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. "