Chris Heuer's Insytes

As you may have already noticed on our registration form for the Berkeley event this Saturday February 25, we have added in 2 new questions – 1) provide three words to describe yourself and 2) what do you want to learn today? This coupled with the question, what roles do you play (or what hats do you wear?) The goal here is to identify elements of what Lee Felsenstein calls secondary information – the meta stuff about why someone would want to learn from you and who you are. This information will be printed in the program (please register before FRI afternoon!) along with your blog URL so that everyone in attendance will know who else is there and what they can offer.

We are taking this even further at the event itself, but I need your help to figure some things out. The key aspect of secondary information is that it leads to the exchange of primary information (the knowledge, insights, and wisdom we share with each other) by allowing others to more easily identify who can be of most value to them. In working through this with Lee, we realized that there is another element that goes beyond the directory and the personal conversation – that is usually found on a name badge and more often than not contains name, title and company. But in an environment such as BrainJams, this has little practical value (though it could be invaluable for some). As with ships who use flags to communicate with one another visually, we feel that this form of ‘signaling’ can be greatly improved upon with some basic structural changes.

You can see the key elements in the sample badge I have put up on Flickr. This involves name, primary ‘hat’ worn, three words, haves and needs.

I really need you to comment here and contribute to the identification of the core values for hats worn and what people have/need. We don’t expect to be fully encompassing with these lists as people and situations are way too complex – we want simplicity that can be adaptable after the first few breaths of conversation occur after these simple signals are received. BTW – A lot of this thinking on my part comes from the days of First Tuesday where entrepreneurs wore red lanyards, VC’s wore green lanyards and service providers wore yellow.

My initial list of roles/hats are:

• Creator
• Financial
• Technologist
• Entrepeneur
• Social Advocate
• Human
• Contributor
• Idea Maker
• Worker Bee
• Marketer
• Leader

Obviously there could be many more – but I really want the core categories under which all the others could fit. Certainly leaders could come from within any of the other items, and often managers are not necessarily leaders, but the idea here is that these categorizations match the primary role that an individual plays.

Wants and Haves are even more difficult in this regards, but this list is even more important to figure out. The idea is that the list for haves and needs is the same list. Individuals will be able to choose colored sticky dots to place on their name badges in the appropriate area (have or need).

• Ideas
• Connections
• Money
• Time
• Technical Skills
• Knowledge
• People Skills
• Advice
• Jobs

Again, the idea is simplicity – we need to get to the core of these key signaling issues. Please, even if you have never left a comment before, please do so now – it can really contribute to the quality of this event and many many others. I know the concept is essentially an analog version of the nTag (which will never be viable in amateur events due to cost constraints) so I am hopeful more of you have thought about this than I have…

Technorati Tags: brainjamprocess, brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:planning, namebadge, unconference

Been thinking a lot about how we are going to sustain and expand BrainJams to become the resource rich Unconference Community we envision beyond the occasional events we put together like the one coming up this Saturday at UC Berkeley. Last week in our newsletter, I relunctantly included a plea for donations as the last item – it was removed and put back about 5 times before I realized that I really had to start doing this if I was going to make our dream a reality.

Thinking like the entrepreneur I am, I came up with an idea for a service we are beginning to offer next week – wireless internet hotspot rental for unconferences. Thanks to a wonderful new technology that is called EVDO and some MIS grade routers, we will be offering a service that will allow event organizers to have relatively high speed wireless access for participants in almost any venue (within the major metropolitan areas that have the technology so far). This idea arose out of a real need we found with our BrainJams in DC since the Improv did not have wireless available. We were trying to get it together to trial there, but did not do so in time so we are hoping to try it out at our event on Saturday (in addition to the UCB wireless connectivity that will be made available through guest accounts).

This is not going to be a big money maker since we want to offer the service at a resonable rate – in fact the only reason for even considering this service is that is a critical enabling element for getting people together. Eventually, city wide free WiFi services may obliviate the need for renting this, but it is valuable in many situations today, so I figure why not? Was talking with Sean Savage the other day about how we might be able to mashup this idea with their PlaceSite software and he agreed. While not as cost effective as a $30/month DSL or Cable service connected to a $40 wifi router – it does meet the needs for several other situations where connectivity is not already present. Definitely a long tail sort of thing…

More details on the service, pricing and other extensions will be posted after the new BrainJams community site launches later in the week.

unconference brainjams evdo evdorental brainjams25feb2006

Don’t get me wrong here, I love tabbed browsing and I LOVE the extensions and plugins for Firefox, but the ease with which new tabs are opened and orphaned has me questioning my sanity and thinking that yes, it is possible to have too many tabs. I use session saver which will automagically reopen all windows and load all tabs after a crash or forced quit on my iMac (which is happening way too often these days as my iMac mysteriously restarts itself at seemingly random intervals). As a result of this, the number of tabs open at one time grows exponentially over the course of the week, making each subsequent restart an even slower and more painful process as each of those tabs needs to load itself by downloading fresh content (particularly from blog home pages).

At the moment, I just counted 84 tabs in 11 windows!

I guess it is time for me to revisit my surfing habits – which really means revisiting my blog writing strategy as well as my approach to reading online. As far as I can tell, the top ten reasons for ending up with too many tabs and windows are:

1. Had to take a pee break, forgot what I was in the middle of
2. That damn phony thing going ring a ding ding
3. Diving down the link hole chasing wabbits
4. Wanting to write about something really, really badly, but not enough to write it right now
5. Finding a very important blog post that I need to read, but don’t need to read now
6. Wanting to comment on something but not knowing what I want to say
7. Having to actually work on something
8. Not using an RSS Reader and visiting everyone’s blog personally and directly
9. It’s too damn easy to open a new tab and/or new window
10. Following the referrer links from MeasureMap to my blog
11. Still waiting for the glory of the 25 hour day (soon to be mandated by the executive branch)

Hmmm, I wonder what I will do now… probably need to visit news.com to see what if anything happened over the weekend, or perhaps I can spend a few hours taking care of all the tabs I have open, hoping my iMac won’t restart again mysteriously and throw me off track again. Naahhhhh, there is too much other fun stuff to read this morning – hey, I even got a link from Doc Searls on Friday! Cool – just happy to know he saw the piece I wrote on the A-Z List.

Perhaps this is the beginning thoughts on a new feature we need in Firefox – a way to look at all the open windows and tabs in one list – maybe as an OPML list even to be saved, edited and shared via my blog – perhaps even made more manageable by Firefox or Flock. Or maybe Session Saver can be rewritten to allow me to pick which tabs I want to have opened after a restart – one that I can categorize by task required:

1. To read
2. To blog
3. To comment
4. To re-read
5. To print
6. To send to someone
7. To save to my PDA/phone
8. To call someone about
9. To borrow from
10. To save for a presentation
11. To ????

Well, here again I am thinking about great pieces of functionality and tools, but no one around to code them… Oh shit, forgot that I am supposed to be down at MuchoCamp today, and have not even had a chance to talk about WoolfCamp yet! More to come later today.

Technorati Tags: flock, freeideas, muchocamp, OPML, reliefopedia, sessionsaver, The Open Web

Last night I had a great time at Kevin’s SuperNova 2006 Pre Party and the Geek Entertainment TV fest. The 2 events could not have been more dissimilar in style and ambience, but each were fun and filled with deep, worthwhile discussions. The GETV party felt like a family and friends get together with most of the Brat Pack in attendance. That is how Mike’s first and second TechCrunch parties were – worthwhile, exciting AND intimate.

Tonight’s TechCrunch hosted Naked Conversations party promises to be quite a crazy, fun, crowded party. While we would have went if we had gotten our names on the RSVP list in time, we did not. Kristie and I briefly thought of just going anyway since Mike’s a friend, but I honestly don’t want to deal with the door men like I had to do all the time in South Beach in order to get into the big parties of friends and celebrities. Again, the hard choices comes down to values – while we probably could get away with crashing the party, we weren’t invited and did not make the cut – c’est la vie. Maybe we could hold an overflow ‘Clothed Conversations’ party in SF 😉

It is obviously a very good thing that the energy and attitude in the community has swelled so much and so many people want to be a part of what’s happening, but I sure am glad I got to experience it while it was still just Keith Teare slaving over the BBQ, Laguna barking at everyone she met and about 30 people in the living room looking at demos on the TV. It’s hard to believe I am saying this, but those were the days…

If you are lucky enough to be going, have fun tonight, remember what it is all really about and party from the heart! This is still just the beginning…

Technorati Tags: bratpack2.0, techcrunch, techcrunch5, Web2.0

Not that I follow his work everyday, but I have no doubt that Steve Wrubel has the pulse of the PR people at the edge. He just wrote about the GeoCoding of Conversations that Topix is doing which is a great and simple tool that should also be available on a broader basis from someone like Technorati. In the post, Steve suggested some of the most basic data points which PR people need, to understand the nature of the conversational network including:

• language
• loud(ness)
• speed (aka velocity)
• accelerating/decelerating

The odd thing to me is that the other examples are really so very basic in nature – barely the price of admission in my book. If this is where the PR industry is at, they are about to get a drubbing at the hands of interactive agencies who are smart enough to seize the opportunity. The new feature from Topix however, is merely a localization tool akin to what Amazon does with Purchase Circles – a personally relevant set of insights based on local geography. The professional analytic tools that create meaning from the data points have the potential to finally let interested people understand the world beyond their physical and virtual connections – what people are saying, what people are thinking and how people feel about almost anything. The most important elements that need to be understood are:

• Persona of person communicating (or better still Identity)
• Tone of the remarks (like or hate)
• historical perspective (more of a fan or detractor)
• relative influence (on other influencers, on specific communities, in general)
• nature of primary information (product suggestion, customer service complaint, recommendation, etc…)
• depth of company/product knowledge
• tag based cluster and visual pivot points – i.e. the visual display of information – being able to slice the data according to any point of interest or shared trait

Most importantly, the potential audience goes way beyond the PR and Communications industry. It includes every employee, every investor and even every customer as well as the general public. Access to “near perfect information” as I speak of at the BrainJams events extends to the sphere of conversation as well as up to the minute accurate directory data. This was the core element to the work I have done on “The Communications Strategy“. This “Open Source” approach to company/product/organization conversations will enable smart companies to move beyond their traditional brands and into TrustMarks – well on their way to the pinnacle of becoming a Lovemark.

While interactive agencies may be more apt to seize the opportunity due to their hunger and nimbleness, the communications industry is best poised to help all of these stakeholders understand what it all means and leverage the key insights to the fullest. Isn’t it true that the best podcasters are those with a professional understanding of how to communicate via the audio medium? The same principle is at work here since communications and public relations people are those with the best skills at communicating ideas and knowledge. The great news from my perspective is that contextualizers like myself who interpret the data to generate creative, insightful, empowering communication pieces for all aspects of the conversation are about to be in very high demand. This principally requires a wider breadth of understanding about the world around us, how things work, how to help people and most importantly, having an authentic desire to help people and the ability to bring your entire self to whatever work you do.

For over 4 years I re-quoted Patricia Seybold’s article time and time again – “[Companies need to]…take responsibility for disseminating all of the product-related information the customer needs to buy and enjoy the product”. Most companies are still afraid that their customers might say something bad about their product on their sites, or even worse, they still actively censor legitimate criticism that could be helping them improve – but instead all it proves is that the company does not get it and they can not be trusted.

In the Knowledge Economy, the most successful companies will have brands that create trust by empowering their customers and stakeholders with the knowledge and ability to enjoy their lives more by saving them time and furthering their life goals. Now more than ever, it is about the complete relationship between customers and the people within your organization, not between the people and your CRM database.

Conversal was originally founded on these insights – many others are now working towards them with some very interesting improvements beyond even these core elements. One of which, BuzzLogic, I have been advising on an informal basis for several months. I felt it necessary to disclose this publicly as more and more people have been asking me for advice within the industry and I want to avoid any potential conflicts of interest ahead of time if at all possible. They are doing some really incredibly innovative things that I hope to be talking with you about in the future.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, customerservice, knowledgeeconomy, NPTECH, thecommunicationsstrategy, The Open Web, Web2.1

It’s over 12 hours later and I still have feathers in my hair! The whole scene was pretty surreal, but what a great example of creative expression and explosive love via lashing out (with a soft fluffy pillow). Everyone was so happy that even those who took a real shot left the melee with utter joy on their faces. This is the best flash mob event I have seen yet!

Kristie and I got to step into the fray to shoot some photographs before going to One Market for a Paraduxx Vintners Dinner (the Valentines Day surprise I set up for her but could not keep a secret). We had a blast and ran into Eddie, Alicia and Scott Beale.

Scott has a good post on it and the Chron ran a good story as well…

Technorati Tags: pillowfightsf, valentinesday

While the original point of Scoble’s BlogCode post may be lost by the brrreeeport tagbait project, it is clear that the collective unconscious strikes again – Whether it is the issue of the ‘Z-list’ or not being allowed to sit at the cool kids table, the question of being found and heard seems to be an emergent issue again. Doc Searls talks about the A-List as gatekeepers and then in a separate post points to numerous bloggers from the long tail who have written on this issue like Mike Warot.

The bottom line is that this is one of the tactical/practical issues behind the Pareto principle and power law distribution – it is why the head of the long tail is so large and powerful, but the tail is so long and thin. The value of the people and idas in the thinner tail is not actually low, it is still just very, very, very difficult to find the gold within the mine using the mining tools that are available… Which does not mean that Doc needs to change his behaviour, but rather that we still need better tools for discovery. I had thought Tailrank was supposed to do this, but instead it seemingly highlights the same A-listers that Memeorandum and Technorati do and puts those in the tail a click behind them – where most mainstream users will never discover them.

Still, we must look to the fact that we are the early adopters relative to the rest of the people, and the everyday people’s behaviour will be slightly different than our own in this regards. While many of us early adopters will delve into the long tail looking for subjects and deeper smarts, the majority of the masses will continue to do what they have always done, rely on the implied power and authority that comes with fame and wide distribution/awareness. Even though Doc doesn’t want this role, he plays that role within the system – it is one of those universal laws, not something bad he is doing. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it really, but as he did with his post linking to numerous other bloggers, he has the power to shift some of fame’s bright spotlight on other’s via hyperlinks. Scoble just wrote about a similar issue with regards to Guy Kawasaki ‘joining the conversation‘ a short while ago where I posted a relevant comment to this subject.

The trouble is, the power of A-listers is real and very often legitimate in that they have risen to such a level of awareness and impact by being insightful AND understanding how to leverage the system to build an audience. It is not necessarily an evil conspiracy when it comes to the cross-linking between them – it is usually just an issue of people bringing their entire weight to bear within the conversation on particular subject matters, within different conversational spaces. In the global conversation that is the blogosphere, it just happens to be THE most public space for those who really care about what the best thinking is. The difference is the A-listers bring a lot more gravity to their words since they are more widely recognized, with a greater number of ‘trust points’ in the minds of everyday people. It is also often a necessity for them, from a practical viewpoint, to counter what they perceive as incorrect statements from other people of power – hence, a very necessary public service for them to engage other’s of somewhat equal power in debate to ensure the right ideas are being spread and the wrong ideas are being squashed.

From a practical point of view, we still need better editors and filters with high valued ‘trust points’ in order to find the ‘good stuff’ (like Memeorandum is today and Cool Site of the Day used to be). The public conversation system itself has its own natural laws in effect that are hard to counter. Perhaps it is time for someone to develop a specific site (Zlisters.com is already taken!) that shines the spotlight on a relatively unknown subject matter expert each day within different fields of expertise – from this site many A-listers could engage them in conversation rising up the Z-lister’s good ideas and shooting down their bad ones, ultimately defining and establishing their expertise. By focusing the conversational spotlight in such a way, the ranks of the A-list could swell and the entire knowledge economy would be the better for it.

In a very small way, this is part of the idea of BarCamp and BrainJams – to ensure that everyday people’s ideas can be heard as opposed to continuing to support the current slate of talking heads on the podium in front of the public.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, brainjams, brainjams:freeideas, brrreeeport, freeideas, memeorandum, Web2.1, ForBrainJams25Feb2006

In another significant move pointing to the deep smarts resident at Yahoo!, Yahoo! has opened up its Design Patterns and User Interface Libraries. Whenever Nate has his head down for 14 hours each day over several weeks, we know something cool is going to come from it, but this is even bigger than I could have imagined (and I have a pretty big imagination).

So why is this such a big deal? In simple terms, it means you can now officially leverage all the years and millions upon millions of dollars of Yahoo! research that has gone into developing highly usable web sites, using highly interactive design elements – without having to try to hack it or reverse engineer it, without fear of reprisal or that guilty inner conscience. From what I understand in my brief conversation with Nate about this announcement – it makes including rich, Web 2.0 styled AJAX interface elements as easy as dropping in one line of code – the ultimate of ultimate’s in open API. Better still, they are also publishing detailed documentation in addition to blogging about some of the reasons they made their design choices and what they are thinking.

Ultimately, this also means that their expertise will grow even deeper as they can now engage in open discussions with the Information Architecture, User Experience and Human Computer Interaction communities about their choices. Of course, it also means that my web sites, and many others out there, will get to test some of their insights in new ways, further enhancing the core of the knowledge that is originally presented.

Kudos to Nate and the rest of the Yahoo! team who worked on this!.

More on this from WebBreakStuff and O’Reilly.

Technorati Tags: DUX, HCI, ajax, UI, usability, Web2.0, Web2.1, Yahoo

I just read this post over on Scoble’s blog pointing out the new feature on Technorati search. Parts of the below post is cross-posted there as a comment, but since it is such an important piece of news and potentially so much trouble, I felt I needed to post it here for you as well.

I agree with Stephanie (a like minded innovative spirit from Switzerland I just met via the BarCamp channel on IRC this past weekend while we both virtually attended Northern Voice) – like pagerank, popularity is just one approach to determining relevancy – but it too can be gamed and often has nothing to do with ‘authority’, though Technorati positions it as such incorrectly. As hacking memorandum showed, even the best of algorithms can be gotten the better of. It just feels off I guess, so I investigated further…

As an optional feature it is ok I guess, but just because some people are sitting at the cool kids table does not mean they are the authority. Funny how most of us geeks never sat at the cool kids table growing up and how we detested such egocentric attitudes – but now we are just emulating what we secretly wanted to be a part of before in so many parts of our online and offline lives.

So in trying this feature out, I did my oblilgatory search for ‘BrainJams’. When applying the filter for ‘a lot of authority‘, my posts are not even included in the list, though arguably, as one of the founders, one might expect me to have a lot of authority on the subject. To be fair, when I tried ‘a little authority‘ it seemingly removed several blog spam posts – but then again, one search with this level filter returned 178 posts, the next returned 193. This inconsistency of search results (and ongoing unreliability to even return results on occasion) is a continuing problem with Technorati that I expected to be fixed by now.

An interesting thought on this just came to me which hopefully some people here can expand further:

Popularity = awareness * excitement

Authority = awareness * (understanding + experience)

The feature on technorati may prove to be useful over time, but I still think it is a combination of human inputs and computer algorithms that are necessary for truly relevant results. When it comes to understanding levels of authority, I believe the same general rules apply. The logic boards are good for linear processing, but the human brain is what will put things in the proper context… I suggested to Kevin Marks via chat during Northern Voice that the real key to improving result relevancy was simply adding a button next to each result that enabled the community to filter out the splogs (spam blogs) much as Craigslist has the miscategorized or inappropriate buttons on each posting there. He said they considered it, but did not elaborate further on why they chose not to implement it.

As it is, this feature seems like a way of filtering out the long tail edge thinking so searchers can focus on the head of the tail – ultimately reducing the variety of inputs and leading to more like minded thinking from those people who want to be sitting at the cool kids table.

Technorati Tags: peoplepoweredsearch, technorati, Web2.1

I am very impressed by the two gentlemen who attended a Mohammed cartoon protest in France who demonstrated extreme bravery in the face of a swelling and very angry crowd. By merely supporting free speech and the country of denmark in silent counter protest, they are called terrible names by the ‘spiritual’ and ‘peaceful’ protesters in the crowd who are showing the telltale signs of eminent violence – even chasing after the men while they were whisked away by police for their own protection. These men did not speak against anyone, they only silently stood for free speech and the country of Denmark (though I do see that they also had a severed hand with them, which is one of the things many Imams have called for) – this is enough of a ‘provocation’ to seemingly warrant their death in the eyes of many in the crowd.

The full story, and a link to the video can be found here.

This is seriously getting out of hand. Unless you can sit down and talk with someone, it is nearly impossible for there to be peace. Perhaps this is why so many of their leaders won’t have an open and honest dialogue that addresses the real issues with an eye towards compromise and getting along better – perhaps they simply don’t want peace and would prefer all out war, but don’t have the chutzpah to actually start one directly. They are certainly preparing their young children for such a world as evidenced by these photographs of a Hamas lead protest involving kindergarten aged children where the children are carrying a coffin draped with the flag of Denmark.

While few, if any, muslims (even fewer of their leaders) speak out and stand up for dialogue, understanding and loving other human beings, our leaders grapple with an untennable problem that seemingly gets worse no matter what their approach. Regardless of which party is in office, I feel the problem would still be very much the same (though perhaps Al Gore might be more in bed with the Saudis than the Bush’s are). As I have said before, it is hard to believe that World War III may be started by cartoon… but with the violent, unemployed fringe elements of the Muslim world in the drivers seat and most of the peaceful (and silent) centrist majority scared for their own lives lest they be found out to be in disagreement, I am deeply concerned that this is a genuine possibility.

I found an interesting background piece on the whole story from the Weekly Standard (which contains a reprint of the original Danish publication) courtesy of Michelle Malkin (my first visit to her blog BTW).

Technorati Tags: mohammed cartoon