Saturday, January 15, 2005

Larry's Solar Toilets


IMGP4139
Originally uploaded by Choconancy1.
A while back I blogged about Larry's Solar Toilets. I forgot I had uploaded one of the pictures to flickr. This is a shot of the newest model which includes a little sink for handwashing. Larry runs the pump for the water from a wind generator. If anyone is interested, I can upload more pictures of the work that Sandy and Larry are doing with sustainable agriculture and Technorati Tags: , , ,

 

Technorati Tag Testing Times Two

Now trying Matt's bookmarklet to tag Technorati's tag page on the word tags. My, this can be denser than flourless chocolate cake.

Technorati Tags: ,

Looks like it works like a peach. Or is that like a chocolate covered peach? (Still working on getting chocolate into every post! ;-) Oh, that means I need to add a tag...

 

Technorati Adds Tags

The buzz is flowing across blogs like molten chocolate. Technorati has added the ability to add tags. I use blogger, which does not have categories (boo), so I have to put the tags in manually. So I'm experimenting with this post. I'm giving it a tag of "tags" (quite original, eh?).

Matt has noted that this manual tagging is tedious and has written a little bookmarklet to help. I'll try that next.

Technorati tags:

 

An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot

Anjo has thrown down a challenge I can't resist to see if chocolate shows up as some sort of signature word in my blog. With a little kismet in the wind, John Smith sent me the link to this lovely research articlePlokta Issue 23 - An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot. Too good to miss:

Simon Bradshaw, Amanda Baker, Bridget Bradshaw, John Bray, Gordon Brignal, David Clements & Del Cotter

THE CHOCOLATE teapot remains popular as a general comparative standard for the failure of an object to perform in accordance with its intended function, rivalled only by its close relative (in terms of composition, if not morphology), the chocolate fireguard. However, whilst numerous items are colloquially labelled as being ‘as useful as a chocolate teapot', there does not appear to be any objective standard for the usefulness, or indeed uselessness, of a chocolate teapot itself. In the absence of any British, European or ANSI Standard, Def Stan or MIL-STD for this important but poorly-specified reference item, it was decided to conduct an independent assessment of exactly how much use one of them was. As well as filling an significant gap in the standards literature, it was felt that this study would add to the body of work published in the Annals of Improbable Research on the scientific evaluation of common metaphors (Sandford, 1995; Paskevich and Shea, 1995; Dubik and Wood, 1995; collected in Abrahams, 1998).
So what does this have to do with online interaction? I could make something up. Well, it could also be a confessional about my research methods. I would have eaten the chocolate teapot and ruined the research. But my keen intuition would have reached the same conclusion and my chocolate-requiring-cells would be much happier.


 

Jon Husband's 10 Principles for Our Interconnected Workplace

As of today, Jon is up to #4 of his Ten Principles For Our Interconnected Workplace. He started on January 12th with this intro:

About a year and a half ago I wrote what I intended to be a little booklet that set out one principle per page, just a few bullet points ... ten principles in all ... based on my past experience consulting to organizations about work, workers and management/leadership development.

Principle # 1 - Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has.

Principle #2 - The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization ... more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.

Principle # 3 - People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long

Principle # 4
- Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control.

I'm nodding a lot here in agreement. #4 is one of the better expressions of power shifts that I've read because it acknowledges the strengths that were borne in the command-and-control era -- the positive stuff like leadership -- but frames them in the network age in terms of a champion. Leadership has a new manifestation in the interconnected age. It is more artful than ever.

I do have some nits to pick, mainly because of the context of some of my work outside of Western cultures, particularly North American cultures. The freedom of access to information and the freedom to have a voice is still huge issue in many parts of the world. This is not just about internet connection, but the control of this ability. I feel this is a critical issue facing the world and one that gets very little visibility on my continent. It worries me. What are the implications?

I'm looking forward to the next six. Keep it coming, Jon!

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Thursday, January 13, 2005

Still Not Sure What it Means... but WHAT, no chocolate?

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon Anjo's research. Today, I floated back to his blog and found this interesting post. First, we are clearly having some fun with the idea of not knowing what it means. But I loved something Anjo wrote about his experiment into tracking key words appearing in certain bloggers blogs.

In our research, I'm drawn between those who seek meaning and those who see meaning. Those who seek meaning revert to logic, mathematics, or whatever is computable and formal. Those who see meaning revert to words and images, or whatever that is open to interpretation.
Oh, I think I forgot to note what words showed up in my blogging: blend, coach, distribute community, grey, on line community, on line facilitation, on line group, on line interaction, peek, principles, sector, telephone, thread, web based.

What, no chocolate???? I must be slipping.

 

Connecting with Bloggers in Vancouver

I'm thrilled to see that Seb will be coming to Northern Voice. He writes: :

"...I will be at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, sitting alongside my colleague Stephen Downes and Laura Trippi on a panel on weblogs in academia moderated by Cyprien Lomas.

Looks like lots of interesting people will be at Northern Voice! I'm especially thrilled with the prospect of meeting Stowe Boyd, Brian Lamb, the Bryght guys, Suw Charman, Nancy White, and the one and only Lion Kimbro, who's just told me he was coming all the way from Seattle.

Plus, Roland Tanglao is organizing a pre-conference BlogWalk, which I also intend to take part in. List yourself if you want to come! (Look for the Edit this Page link on the page.)

And finally, Suw is thinking about putting together a pre-pre conference open space session, which sounds like a great idea. Interested? Leave a comment here."
This is going to be FUN!

 

"Blink" and "The Wisdom of Crowds" Book Club

Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki are doing a joint online book club of their two books, Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds . They are interested in how to improve the decision making environment. First, there is lots of interesting reading in their posts. Second, it is a very human voiced interchange.

Surowieki hooked me in his first entry with

"You and I are friends, you blurbed my book, and I think Blink is a terrific book. Now let's argue about it."
Gladwell riffs off of him with his opener
"You are quite right to find this format a little strange. Authors don't usually get to discuss their own books, since that (quite rightly) raises the possibility that the discussion will be less than objective. The difference between a book discussion involving outsiders and a book discussion involving the writers themselves is a bit like the difference between Olympic wrestling and pro wrestling. (Then again, pro wrestling is an awful lot more entertaining than Olympic wrestling, so clearly there is something to be said for contests where the outcome is preordained.)"

Yeah, they appear to have carefully crafted their posts (wouldn't you if you were writing on Slate?), but there is this delicious thread of dialog. Very cool.

[via Stephen Downes]

 

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Doors of Perception - An Enticing Sounding Event

Platforms for social innovation is the theme for the Doors of Perception 8 event in India in March.

What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in social innovation? And how do we design them? Doors of Perception 8 is about these two questions.

Doors is a worldwide design and innovation network whose aim is to learn how to design services, some of them enabled by information technology, that meet basic needs in new ways. Every two years or so, the network meets to share the results of its work with citizens, education, industry and professionals.

Our latest global meeting, Doors of Perception 8 (Doors 8) is a five day encounter in New Delhi, India. Our week together features a range of activities :

- plenary think-piece presentations (Monday and Tuesday);
- Project Clinics and workshops (Wednesday and Friday);
- one-to-one conversations (every day);
- encounters and exchanges in the city and around."
Ah, sounds fascinating, with some overtones of a Muckabout minus the online pre/post. For more see:

http://www.doorseast.com/
http://flow.doorsofperception.com/

 

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Patti Anklam on Eclipes and Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

I've been following Patti Anklam's work for a while -- always lots of interesting ideas and forsight. Here is a bit more to chew on about the Eclipse Trust Framework -- and I'm not sure I understand it, but my instincts say "pay attention.

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness.

Eclipse is an open source framework and toolkit for software applicatoin developers. Being a part of the Eclipse framework means that the concepts of social physics, specifically the abilty to collect user context information and interactions with 'the right set' of privacy controls may become standard. One vision for what this means is that I can control how much software applications that I use collect information about the communities I participate in, the identities that I have in those communities, and who can access the information.

As a practitioner and teacher of social network analysis, I am constantly looking for responses to the question of individual privacy. This trust framework, when fully implemented, will provide the technology response. The human, personal, ethical response will always be just that: human, personal and individual.
The last part I get, right away. What interests me is the intersection between the technological and the human, particularly our processes.

 

Monday, January 10, 2005

The Merc on Online Communities

The San Jose MercuryNews.com had an interesting article on the 9th: Two's company, three's a `community', by Mark Leibovich

Coming off the attention to the ``rat-terrier community,'' the ``heavy-metal community,'' and their roles in recent news events, Leibovich notes there are certainly pressure points. But he is more interested in how the press and the public perceives and portrays these things we call "communities" and "online communities."

`Community' evokes a sense of warm fuzziness on a group of people who have only the most superficial bonds,'' said Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who has written extensively about the ``community of communities'' around the world.

Etzioni said the term ``community'' has not been overused as much as it has been abused. He said an authentic community must include both genuine bonds of affection and shared moral values.

``That should be the test of a community,'' Etzioni said, ``not whether someone simply calls them a community.''

We celebrate this man as a pillar of the community-restraint community.

 

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Anjo Anjewierden: Making a Difference

I'm still getting my head around Anjo's experiment to find common interests among blogs. I found it because it came up on a Technorati search for my blog. Anjo Anjewierden: Making a Difference:

While searching for a reasonable approach to create Visual Settlements based on language rather than linkage, I considered the following idea. In Information Retrieval the idea of inverse document frequency (TF/IDF algorithm) is often used to find 'unique documents'. In a (virtual) community there is a shared interest, but there will also be 'personal' differences, and to identify the uniqueness of a single blog within the community the idea of inverse document frequency might come in handy.

Partial motivation came from a paper on identifying virtual communities using linking structures.
Looking at the terms from folks like danah boyd, Lilia Effimova and others is fascinating. Not sure what it means, though. Find this interesting? Look at Anjo's earlier post on Visual Settlements.

 

Lee Bryant Looks at Blogs into the Future

More great stuff from Lee B.: Blogs are not the only fruit

What is really going on is a major shift in the way that we are able to communicate, collaborate and share things with each other using online technologies. The key to this is not the technology itself - there is remarkably little that we can do now that wasn't possible 5 years ago - but rather the critical mass of connectivity between people that we are finally reaching, as the Pew survey makes clear. The real story is about about ease of use, availability, culture change and most importantly network effects, as Jon Udell rightly emphasises. As Simon Waldeman notes, the only slight negative in the Pew stats is the relatively low level of RSS adoption among non-expert users. This is something we should all work to address, as RSS/Atom and other syndication schema are the glue that binds this growing ecosystem of connected conversations.
This is just a sip. Go drink it up.