often rivals the importance of "getting it correct." This isn't something new...

A few hundred years ago mapping the coasts of North America was the great challenge for Royal Cartographers. As explorers laid claims for their Sovereigns, access to good maps became something even more important than usual.

Explorers had moved up and down the coast of what we now call the state of California. At the southern tip these navigator/explorers rounded what we call Baja California and began sailing north again in the Gulf of California. After a while -- seeing nothing but blue waters again, these explorers turned their attention elsewhere. About the same time explorers were moving up the West coast, mapping what we call Oregon and Washington -- only to arrive at that great area of waters we call the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Rounding the corner, the explorers started sailing South. As before, once the direction ahead was clear, the explorers went on to other matters.

Cartographers are nothing if not Cartesian Thinkers. Sailors claimed they could sail South from Juan de Fuca. They claimed they could sail North from Baja. Dots were connected. And California became an island.

Maps not only represent the world - they help us plan our actions.

For missionares intent on converting the natives in what was then New Granada and New Mexico - their trek was obvious.

They would make the long voyage from Spain, around the tip of South America, and up to the capital of california -- then Monterey. They would gather the strengh and courage for the next part of their trek.

They took apart their long-boats - plank by plank, dowel by dowel -- and packed them over California's Coastal Mountain Range. Their maps told them what to expect. Somewhere -- not too far on the other side of the mountains, these missionaries would arrive on the other side of the island. There, they would re-assemble their vessels and sail on to the inland Spanish Missions.

What they saw instead, needless to say, was the world's deepest beach.

Many died in their quest. Many - a tribute to the human spirit - got their boats as far as the Sierra Mountains before they either gave up or turned back.

Those that survived the trek back to the mission at Monterey were clear in their messages back to Spain.

There is no island here! The maps are wrong!

From Spain came the reply that any of us who've been associated with large companies can hear in our minds: "no, no, the maps are correct -- you just weren't where you were supposed to be..."

This back- and forth- continued for a human generation until, finally, and by way of a Royal Decree, Caifornia became part of the mainland of North America.

There's a moral for our times hear. It has to do with the mental maps our companies depend on for making sound business decisions. It has to do with the importance for companies to be aware of 'disruptive' ideas that question conventional wisdom.

three lessons from the map of California:

-If you make maps with less than full information, your maps, very likely, will be wrong.

-If your maps are wrong, your actions will be wrong -- and in some cases, deadly.

-And critically -- ONCE you have a map, even when confronted by evidence that contradicts all that you believe, IT'S HARD TO LET GO OF MAPS.





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posted by Tom | 12:13 PM


Saturday, February 26, 2005  

SocialText - a review and a comparison


Communication Guru Robin Good offers a review of what is arguably the Corporate Standard for wiki-spaces -- Socialtext -- compared to Yahoo Groups or Groove for small business collaboration. As an independent analyst, he shares his experience using Socialtext for project work with small distributed teams.

There's a post-script needed here. SocialText has just changed (as in *lowered*) its pricing plan.



February 15, 2005

YahooGroups, Groove Or Socialtext Wiki: My Personal Impressions
Online Collaboration

Social Networking

Thanks to the courtesy of Ross Mayfield (founder/CEO of SocialText -- TP), I have been experimenting with my small geographically dispersed team, how effective a wiki can be in supporting projects in which multiple professionals contribute and complement each other.

-------------------

In the past I have made heavy use of technologies at the extremes of the asynchronous collaboration spectrum. From completely free ones such as web-based YahooGroups, which offers everything from a mailing distribution list, to files archiving, polling of the group and calendaring, to much more versatile and rich commercial applications such as the desktop-based P2P full collaboration solution offered by Groove Virtual Office.

While the first approach has severe drawbacks in terms of privacy and intrusion from ads, both in the online facilities as well as in your inbox as a consequence of having signed up for a Yahoo service, the second one has issues relating to the level of computer hardware required, and the performance impact it may have on your other applications. Groove is also plagued by an excessively conservative and rigid access and protection system, great for enterprise customers, but absolutely suicidal for the SOHO and small business user.

