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.

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

The Ant Trail - A web research journey using Grazr

I got a query on Facebook from Nancy White about how FB is used by high school and college kids, I remembered that studying teens' use of social networks is Danah Boyd's specialty so I linked to her website, where I found Danah answering Scoble about the condition that I have referred to as Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) or ambient friendship, or AORTA(always on, real time, anywhere)

this post features a use of the Grazr Web Research tool which enables me to "capture" of the Ant Trail by just dragging and dropping links, clips, photos, videos, podcasts from the brower "canvas" to the sidebar.

Shown in the sidebar is the resultant CB widget, which I have called AORTA and which I can edit and embed on any webpage( like this one), and with the widget's Firefox extension, can serve as the AntTrail "collector" as I discovery-surf the web.

This post is really personal exploration and I hope as we launch a ConversationBase version of Grazr in the next few weeks to make good use of the "drag and drop" Web Research the tool offers to bloggers and pass the good news along.

The Amazing Recursiveness of the Web!

In continuing preparation for my presentation on Wikinomics, and as a result of a conversation with Chris Carfi of Cerado, I learned about Spikesource and CEO Kim Polese's interview with Wikinomics author Don Tapscott.

In addition to recognizing Spiksoure as a wikinomics story, the AntTrail from linking to the Spikesource story led me to this Webinar invitation to Kim's interview- powered by, surprise!, WebEx, who will also be providing the remote broadcast service for my presentation on June 22.

The feeback loop here is recognizing also that Spikesource is a potential platform partner for ConversationBase, and for delivery of Networked Books into the corporate market. First book up is, obviously, Wikinomics!

SpikeSource - SuiteTwo

Presentation Research -Discovery through Google Images

In preparing for my second presentation for the eLearning Forum on the subject of Wikinomics I wanted to use the power of time-shifting and stored "memory" exemplified by TiVo.

My "ant-trail" 1. Search google images 2. select the image shown above 3. Follow the image link to find this 4 year-old post Church of the Customer Blog

"Student volunteers, who received free pizzas for their labor, helped with the assembly of the system, essentially an array of large refrigerators to keep the computers from overheating. Virginia Tech's president offered free football tickets to the technicians who were spending long hours on the project.

"'When you have a small budget," said Srinidhi Varadarajan, a leader of the project, "you have to take risks.'"

Voila! a perfect example of the principles of Wikinomics in action and another story for the Wikinomics playbook.

Time-shifted and stored in the "memory" of the Church of the Customer blog and discovered through google image search. Their tag cloud on the blog piques my attention. Maybe we should introduce them to ConversationBase .

Blogging my way to a presentation

I have to make a presentation next Friday at SRI, so this morning I began using the Web to gather the images I needed for my slide set. I'll leave an Ant Trail of my journey to "places" on the web where googleimages leads me. AT will stand for Ant Trail stops on the journey.( I found out that blogger will not accept the little AT circle-a sign so I had to use AT)

As we take this journey together, we will meet some interesting "pals" in the blogosphere and I will acknowledge their help with sidebar posts from their blogs where my "nuggets" of images are found.


AT 1. Here is a clip from my Firefox/google search history(the trail is in inverted order).
The first page of search results; where I found the image I needed.

Voila! here's Big Al.



I found this image on David Seaton's News Links: Al Gore: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done." along with this cogent summary from David:

"In global warming Gore has found an issue of universal concern and has carved himself a universally recognized position as an authority on it. He did this quietly, patiently and methodically. Even if adopting global warming were only a strategy to recreate his political career, it is such a long headed strategy and so subtly executed that it would prove a capacity of analysis, judgment, self control and execution that have long been (longer than six years) missing from the White House. One thing for sure, Al Gore shouldn't have to beg for the presidency. We cannot turn back the clock or undo the harm undone, but there can be second acts in American life."

I left a thankyou comment for David and linked him hereThoughts Illustrated: Are Crowds Intelligent Life Forms? where my "pal" from the blogosphere The Head Lemur( i don't even know the guy) had this to say on his blog:

" One of the most remarkable things about the Internet is the awesome amount of information that is out here. You can find something on just about anything here. But this place is like a huge library where the shelves are empty and the books are piled on the floor. The pile is getting bigger as another truckload has just been delivered in the backdoor. It is all here, but it has little structure or form."

Sound familiar?

Ant Trail No.2 - finding information Architects!

This Ant Trail leads to Information Architects in Tokyo,a dynamite design resource for all things Internet.

The trail will be entirely visual, without associated links. It will give me a visual
platform for my meeting with Robert Scoble in early March. In meeting with Robert, I hope to help him overcome his problem of continuous partial attention. (CPA) that I mentioned in previous posts.

iA's interface design rules make great visual sense to me, and I am hoping to find a way to redesign this blog so that it follows the iA rules. I think they would be equally applicable to Scobleizer and the Scoble Video Show.

Let's start on the trail with Netvibes
dave davison's home page (22)
followed by the link to
which contains the link to iA which led me to this really powerful statement: The Interface is the Brand ( which relates to my prior posts on the iPhone and its need for radical simplification). iA gets it just right with this post: Information Architects Japan

and then finally a payoff for my meeting with Robert Scoble - this table rating popular blogs showing that Scobleizer has a way to go in its design.


Ain't discovery grand? I hope Robert will agree.

STIGMERGY -MY ANT TRAIL IN CYBERSPACE

This ANT TRAIL - led me to learn the meaning of STIGMERGY and how it works to create such RADICALLY SIMPLE collaborative creations as WikiPedia , Open Source Software and termite "cathedrals" - and it gave me a better understanding of the power of mass collaboration -the subject of Don Tapscott's new book described earlier here: Thoughts Illustrated: WIKINOMICS-another "Networked" book example

I started this web journey as the result of a post by Mark Elliott(the person who led me to the Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods) i will post the ANT TRAIL in a series of links you can follow at the bottom. This web journey was its own reward, as Steve Jobs is fond of saying - and I hope it will be rewarding for you, too.








In keeping with the blog reverse chronology here is the Ant Trail starting backwards from the link above to:

Chapter 1 of Small Pieces - David Weinberger

which started here:Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems

but before that was this link Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web

which came from the Future Commons post by Mark Elliott ( he of the link to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods presented in a previous post on TI) leading to his article on here:M/C Journal: "Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work"

The whole Radical Simplification slide show can be visited here: RS: Radical Simplification
and may be worth your while. And for the finale - Stigmergy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia