Attention Please! Your Metadata Is Showing!

From Ester Dyson's Release 1.0, Steve Gilmor recognizes an important emerging concept since blogs became prevelant as information delivery channels in our world of communications. Links - and the metadata about them - allow the spontaneous emergence of structure.

Tools have emerged in order to capture, document and track those tags and links, forming new structures of identity and meaning.

The emergence of "attention-based ecosystems on proprietary platforms, while others are attempting to broaden the use and interoperability of attention metadata so that communities and other attention-defined structures can emerge on the open Web."

Social Tagging, and Networking through Weblogs

Great posting - Social Tagging, and Networking through Weblogs - on Gerry Heidenreich's blog.

A topic that has had my gears spinning for weeks now... the “tagging“ phenomenon is introducing us in real-time to a new set of technologies that, without a doubt, will revolutionize the way we work with the web. Tagging weblogs a powerful concept.

Land The Dutch Connection Brand - Part 2.

Yesterday in my Amsterdam studio, 6 of us gathered to finish landing The Dutch Connection brand.

What became very clear to us was that what makes us exceptional is our creativity in being able to strategically create opportunites for business - not only a material level, but a social and conceptual level as well - and to visualize these opportunities so that everyone in the business can really understand their meaning and impact.

This is big. This is unique. This positions us very differently than consultants.

I feel privileged to have found myself in the companies of these talented people.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to pull all of our resources together to go for that first collective client. I have a feeling that we're going to have a lot of fun creating business for our clients.

Odeo & Podcasting

Odeo is the new podcasting brand from Noah Glass and Evan Williams, the creators of Blogger and AudiobBlogger.

Read and get up to speed. If their past performance is an indicator, Odeo will shape podcasting.

How Odeo Happened
Article about impact Odeo could have.
Odeo Blog
Sign up for Odeo

Looks like Podcasting is here to stay if you read the statistics of iPod penetration and tools like the iPod as channels. So, what will the new business model be? It certainly won't follow the old braodcast model.

Firefox 1.0.1 released today

Firefox 1.0.1 released today!

Here's what's new in Firefox 1.0.1:
-- Improved stability
-- International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode. (To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference to false.)
-- Several security fixes.

Landing The Dutch Connection brand

Several of us founded The Dutch Connection - a business development group focused on collaboration, creativity and culture - almost one year ago. We come from all different kinds of cultures and disciplines. We've been meeting and sharing ideas and thoughts about a "think-and-do tank" in Pow-Wows.


Last Saturday, in The Tube Gallery in Amsterdam, 10 of us got together to contribute our human content to explore what that could mean for us working together and still maintaining our individuality, our sense of independence, and our other commitments. The day was an expedition into a possibility, a potential and a shared vision of the future.

We struggled, we explored, we discovered - and we found out that there was a common belief that this could be something. We are entrepreneurial, which sets us apart from consultants - we like to develop concepts and bring them to life.

We have a wiki space where we collaborate, so we've been posting the content we generated there. It's taking shape and beginning to look like something we can use to profile and postition ourselves very uniquely in the marketplace here in The Netherlands.

We're having a second round of Landing the Brand, so that we can try and build a new kind of business model that will capture this dynamic network of individuals, skills, talents, interests, disciplines, experience and all of our networks. We just might become an evolving showcase for the new business model for the future.

I'll keep you posted.

FutureMail

Wow - you can send an email to yourself in the future with FutureMail. You can even subscribe to your future RSS feed.

Hmm-mm...I think I'm going to play with the idea of sending myself an email several years from now. What should I tell myself that's important to remember then about now?

Catch a Wave from Space - Einstein@Home

To celebrate the World Year of Physics 2005, join the project group Einstein@Home, and you just might catch a wave from space.

"Albert Einstein suggested long ago that we are adrift in a universe filled with waves from space. Colliding black holes, collapsing stars, and spinning compact celestial objects such as pulsars create ripples in the fabric of space and time that subtly distort the world around us. These gravitational waves have eluded scientists for nearly a century.

Exciting new experiments may let them catch the waves in action and open a whole new window on the universe - but they need your help to do it!'

Einstein@Home is one, small part of the LSC scientific program. It is being set up as a distributed computing project, which means that it relies on computer time donated by private computer users like you to search for gravity wave-emitting compact stars.

Einstein@Home will rely on private owners of PCs, like you, to donate computer time to the analysis of LIGO data. All you'll have to do is install a small, screen saver program to your computer.

Sign up for Einstein@home and take part in discovering the future.

This is very cool.

Creative Capital Conference - Amsterdam

The Creative Capital Conference - will take place 17 and 18 March 2005 in Amsterdam at the Felix Meritis building on the Keizersgracht.

It is an international conference on the hot topic of Creative Capital focusing on Culture, Innovation and the Public Domain in the Knowledge Economy

What are the real issues for a creative public domain? Join the conversation about the meaning of Creative Capital, cultural propositions and social platforms during this conference.

Register here.

See you there!

Tribute to Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller's death has raised discussions that cross borders and engage us all in thinking very close to our hearts. When you consider the social media that is enabling us to transform business models, think about how we also are taking this opportunity to transform ourselves as a society. The cultural creatives, as Richard Florida calls us, are leading the way with social entrepreurship. Arthur Miller would be proud.

I read Bob Herbert's column - Meanwhile - in the International Herald Tribune this morning. He quotes Charles Isherwood from the New York Times. "Arthur Miller's concerns were with the moral corruption brought on by bonding one's ideals with society's dictates, buying into the values of the group when they conflict with the voice of personal conscience."

We are at a place in time where we have to balance our needs as citizens against our desires as consumers. This has more to do with having a personal strategy for self-sustainability than with buying power. We live in a society that demands not only our attention, but it requires us to engage as active citizens.

This requires collaboration, creativity, consciousness and attention to culture.

Read The Crucible again. Arthur Miller demonstrated that we can make things right. We just have to make the commitment to what our hearts believe in community.

Google Maps

Google Labs had added another project that is very handy - Google Maps. Unfortunately, if you want to access maps for anywhere besides the USA and Canada, you're out of luck.


Looking forward to when they add the rest of this wonderful world.

AV Blogger

Ton Zijlstra just turned me onto the AV Blogger.


You can make video clip and then post it to your blog or site. EZ-PZ.

Us.ef.ul - Beginner's Guide to del.icio.us

John at beelerspace has written a comprehensive and linked guide to del.icio.us. Enlighten yourself and have a read through Us.ef.ul - A Beginner's Guide to the Next Big Thing.

For those not in the know, del.icio.us is primarily a great way to track, tag and aggregate your bookmarks. You can also read what other sites people are currently reading and posting...and - this is the best - discover what others are tagging by linking through the meta-tags.

Having trouble finding yourself?

Judith Meskill's blog posting on the Social Software Weblog from 9 February - Having trouble ‘finding’ yourself? caught my fancy.

She highlighted Crunkie, ”...a revolutionary new location-based mobile blog virtual community service that allows users to find friends and post location-tagged messages, pictures and other media instantly retrievable by friends and other Crunkie users…”


Lost? Need to find yourself? Might be just the trick!

Create a Soundtrack for your Life's Moments

Tiny Mix Tapes has an extraordinary offer:
"Here's the deal: You send us a style, genre, word, phrase, emotion, or whatever else, and if one of our mix tape robots fancies your suggestion, that crazy set of circuits might just make a mix tape out of it -- well, at least a tracklisting for a mix tape out of it."

Just reading the archives is worth the visit. Chewing gum for the eyes.

Can't wait for my soundtrack.

thought experiments lain: serial experiments lain

This is cool ...thought experiments lain: a serial experiments lain information site ... and it has an annoted glossary that prickles your thinking as it brings you up to speed with what's going on.

"The creators of lain have made a progressive cyberpunk anime which is highly informed and operative on multiple layers, both figuratively and literally. No single explanation or speech or essay can hope to encompass all that is serial experiments lain. As such, lain will always be open to interpretation and always encourage us to do our own research, our own experiments, which is why I call this document thought experiments lain."

The Human Body Project

The Erotic Museum has started The Human Body Project. "The Erotic Museum is conducting an ongoing research project intent on recording the full breadth of natural and altered human physiology. By creating a massive image database of everyday people of every race, age and size we hope to provide the public with an enduring image of mankind's actual appearance in all of it's natural and unnatural forms."

We were all on that train - Madrid 3/11

There is a new documentary about the Madrid train bombing. We Were All On That Train - or in Spanish Todos ibamos en ese tren.

Docus Madrid - a Spanish production company - has released their 24 short films in a documentary about the terrorist attack in the Madrid train station on March 11, 2004. The website is in Spanish, though you can download an English PR release. If you get a chance to see it, please attend because the proceeds from ticket sales go to the victims' families.

The Darwinian Interlude

Enlightening article - The Darwinian Interlude - from Feeman Dyson in MIT's TechnologyReview.com. The Darwinian era is over, after 3 billion years.

"Cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization."

Dive into the article because it goes deep into the explanation of why Darwinian evolution ended - now that we are one human species dominating and reorganizing the biosphere.

According to Dyson, the availability of biotechnology and genetic engineering in the hands of the general public will create an explosion of diversity as people play with this technology like an art form.

Blog University

After the discussions during the Summit for the Future, we begin to realize that the time has come for events like Blog University produced by The New Communications Forum 2005.

I belong to a group pf people - The Dutch Connection - who are playing with the cutting edge of human communication practices and using them for creating and collaborating on business development in new ways.

What we realized during the Summit was that people, in general, need invitation into participation. Like the internet 12 years ago, it's time for another evolution. Blogs and wikis are tools for people to publish, share, co-author. This connects us in ways that move us from simply sharing common interests into sharing a practice that grows from that hub of interest.

Social cause is driving this, as well as our human need to live a more integral, conscious life. "Let me do it my way." + "Let me make a difference" People want to define their lives with meaningful purpose.

Events like Blog University createt he space for people to participate and learn and share.

Landing the Brand - Modo Fac in Edinburgh

I left the Summit for the Future and headed for Edinburgh, Scotland last Friday to participate in a group workshop with 8 other people to "land the brand" Modo Fac.

Modo Fac is the inspiration of Kerry Santo, a wild mix of Liverpool scowse humor and her amazing heartfelt social-fixer-of-the-universeunderpinned with "we-can-do-it" power. Her story alone should inspire people to join Modo Fac and continue the chain of events.

Kerry chose the name Modo Fac because it means "just do it" in Latin. She seeded the idea of Modo Fac as a club on Ecademy. We began holding discussions about a range of issues. Somewhere along the line, I moved from outside to inside. The spirit behind Modo Fac captured my sensibilities and I recognized that we shared a common purpose.

The work we did on Saturday only reconfirmed that. Using a systematic approach to capture the dynamic human content of this group, we landed it into a framework of vision, values and performance differences. With this brand architecture, Modo Fac cab now attract and inform partners and players who want to champion the building of the organization and the space. Now people can see the space where they can contribute that special bit of themself to make a difference.

The vision: ‘To create a space where people can contribute ‘when and where’ they want AND CHAMPION what they’re good at without feeling pressured!’


Hats off to Kerry Santo and her merry group of inimitable individuals dedicated to helping people be all that they can be in a business world that embraces social cause as a core value.

If you want to join in a group of people who are making a difference, and not just talking about it, the visit the Modo Fac site and invest your money into something with great purpose.

Summit for the Future - Amsterdam

Last week I participated for two days in Summit for the Future in Amsteram. I missed the last day because I had to run off to a project in Edinburgh.

During the Summmit we listened to some very knowledgable speakers and discussed preferred futures in five sectors: Trade, Energy, Healthcare, Science & Technology, and Media. Tom Lambert, Vladimir Petrovskiy, Glen Heimstra and Wendy Schultz (the speakers) shared their thoughts and identified some trends that are shaping the world and impacting our future. We then broke out into discussion groups focused on a particular sector with our own set of speakers relevant to that sector.

Jonathan Marks led the Media knowledge stream where I was a participant. He had invited Paul Kafno, Helen Shaw, Wim van de Donk, and Gerd Leonhard to share their thinking about the future in different areas of media.

Paul Kafno - previously with BBC and now with HD Thames - addressed the future of the viewing vehicle, basically High Definition TV. He said we have an opportunity to re-invent an electronic service to the home. He also said our big challange would be to find a way to re-purpose entertainment brands where people will pay. Most likely convergence will drive the strategies behind how the different technologies will move forward. According to Paul, "immersion" - high level engagement moving into mediated experience - will come from our engagement with high defintion viewing. People will be the dynamic hub rather than technology.

Helen Shaw and Wim van de Donk shared their experiences with the changing mandates for creating media policy.

Helen - a longtime broadcast journalist - has been investigating the globalization of media relations and its impact on democracy. She addressed the consumer-citizen quandry, where our different needs and wants in each of those roles reflect the conflicting nature of how we operate as a society. The profit driven agendas of the big media players are at odds with the public's values, and the public is demanding verification of the content and delivery of information. Trust and accountability will drive the strategies of information dissemination. Helen sees fragmentation into smaller media groups to serve a greater purpose as the way forward. The partnerships and alliances are key to survival, not as organizations, but as a culture. She sees a convergence of social, political, technological, intellectual and creative content for the public good.

Wim van de Donk looked at the new map and functions that the evolving media landscape has to fulfill for society. He sees a policy repertoire as creating relationships with audiences. Policy has to reflect the real landscape and society's values. We have to create policy that's aligned with what's happening and not make broad policy for the long-term. He belives there is growth opportunity for media economics as it becomes inclusive and less exclusive. Protectionism can no longer drive strategy. Media policy needs "learning".

Gerd Leonhard comes out of the music industry and wowed us with his take on the role music plays in our lives and how we will access and share it. He wrote the book, The Future of Music. Technology will move to the background. filters will become crucial. People will swap libraries. The content economy will change from per unit ownership to a subscription model for access. The future digital home wll have computer technology as the backbone in the background with a big high definition screen on the wall. The mobile phone will be our tool and channel for accessing and playing content. Time-shifting - download, freeze, replay later - is the trend. Packing "lifestyle" will be a key service.

My out-take from those sessions on the dynamics shaping our future were rather simple. All of this will change the traditional business model. Age dynamics will play a role in how. The "digital natives" born after 1981 will have a much smaller population than the ever-living "digital immigrants", which will push the envelop with bio-technology augmenting any aging issues. In a much more global context, we will see responsible human practices drive business behavior. We - people, individuals - will demand a more people-centric, social values based model. The personal brand will drive new economics, not the business brand.

I have to speak with Jonathan Marks to find out how they closed out the Summit, and if there were any BIG eye-openers after that.

Quantum Cryptography

According to Scientific American -- Quantum cryptography has marched from theory to laboratory to real products

Cryptography depends on "factorization" or other algorithmic mathematical formulas. "It is easy to compute the product of two large numbers but extremely hard to factor it back into the primes."

"...the advent of the quantum information era -- and, in particular, the capability of quantum computers to rapidly perform monstrously challenging factorizations -- may portend the eventual demise of RSA and other cryptographic schemes. 'If quantum computers become a reality, the whole game changes,' says John Rarity, University of Bristol in England."

Government and companies needing high security tranmissions can now buy quantum-cryptographic possibilities from two companies...as yet undisclosed.

Whether or not we can be in two places at the same time, maybe our message can...coded and carried with integrity, safe from prying eyes.

Can you think better when you're typing?

Clive Thompson posited a very interesting question - Can you think better when you're typing? - yesterday in his blog, Collision Detection. Appropriate name for a blog about this topic.

Since we are glued to our computers, how many of us still write by hand?

I frame out concepts by mapping the thought process by hand with diagrams and pictures, and then fill it in with keys words and concepts. Then, I use this "picture" as my guiding structure for building the story. Clients love it - because they always have something to show people that explains the situation at a glance. Writing things out by hand helps me consolidate my thoughts. Once that is accomplished, the fingers fly across the keyboard.

Share your thoughts here...or...Cruise over to Collision Detection and add your thoughts to the others...they are worth a read.

The 5 Steps to Corporate Responsibility

Thought this was appropriate given the work that Martin Dewhurst is doing with CSR. Modo Fac means "Just do it".

This HBR article: The 5 Steps to Corporate Responsibility is about a company's journey through 2 dimensions of learning - organizational and societal. The author, Simon Zadek, calls it "civil learning". I like that. It appeals to me. I like what this man is saying - and I like that he's saying it in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, where lots of people will read it and share it. "The trick is for companies to be able to predict and credibly respond to society's changing awareness of particular issues."

We could make a meme out of that - "civil learning". Just keep saying that- "civil learning" - and pass the concept around.

The article is worth a read because it frames the whole issue rather well.

The Lifecycle of Memes

Found this very informative paper - The Lifecycle of Memes - written by Henrik Bjarneskans, Bjarne Grønnevik and Anders Sandberg. They have analyzed three well-known memes to examine their lifecycle.

They say that a meme has to complete a cycle again and again - and that it will die if it is unable to complete the cycle.

But... this was the best part...

"Before our paper ends, we will inform you of our until now secret sub-goal with this paper. It is our intention that by now you, by reading this text, has been infected with one of the strongest memes on the planet: The Meta-Meme, e.g. the meme about the theory of memes. It is our sincere hope that you will tell your friends about this (yes, transmission and further infection) or maybe even let them read this paper. In either case, unless you carry a very strong vaccime (se appendix), we have made you a host. And you didn't even flinch. You should be lucky we are not after your money..."

So, I decided to help them perpetuate it.

Email Dialogue between Malcolm Gladwell & James Surowiecki

This week at Slate there's an on-going email exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki that has captured my attention. Both clever writers on topical issues today - not to mention authors of some great books - they are addressing subjects like What Do We Mean When We Talk About Intuition? and Challenging the Standard Model of Decision-Making in emails to each other. Intersting dialogue they've got going. Have a read.

James Surowiecki wrote "The Wisdom of Crowds", a book I highly recommend you read, if you haven't already. Malcolm Gladwell just came out with "Blink after "Tipping Point" caught the attention of everyone.

James Surowiecki used to write a column at Slate and now writes the 'Financial Page' column for The New Yorker. Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker as well.

Sounds of an Alien World

This is just way too cool for words.

Listen to the sounds of alien winds picked up by Huygens' microphones in its descent through Titan's atmosphere. You can also hear radar echoes from Titan's surface.

ESA's website has so many interesting photos, articles, sounds. It's fascinating to follow Huygens' trip as it explored Saturn and Titan.

The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism

Ran across this paper - The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism - as I began to prepare for teaching my next Master class Working with the dynamic network structure of Brands, Identity & Concepts using Applied Connective Dynamics (ACD).

Though it was written in the spring of 2003, it has more relevance now than then. Webspace is rich in choice for social networking platforms - LinkedIn, Ecademy, OpenBC, and many, many more - and collaborative spaces like wikis. Blogs and aggregators have democratized publishing. The tools we have at hand for managing our expeditions in webland multiply weekly - ping sites for getting our blogs and sites recognized and listed in search engines, del.icio.us for tracking bookmarks and following what others are reading, Flickr for cataloguing and posting photos, flash based polling tools for keeping a live pulse on what people are thinking and doing, and so many others.

As I finish writing the reader for my students, I question what is relevant and what will remain relevant. I want them to build a brand out of their human content using a wiki for working simultaneously online and a blog for expressing and sharing their experiences in doing this.

What do they really need to know without overwhelming them?

First ever earthquake movie created

Check this out from New Scientist Breaking News - First ever earthquake movie created
A pioneering technique using data from GPS receivers has been used to make the first movie of an earthquake. The animation shows the Earth's surface deforming during a magnitude 8.3 quake in September 2003 off the coast of Hokkaido in Japan.



Will we soon see how the Asian earthquake appeared?

How the Earthquake affected Earth

How the Earthquake affected Earth The Dec. 26th Indonesian megathrust earthquake quickened Earth's rotation and changed our planet's shape.

"January 10, 2005: NASA scientists studying the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, have calculated that it slightly changed our planet's shape, shaved almost 3 microseconds from the length of the day, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters."

I would like to understand what impact this has on our life and what this means for the future. Anyone know?

Random WebCams from around the World

Flemming Funch from Ming the Mechanic has assembled a collection of WebCams from more places than you can imagine. Just click on one of the images and it activates it.