Kevin Kelley on Visuality ( NYT)

An insightful glimpse into the new potential for visuality - as we become "people of the screen" Here are a few clips from Kevin's NYT article which can be found in its entirety Here: Idea Lab - Becoming Screen Literate - NYTimes.com

"The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality."

"Take, for example, the problem of browsing a feature-length movie. One way to scan a movie would be to super-fast-forward through the two hours in a few minutes. Another way would be to digest it into an abbreviated version in the way a theatrical-movie trailer might. Both these methods can compress the time from hours to minutes. But is there a way to reduce the contents of a movie into imagery that could be grasped quickly, as we might see in a table of contents for a book?"

Powers of Ten-like view of the neurons of the brain

Everyone has probably seen the Powers of Ten Movie -- If you haven't, this short video visualizes a "zooming out" at the neuronal level of a single neuron, simulated in a collaboration between IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne using the largest IBM supercomputer.

So that's where thought occurs!!!

EPFLTV: EPFL's video portal

Me to We - how to score in the social world

A slick slideshow pointing out the value of WE

Me to WE: How to SCORE in a Social World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: score community)

The world is Flat - take 3 - or more if you want

Here are three views of The World is Flat. The first is a visual mural created by a visioneer listening to Charlie Rose interviewing Tom Friedman on The Charlie Rose show.. click on the mural for a larger,sharper image



The second is the Charlie Rose interview on You Tube

The third is a selection from Slideshare where the same information is conveyed in a powerpoint presentation produced by consultant Andi Boediman (credits at the end of the preso) you can watch the preso right here or click on the slideshare logo at the bottom right of the embedded slides to go to a full screen version for better viewing.

The World Is Flat

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: insourcing education)

Take the tour from the mural to the video to the slideshow - eventually I will edit the video and provide clickable links from the mural to the related short video clips that provide the narrative background - and perhaps I will do this also with the slideshare deck, providing my own voice over narration and hopefully making it possible for viewers/listeners to switch back and forth between the different media.

Of course there should also be a clickable button for ordering Tom'sbook from Amazon or maybe even better his revised version. like this Amazon.com: The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century: Thomas L. Friedman: Books which takes you to Amazon where you have these choices:

Guy Kawasaki and Dan Roam - the art of visual thinking

(Click on the images to get a larger view.)

Guy provides another gem to promote Alltop Innovation by teaming up with Dan Roam Thoughts Illustrated: Back of the Napkin -visual thinking - you can do it!

Here's a link to the original article
The Art of Visual Thinking | AlwaysOn

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Be Grateful for your day.

this is from Claudia Welss blog and will open your eyes to how beautiful your day really is and why you should share your gratefulness with the rest of the world. - the video will help you do this and will give you a sense of the beauty and the gifts that life gives us every day.

Brother David Stendl Last is the narrator from GRATEFULNESS.ORG - A Network for Grateful Living

Telepresence on "House"

Pretty good promo for Telepresence (and some nice product placements for Apple: First clip( 44 seconds) is a SuperBowl commercial trailer for the House episode Frozen showing Dr. House and his medical staff collaborating with a patient to diagnose and treat her symptoms "a world away" at the South Pole.




This sceond clip (2:34) has key trailers from the Frozen episode showing more detail of the Telepresence interaction between House and his distant patient. Happy ending.

ManyOne Survives - The New ManyOne Portal Network

I served as an advisor to Joe Firmage at ManyOne during their early years and left for other projects feeling that the original business model of ManyOne had fatal flaws.

Their latest incarnation may be the right model and I intend to try the new beta that has just been released and perhaps reconnect with the Company.

Here is one of their earlier articles on Portal Networks,
Emergence of Portal Networks

and here is a link to the new beta site

Home

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Painting Tom Sawyer's Fence

Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford is co-creating a new book Psychology of Facebook - Dr. BJ Fogg which will be published this Fall. 435 folks ( I am one of them) have volunteered to review the rough drafts of the book's chapters which have, (you got it!) been contributed free of charge by a cadre of eager Facebookers. The primary themes of the book are:

* Why is FACEBOOK so compelling, even ADDICTIVE?
* What motivates MILLIONS to spend time each day on Facebook?
* How do FRIENDS persuade friends to use Facebook more?

It may have been a long time since you read Mark Twain's remarkable account of his character Tom Sawyer and painting his fence. So I thought you might like to look it over one more time.

Tom Sawyer And The Fence

I think Mark Twain understood the Psychology of Facebook and his story Painting Tom
Sawyer's Fence deserves a chapter or at least a footnote/link in BJ's forthcoming book.

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Metcalfe's Law is Wrong?

A more reasoned argument for valuing network connections as they scale, challenging both Metcalfe's Law of exponential growth of network value, and Reed's Law of the value of Group Forming networks like Ning, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

What does this say about BJ Fogg's exploration of Massive Interpersonal Persuasion on Facebook? Does Facebook's virality challenge the author's views of the returns to scale of networks. BJ seems to argue that Facebook follows Reed's law.


Lots of money was lost in the dotcom bust when entrepreneurs and venture capitalists overvalued network scale effects - the concept of "the more eyeballs, the more potential value" proved to be fool's gold.

Link from John Maloney on the ValueNetworks google group. Illustrations by Serge Bloch.

IEEE Spectrum: Metcalfe's Law is Wrong

visual resumes - bringing the CV to life

I first posted Karen Bennett(nee Storer) visual resume over 18 months ago Thoughts Illustrated: A Visual Resume - from a TI commentor - and just got a commment from Saran whose visual resume is shown below(from Slideshare)

Combining these visual CV's with social networking tools brings the person to "life". Saranyans' slideshow could be a short video with his voice overdubbed ( this can be done in Slideshare) With his voice the CV would be even more personal.

| View | Upload your own

from twitter to youtube - nice segue from Garr Reynolds

I am not a fan of twitter, but a twit from Scoble in my inbox led me to one from Garr Reynolds the author of Presentation Zen.

Because I like Garr's world view of presentations and zen,Thoughts Illustrated: Ah So! PresentationZen - a book every presenter must read I clicked on the twitter url on Garr's twitter page and found this very personal postcard on YouTube (short 1:14m and I think you'll like it.)



Make you want to go to Cannon Beach in Oregon?

Make me understand how twitter can serve as a microblogging link to videos like the one Garr produced?

Maybe there is a role for twitter in my digital LifeStream.

Obama's 'Cybergenic' Edge - Paul Saffo on ABC News

Paul Saffo is a genius at translating his meta-insights into quotable memes.

Here is his take on how Obama stacks up against McCain ABC News: Obama's 'Cybergenic' Edge

I recall a YiTan teleconference call in May of 2007 when Facebook was just emerging as the social network platform. I put the question to the over 80 conferees " is anyone using Facebook?" Only one person said "yes" - and it turned out he was an Obama staffer honing his Cybergenic edge.

As Paul says in concluding his essay:

"I'll bet we will look back from the other side of Nov. 4 and conclude that the single most important factor in this election was the winner's cybergenic edge.

We might even see a Kennedy-Nixon moment before the race is over. But even if we don't, I'll be very surprised if Obama isn't our next president. And when he wins, let us hope that Obama's cybergenic instincts enable the first cybergenic president to govern as effectively as he ran."

Right on, Paul!

telepresence -

check out slide 14 for Cisco apps data.

| View | Upload your own

Randy's Last Lecture- lessons for living from a dying man

Randy Pausch is dying of pancreatic cancer and his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon appears in this abbreviated version on the the Oprah show. Watch as this remarkable teacher reveals his lessons for your life.Click over to Youtube for a full screen version.

Noise Creep?

