Chris Heuer's Insytes

Rober Scoble jumped into the latest dustup between Dave Winer and Roger Cadenhead that has the blogospehere abuzz. I posted some of the below post as a comment to his piece entitled “The new A list” but wanted to repost it here since it is so important to me.

What can we do about trying to keep people focused on discussing the issues rather than letting the conversation deteriorate into a childish name calling battle? We can lead by example. To a lesser degree, this issue came up with Tara’s response to a post in which she was referenced by another blogger with derogatory remarks. I almost hate linking to it, but the issue of rising above the name calling and moving to respect and dialogue is coming out a lot lately.

We need to set examples for how to deal with this so that the community standards shift from that of name calling and demeaning each other back to reasonable discourse focused on the issues (when they are important at least). I don’t know if it will ever happen fully, because, as I have said before, “there are always going to be assholes out there somewhere shitting on other people – online and off”. It is really unfortunate that this is the way some people get their feelings of self importance – by putting other people down instead of lifting them up. it is that never ending cycle of abuse that was the key driver in many individual’s socialization while growing up in ‘broken’ households. The good news, is that people can rise above that – they just need a little help in finding their way sometimes.

As Scoble and Mike Arrington said, I don’t know about the facts of the matter here, but this is exactly the sort of issue which is a perfect case study on decorum in the blogosphere and the nature of public disputes. Because the blog/comment system enables it so easily, we are able to see the long tail of low value commentary much more easily – I dont necessarily think this is an attack mob, though I could see how it would FEEL like one. I just think that all the people who have felt wronged by Dave in some way are expressing their emotions and frustrations thinking this is the opportunity they have been waiting for. Cadenhead even admits to being an ardent supporter of Dave previously, most likely behaving in a similar manner on Dave’s behalf instead of against him, but I don’t know those facts – just pointing out the possibility that this is subjective and shifting.

Of course, that just muddies the waters of the point I am trying to convey.

The bottom line is that people like Scoble and Arrington have the power to influence a lot of others to refocus the dialogue on the issues rather than resort to name calling. But its hard, so most people will take the easy way out. Instead of laying out an argument as to why somebody said or did something they believe to be wrong, or behaved in a way that is pereceived to be inappropriate, they just call the other party names which is really just like putting some Crisco on that slippery slope…

I have been trying to make this point for the last several years, but am often dismissed by those who believe in the free form chaos of the Web – by those who say “F___ off – its our Web and we will say what we want”. By the people who think it is ok to call Bullshit, or call someone an asshole rather than laying out why they think differently than them. It is a tough but delicate line to manage here, because to a degree they are right – free speech means people can and should be able to say what they want – but when the speech is of a derogatory nature that it prevents the dialogue from moving forward and puts everyone 2 steps back, I think there are reasons for some of us to step into the ad-hoc mediator role and refocus those around us away from the name calling and back to the truth telling.

We should all learn to be more respectful of each other and to focus our energy on tearing down ideas we believe are incorrect, not tearing down the people who believe differently then we do. Robert, I hope you are able to move this idea forward better than I have been able to…

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc mediator, ad-hoc+collaboration, blogosphere, citizenjournalism, thetruthtellers

So I read many of the posts on this after I saw Mike Arrington’s take over on Tech Crunch and at first I could not really figure out what to make of it, but now I know. Putting aside the business model of monetizing their internal expertise of creating highly reliable server ecosystems, I now see the real practicality of being able to have a trusted, reliable server backend to hold all my Web services data – particularly given the long tail of single developer web services that may never make much of themselves, but I digress.

My first thought was this could be a great backup system for my files. I already have 2 mostly dead backup hard drive I need to recover data from, so we need to do something about this fast. But as I went through my daily ritual of browsing and filing away a few of my email newsletters for future search capabilities, I saw exactly what I need from S3.

