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

---

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.

Watch This! The creation of a master muralist!

Take the time to watch Stephanie Crowley, a master graphic interpreter, as she creates this Journey Map mural for the University at Buffalo. Compressing 40 hours into 2.5 minutes via timelapse video is a slick way to present a "state of the art" visioneer. Stephanie hangs out professionally here Welcome!

Click to start the video below and enjoy!

Brainbow-a Hubble telescope for the brain?

Adding Color Untangles the Brain’s Gray Secrets - New York Times

From Stuart Silverstone's link to the New York Times article, a color picture of the brains "tangles"

"I take a view that this is like the Hubble telescope," said Dr. Jeff
Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard who is
the paper's senior author. "We¹ve never been able to look at the brain this
way before. Why not just start looking and see what we observe?"

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.

Amazon Kindle Redux - standup comedian Robert Scoble

A bit late but here is Robert's dim view of the Kindle - he actually has one and you will see his trash talk in this 13 minute video. If you don't want to spend 13 minutes watching standup geek comedy - here is Robert's list of the shortcomings of the Kindle.


1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.




Here's what i thought about the Kindle before Scoble blew it up. Pays to wait for the critics.

Thoughts Illustrated: Amazon Kindle - your ideal gift for the readers on your Xmas list

Logic + Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts

David is at it again with this crisp review. this couples nicely with the Persuasion Architecture pdf which I read this morning which outlines a similar process in 60 pages. David did it in 1. Who gets the ROA prize today?

Logic Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts

Tom Friedman NYT - We are the people we have been waiting for"

Tom Friedman NYT oped links to this heartwarming story:


MIT Vehicle Design Summit 2.0 - Home: "VDS Mission Statement The mission of the Vehicle Design Summit is to catalyze an Energy Space Race: to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency to the multitude of global challenges (and opportunities) facing humanity and the planet in this day and age. To achieve this end, VDS will begin by assembling a global consortium of the world's leading thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries and change agents to develop the collaborative framework necessary to harness the world's genius, imagination and inspiration. "

Adobe - Flash on: The fusion of TV and the Internet

Click here Adobe - Flash on to see a powerful interactive mosaic of selected short videos - try the side bar for different genres. This interactive Flash presentation from Adobe offers some really neat ideas for user interfaces to complex video, audio or slide collections.( thanks to Bill Daul of NextNow Collaboratory for the link)

A visual tag cloud? A new way of mapping the social graph? With RSS feeds updating the visualization elements, I could see using this as my live social network dashboard, with the genre sidebar providing a selection of different social net connections based on topic, trust, reputation, recency etc.

Rather than build this visual UI into the OS as Apple has done with their new Leopard visual stack and grid interfaces, this could be a cross platform browser-based UI.

I will talk with Bill Daul to see if we can prototype such an interface.

Amazon Kindle - your ideal gift for the readers on your Xmas list

Amazon "kindles" a new fire in electronic book reading. This 6 minute video shows how you will use this new portable, 10.3ounce, paperback size device. Download your reading library via a wireless connection just like calling on your cell phone. This device and the kindle service will revolutionize the book, magazine,newspaper and blog publishing media space.

It's already sold out at Amazon, so you will have to stand in line to get one for your Xmas list. I want one too.


Amazon.com : Entertainment : A Video Demonstration of Amazon Kindle

ReplaceGoogle.com

ReplaceGoogle.com

Defragging the Defrag conference - Dan Farber on Identity disclosure -

Looks like a lot of the key Social Networking folks at the Defrag conference are concerned about the potential Trojan Whores in Open Social APIs. Dan Farber of ZDNet reports on what EstherDyson, Ross Mayfield, Doc Searls and Dick Hardt had to say about user profile protection. Good to see the A List dealing with this problem.
� Defragging identity, disclosures and vendor relationship management | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com


Thanks to Adam Green of Grazr who provided the reading list widget below from the Defrag conference. There's a lot more to Defrag from the Defrag conference than just this one

OpenSocial Trojan Whores? Cisco has an answer

In yesterday's post on OpenSocial, I expressed concern over the potential for personal profile misuse.