I have been watching the rising tide of concern for the increase in the garbage quotient in the blogosphere and the declining quality of the content of online conversations. Just the other day it was Scoble who admittd to being inundated with Twits from his followers(it's his own fault IMO) and today Seth Godin, another A-list blogger, sounds off on the same theme:

Seth's Blog: Signal to noise:

"Lately, I’m feeling noise creep.

Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through. I don’t use Twitter, but I know a lot of Twitter users are feeling this. So are folks who go to too many conferences. And don’t get me started on victims of Blackberry cc: disease.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can’t. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem."

It sure is, Seth. We're caught in a death spiral of Twittering, Facebooking, Texting, and IM-ing, which Professor BJ Fogg, at the Stanford Center for Persuasive Technologies admiringly calls Massive Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP). As it becomes increasingly difficult to filter out the signal from the rising tide of noise, we are squandering our most precious asset ....Attention!

The Human Network - Cisco

This video is short and to the point and reinforces the message of my previous post ( see link below)



Thoughts Illustrated: Shift Happens - Did you Know?

Shift Happens - Did you Know?

Over 5 million people have seen this video in some form or other - the original was created by Carl Fisch, a teacher at Centennial High School in Arapahoe, Colorado as a PowerPoint presentation . You can download the PPT deck from Carl's blog site but I wouldn't recommend it. The content is the original, but the deck is all text slides.

Here is what Carl said on his blog The Fischbowl: Did You Know? about the presentation :

"I was very nervous about showing this and how it would go over, but it seemed to have its intended effect (at least initially - we'll see if it really helps generate the on-going conversations we need to have). I would be interested in feedback from anybody who decides to download it."

And download it they did - with a wide variety of design takes on the original. Here are two I like the best - worth your time to watch both, because the same message gets to you differently.

Here's the first remix with updated information produced by Scott McCleod and Xplane.



Michael Arnold, with permission from Carl Fisch added his narration and a new set of supporting images. Same story different treatment.




With assistance from Xplane, Carl has created a wiki shifthappens � Suggestions for Using the Presentationfor Shift Happens where you can find research, resource links and a lot more.

TED BIGVIZ - Behind the scenes

I can't embed this informative video by David Sibbet(inset above) so you will have to click on the link below to take you to the video which explains how BIGVIZ was produced in real time and visualized on the PerceptivePixel touch screen displays at the TED conference.


David Sibbet: TED2008-BIG VIZ Production

The Long Tail of David Armano

This image is from David Armano's Visual Thinking Archive shown in Slideshare form below. This archive is available to anyone on the net for free and contains 50 unique images that are as useful as the one shown above.

To get the best view of this image archive click on the slideshare logo to be taken to a larger size version. ( click "full" in the lower right hand corner of the slideshare version to get the full size.

Thanks, David!

| View | Upload your own

Thoughts Illustrated: BIGVIZ - an ebook of sketches from TED2008

Thoughts Illustrated: BIGVIZ - an ebook of sketches from TED2008

Back of the Napkin -visual thinking - you can do it!

Here is Dan Roam's blog on visual thinking. Back of the Napkin
which is worth visiting to see how his blog complements his new book which he talks about in the video below.

Watch the interview with Dan to get the gist of the book - I'm buying it today!

How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left? | AlterNet

How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left? | AlterNet

Ah So! PresentationZen - a book every presenter must read

A unique forward by Guy Kawasaki launches this most valuable of how-to books for presenters - After 30 years in the presentation business, I am hard to impress - but Garr Reynolds has put it all into a visually stunning and practical guide. Learn how to bring your presentations to the level of the pros in both design and delivery. Go get it now !

Amazon.com: PresentationZen:.

googleforce.com - cloud computing partners

A 3 minute interview with Eric Schmidt CEO of Google describing their partnership with SalesForce.com. A harbinger of an explosive adoption of SAAS and Cloud Computing that will give Microsoft something to think about, and could lead to a merger of google and SalesForce over time.

Wii Multitouch Wows TED

Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon graduates to the TED2008 platform to show off his Wii-based interactive whiteboard and give a strong plug for the use of YouTube in democratizing the process of technology research. ( 5 min video from TED Talks).

I posted earlier on Thoughts Illustrated: WiiMote multitouch from CynergyLabs on Johnny's simple, very cheap method ($40) for using the Wiimote IR sensors to provide multitouch interactivity in large "mural" size format brings the price point of these displays within the reach of anyone wanting to integrate the user with the display of visual information. Since I first learned of Lee's innovation, he has reached over a 500,000 people who have downloaded his code to explore the use of the Wiimote and has made a business deal with Electronic Arts the giant game producer to incorporate his 3D "glasses" into interactive games ( shown in the second segment of the video)

This dramatic reduction in the cost of interactive whiteboards presages an explosion of the use of this powerful form of user interface with images and data. Every classroom and business meeting room should have one.

Memory is the New Sex

I am exploring the use of Clipmarks as a short cut to posting. If you click on the link it will open an article by NYT writer David Brooks on the Age of Forgetting. Sometimes humor can be very brutal .

clipped from www.nytimes.com In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.

How we think - or Not?

This New Yorker cover by Steinberg appears in Philosopher Daniel Dennett's thought-provoking presentation on Consciousness which you can view by clicking on the video below from TED Talks. Dr. Dennett makes you think twice (or more) about your own and other's consciousness. IMO Dennett is one of the most profound thinkers of our time- His books are at once humorous and enlightening.

PANGEA DAY MAY 10 2008 A TED Prize wish come true.

On May 10th throughout the world millions will gather to "meet" each other through the magic of film. From the Pangea website:

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

Pangea Day is the culmination of the TED 2006 Prize dream by filmmaker Jehane Noujaim


TED | Speakers | Jehane Noujaim: "Jehane Noujaim"

View the trailer here:

BIGVIZ - an ebook of sketches from TED2008

This is the cover of a 200 page ebook created by Autodesk capturing in full color, sketches of the 50 or so speakers at TED2008 conference and an artistic visualization of the content of their speeches. The book is offered as a free downloadable pdf at if:book: the big book of TED

BIGVIZ comes very close to my concept for mural casting.Thoughts Illustrated: MuralCasting - Improving ROA (Return on attention) What's missing from the ebook is a hyperlink from each sketch to the audio/video archive of the conference giving a visual context to the recorded archive of the TED speakers. I will be talking with Tom Wujek at Autodesk to see if I can create a hyperlink layer from the BIGVIZ artwork to the audio recording of the speeches from the TED archive. Without the speech link, the images in BIGVIZ are interesting but lack the context of hearing the speaker's voices or watching segments of the selected video.

Realscoop - pinnochio in color - is Barack telling the truth?

A potentially viral facebook app for recording your FB "friends". - and, maybe, a way to derive Trust Metrics in Social Networks.Thoughts Illustrated: Trust Metrics for Social Networks



To see the Realscoop community site click here RealScoop: Barack Obama before he was running for President

Scoble and John Kao - great debut for Fast Company TV

FastTalk with Katie Couric on CBS

From my friend Peter Durand's blog comes this YouTube clip of the use of graphic facilitation in support of TV news. It looks a lot like Lee LeFever's CommonCraft videos that I have posted about before. The video is only 3.5 minutes long but you will understand the importance of SuperDelegates after you've seen the video. As Katie says after watching the FastTalk visualization that accompanies the talking heads: "Now I understand"

FastTalk makes use of simple cartoon animation and time-lapse video editing to create the effects - combining the power of visualization with live video interviews is a step forward in illustrating a concept and getting a point across.

MuralCasting - Improving ROA (Return on attention)

I have worked with many talented visioneers whose graphic interpretations of the collective wisdom of people in collaborative sessions or in recording the gist of conversations with interesting thought leaders has been almost a magical experience for me.

For several years I have been discussing with Eileen Clegg (one of my favorite visioneers) a way to bring this magic to the web and incorporate it in the blogging process, and I figured it was about time to share some this magic with you. Here's an example created last year by Eileen Clegg and Jim Schuyler from their Mapping the Edges prototype.



The image shown here was produced by Eileen during her telephone interview with:

• John Abele, cofounder of Boston Scientific, founder of Kingbridge Conference Centre
• Jay Cross, founder of Internettime, author of Informal Learning
• Moderator: Andrew Webster, Customized Experience Coordiinator, Kingbridge Conference Centre
• Visual Map: Eileen Clegg, visual journalist

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Jim Schuyler then post-produced the mural by adding "hotspots" to the image surface which "light up" when moused over,and when clicked on, hyperlink to related audio, video or web resources. The purpose is to give the reader/viewer the big picture of a complex subject by providing an overall map of the context of the subject and an easy way to "dive down" into the map to get access to a richer layer of related multimedia materials.

I would like to add the ability to "embed" murals like these directly onto the blog page as we can now do with YouTube and Slideshare content like this Thoughts Illustrated: Watch This! The creation of a master muralist! , but for the moment to get the experience of Mapping the Edges, you will need to click here:Mapping the Edges - Conferences



Your comments are always welcome.

Innovate or Die

A contest sponsored by google and Specialized(a bike manufacturer) about innovative uses of bicycle power - click below to see a video of the AQUADUC T - the grand prize winner.



And click here to see all of the other contest entries Specialized: Innovate or Die

WiiMote multitouch from CynergyLabs

Building on Johnny Chung Lee's Wiimote example, CynergyLab in San Diego has created a multitouch prototype using a large screen display and IR emitters built into gloves. I'll bet Nintendo never thought of that!

Minds on Fire - Learning to Be

From John Seely Brown ( co-chairman of the New Deloitte Research Center at USC) and Richard Adler of the Institute for the Future comes this timely article on the importance of conversations in stimulating learning in communities of practice. The primary audience for the article is academics in higher ed, but the message is useful for any learning practice.

John's whimsical cartoons like the ones shown below make the article much more entertaining and understandable.


Here is the link:


http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823

Le Grand Content -

Meet Jessica Hagy

Jessica Hagy was my top vote from the 100 authors who crowd-sourced the Age of Conversation. So I naturally added her feed to my reading list and today found this enchanting visualization(3:57 minutes) which derives its design from her profoundly simple way of visualizing in what she calls "a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math."

Take the journey of Le Grand Content below- and subscribe to Jessica's blog - a few seconds a day and you will be entertained and enlightened.

The Original Powers of Ten movie -Charles and Ray Eames

Here is the original Powers of Ten movie produced for IBM. It'still as powerful as it was when first produced. Best to click onthe YouTube link in the picture here so that you can see it in full size. You can watch the mini image here but the larger image is much more impressive.  9 Minutes of video you will never forget.

When I first saw it, I was blown away - still feel the same way. From here on, I will use Powers of Ten as the base for our exploration.

Zoom from Compression to Comprehension -Visual Powers of 10

This image was the graphical interface to a demonstration of zooming similar to the way one zooms in on google maps for more detail.

Unfortunately the demonstration is no longer on the web I am hoping I can resurrect it from the original artist, Andries Odendaal. I did find it on the Internet Archive, but the links beyond the landing page are missing and thus the power of the demo is missing in cyberspace. Here is the InternetArchive from 2006 10 ways

Here is what I said back in 2006 about the demonstration. "From its content to its visual components, a photograph is filled with information. Choose a point on an image and delve deeper into it, linking one idea to another in a never-ending chain."

Try the "information" demo and you'll be intrigued as the zoom "box" takes you deeper into a mosaic of thousands of color images.

On the same site, launch the demo of lightand experience a photomosaic of light and shadow and the eerie, yet powerful gradual sharpening of resolution as an image chosen from the thousands that make up the 3D object and its lighting source "dissolves" into crystal clarity.

There's enough in these two demos to prove that " A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS" taken to the "next level" with a Powers of 10 visualization "platform".

Use your imagination to visualize your multiple social network friends pictures or images of shared projects having this capability of massively compressing large collections of images into tightly packed "atomic" structures - but allowing for the collections to be "decompressed" in Powers of 10 zooming.

The image sets could be driven by external RSS feeds to highlight areas of recent interest and the zoom to full size image could be automatically driven by the feed sources.

I will try to provide an example using google maps which have both the benefit and the detriment of being geospatially constructed.

Connect, Discover,Experience

3 minutes of entertaining informative video, with video vignettes selectable and augmented by brief topic bullets which serve as a way to select and replay each of the segments of the full video.

Great ROA - Welcome to the Visual Networking Experience. Cisco Systems, Inc



Makes me want to join the Cisco Human Network.

The Great Train Wreck of Social Networks - can we be saved?

John Maloney tipped me to Jay Deragon's Are We Headed for a Train Wreck?
which starts like this :

"Today’s social networks are “train cars” of conversations..... The “train cars” are fueled by today’s conversations and they are building speed, momentum and the attention of business. The velocity of these train cars, running on multiple tracks, is moving faster than anything in history and most businesses are not even aware that “the train is coming ...will there be a wreck at the intersection of people and business?"

Jay then quotes Doc Searls morose lament:

“Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metasticized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization"

To the rescue comes optimistic reader Daniel Robles with a view that conversational and collaborative nirvana may be just around the corner. He uses the data-information-innovation pathway popularized in Russell Ackoff's Paths to Wisdom diagram we used in our 1997 monograph The Knowledge Channel shown below:(1)

"The problem is that nobody has made a tangible connection between information, knowledge, and innovation - the current myriad of definitions made by important people are flat out wrong if not dangerous. Information is facts and data, knowledge is the rate of change of information with respect to time, innovation is the rate of change of knowledge with respect to time - The “in-crowd” still argues that you cannot measure knowledge and innovation directly. They fail to see that you can, however, measure the rate of change of information as a proxy for knowledge (first derivative) and the second derivative of information as a proxy for innovation. Whoever still thinks that knowledge is ‘intangible’ is living in a world that no longer exists....

...we can expect to see a true innovation economy - Web 3.0 will be predictive. A percentile search engine will calculate and combine strategic combinations of knowledge assets (from an computer enabled inventory) in infinitely unique and creative ways. Each combination will represent a business plan at a known probability of success. People will own knowledge assets and have perfect information regarding the inventory."

Devising such a model to represent these "strategic combinations of knowledge assets" such that "Each combination will represent a business plan at a known probability of success" has been the holy grail of the knowledge management clan for several decades.

Owning and having perfect information about your knowledge inventory is indeed a very exciting prospect. Can we avoid the train wreck?

To borrow Jay Deragon's blog tag line: "What say you?"

Link resources:

(1.) InnovationLabs Publications: The Knowledge Channel - Corporate Strategies for the Internet

(2) InnovationLabs Publications: Knowledge Channel Networks - Integrating Industry Value Chains on the Internet

(3)For my "antrail" to these resources see ddavison's Grazr Blog

Using the Wii Remote as a VR Head tracking device

Using the Wii remote as a low cost electronic whiteboard

The ignorance of Crowds?

I have been hooked, as have many others, on the potential of harnessing the power of mass collaboration as touted in Wikinomics, in which authors Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue that peer production can help businesses “take innovation and wealth creation to new levels.” ( see my Thoughts Illustrated: Network Innovation - a lesson from Apple. )

"Not neccesarily so" says Nicholas Carr in this thoughtful article from ManyWorlds:

"The open source (peer production) model can play an important role
in innovation, but know its limitations."

and....

"The bazaar should be defined by diversity,
but the cathedral should be defined by talent."

To see what Carr means by this important distinction link here:

ManyWorlds.com - The Knowledge Network for Thought Leaders on Business Strategy, Innovation and Futures.