Someone should create a Web service that accepts an email from a list or digest and archives it within S3 for future searching. I know this is a lot like Usenet, but perhaps it is UseNet 18.0? The storage and bandwidth would need to be paid for somehow, and I have some ideas on this if anyone is interesting in pursuing it. Or perhaps someone can use the API’s from the Internet Archive to host such content databases there instead. Regardless, this is something I would really like to see happen soon so I can unsubscribe from all these email newsletters I am personally archiving in Entourage and know I can still get access to the collective wisdom they contain at some later point in time.

Of course this also implies that we need an improved search interface to go with it – but that is what Insytes is for…

Technorati Tags: freeideas, freeideas=chrisheuer, Amazon, Web2.1

So odd that I am sitting here in the Apple store, surrounded by all this technology, in what is turning out to be a great public knowledge event with Sara Beckman from UCB’s Haas Business School. She focuses on design and innovation management which is a very interesting topic for me. UsingBlue Ocean Strategy as a reference as well as some research from NPD, there is a somewhat obvious correlation between the level of innovation and the spending on design. But that discounts the primary driving cause of the problem in favor of supporting a preferential argument – what is really at the core of that issue is an avoidance of risk and a desire for security. In essence, the belief of key leaders that the market is contracting rather than expanding and/or that the market is generally mature rather than young. ie, that there will never be another Mulit-Billion Dollar software company again…

While the content is sharp and mostly insightful, I am most transfixed with the idea of this overflow crowd (I am sitting against the wall with about 20 other people) and the fact that this sort of amazing opportunity is happening over and over again and not being captured, even though we have the technology available to us. What is missing is an organizational structure of freelance resources – or perhaps as I reference them more often, an army of digital anthropoligists. I was joking with Eddie the other day that we should launch a sister ‘station’ to GETV and call it Geek Education TV – but perhaps that is something we should really do instead of joke about. All the creatives out there could band together to make a true freelance network of vloggers/podcasters who go out into the world to record and produce content that can then be stored, shared, tagged and made more easily discoverable.

I suppose this is what Current TV was trying to do but really has failed miserably at. That is simply because they cared more about the ‘system’ they were creating than the people creating value within it – in short, they see the evolution of the Web and media, but they just don’t ‘get it’.

Regardless, maybe BrainJams could partner with Creative Commons and OurMedia to establish a co-operative of content contributors. It certainly is directly needed by the unconference community, and seemingly by the world in general. Dan Farber was reporting on this earlier today from Esther’s Conference in regards to the long way search has to go – recruiting, motivating, supporting and organizing an army of digital anthropologists would go a long way to solving the problem they speak of…

PC Forum: Searching the dark matter and users by ZDNet‘s Dan Farber — Esther started off the PC Forum panel with search stars, by saying the search is getting boring and has peaked to get some reaction. They all properly disagreed and the discussion focused on the amount of information that isn’t indexed or searchable. Rich Barton, CEO of Zillow (the hot real estate search service) and former CEO of […]

Dan reported that Jeff Weiner from Yahoo estimated that .0058 percent of world’s knowledge is actually indexed. This is exactly what I have been talking about for the last 4+ years with regards to The Noble Pursuit, that we can and we should take steps to start collecting and collectively cataloging what they reference as “the dark matter” that is not digitally and publicly accessible to search. But rather than seeing it as a technology problem vis-a-vis ‘Search’, I see it as a human matter. It was very good to see that most of the panelists were looking in the same direction. Of course, Yahoo! is really the leader in this regards now with their acquisition of delicious.

This idea is different from the Bayosphere and NowPublic though, but really does leverage Terry Heaton’s ideas about Video Journalists. They are seeking reporters to cover ‘news’ – we are talking about bringing together A/V Creatives who want to capture long format open knowledge exchanges such as the ones we do with BrainJams and the one I just participated in at the Apple Store and simply upload a digital video/audio file to the Archive for everyone to remix – and of course for them to remix/produce themselves.

If anyone else out there is interested in this, please let me know as I have many deeper thoughts and strategies for how this can be accomplsihed. It would be a great use of our time to get this going.

APPROX 12 Hours Later: Just as I went to make final edits to this post, I see this post from SiliconBeat that Podtech raised $5.5 Million to “become the NPR of podcasting”. Wonder how much this fits in with my idea of an army of digital anthropologists discussed above? You can read the official PodTech Press Release and decide for yourself. To me it seems that this is a network media play pure and simple just as with PodShow and Odeo, but perhaps more focused on Technology. We will have to wait and see what real “Blue Ocean Strategy” and innovations are really happening here.

One of the many things that came from the UCB BrainJams event was this great idea for setting up a P2P knowledge sharing event within a networking space. We are actually going to do this within the context of the next BrainJams event in New Orleans on Thursday May 4 as well. When combined with an initial session of one-one-one speed networking like we did @ SRI in December, I think this is the powerful one-two punch that will help define what BrainJams are and why they are different from traditional conferences. The other important, unpublished, but thoroughly discussed thought I will write about later, is focused on group to group collaboration (G2G). I continue to try to figure out how to maximize the impact of G2G, though efforts to foster it are proceeding at a snail’s pace.

Fortunately I think we are going to be doing another variation on this idea with One Web Day in the guide of what is currently just called “Web Teach-In”. I realize others have done this before (like Socrates perhaps?) but it really is an incredible way for us all to reconnect with each other as fellow humans and work together towards bettering our society.

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I would like to extend the “show, do, teach” model through BrainJams. I really envision an event session where someone could show another person how to do something, that person could then do it themselves and then that person would teach someone else and this could go around and around like the one on one networking at previous BrainJams. Sort of a “Show and Teach Jam” where peer to peer learning is the key connector between people. This can be done in long format sessions with groups of people (ie, an internal team learning to use Drupal or Movable Type) or as ‘break through’ sessions that are focused on a given tool or type of tool.

What we will look at below can be done in an hour format with a variety of people, though the full ‘hand off’ between teacher and learner is not completed. Instead, an individual would be in charge of a station with a focused goal and have 3-4 minutes to show how to do something (like setup a Blogger account) and the learners have a few minutes more to do it themselves. Stations can be set up around the space with the Peer Leaders bringing their own laptops from which to demonstrate and teach.

Peer Leaders are requested to sign up to lead a lesson a specific set of topics for each event. We can choose to focus on a certain type of tool or we can cover multiple tools or we can even lead it up to the Peer Leaders to choose for themselves. For the first one, I recommend taking an introductory approach with the end goal being that those who don’t know much about how to work with the new technologies can leave feeling they know what to do.

The format will allow for four 10 minute sessions across an hour, with 5 minutes in between to move on to the next session, or ask important follow-up questions. These will be held in small groups of 1-5 people around a laptop screen (sitting on a podium, bar top, bar table or pedestal). Five people is really the maximum, 2-3 would be ideal. The Peer Leader will speak to the same topic for each of the four sessions so that participants can move around the room to the one’s that are most interesting. Sign up sheets will be placed at each station at the beginning of the event so participants can sign up for the sessions they want.

Each session will focus on a demonstration of how to accomplish a particular task and should include one of the Peer Learners actually doing what the Peer Leader is demonstrating. For instance, if the Peer Leader is showing how to set up a blog on LiveJournal or Blogger, one of the Peer Learners should then set up a blog for themselves.

Possible topical lessons could include:

– How to set up your blog
– How to include tags in your blog
– Social Bookmarking in Action
– Tags as conversation
– Blogrolls / OPML
– Online Calendars
– Using a Feed Reader for RSS
– Other suggestions from potential Peer Leaders

In short, these sessions will be designed to teach participants enough of how to do something to get them past initial fears or trepidations so that they can get out and really try to do it on their own. The end goal is that the Peer Learners will eventually become Peer Leaders who go off and teach other people how to do the things that they learned. Other formats can be modified from these principles to achieve deeper learning, but the core idea is to make it personal, one to one or one to few really makes this work. It may take a little longer, but the human connection makes it invaluable and in the end is exactly what the web is all about – people helping people.