In contrast to the potential Trojan Horses of OpenSocial, to provide greater security for users of unified collaboration and communication tools for enterprise, Cisco has announced the acquisition of Securent Cisco Acquires Securent for $100 Million to provide security for enterprise knowledge pools and social networking profile data.

Here is a related reading list from the web today.

Open Social -Trojan Whores?

Open Social hit the net last week and gave google and partners a legup over Facebook in the exploding field of social networking. But the value of the open social networking APIs embodied in Open Social may be nullified by the potential for misuse of open user profiles by OS app developers who could mine the data gathered from OpenSocial profiles for their own purposes without user permission.

Anyone who can provide users a way to prevent application developers from gathering, mining and selling end-user profile, activity and clickstream data without their opt-in permission
could have a killer app.

If you have an hour to waste click on the YouTube video below to view the announcement by google's Vic Gundotra and the first group of OpenSocial Partners.

What's your take on OpenSocial?

The Outsourced Brain - New York Times

OM! by David Brooks

The Outsourced Brain - New York Times-

"you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing .... Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins."

The entire article is about a 1 minute read -- humor with a really sharp point - you will be glad you did!

Nokia's twango - multimedia sharing for mobiles

Here's a new media sharing site just acquired by Nokia. Features like flickr, but includes audio and video as well. Twango - Media Sharing and Hosting: Photos, Video, Audio and More

The image is from the twango/google mashup. Twango also features a process for organizing the media in "channels" which can be used for editing and for embedding in blogs or websites.

Innovation-What's Luck got to do with it?

From Erica Driver at Forrester Research - a fine article on how serendipity(LUCK) may be more important than all the other keys to innovation.

Forrester Information and Knowledge Management: Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor

Here is a clip from Erica's article:

"As part of the run-up to the Business Innovation Factory summit (BIF-3) currently going on in Providence, Rhode Island, attendees participated in an online social network.On the social networking site, the most common one-word answers to the question “What are 5 keys to innovation?” were rolled up into a tag cloud (see figure). Words that rose to the top of the list included creativity, collaboration, and passion.

But as I sit in the back of the theater listening to the storytellers (they each get 15 minutes of stage time to share experiences they’ve had with innovation or to participate in a short interview) I realize we missed something big: serendipity — fed by sheer dumb luck. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, serendipity is the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought after. And luck is a force that brings good fortune or adversity, or the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual."

While I liked Erica's article, I take issue with her characterization of serendipity as "fed by sheer dumb luck". Louis Pasteur is quoted as saying in a lecture in 1854 "Chance favors only the prepared mind". From my own experiences in founding and managing innovative startups, having a prepared mind enabled me to recognize my luck when it knocked on my door.

Erica's article also features a link to Icosystems founder and Chief Scientist Eric Bonabeau whose company applies complex adapative systems technology to help clients prepare their minds - and create their own luck. Might be worth checking Icosytems out to improve your luck. Icosystem Company Overview

fact checking - a 5,000 year error - Lascaux

When I posted yesterday about the Reuters story of the "world's oldest painting" I was reminded by a commentor about Lascaux and the cave paintings which predated the Aleppo paintings by 5,000 years.

It seems that Thoughts Illustrated commenced a lot earlier - in the caves at Lascaux and at Altamira in Spain - 5000 years before the "world's oldest painting"

It amazes me that a person in the blogosphere would care enough to set the record straight and that I could correct the error of the Reuter's "headline" story about the world's oldest painting.

From 9000 BC - the world's oldest painting?

This 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo, team leader Eric Coqueugniot told Reuters.

"It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 B.C.," Coqueugniot said.

Looks like thoughts were being illustrated 11,000 years ago. Quite a legacy.

test of blog embed

SOA - music to your ears?

Evolution of Communication: From Email to Twitter and Beyond

This diagram leads a very provocative post by Alex Iskold from Read/Write Web (1) which reinforces my own prior point about Twitter versus Blogger. (2)



(1) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/evolution_of_communication.php

(2)Thoughts Illustrated: A Brief Message - twitter vs blogger?