I don't know how many of my colleagues and teammates have had to recur to re-install Groove from scratch as a consequence of the difficulty of storing or retrieving access codes once they are created. I myself have just lost my laptop, who died of over-resistance to being patched, and I am at a completely loss as to how I will be able to access again my account on Groove. I know I am not alone in this and I have duly reported my frustrations to Groove in the past. What I am asking is the provision of an option that allows the end user to select the level of security that she wants to enable at installation, while providing the ability to safely store and later retrieve one's own username and password with ease.

On Yahoogroups this is never an issue as, like most web-based systems it allows registered users to safely retrieve their username or password with a few steps that are easy and now familiar to many Internet users.

YAHOOGROUPS

But, and really I am just speaking of my own experience, I was never completely happy with either one of these systems.

As said, Yahoo annoyed me with too much advertisements both on its online facilities as well as in my inbox.

With Groove, I am never sure who I can safely invite without getting them in a complete nightmare. The issues that most frequently annoy my potential teammates are:

GROOVE

a) the need to download a large application

b) the fact that Groove demands a pretty recent hardware setup with a fast processor, lots of RAM memory and possibly a fast connection to the Internet too.

c) issues dictated by its complexity and richness, whereby not everyone can easily and promptly understand or find out how to achieve something.

d) the fact that Groove works only on the Windows platform. Like for all collaboration tools to be used in cross-enterprise teams, being limited to interoperate only with people having the same type of operating system is a great limitation today.

Happily, Groove can now be utilized also from ANY other operating system, thanks to the great work done by the PoPG team in the UK, who sells access to a supercool service called Blended Groove ($30/user/month) and which provides web-based access to your Groove account from anywhere and with ay type of OS.

But, as you can imagine this doesn't come for free. The Groove full version costs in excess of USD 170, (price actually varies depending on where you are located and in relation to the version you choose).

So, when I headed out to test Ross Mayfield's SocialText wiki workspace, I didn't expect much, as I thought wiki spaces allowed yes for collaborative posting of notes and files but not for much more of what I had become accustomed to find in these more established and popular collaboration solutions.

I was wrong.

As you can find out yourself by accessing the free 30-day try-out offered by SocialText, wikis can provide a very effective collaboration workspace that is both easy-to-use and rich enough in features to support many teamwork-based projects.

While each wiki (there are tens of different types of wiki technologies out there) can be rather different from another one, all wikis share one thing in common: they let users edit web-based content in a very simple and straightforward fashion providing great support to those projects where you need to post, comment, annotate and update information with other team members on a daily or even hourly basis.

Access is as fast as to getting to any standard web page. No software needs to be downloaded, no plugins need to be installed.

Navigation is immediately simple and once you understand how to do two things (create a new page and make a link to it) you can do most anything you want.

You can create pages with assignments, references, attached files and images that your selected teammates can access privately and update, extend, re-organize at any time they wish.

It is as simple as working inside a normal text editor. Text can be formatted very easily, and making a change to an online document requires only a few seconds.

Weblogs and RSS are integrated from day one. You can also create as many "workspaces" as you want and utilize each one of them to manage a different project or workgroup. Each workspace is in fact associated with the people you select and it is extremely easy to remove or invite new team members.

SocialText wiki workspaces generate email notifications, RSS feeds and Update pages that allow any team member to easily monitor and rack any progress and changes to the workspace without needing to access it directly.

Everything that is composed, edited and written in the wiki maintains a full track record of the changes made, and the administrator(s) can easily revert any document /web page to any previous state it was in.

Workspaces in the SocialText wiki can also receive emails from any of the team members, which are immediately organized and made available to all the other workspace members.

For my own experience, this is indeed a great collaboration technology that can be extremely useful to virtual teams of non-technically oriented people. It bridges ease of use and access with all the advantages of being web-based and open to any operating system.

If I were to recommend an alternative solution to the likes of Yahoogroups (and similar ones), Groove and other asynchronous collaboration spaces I would have no hesitation in indicating a wiki, and the Socialtext implementation in particular, as a great alternative to such other approaches.

Having worked daily on the SocialText wiki workspace for a few weeks now, I only have a couple of issues that I personally look forward to see improved:

a) Speed. For a web-based solution like the SocialText wiki, speed is of the essence. I mean, if I click on a Web page to edit it and I need to wait for 20 or more seconds while being on a T1, I may as well go back to Groove.

b) Cost. The SocialText wiki workspace is presently priced at $30/month/user. At this price level Ross is cutting out all of the professionals, SOHO companies and non-profit institutions out there, including a great deal of academic organizations. Not that the tool isn't worth that money each month, but being totally innovative collaborative technology, at least for the mainstream, a much lower entry price would positively guarantee much wider adoption. What is most ironic to me, is that those customers groups are probably the types of organizations that can take best advantage of this new technology, as large corporate accounts take a much longer incubation time to comprehend, test and certify such innovative technologies for adoption. My suggestion therefore is for greater diversification of the price offering and for a substantial lowering of the cost to professionals or small business teams (1-10) like the ones I often operate with.




To those of you that already use a wiki with productive results, I wish to ask which are the true alternatives to Ross' system and what are the differences in terms of costs and features?

For independent publishers, professional consultant, small virtual teams operating online is money spent on the SocialText wiki workspace well spent or should we be looking elsewhere?



posted by Robin Good on Tuesday February 15 2005

posted by Tom | 10:54 AM
 

Financial Times & Wikis

Two days ago, the Financial Times had a piece on Blogs and Wikis. It talks about them in terms of a tecktonic shift in what's possible.

For those who subscribe to FT -- you can look at an archive file of the text. For everyone else, a somewhat fuller version:
.
-----------------------------------

Tom Foremski: Blogging technology opens doors for enterprises
By Tom Foremski
Published: February 23 2005 07:50 | Last updated: February 23 2005 07:50


There is a new phase of the internet emerging and it is being fuelled by a new class of technologies coming out of Silicon Valley that don’t even have a name yet, but they have the potential to be disruptive in their application.

Some have begun calling this new phase Web 2.0, but I prefer the term internet 2.0 because it more accurately encompasses the broad nature of what is happening. Blogging, and blogging-like technologies such as wikis, are shaping up to become one of the most important features of internet 2.0. I would not be surprised if these technologies become recognised as the “killer applications” of the next few years.

Let me explain why I think these technologies are so groundbreaking. I know that most readers are familiar with the term “blogging” and many also read blogs. Their content consists mostly of personal views on the day’s events, and other subjects. The content of blogs, however, is not the interesting part – it is the underlying blogging software and its ability to automate the many tasks required to run a website. No technical skills are required of the writer, beyond being able to use a browser and the ability to type. For less than $100, blogging software such as the popular Movable Type, from Six Apart, is a good enough replacement for online content management systems costing more than 1,000 times as much.

That capability alone would be enough to be potentially disruptive to online publishing business models, but blogging technologies also come with a lot more, a distribution system that targets its audience perfectly. This is done through a feature called “trackback,” and a standard known as RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Trackback automatically detects if someone has published a link to your blog post, and it will publish their comment on your blog. This means that it doesn’t matter if a reader posts a comment on the writer’s blog, or, on another blog – the software tracks it all. The response of readers to a news story, for example, can be plainly seen in real-time. It also means that other bloggers, by writing a comment and publishing a link to the original story, become distributors of that content to their readers. And it shows that if the content is relevant, an audience will find it, and also personally recommend it to others through their blogs.

RSS is another way to distribute blog content. It allows readers to subscribe to a blog and read the content without having to visit the originating site. RSS makes it possible to aggregate the content from several sites within software called a “newsreader.”

Other types of related applications are wikis, which differ from blogs in that any reader can change the content of the web page. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by internet users, is a good example of a wiki. It also showcases how wikis can be used as knowledge management systems.