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This is another of the FreeIdeas I promised to write about back in December (which need to be tagged properly still)> Expect more to be coming over the next couple of weeks in light of nearing the end of a reflective cycle and being able to clearly see some cool solutions to many of the things I have been thinking about. I am really excited to have the chance to work this out with the One Web Day folks and look forward to doing some other similar events with other groups in the near future.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:freeideas, brainjams:neworleans, brainjams:planning, knowledgeeconomy, net2, openspace, freeideas=chrisheuer, socialconference, The+Open+Web, unconference, Web2.1

So it looks like the judge in the DOJ vs Google case is siding with the Bush Administration and against privacy. CNN has a nice writeup on what just went down and MSNBC has similar coverage. While Google is apparently claiming victory because they did not have to give up all of the information that the DOJ requested, this is definitely not the sort of precedent we would like to see established. When I worked at the US Mint, one of my favorite people there had a saying I find particularly appropriate here.

Once the camel’s nose is in the tent… the camel is in the tent.

The specifics of the case are related to a request for data from Google to support the government’s position in a case dealing with pornography and filtering software’s ability to block it from children. They originally requested a month’s worth of search data, but the ruling today seemingly limits the scope to a much smaller cross-section of random samples with no personally identifiable data. This ruling just sets the stage for making it easier for them to dig deeper next time.

Still, I am perhaps more worried about Google’s fickleness than I am the DOJ’s desire to get insights into searching behaviour as it relates to pornography. With their recent capitulation to the Chinese on censoring its search results so that it can cozy up to the powers that be, the grandstanding on this important privacy issue does not bring it back in the ‘do no evil camp’ they claim to host.

In fact, Danny Sullivan laid out a great piece yesterday entitled “25 Things I I Hate About Google“. It was Google’s acquisition of Writely that took Danny over the top prompting him to exclaim [give me a break from] “Google going in yet another direction when there is so much stuff they haven’t finished, gotten right or need to fix.” He is absolutely right – they have gotten that Monopoly power all hoarded up and are no longer acting like an organization that cares deeply about surprising and delighting its users as it did in the early days. I heard Cal speaking a few weeks back with some friends and he said that Flickr once had something like 40+ releases of the site code in one day – I wonder how many Gmail or Gtalk have gone through since launching and how often they have done so?

While I am very glad that Google has stepped up to fight the DOJ on this, and I believe that many of the executives managing the China deal also fought a hard lost losing battle against censorship, I have very mixed feelings on this issue. While the reality is that they used the system as best as they could in the DOJ case by investing in the legal battle and they would have been locked out of China had they not capitulated, there comes a time where the stand we make for what is right is more important than the principle of compromise. The hard part is deciding which issues are important enough to fight to the end for without compromising too much of your principles.

We dealt with this briefly on a less important issue at the One Web Day planning dinner last week in SF when discussing the Net Neutrality issue and the involvement of the Telecoms. My initial reaction was that the celebration of the Web Susan Crawford is organizing should not involve those like AT&T Charirman Ed Whitacre who are working to destroy the very thing we are celebrating by restricting access via tarriffs. That we should take a stand on this issue by not inviting them to the party. Susan however, was adamant that the tent is big enough for everyone – while I would like to agree and do so in principle, I do wonder if this might be a place where we can take a stand and get everyone else to take a stand too.

Bottom line – polite golf clap round of applause for Google taking the stand on this issue, but let’s all hope they can apply the ‘do no evil’ policy more consistently in the future.

Technorati Tags: Google, onewebday, The Open Web, The+Open+Web

Just saw this link courtesy of Dave Taylor

Update. Turns out this video was actually developed by Microsoft. Guess it’s funny because it is true! IpodObserver reports the details and links to the file on Google Video.

Technorati Tags: graphicdesign, ipod, microsoft

Last THUR, Derek Scrugs and Dave Taylor held a Front Range BrainJam in Colorado. Looks like we missed this event, but I found a link from it in my web site referrer logs which I try to look through once per week at least to see who is linking to us or writing about what we are doing with BrainJams.

