Crowd-sourcing - AssignmentZero

Thanks to KoAnn, CEO of Sustainable Life Media, for this important link about Pro-Am journalism. AssignmentZero is co-sponsored by Wired and is an innovative approach to orchestrating conversations between professonal editors and amateur journalists. I believe this editoral approach can have useful application in online interaction between authors and readers of networked books.

Get Involved | AssignmentZero

" To get the project started, Assignment Zero editors have identified some relevant topics and broken them down into assignments - like an interview, research, or writing a piece. Each of the assignments is marked with either a crowd or individual symbol. The crowd symbol means that this assignment is open to everyone -- it's non-exclusive and ongoing. You can add information at any time".

I will be exploring how AssignmentZero manages their Pro-Am integration.

iinnovate - an interview with Eric Schmidt CEO of Google.

A major driving force for innovation in the Silicon Valley springs from the entrepreneurial environment of the Stanford campus - here 2 bright Stanford entrepreneurs-to-be interview Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google - worth a listen. As Schmidt says " I come to Stanford to teach because I always learn a lot from my students questions'" There are some great student's questions in this interview with the CEO of one of the most successful entrepreneurships in Silicon Valley history.

iinnovate: a podcast about innovation and entrepreneurship: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

GTD -Because getting organized should be fun.

GTDrawings

From the designer Joan M Mas in the Balearic Islands, Spain - Joan has designed a portfolio of typographic designs and dingbats that could be very useful in visualizing networked book elements. Iwill be contacting her to see how we might work together.

The link to Joan is courtesy of Karen Storer Picture It Solved - a visual approach to thinking

YouTube - Hilary 1984 Spoof Video

You have probably already seen this YouTube video takeoff on the Apple Macintosh 1984 Superbowl ad - My departed friend Fred Hoar, then the PR chief at Apple,felt it was his signature moment in the world of branding - It is clear 23 years later that this commercial "has legs" enought to provide a NewMedia disruption in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.

Maps of Science

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers.scimaplarge.jpg (JPEG Image, 6013x5782 pixels) - Scaled (10%)

the map view can be enlarged to make the text labels on the map readable.

Viral Video Chart - Today's Top 20 Viral Videos

Viral Video Chart - Today's Top 20 Viral Videos

wikinomics presentation by Don Tapscott

This will take you to the eLarning site where you can download and listen/view Don Tapscott's presentation of Wikinomics. I was in Mexico when Tapscott presented on the Cisco campus so I am grateful to John Maloney of Colabria and eLearning for the fully documented archive of Tapscott's talk. eLF vPortal I now will take up Tapcott's challenge in the Wikinomics Playbook to attempt to add value to his work.

This is a powerful example of the emerging concept of the networked book.Thoughts Illustrated: WIKINOMICS-another "Networked" book example

Lunching with Scoble

After a lifetime of accusations of my being a verbal "firehose", I met my match yesterday at lunch at Mike's restaurant with The Scobleizer. It was a truly enjoyable experience. Robert seems to have perfected the ability to integrate his in-person reality with his online presence. He radiates intelligence, good humor and an openness in conversation which is a rare combination - and probably the reason he continues to attract such a large following in the blogosphere and in F2F interactions with the movers and shakers of the geek world.

I first met Robert at Meshforum in May 2006 Thoughts Illustrated: Meshforum - Scoble and Israel on Naked Conversations where he stimulated my curiosity and interest in how he and Shel Israel approached the creation of Naked Conversations - an early version of what I call the Networked Book.

During our lunch yesterday, Robert explained the rationale for his Scoble Show - a relaxed- style interview show featuring hot Silicon Valley CEOs telling their stories and demonstrating their products. Here's a recent example: Inside a real Silicon Valley garage startup: Maya's Mom | PodTech.net: Technology, Business, Media, and News Podcasts. Robert is rapidly accelerating his video interview production, recording 3-4 video interviews per week. He now has a large backlog of wannabe's lined up to be interviewed on his show and expects to select a "Top 40" from his show portfolio when he has enough footage in his playlist archive.

If you are interested in how The Scoble Show integrates with Podtech's business model, scroll down the right side of the page linked above and you will see the logos of 39 high-class Scoble Show sponsors. John Furrier's recruiting of Robert Scoble to be a centerpiece of PodTech's NewMedia business is clearly paying off.

Robert also showed me how he uses google reader to keep up with his prodigious daily blog reading and posting efforts and gave me a short guided tour of how he uses Twitter / Scobleizer to keep up with his many contacts in real time.

Great lunch - and an in-person confirmation of the unique social networking power of the NewMedia to connect and engage people in "naked conversations" on a global basis. Also solid evidence of my friend Mark Anderson's Thoughts Illustrated: Mark Anderson-Welcome to the Blogosphere!support for the AORTA (Always On Real Time Access) concept of today's technology-enabled society. Here's how Mark described it way back in 1998:

"With AORTA, users tend to transfer all work to Net-enabled applications, and to use email, Inet chat, collaboration software, and Inet telephony as easily as they used to use the phone."

