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

+

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.

+

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.