Blogs have been around for several years and wikis are 10 years old. What is new however, is the realisation of the business uses for these types of technologies. If they can create communities of self-selected readers companies could potentially communicate directly with their customers. And customers can provide direct feedback to the companies. If it is done right, this means potentially huge savings in marketing, and market research activities.

Astonishingly, a very small number of people within the business community have figured this out. Even in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of blogging technologies, the common view is that it is a narcissistic activity by unemployed software engineers with plenty of time on their hands.

A few people are trying to educate the business community through conferences, and interest from corporations seems to be sparking up. For example, in late January 2005, I took part in a journalism panel at the New Communications Forum, one of the first US conferences on corporate use of blogging and wikis. Elizabeth Albrycht and Jennifer McClure, the organisers of the event, were having trouble reaching their modest goal of attracting 80 to a 100 people to the conference. “I don’t know why, but then suddenly, just days before the conference, we were swamped by people wanting to attend, and companies wanting to be sponsors,” says Ms Albrycht. Encouraged by its success, they are now preparing a similar conference for Paris in April, and one for New York in the autumn.

The enterprise sector is being targeted by new start-ups such as Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite, once one of the largest search engine companies. “Corporate departments can use JotSpot to quickly and easily build custom business applications,” Mr Kraus says. Other entrepreneurs in this space include Ross Mayfield, of SocialText, also a developer of wikis for corporations. David Galbraith, one of the authors of RSS 1.0 has developed “Wists” a simple tool allowing users to create and publish online catalogues of images. In the UK, Fergus Burns heads Nooked, a company that helps enterprises manage their RSS feeds. And new types of web sites such as Flickr are creating novel communities and group activities that could not have been predicted.

A characteristic of these software technologies is that they behave as “platforms” that enable and support online communities on the internet or in the private corporate intranet. Social software is one label, but a more fitting one might be “community-ware” or even “community-aware” software.

Tom Foremski is a former Financial Times news reporter and now publishes SiliconValleyWatcher.com, a business news blog for northern California’s Silicon Valley. tom@siliconvalleywatcher.com

posted by Tom | 10:36 AM


Tuesday, February 22, 2005  

a friendship of 40 years...


I had drinks and dinner tonight with a friend I've known since the days of riding around on balloon-tired, single speed, coaster brake bikes. I hadn't seen this friend -- and his wife -- since, oh, three or four major 'scene shifts' in my live. Different cities, different carrers, different parenting roles, and so, so, so much time.

When my friend came to my mom's old house, as I looked at him I thought "this is my friend but gee -- he looks older -- different somehow." It's fair to say that *neither* of us has been spared by the hand of time - but even knowing that, my first feelings were that this 'person' wasn't _quite_ the person I'd known for all those years.

As the wine poured, as we sat around, as we broke bread - the conversations became noisier, and fuller, and more comfortable. And after a while, I felt as though I was, indeed, with one of the best friends in my life. For all of the shifts in our lives, he and his wife and I were back in the remarkable space of profoundly comfortable friendships. He talked about beer making and I talked about making bread. She talked about music, and performing as an organ player, and I talked about fiddle playing and the day my teacher surprised me by my first 'ahem' mini receital. We all talked about edinburgh and the Highlands, about Montreal, St Joseph's Oratory, about the process of elevation to sainthood of Brother Andre and local (montreal) Jewish craftsmem had made most of the church's ironworks. We shared stories about funny things my mom or dad had done - about my sister and brother-in-law's plan to sell the Old Homestead.

We parted company on the front steps of the old house -- watching the late night light snow come down. Warm hugs and manly chucks on the shoulder...

There's an old saying to the effect that -- a good friend is hard to find, hard to lose, and impossible to forget. This evening, I remembered just what it was that had made us such good friends -- and knowing that, I feel very lucky that we've finally reconnected those bonds.

posted by Tom | 10:23 PM
 

Eat a cake, go to prison


Eccles is a Lancashire town and originally its name meant 'Church.' Eccles is also the name of type of cake with a somewhat unusual story. Truth is, Eccles cakes are a fairly simple roll of a thing, usually filled will currants, and as the record tells us, made in the town of Eccles on religious holidays.

American Puritans were a pretty sensual averse bunch of people. It seems that this country's early settlers decided that Eccles cakes were so rich and delicious that they were probably a tool of Satan.

So. In 1650 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law in 1650: you could be sent to prison for eating an Eccles cake.

The record isn't clear as to whether Eccles cakes could be consumed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes.

--
I ran into a bake shop t'other day in Providence Rhode Island. A woman who's voice suggested origins on the other side of the Atlantic laughed when she saw the Eccles sign -- so - I had to know The Story.

On principal, (and 'cause I was a bit hungry) I ate one in the full daylight in the great Out of Doors.


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- a bit more on these cakes: http://www.visitsalford.co.uk/html/intro/ecclescakes.html

posted by Tom | 2:50 PM


Tuesday, February 15, 2005  

A coffee shop discovery

I've been preoccupied with All Things Wiki-ish these last few weeks, so today I was savoring a bit of tabloid reading over an espresso at a coffee shop. There, under a pile of newspaper sections was a book someone -- obviously - had left behind. It was a book on personal transformations - a series of loosely written case studies of people who'd moved from one career or personal arena to someplace entirely different.

Truth be told, I usually skip books like this -- feeling that it's too much Berkeley-esque verbiage to wade through get to what I cynically see as a page or two of real merit. Still - I started browsing. Pretty soon I figured this really *was* something I'd liket to read but figured the Honest Thing would be to either locate an owner or, at the very least, give it to the coffee shop to leave out for someone to claim.

On the inside cover of the book was a note:

-------Hello Kind Reader,...Just a quick note that I've registered this book at BookCrossing.com, so that I can keep up on where it goes, who reads it, and what they thought of it. Please visit www.BookCrossing.com/888-287902 to make a quick journal entry, then pass the book along to someone else who will appreciate it. We can all track this book's journey and the lives it touches forever more!
-------Thank You! (NOTE: I've changed the number of the book)

SO !

I went to BookCrossing.com and found out about this *very* good karma-ish thing booklovers are doing. Basically, you read a book you want to share, you write up a blurb on why you enjoyed it, get a tracking number from BookCrossing, and _release_ that book - somewhere - with this kind of note in it. Someone (like me) will find the book, discover it's a book 'with a history,' they'll read it, add THEIR comments and release the book again.

For some reason, this little bit of literate good will charms me.

For an Utne Reader piece on this:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/UtneReader-JulyAug2002.html

posted by Tom | 9:51 PM


Monday, February 07, 2005  

Berkeley journal, Monday 7 feb 2005



Once in a while I have to admit some of the jokes about Californians have a degree of merit.

Earlier today, after dropping off my daughter at her school in Berkeley, I thought it'd be a good time to run into a market to get some things for dinner. Now you need to understand that foodies in Berkely are a shade different from their counterparts in other parts of the country. Here -- there's *Attitude*. Forged by political thinking.

There I am, in one of Berkeley's great natural food emporiums -- Berkeley Bowl. It's a few minutes after nine, the store is pretty quiet, I get my 3 items and head for the Express Line.

Behind the cash for this Rapid-Exit line is a woman -mid twenties - a fuzz of fuscia hair sprouts from her head, one ear is jauntily pierced by at least a half dozen studs, there's a diamond stud in her nose and a loop in an eyebrow. Black fingernails match the black lipstick - and she's wearing what looks like army fatigue shorts over black tights. This is NOT the kind of person I especially want to look at before I've had a few shots of caffeine...

Anyway, it is clearly Way Too Early for Fuzzy Grrl. I notice that there are 5 people ahead of me in this Quick Express line and that we're moving VERY slowly. Fuzzy Grrl punches in item costs very deliberately.

The line moves glacially forward. FINALLY, there's only one person between me and the woman who can take my money.

He's another type speciman for this city. Old-ish (by this I mean anyone/everyone who's more than 15 years older than I am), bearded, bespectled, birkenstocked, carrying his Save-the-Earth muslin bag for groceries and a bike seat he's taken wih him (you can break a lock but TRY riding a boosted bike away from the scene with nothing but a metal tube to occasionally -- try to -- sit on.)

Eco-boy gets to Fuzzy.

He asks "do you think this chicken broth comes from Free Range chickens?"

Like the images seen by a dying man, my day's schedule passes in front of my eyes.

The woman in fatigues takes the bait and together, this remarkable pair start talking about what constitutes REAL freedom. And there I am, with two pastic bag of herbs and a quart of milk listening to opinions of whether multi-level cages of *any* size can be labelled as 'free range.'

In due time, my transaction with Berkely Bowl is mercifully complete.

Never to forget WHERE I live, on the way home there's a sign on the bumper sticker on the car ahead of me.

"buckle up -- it makes it harder for aliens to suck you out of your car"

ah - beloved Berkeley...

.
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posted by Tom | 10:07 PM


Thursday, January 27, 2005  

There's a new blog Out There -- wikiSquared.com



The skinny? All Wikis All the Time.

After no small amount of time and energy looking at what web-logs can do, I've resigned myself to thinking of blogs as something of an evolutionary niche product. Kinda like rodent-y things that live in grasslands. Good for highly specific tasks but woefully too specialised for addressing a whole range of business needs.

Wikis - on the other hand - offer more ... with less.

Check out wikiSquared.com . (press here)

posted by Tom | 9:38 PM


Tuesday, December 28, 2004  

when consumers own their own purchasing dossiers...



I was looking at the books I'd bought myself during the last few weeks of Christmas Shopping (you know, One for Them, One for Me ...) and 'the obvious' struck. While it may be a very imperfect mechanism, a careful observer of my book-buying trail could probably glean a fair bit of my personality. And then I thought about my several years of book buying with Amazon.com, or my chain of receipts at either Borders or Barnes & Noble.

As any spy novel reader knows, dossiers are built up from the minutiae of workaday patterns. I suspect the richness of data about me from any (or all) of these booksellers is fairly deep.

And I thought about an older idea I've written about -- applied to these purveyors of The Printed Word. It's an idea applicable to any of these companies: Amazon, Barnes&Noble, or Borders. For the sake of this squib, I'll call the Mega Mega Bookseller ABB.

-----

GROWING ABB REVENUE BY QUESTIONING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Consider a few observations about consumer preferences databases.

* Over time, ABB -- by way of on- and off- line sales -- has created a vast and rich database of consumer preferences

* Marketers would pay dearly for the ability to drill down into these data -- to be able prospect for highly specific demographics.

* Consumers tell us -- via surveys and focus groups -- that they are tired of being targets for unsolicited marketing material. They tell us they are tired of having no control over the flow of such offers, of having no say in what knowledge about them is collected or sold. And they are tired of having their real world or electronic in-boxes filled with so much clutter.


Conventional wisdom tells us we're looking at nothing less than irreconcilable differences. Conventional wisdom is not always the best place to look for new business opportunities.


What if consumers rather than Big Business controlled the knowledge of their own buying preferences?

* What if consumers could 'edit out' buying behavior they didn't want included in their purchasing dossiers? (example: each year I buy 'doggy' calendars and books on crochet for relatives -- neither of which represent anything I want to receive junk mail about)

* What if consumers could place a price tag on their purchasing information? ("OK - you can solicit me on these topics if you're willing to pay me a dollar for each piece of e-mail you send...." or "OK - I'm available as a recipient for your marketing efforts -- but for each promotional piece you send, I want $2 sent to the Sierra Club".)

* What if consumers had a private and anonymous mailbox where all this marketing material would be sent?



What if consumers could turn to ABB for such services? What if consumers who 'opt in' to these services begin to see their buying preferences as a valuable personal asset? What if they could count on ABB to actively manage that asset -- continually packaging sets of consumer preferences and selling it to the highest bidder -- to maximize its return?

ABB's doing so would create a significant new revenue stream. I also suggest doing so would demonstrate considerable 'thought leadership' by this company.


Benefits?

* Consumers gain control of their own buying preferences. Everyone, or no one, or some number of marketing campaigns willing to pay a certain 'toll' will have access to the "Choice-Mailboxes" of these consumers.

* Marketers gain access to tremendously insightful purchasing dossiers - refine-able in ways typically impossible in most marketing efforts.

* ABB takes a middleman transaction slice for performing requested database queries.

* ABB's online presence becomes a more attractive destination as consumer-participants look at their 'choice mailboxes' looking to see who's currently paying for their attention.





posted by Tom | 2:26 PM


Saturday, December 04, 2004  

FLOW, Civil War music, and a wind storm in the East Bay Hills


When the psychologist/educator Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [pronounced Mi HIGH-ee CHICK-sent-me-high-ee] talks about situations that engage us fully -- ‘flow’ conditions in his phrasing -- he talks about a balance of necessary conditions and elements.

-He talks about the need for us to be intellectually aligned with what we're doing: what we're doing has to make sense in a context of other actions and other ideas.

-He talks about the need for us to -- easily -- see ourselves being successful at what we're doing: we need to be involved with activities where we know whether we're doing a good job, or whether we're just not in-the-groove.

-And he talks about the need for passion in our activities: we need --if only occasionally at least -- to feel that what we're doing is compelling us at some very basic level. We need to feel that 'this is what I must be doing - anything else can wait.'

Along the way I've written that businesses should consider these criteria as they develop products and procedures. But that's not what I want to write about here.

A week or so ago the East Bay area (San Francisco's East Bay towns, to be specific) was buffeted by especially strong winds. Trees fell and -- this is unusual for urban areas -- we found ourselves without electricity for several hours.

It was mid afternoon, the house was still full of light, and I wondered how I'd spend the time. Ahhh... a great time to practise my fiddle. It so happens I'm working on learning a particularly challenging new song these days -- it's a piece from the Civil War era.

Out came the fiddle case. Resined the bow, checked the strings for tuning and attached the neck-rest. Out came the music and the mini-disc recording I have of my teacher doing the song.

And I started bowing. First there was a little riff that gave me trouble. Then it was the slightest suggestion of a vibrato that I wasn't getting. (Vibrato, Wikipedia tells us: " is a musical effect where the pitch or frequency of a note or sound is quickly and repeatedly raised and lowered over a small distance for the duration of that note or sound." Basically, it's the soulful sound we think of in a lot of violin music)

At some point I thought the light was fading from the room and I rounded up some of our candleholders. It somehow seemed appropriate to be playing a violin in the late afternoon in the glow of a handful of candles.

The riff got better, the vibrato part less elusive, and it was on to the next chunk of the song to learn. Each new set of bars was a challenge, and I went over every note, time after time until I nailed them.

And then it was on to trying the whole piece. Slowly at first, and then with a little more speed. And then with more expression.

AND finally, it was on to seeing how it really sounded. Out came the clip-on mike for my mini-disc recorder, and after, oh, a few attempts... truth is... it was half way decent.

I was standing in our dining room - where I'd been standing for my little practice session - listening to the music I'd made. My neck was a little sore, my left hand fingers a little tender, but damn!... it was a great feeling.

And then I looked around.

The house was pitch black. To in the dining room of our house is to stand in a room 20-some feet tall - with a view of three levels of rooms as well as the view up the circular stairs to the bedrooms. I was in a perfectly silent house, a perfectly dark house save the light coming from a pair of thin candles that had burned down to inch long stubs.

And I looked my watch.

I'd been standing in one spot, doing one thing, for almost 5 hours.

Time had stopped. I was as content with myself as I've been in many years.

It was, to use Csikszentmihalyi's term, a perfect case of flow. Less bookishly - it was an *unbelievable* experience.