I never heard from the organizers, but really good to see these sorts of events continuing to take shape as camps, devhouses and jams continue to grow in spirit and in reach.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams:frontrange, brainjams:associated, unconference

My friend Greg Narain has been working on a new service called Xposted (cross posted) that will play nicely with his Social Conference software called SyncPeople. I am now registered on BlogBurst as well as Xposted so it will be interesting to see how blog syndication will work out – I am particularly interested in some of the features that Greg will be adding in the near future we discussed the other day that will clearly push his service into the lead. One thing is for sure, Greg really ‘gets it’ in a big way and I hope all of our talk about working together in some way on SyncPeople comes to fruition.

There are not many company ideas that I hear about that I believe will be anything more substantial than a dotcom flameout – I am fortunate to be contributing in some small way to several companies that have real growth potential and staying power. SyncPeople, BuzzLogic, and D-BAM are just the tip of the new new economy from where I sit – and chances are you have never heard of them before, but that will be changing soon enough…

BTW – Greg will be presenting at DC 2.0 next Wednesday so check it out if you are in the DC area and join another emerging, cool community out in DC.

Technorati Tags: xposted, syncpeople, buzzlogic, d-bam, dc2.0

Brainjams in Berkeley was quite an exercise with ‘free radicals’! Don’t worry though, no one was the worse for wear afterwards, and the 20+ folks who joined us at Jupiter Pizza afterwards did quite well shutting their Brains Off…

As with most events we have held so far, we have tried to experiment a bit with different formats, to learn what works and what does not. Despite learning quite a bit from what did not work out as I had hoped, participants generally felt the event was a success and the value of the conversations we all had was fairly high. There was some particularly useful insytes shared on the topic of collaboration and I was fortunate to get some great advice on the future of BrainJams from David Allen, Cathryn Hrudicka, Dave Burleigh, Kristie Wells, Dan Genova, Shannon Clark, Bill Allison and Rachel Murray.

It was this discussion that lead to the idea that we should focus BrainJams on serving the needs of people who belong to multiple groups or cliques – the boundary spanners, or primary hubs of the attention economy. Dave Burleigh referenced this as becoming the SIG of SIG’s, but I really think it is more about developing the meta-layer for detailing the social fabric of group to group collaboration. Peer to peer collaboration may be the big thing today, but group to group (G2G) collaboration and networking is an area that deserves more understanding. In striving for diversity in an open community such as BrainJams, it just makes sense that we want people who are not self-identifying as only a ‘geek’ or only a ‘marketing guy’ or only an ‘artist’ – from my personal experience with several large organizations, it was these people who got the real work done inside the organization, so it follows that these are the people who can get the real work done ACROSS organizations.

At the end of the day, I was fortunate to chat with Angela Hunter and Wayne Caplinger. Angela drew a parallel between what Lee Felsenstein and the Homebrew Computer Club did for computers and what BrainJams is trying to do for ad-hoc collaboration using the best insights available. She referenced the idea of having BrainJams serve as a “Grassroots ThinkTank” which I find insightful. This directly parallels the power/access issues that was at the root of the need for Homebrew in that the people on the inside often disregarded the people on the outside as amateurs with little to contribute. But then, as now, we know this to be far from truth. The collective wisdom is much greater than that of those in the ivory towers – you and I have much to contribute, though the systems and power laws are not designed to easily enable such contributions. That is why we must take this matter into our own hands and figure out the systems and tools we really need in order to raise awareness of the most valuable insytes and knowledge, from the widest swath of experience possible.

With the enthusiasm for collaboration and sharing knowledge clearly expressed by other participants, and a desire to bring about positive social change within all areas of our lives, it would seem that “The Noble Pursuit” is more relevant than ever. Perhaps this is really what it is all about – not just people getting together for an unconference of XYZ, but really mapping out the people, tools, processes, groups and other elements in a way that truly makes it easy for people who want to create positive change within their corporations and across society to find out what they need to know to do what they have to do to.

Lots to think about for sure…

But rather than running down this road right now, I wanted to share some other posts from the BrainJams Berkeley that are worth a quick perusal.

• Ted Tagami posted some great video, which also contains some insights into some of my confusion with Paul Sas…
• …who wrote a terrific blog post analyzing the first part of the day. Paul correctly wanted to move past the ‘alpha-mouths’ to dig deeper into what people wanted to learn. He did a great job, though I was really confused by my perception of his purpose. A good lesson in establishing clarity of intentions when within a group setting. In it, he also takes issue with Lee’s opening monologue, which was really my fault on so many levels…
• Kristie Wells wrote a nice post which highlighted the all important principle of open space “Whoever comes are the right people”.
• Hong Qu wrote an incredibly valuable post from the conversation they had in the afternoon on very important aspects of building community. He also followed that up with a useful reference post on the different Silicon Valley Knowledge Exchanges.
• Arthur Law was seemingly doing some live blogging, capturing some of his thoughts on the morning sessions, his first BreakThrough group conversation, some summary notes on each of the group conversations and his thoughts on the afternoon group conversation he joined.
• I also wrote some notes in the middle of the day, shortly after we sort of lost control of the session from not having enough structure

All in all it was a very good day, but I must admit being surprised that more people who attended did not write up something to share. This is in stark contrast to what Grace Davis pulled off at WoolfCamp where participants are still contributing to a very vibrant conversation. Perhaps that is the difference between a community of people and an event of attendees. I don’t know for sure, but I hope we figure it out…

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, thenoblepursuit, Web2.1

Been noticing a recurring problem that I have been struggling against – it may be tied tied to my mood and varying levels of certainty/uncertainty, but that could just be ancillary or more effect instead of cause. I have always had this problem with writing (waiting for the right mood to strike), so I suppose that blogging is just making me deal with it more often and more directly. The past 10 days since BrainJams Berkeley have seen only a handful of blog posts that I published, along with a dozen others that are still sitting here in various embryonic states (a few simple notes, a nearly complete post, a hand full of open tabs awaiting commentary, a stream of consciousness over 7 pages of a word doc that needs to be ripped apart and rebuilt and even a bunch of thoughts that should be made into blog posts but I have not even written anything on because I am so behind with the others)

Sometimes I am so in the flow of an idea that I just need to get it out right away, so I sit down, put fingers to keyboard, and an hour or so later some really long blog post with deep insights has been published. Other times, I go back and forth on a wide array of thoughts that are related in some complex manner and never reach any degree of what could be called understandable by regular humans, so the posts just sit there. It is hugely frustrating for me and at various points in my past has overwhelmed me so much that I pretty much shut down. Thankfully, I have not reached that point and probably won’t again, but it certainly ‘feels’ like one of those times again so I am here being reflective, trying to work this out intellectually and emotionally.

The reality is that to blog or not to blog is really a function of my available time, and lately there has not bee all that much time left after the top priorities get handled. Or at least, I am still trying to keep my life in balance as best as I can and trying to working less than 80 hours hours each week eventhough there is always something more that needs my attention. Perhaps I need to shift my balance a bit, but I hope not. I generally like the way things have been going lately personally and professionally and hope it continues in the same direction. Of course, there is the little matter of making some big decisions about the future of BrainJams as well as my professional consulting life, but I don’t feel put off by those decisions, just still uncertain as to which course of action I should take, and which of the great possibilities deserve my complete focus.

Then of course there is the matter of the blog feeling as if it is the equivalent of ‘one hand clapping’. As a firmly entrenched member of the M-List Blogger Core, I don’t write to get juiced by how popular the blog is, though I do monitor the traffic to see who if anyone might be linking to me. I write the blog hoping that what I have to say is considered as part of the broader conversation – or more specifically, that some of my ideas seeking feedback directly, do get that feedback from whoever might be reading. So when I post on the future of BrainJams, I hope that someone other than my fiance might have something meaningful to contribute. Then again, I might be too concerned with what other people think at this point and should perhaps just invest more time and energy as the leader of an organization rather than thinking like a participant of a community. Hmmmmmmm

So what to do with the blog posts that are in process? Well, I guess I can always edit them later, so I might as well start kicking them out this afternoon/evening and see where they take us…