Robert Scoble is the living, breathing exemplar of AORTA in action and, boy, does it work for him!

The greatest innovations of all time

View the Slide Show The Greatest Innovations of All Time

Business Week's slide show design tells the story visually. An accompanying audio podcast would make the presentation more compelling.

Are Crowds Intelligent Life Forms?

You are looking at the Head Lemur who pens raving lunacy which I put on my
my google reader just to sample his oxymoronic humor - which is often pointed in a similar direction to my own exploration of how to refine the "landfill" of the web into useful nuggets suitable for digestion by the folks afflicted with the disease continuous partial attention (CPA).Thoughts Illustrated: Who is Linda Stone and why should we listen to her?

I agree with the raving lunatic's comment:

" 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."

Perhaps the Head Lemur and I can find a way to build a pilot refinery. I intend to risk being subjected to his rapier-like wit, if I can get on his wave length.

raving lunacy: Are Crowds Intelligent Life Forms?

What were they saying? Tag Clouds from US Presidential Speeches from 1776 to the present

Sliding the timeline bar across the tag cloud space provides an impressive look at the key topics at the "top of mind" in Presidential speeches from John Adams to George W.

This demo also shows the visualizing power of the tag cloud done with just 2 levels of font size and color differentiation. Each cloud contains 100 tags.

From the website of Chirag Mehta a 26 year old kayaking programmer. Original link from the ifBook blog on a networkedbook: GamerTheory

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud - Chirag Mehta : chir.ag

Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped--Now!

Here's a clip from a recent interview with Alan Kay - one of the Titans of the personal computer evolution. The article is short and worth reading. In it Alan pays tribute to the founding role Doug Engelbart played as the original catalyst of the PC. The images are taken from a Siggraph poster produced 1997.

"Basically, the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently."
Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped--Now:

To see the original siggraph poster :http://san-diego.siggraph.org/sigkids/Influences.html

Denise Caruso has something very important to say - read this review for a starter

WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: Denise Caruso's Intervention: How to Get Responsible, Democratic Biotechnology

Amazon.com: Intervention: Confronting the Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet: Books: Denise Caruso

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.

Periodic Table of the Rejected Elements

Periodic Chart of the Rejected Elements

Atlantic Monthly copyright 1999. Contained in this website are a wide variety of uses of the "visual organizing principle" of the Periodic Table.

iPhone- Is the interface the brand?

See my previous Thoughts Illustrated: iPhone redux - Ubiquitous computing or a Fashion Statement?

These guys from Japan really understand Radical Simplicity. Here is how they put it:Information Architects Japan

And once again Apple proves that nowadays the interface is the brand. Useless to say that I will get that little miracle as soon as I can, yet our uncle Fritz is still desperately waiting for the other Apple promise to be fulfilled: Simplicity.

Information Architects Japan � iA Notebook � Strip it down for Uncle Fritz: Introducing iPhone Nano&Shuffle

BookTV.org - Another way for authors to promote their memes

BOOK TV.ORG
Click here and when you see the BookTV page click on any of the books which will link you to a brief abstract about the author and the book, and a TV schedule for interviews with the author.

The one that caught my eye was After Words, and clicking on that book spine took me to the description of a George Gilder interview with John Naisbitt and his new book MindSet.

In the interest of integrating the BookTV approach to promoting author's works, i will force myself to watch the Gilder/Naisbitt interview and, if possible record it for podcasting.

Who is Linda Stone and why should we listen to her?

The link above is not live. If this post interests you there will be a link to Linda later on in the post.

Here's the preamble:

My Friend Mark Safranski(ZenPundit) alerted me to The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 which contains as Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: "Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)" .

I think Linda's phrase ranks right up there with Information Anxiety and Future Shock in drawing our attention to how technology is creating a condition I call "too much stuff - too little time" which gets worse as the dilemma of information overload and attention scarcity continues unabated.

Although she first coined the phrase CPA in 1997 during her work at Microsoft, I first heard Linda use it in a speech she gave at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference last year.The entire talk (28 min.) is worth listening to and you can download it to your playlist or listen to it here: IT Conversations: Linda Stone

Here's an abstract of Linda's concept of CPA

"This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call 'continuous partial attention.' Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers."

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention.

It has been my passion since I began posting on this blog 10 months ago to seek ways to provide solutions to this dilemma, solutions which I believe rest on the ideal developed years ago by the architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. His axiom " Less is more" is my guiding principle.

As I find useful tools for compressing and synthesizing the chaos of content on the Internet I will share them with you, so you won't have to feel like this guy who obviously is suffering from CPA!

The Visual Dictionary - a visual exploration of words in the real world.

Another mosaic of images -these containing single words. The mosaic idea and the site organization is nice but the content has little meaning. Each image in the mosaic contains a link to the invidual image and some data about the photographer.

The Visual Dictionary - a visual exploration of words in the real world.

How about a nice restful conversation?

conversation table - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics