Off to Malaga with bicycle and old friend Paul Price. We are (apparently) cycling from there, via one impregnable Moorish fort to another, to Cadiz. Hills - what hills? Anyway, I won’t be posting for a week.

Discovered the interesting Phil Jones via a comment he left here. His ThoughtStorms wiki makes for some provocative thinking. I especially like some of his stuff on individuality. One of the tentative ideas is that individuality is a modern concept, and as an example he suggests surnames. People used to be named by function after all.
read on »

June 09th 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on History names

Sebastian Fiedler has written a couple of interesting posts on learning and self-organization, the first of which is calledSeblogging: Is self-organization in learning always the problem of somebody else?.

It reminded me that the value of university - certainly as I saw it - was (at least) 50% social, but there’s a yin/yang catch.

The yin for me is breadth: while I enjoyed my course, and learnt a lot from it, being in a group of like-minded, almost certainly pretentious(!), but definitely curious peers who could knock the edges off your ideas (and prejudices) - and being able to do so regularly, face to face - was fantastic.
read on »

June 07th 2004 | Comments(1) | Thoughts, Life on education, Learning, social value

If blogs really are about conversations, then why not make them more like human conversations and add a face or two to the feeds?

All the aggregators I’ve tried to date are text based. They have (broadly) 3 panes - an “all your feeds” list, a “selected feed’s titles” lists, and a “selected title’s post or excerpt”. My “all my feeds” list is growing inexorably bigger and at some stage, it’s going to be long and unmanageable. In my experience, some people are better at remembering names and some people are better at remembering faces. (Personally I’m better at faces - names I’m normally fine on, but there will be hideous blanks now and then.) But aren’t the aggregators slightly skewed towards people who are better at names?

It’s just a thought, but I’d be really curious to see what sort of a difference adding some sort of small visual cue (e.g. passport photo, Technorati profile photo, group logo) to that list would make. So, instead of having a load of “Bill’s Blog about Everything” feeds whose value to me becomes harder to distinguish as time goes by, I might get a little picture of Bill and then the title of the feed/blog. Perhaps it might help sort through unwieldy subscription lists?

(And er, I realise I don’t have a picture of me on this blog, but [sigh] I will soon - just let me comb what hair I have left, lance this unsightly boil, and get my dentures back from next door’s Alsatian….)

June 07th 2004 | Comments(7) | Thoughts on branding, personalisation, Rhetoric, RSS social computing

1n 1997, Peter Drucker outlined seven personal experiences that had shaped him over the course of this life. One of these was when he was studying early modern history. He learnt that during the 16th and 17th centuries

“two European institutions had become dominant forces in Europe: the Jesuit Order in the Catholic South and the Calvinist Church in the Protestant North. Both were founded independently in 1536. Both adopted the same learning discipline.

Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance–making a key decision, for instance–he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later he traces back from the actual results to those anticipations. That very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally, it shows him what he has no gift for and cannot do well … “

[thanks to David Gurteen’s knowledge newsletter for this]

Was forwarded this book review by my mate Pete McCrum - and am now off to get it. The book is called “The Wisdom of Crowds: How the Many Are Smarter Than the Few” and it’s written by a New Yorker called James Surowiecki. Some of the choice snippets are:

“In 1906, English scientist Francis Galton visited a country livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest.

An ox was about to be slaughtered, and the villagers in attendance were invited to guess the animal’s weight after being slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go, and not surprisingly, no one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the average of those 800 guesses came close - very close indeed.

It was 1,197 pounds.”

It looks to be much more than a series of interesting anecdotes though …

the mathematics work so long as Surowiecki’s three key criteria - independence, diversity and decentralization - are satisfied. “If you ask a large enough group,” he says, “to make a prediction or estimate a probability,” the errors they make cancel each other out. “Subtract the error, and you’re left with the information.” In this fashion, the TV studio audience of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” guessed the right answer to questions 91 percent of the time, torching the “experts,” who guessed the right answer only 65 percent of the time

Have to admit, I was a little surprised that Pete was reading the Christian Science Monitor

Firstly, sorry. As you might have seen, I uploaded a lot of archive stuff on today’s date by mistake.
a) the upload is now over
b) it won’t happen again, and lastly
c) I’m sorry for cluttering up your aggregators with old news

[Update: Still blushing, now loading them to the right dates …]

June 02nd 2004 | Comments(2) | Asides on monkeymagic

Seem familiar anyone?

“Imagine that you enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

- Source 110-11, Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.

June 02nd 2004 | Comments(2) | Notes on conversation, KennethBurke, quote, Quotes, Rhetoric social computing

Stumbled on Ron Burt’s notes (PDF) (he of Structural Holes fame) and found this, which I liked:

“The Naskapi Indians of Labrador survive primarily by hunting. Each morning the adult males gather to ask: “Where should we hunt today?”. An unusual procedure is used to answer the question. The men take the shoulder bone of a caribou, hold it over a fire until the bone cracks, and then hunt in whichever direction the crack points. The procedure works. The Naskapi almost always find game, which is rare among hunting bands”

Now, to be fair, I don’t know whether or not Labrador is chock-a-block full of game. If it is, then this would explain the Naskapi’s unprecedented success (and take the rug out from underneath the quote!). I suspect not. Either way the point holds: in a hunt for ideas, structured, thought-through approaches don’t necessarily outperform wherever the wind blows (or bone cracks) faith.

June 02nd 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on Creativity, direction inspiration

Interesting comment here on Fast Company Now

Francois Michelin, founder of Michelin tire company, once made an interesting observation. Whenever he met Michelin retirees, he liked to ask them what they remembered most fondly about working at his company. Almost always the retiree talked of an idea he or she had proposed, and that the company had used. Francois Michelin came to realize that the reason why people remembered their ideas in this context was that these were how his employees felt they had left their mark on the company. Ideas were their chance to make a difference. Michelin was the first company in France to start an idea system, which was getting some 15 ideas per employee per year by 1933, a lot better than most companies do today.

I read this and thought wow. And then I thought,. “Eh? Really? Are we getting less imaginative?”

It’d be lovely to get some context on this - such as incentives, how many ideas were followed through, the system they had for sharing ideas etc.

June 01st 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on business, Creativity culture

Does anyone else get the feeling if you blink, you miss all the conversations going on?

I don’t have a huge number of inbound links Technorati-wise, but (m’hearties) some days they shrinks, and some days they grows. The constant I’m left with - or at least what I can bank on seeing if I Technorati my blog - is a list of people that have a static link to mine, such as on their blogrolls at the edge of their sites.

But if that’s the constant, how do I track those conversations appearing on the “world live web” on topics in which I’m interested? And how is what I’m getting different from doing a “link:” search on google?

I suppose it is more specific to blogs, but that is about as far as it goes in getting me closer to the “World Live Web”.

I like Technorati, and I like the concept behind it - I just wonder whether the window for what is “live” should be customizable. For me, and I suspect for others down here at the tail end of the distribution, my conversations happen over weeks, not days, and sometimes months, not weeks.

Ho hum.

[UPDATE: See the comments on Lilia’s post for some practical suggestions on tracking dead conversations]

June 01st 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on conversation, Technorati tracking