Amy Jussel commented to my Twitter post as follows:

"I actually appreciate Twitter's free form spontaneity, and can see how I might use it as almost a "Jott" style app to reach thought leaders under severe time crunches who seem to be living on the short form tools. (David's a case in point, eh?)

That said, your database filtering idea is a 'value-add' that would put it off the charts in my book...

To me, that would be the 'killer app' of relevance that would truly give Twitter the chops to be a 'collective knowledge depository' with value far beyond its current uses as mental floss....

The widget below may just be Amy's "killer app".

What goes around, comes around!

In the the fall of 1978 I sat in this comfortable Eames lounge chair, and with the same thumb controls that I now have on my laptop, "flew" through the amazing information spaces that Richard Bolt and Nick Negroponte had built at the MIT Architecture Machine Group. A full report on this visionary innovation is contained in the MIT archives as a downloadable pdf. You can get a copy of the full report here. (1) Scroll down until you see this image and select the download.



It is worth reading, since a good deal of the interface designs for the original Macintosh and for Microsoft Windows that followed it came from a visit by Bill Atkinson, a key member of the Macintosh team, to MIT after they had already "JOBBED" the design for the Macintosh from their visits to the ALTOS computer lab at Xerox PARC. A bit of history of the evolution of the PC/MAC user interfaces that is not widely known.

The vision of the SDMS persists today in many of the visual interfaces we use to navigate spatially from an image space we have become familiar with, using the image "map" to orient our deeper dive into the data it "contains".

In my first post on this blog (2) I outlined my thoughts about the combination of image maps with multimedia databases using visual maps as a way to compress the time for searching the the Web. google has delivered a great example in google maps, and we now need a way to do this with "non-geographic" maps.

Here is a visual clip from the SDMS document showing how the guys at MIT visualized the "nested" spaces of their remarkable system.



Today, with the experience of 30 years to guide us, we are able to encapsulate the features MIT envisioned in their SDMS labs in an easy to use , "embeddable" browser widget . We can now re-create their vision with simple user tools for "authoring" nested levels of structure ( Frameworks) like those shown in the image above, linking these Frameworks through continously refreshable, syndicated feeds of information from the vast reaches of the Web.

From the perspective of 30 years of living in the increasingly visual and powerful digital world of computers and communications technologies, and now able to enjoy them through the World Wide Web, I can see that the vision the guys at MIT Architecture Machine Group innovated being made available today to anyone with a laptop and a web browser. ( and with a Safari browser widget for iPhone aficcianados)

I will soon be able to share my frameworks and their related image map widgets with anyone on the web, and better yet, through global conversations, enable anyone who wishes to do so to add the collaborative value of the "wisdom of crowds" to our sharable knowledge by passing these widgets around and adding their own 2 cents worth.

Back to the future!!

(1) Speech Interface Group - Papers

(2) Thoughts Illustrated: TI - first example the thoughts of Doug Engelbart

Too many ripples in the pond?

In a previous post I pointed out David Armano's observations about Social Media Fragmentation which David pictured in the graphic shown below.

Thoughts Illustrated: Multiplicity Anyone? Influence Ripples -Social Media Fragmentation


This morning, another "friendly" ripple appeared on my screen suggesting that I view the YouTube Battle at Kruger, an amateur video of a combat between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo and some really honking crocodiles along a muddy stream bank in Africa. The guy who sent me the link is a friend from the "real world" who intrigued me enough with some trick questions that he included in his email that I just had to view the video.

The video, which I have embedded below, has now been the subject of over 2.5 million hours of viewing time by 17 million viewers, and consumed just as many hours of network bandwidth on YouTube.

I did watch it, out of deference to my friend's recommendation, but it got me to thinking about my ROA( Return on Attention)

In these days where attention is a scarce resource, and our social network "friends" send continuous ripples like this 9 minute video our way, how do we manage to gain some control over the cacophony of the online world and yet maintain our social network relationships. How can we "tune" our receivers to filter out important signals from the overwhelming noise of the Web?

With apologies for dropping another pebble in the pond, the Battle at Kruger is on your screen below:

"filtering on the way out"- David Weinberger

Under the "covers" of Blogger, Picasa has been automatically collecting the images I use in the TI blog. Today I reviewed the 120 images collected by Picasa, giving me a "map of cognition" spanning the illustrations I have used to illuminate my posts over the past 14 months.

The review of this map of cognition was triggered by my attempt to understand a key point in David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous (my acronym E=M)


Step 1 - above - depicts my review of the Picasa image collection using a drawing by Barcelona sketch artist Joan Mas from her sketch book on GTD which I found last year courtesy of Karen Bennett.


Step2 -From the miscellaneous(but remixable/reconstructable) Thoughts Illustrated image collection in Picasa, I selected the one below also drawn by Joan Mas, which I then linked backThoughts Illustrated: GTD -Because getting organized should be fun.

Now there must be a way to connect the "pipes" of Picasa and Blogger to enable me to grok my TI archives visually - and engage with David in conversation about his filtering concept (p 103 Everything is Miscellaneous - E=M) using images to express my thoughts and to enable this while I am "IN" blogger! ( As of May 3, 2008 this function is not yet enabled and may take a google API hacker to create it)

It would show the power of E= M more effectively if I could make the link to p 103 while I was posting this - and even more effective a "reconstruction" of my TI archive if I could link to this post on CPA automatically.Thoughts Illustrated: The Creative Tension of CPA

I wonder if this RSS-able collection of links could be dragged and dropped onto a Grazr Widget and serve as a conversation "platform" for asking David - what do you mean by that statement? Is my excursion through my own archival material filtering on the way out- or as I am led to conclude - is it like this......?

Step 1 - Panning - Scan the image collection from TI posts
Step 2 - Zooming- Find the Joan Pas image I posted on GTD and Conversation
Step 3 - Linking - Reconstructing from the TI reverse chronological archive ( blogsearch)
Step 4 - Posting - Creating this new blog post - starting the conversation
Step 5 - Notifying - Sending David a notice of this post
Step 6 - Waiting - Hoping that David will respond and comment (conversation)

If E=M text was digital and searchable, it would begin to make the concept of networking David's book much more useful. because the conversations that can be stimulated and peer produced from E=M readers can add significant value in helping David's central memes survive and find utility in our complex world. (This would also be true if David Allen's GTD was distibuted in ebook form for linkage and mashups)

Finally, to give thanks to the original connection to Joan Mas images, the original link was from Karen Bennett Picture It Solved - a visual approach to thinking
I was pleased to see Karen and her new husband at the Vizthink conference in January.

Note:Misspelling of Joan Mas in this post has been corrected from "Pas" to "Mas" wherever the misspelling occured in the original post Sorry Joan.

A Brief Message - twitter vs blogger?

Although this image is from a new blog on design, it could certainly apply to the dilemma of continuous partial attention (CPA) and from the punch line "short is in", it would appear that microblogging as in Twitter meets the criteria outlined above.

My take is that Return on Attention (ROA) thrives on "short is in" and that pithy text and powerful images deliver content in the most effective way, but my experience to date with Twitter is very mixed.


I need is a way to filter the incoming flood so that it raises the signal above the noise. Maybe my conversation with Adam Green of Grazr this afternoon will shed some light on how to manage microblogs along with all the other social networking stuff.

PS this post would have exceeded the Twitter 140 character limit by the second sentence. If short is in, maybe I'm out!

A Brief Message

Multiplicity Anyone? Influence Ripples -Social Media Fragmentation

If Thoughts Illustrated had a "pulitzer prize", David Armano would be the winner. He has a mental grasp of the social networking space from blogs, to twitters, to wikis to MSM that bespeaks not only a metalevel understanding of the web-enabled conversational space, but a visual mind that lets us See what he means. Don't miss David's verbal complement in this post to this great visual - you need to absorb both to understand how David really gets it.

His visuals help you "get it " too. Here's his viewpoint in a selection from his post:

"But what's becoming increasingly clear to most of us—is that like the original media fragmentation, the social version of it will be no less challenging to initiate, maintain and nurture. We're all going to have to get used to multiplicity—or simply having a few more pebbles in the pond"

Logic Emotion: Influence Ripples Social Media Fragmentation: