Chris' Insytes

Welcome to ChrisHeuer.com

2006-06-11T07:54:00.000-07:00

I can not believe it has taken this long to get done, and in fact, it still is not done, but it is close enough. This is my last entry at Blogger for my own personal/professional blog. From now on, my personal Blog will be over at http://www.chrisheuer.com/. I will continue to write the unconference stuff over at http://www.brainjams.org/ and I am about to be announcing something really cool about the new home for my professional communications and marketing insytes, so stay tuned at http://www.chrisheuer.com/.

Whew.... data ok, latop not

2006-05-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

So we were able to recover the data off my hard drive and back it up to my iPod this morning at the Apple store in Kendall. Poor gramps was bored stiff as we waited over an hour, but it was worth it because I got to show him a bunch of photos on Flickr. Now I need to get a new laptop because it seems the logic board is bad. Perhaps I can get them to give me a credit on a new MacBook Pro instead.

Dangit - Laptop dead again!

2006-05-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

I can hardly believe it. 2 east coast trips in less than 6 weeks and once again, as was the case with Boston, my laptop has died while on the road.

This time, it is extremely hard to deal with. Last time there was not really much of a loss, other than a few emails and a bunch of photos, which I was able to recover later. This time however, I lost a presentation I was working on for NetSquared conference that is due Tuesday, a ton of important emails, about 100 photos from the Beyond Blogging event, 100+ photos of my big brother and his family, a requirements document I was working on for one of my startups, 2 blog posts I wrote on the plane, the podcasts I recorded at the event and a couple of other important documents I worked on while flying east on the way out here.

Really big bummer and it really hurts this time because so much was lost and will need to be recreated. Worse still, now I am really behind an already overloaded schedule and I have to borrow access on my friend's PC. Now I will need to take it in to the Apple store tomorrow and get them to look at it and/or perhaps pay one of the data recovery companies a few hundred dollars to retrieve the data.

It would not be so bad if this had not just happened about 5 weeks ago. I thought I was supposed to have a new hard drive after the last one failed under warranty, but perhaps they replaced it with a refurbished one? Regardless, there is not much I can do other than deal with it, defer all the deadlines and pray that the Genius Bar can get the drive up long enough to burn the stuff over to DVD.

The weird bit is how it happened. I was working on the blog posts on the plane, when I went to save them as Word docs and the spinning color wheel came up, only to freeze in place. When trying to restart, it just went from the bright white screen to a grey one. After landing, it restarted in the car miraculously, but then froze. It started a couple more times after that, but would not shut down when I closed the laptop. So on the way home tonight I picked up some CDR's with the intention of recovering whatever I could get off of it - after many failed attempts, I have finally given up and just hope it might come alive tomorrow.

I am more of a spiritual, not religious sort of guy, but please do pray for something good to happen from this for me. Apple did such a great job in fixing the laptop last time, going really above and beyond. It would suck to know that they gave me a crappy refurb hard drive that died just a few short weeks later causing me all this anguish and loss...

2006-05-05T00:33:00.000-07:00

This is the final session from our small, but powerful mixup of New Orleans natives and people who care and time did not forget. Photos to be posted shortly to the fllickr account here -
http://www.flickr.com/tags/brainjamsneworleans

Interview with a corporate blogger...

2006-05-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

On Thursday May 4, 2006 I sat down with Earthlink Blogger Dave Coustan to talk about his experiences as a corporate Blogger. This follows up on the Blog post entitled "Reflections on Blogging for Someone Else." There are some really interesting insights from his experience working at Earthlink as well as some more simple details on certain aspects of the work. You can reach Dave through his Earthling Blog.

<P>Beyond Blogging 2006 is an event for communications professionals being held on Friday May 19, 2006 being brought to you by Fleishman Hillard and DC Communicator.</P>

The Blog Rollercoaster, Starting the Conversation

2006-04-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

There is an old saying that goes, "Some days it is in the cards, and some days it isn't". My grandfather used to say that a lot about whether or not he would be able to golf when the summer rains came, but it just as well could refer to my relationship with Blogging. Rather than looking at blogging as 'my job' which I must do every day, I go with the flow and my blog posting frequency changes dramatically as a result.

Somedays I am so excited by an idea or news item that I must put other things on hold to blog about it. Sometimes, I end up writing posts just for me that never get published - many never even saved, just written. Other times, like the past couple of weeks, I am so deep in the activities of 'work', having conversations with people and simply being in the real world, I have no time for it. Even if it is important to share or perhaps just personally meaningful, it is nearly impossible for me to get a blog post published. I suspect a lot of people out there are like me in this regards - sometimes we are just too busy with life, work or whatever to find time to blog.

The key is that I don't need to blog every day, or several times a day to make an impact, but it would certainly help in some regards. My goal is to merely communicate with people who care about the things I care about - to have my voice heard and be recognized for my ability to understand a particular topic. So I do it when I have time and do my best to share valuable insights, stories and experiences with you. Depending on your goals, or the goals of your organization though, the demands on your time could be vastly different. I know of at least 2 startup companies here in Silicon Valley who don't do plan to do any traditional PR activities. They expect their blog will be the company's official voice to the public, to their customers and to the press at large. They blog when they have something to say. not everyday for the sake of blogging.

The month ahead is going to be an interesting shift for me as I move from the free flowing Blogger mentality of writing when I feel like it for the sole purpose of serving my own passions to blogging every day as part of my work life. Today marks the beginning of a new gig I am doing with my friends over at Fleishman Hillard. I have this incredible opportunity to lead an online conversation leading up to an event they are sponsoring with DC Communicator called Beyond Blogging 2006. The premise is very dear to my heart and is something I have been talking about for quite some time.

The truth is that Blogs are a free style, free ranging form of communications that have made it possible for people and organizations to more directly communicate with the world over the Internet. It does not require an army of 'techies' to publish, it does not require some special knowledge of some cryptic computer language and it does not require any real capital expenditures. A Blog can be started in under 5 minutes, it can be free or a few dollars per month, it can be private or public, it can be used as a simple outbound communications channel or it could be used as the foundation of a community. Blogs are just another tool in the communications arsenal, so I am glad we are not doing another conversation on Blogs - it is time to go way beyond the initial idea and look at the bigger picture of how all of this fits together and can be used properly by all communication professionals.

Too many people think that the 'Blog' is some mythical panacea for communications. Too many people don't understand the idea of Blogging within the proper context of participating in the conversation. Too many people think that the Blog is just another fad. (even I have written about Blogging being a fad previously) Regardless of what we think of Blogging, it is here to stay - the power of the tools are growing tremendously along with the number of people who are using Blogs for personal and professional communications. So this event, and this Blog, represent a great opportunity to dive into the conversation with communications professionals who are on the front lines of the industry. Together we will explore the strategic and tactical aspects of Blogging in the context of the shifting media landscape, to collectively gain a better understanding of where it fits within the broader context of communications.

So your first assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to dust off your old copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto and celebrate the 7th anniversary of this landmark book with me. The majority of what we will be talking about over the next month leading up to the Beyond Blogging event on May 19th will likely be based within the key principle of Cluetrain thinking - "markets are conversations". From my perspective, the job of communications professionals, marketing pros and even sales people is to engage people in conversations - this is perhaps what has been forgotten by a few and is what real people are craving - but that discussion can wait for another day.

Over the month ahead, join us in a discussion that will go beyond the ideas and the strategies and dive into the practical applications of how it all works together. We will start off by delving into some of the basic questions like "What are tags? and How do I use them?" As we get closer to the event, we will be hearing from the panelists more directly and moving the conversation into areas that are of interest to you. So let's get this party started - post a comment and let us know what sort of things you want to discuss.

Technorati Tags: blogs, beyondblogging, thecommunicationsstrategy

Join Us in Revitalizing New Orleans

2006-04-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

Though I have only been to New Orleans once before, I have a deep love for this great American city and I really want to help bring it back from the tragedy that was Katrina. As a technologist, business strategist, entrepreneur and humanist, I have been been working with BrainJams over the last few months to bring people together to learn from one another in the real world. While I can't rebuild the houses that were lost or donate millions of dollars, I can work towards connecting the small businesses of New Orleans with an understanding of how they can make the most of emerging Internet technologies. More importantly, I can help facilitate real, personal connections between the people who are building these Internet tools and the local business community in New Orleans who need the best available thinking to help rebuild their local economy.

BrainJams is about people sharing what they know with one another - people helping people, treating one another with respect and working to understand each another's unique ability to contribute towards a common goal. If you are interested in working towards
revitalizing New Orleans, won't you join us for a conversation between the business community in New Orleans and people who understand emerging Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tags, open source software such as Drupal, and other Web services?

I believe that together, we can discover innovative solutions to the business problems that are being faced today, as well as learn from one another how to make the most of what we already have. We know from firsthand experience that the traditional way of running a conference was seldom best for the attendees. The most interesting parts of the conference were often the hallway conversations we had with other attendees. Often times, the people in the audience have better insights to share than those speaking on the panel. BrainJams takes away the "power of the podium" and puts it in the hands of the people in the audience. We turn attendees into participants, and in so doing, make it easier for everyone to get what they need from the event while having a turn to step up on the soap box to share their ideas, concerns and experiences.

So rather than coming to hear me tell you how it is, we will get together on Thursday May 4th in downtown New Orleans to figure it out together. To share our insights. To learn from each other. To identify the needs of the business community. To launch new projects. To pump new life into the heart of the city of New Orleans. To Jam with each other like Jazz musicians, riffing on each other's ideas, leveraging everyone's unique contributions.

There will be many different topics discussed over the course of the day, all of which will be chosen by you and managed under the principles of "Open Space", which is a simple structure for enabling more powerful conversations for large groups of people. In the morning, participants will create an agenda that addresses the most important issues and opportunities for the New Orleans business community and how it can best use the latest technology. The rest of the day will be spent in small group sessions working on the specific issues that matter most right now. All of the proceedings will be documented and a wireless network will allow us to post all of our notes directly to the internet, where others can find them and support our work. The point of the day is to start conversations that matter while making new connections to the people who can contribute to projects that will make real impact. If you care about what New Orleans has been and where the city is heading, your participation is essential for our success.

Please join us! BrainJams New Orleans is free for all to attend - just complete the registration form and put it on your calendar.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams04May2006, brainjams:neworleans, katrina, net2, neworleans, jazzfest, Recovery2, reliefopedia, unconference

WARNING: Don't Use ReNu Saline Solution

2006-04-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I almost missed this. In case you did too, read the article from CNN and check out the official statement from Bausch & Laumb about ReNu with moistureLoc potentially being linked to a rare eye infection that damages corneas. Several people have had to have corneal transplants as a result. There is also a generic brand they make but I did not have time to find those specifics.

Thankfully I don't use my contact lenses as often any more, but I did use ReNu and I did leave my lenses in at night, which increases the risk, but everything seems to be ok.

Technorati Tags: healthwarning, eyes, renu

Questions from the Art of Hosting

2006-04-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

When have I truly lived my passion and what in particular was powerful about this?

More often than not, I feel my true self and complete happiness in my being, when I am connecting with others and sharing my ideas, insights and individuality. When I am able to be of service to others by exploring our shared connections, reveling in our passions and feeling comfortable at the edge of the precipice, staring off into the distant unknown and figuring out how to get there together.

The most powerful thing about this for me has shifted over the years. At first it was a matter of simply gaining external reinforcement of my purpose for being. Eventually it shifted to the perception of power that was bestowed unto me when people were giving me their attention. Now it has settled fully into the understanding that the real power came from an unknown future in which I would play no physical role, but one in which my ideas, insights and voice would be given life through the hand of another - fertilizing the seed I previously planted and watching it grow, far from my own eyes.

What do I now sense is the next level of my passion and practice?

The next level involves bringing together all that I have experienced in a way that can be of value to others. It is through service to the community of my peers - which is all of my fellow man, not a specific industry nor a type of person. The next level is a return to an old idea infused with new life. The Noble Pursuit is my dream of a better world that allows me to be within a space where my passion can be felt by me with every awakened breath, and seen by the world through open eyes. Not hiding in fear of failure, but being ever present in the learning, smack dab in the middle of the circle, but not necessarily up on stage.

It is the work that has already begun for me through BrainJams and is within the space that my new friends call Hosting. These things are one and the same, though rather than trying to teach others the art of hosting, we are working to teach them the art of participating, with respect for every individual and their unique ability to contribute. Even when the contribution is manifested as silence. It is a community of participants rather than hosts or attendees. When each participant has their own leadership held within the space, if only for a moment...

The next level of my passion and practice is the development of the community of shared resources that is BrainJams, the tools and virtual spaces that make up Insytes and the way of being which is at peace with myself, in balance with the world around me.

If this is the next level of my passion and practice, what could stop or come in the way of this?

"as we shine more light, the shadows get bigger" - Debbie from Berkana

While I do believe that the past does not equal the future, it has been hard to live with this principle on a daily basis. The fears of failure, and even of success to a certain degree, have in the past held such a grip on me that I would often choose to not take action to remain with the possibility of some future success. As an entrepreneur, you would most likely not guess this of me, but as a human without someone to take me by the hand and encourage me to take the leap - to provide external validation of the figments of ideas that swirl within my mind, it was nearly impossible.

The only thing that can stop me is myself. Today, I choose not to stand in my own way, but instead to lend myself a hand - a hand up, a pat on the back and a round of applause. All of these powers are within us, we just need to practice with more - we need to give ourselves permission to try, to pursue with vigor and undeterable purpose, that which burns within our hearts.

On this day, I choose commitment over complacence, movement over stillness and love over fear.

While the things that could stop me are many, I will not allow it. I will overcome whatever obstacles I may face. There is always a way.

What is the burning question that will help me step more fully into the fire of my hosting?

The focus can no longer be on the costs of taking these actions, or on what I need before I can take these actions, it is squarely within the question of "What will it cost if I don't step fully into the life I was born to live?"

How will it feel if the world heads into complete chaos and fear, and I have to live with the fact that I did nothing to stop it? How will it feel to live with myself and my loved ones everyday for the rest of my life, knowing that I could have made a difference but chose not to act because I was afraid or thought that I might be judged unfavorably by others?

At least they were honest...

2006-04-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

Many, many things to talk about this week, but I only have a minute since I have to leave for Boston in 6 hours. This article on CNN about the Muslims protest over the launch of Playboy in Jakarta is a telling tale of the deep value conflict between the our different perspectives. Many of the hardliners, such as those from the Islamic Defenders Front, are still protesting and threatening violence even after the magazine debuted with much tamer content than is displayed in the local tabloids and other magazines daily.

As reported by CNN

group spokesman Tubagus Muhamad Sidik. [said] "Even if it had no pictures of women in it, we would still protest it because of the name."

Trouble is this is the same problem that we have between our use of different names for the power/being in whom we faithfully believe - for the entity that proves there is meaning and purpose in this life, a reason for being and a reason for all things. The belief that someone is in control, it is of course the word I believe in who is in control. For you disobeying the one I give this name to, you will be punished - I will punish you. We fight over the many different names we have for the same idea, in this case, the blind faith in a higher power we call God, Muhammed, Jesus, Abraham, Yahweh or even within new age circles, "The Light".

I obviously disagree with people who take to violence in light of calling the same thing a different name, but at least he is honest, which means there is just the sliver of hope that we can learn to get along with one another not only in spite of our differences, but because of them. We really need to get past that sort of reaction to the things we dont have in common and see that the people around us are all people - the ones in the ivory towers and the ones in the streets. Respect of our fellow man and a love for them just 'because' they are people, regardless of their beliefs, their looks or their station in life is the real shift we need to make to energize our society.

What we give to others, we get in return. Give a peaceful smile, share it with everyone. See what happens as the world lights up around you.

On a lighter note, this is very much similar to some of the disagreement around calling the new new, Web 2.0 and the meaning of Marketing going on over at Burning Bird, where I have more to add tomorrow...

Technorati Tags: playboy, religion, tolerance, web2.0

Chevy Embraces Creatives: watch out for those sharp teeth!

2006-04-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

Tara has a great article on Chevy's 'create a commercial contest' for the Tahoe brand of ubersized SUV's that serve little purpose other than to take over the role that Jaguar once did for those with fears of inadequate equipment. The story is a must read for everyone, as is watching the actual user created commercials which are over on news.com

On top of it all, her post contains all the right elements of an exceptional blog post that people can look to as a case study.

1. It is informative - she told me something I did not see elsewhere
2. It is entertaining - she was clever with her delivery and the story itself is actually quite amusing
3. It is engaging - I wanted to share it with you and talk about it
4. It is educational - her advice for Chevy to embrace the vitriol rather than hide from it is spot on

In response to her earlier call for suggestions to rename "Pinko Marketing", I wish it could just be called "marketing", but that term has been tainted like a used car salesman in a loud suit. In a very real sense, she is really talking about "Cluetrain 2.0" through the lens of the Web 2.0 era. I don't honestly know what is wrong with simply referencing the original Cluetrain Manifesto, other than marketing the 'New' "New". Don't get me wrong, I respect Tara immensely for what she has done and she fully embodies the core principles of the Cluetrain in her blog and her work, but I am in the camp with those who don't think Pinko Marketing is the right phraseology for helping more people to "get it".

It feels a lot to me like the original statements Chris made about "Open Source World Domination" before he changed it to the more powerful "Liberation". I just don't see anything remotely "Pinko" about it, it feels more like "Real", "True", "Authentic", "Genuine" or "Honest" might be most appropriate. Steve Wrubel calls it "Open Source Marketing", which may be accurate, but is not simple or fun enough to catch on - or perhaps it is, we will have to wait and see.

This reminds me of what I have often told people about the 'marketing' of BrainJams - "If you mean to say that I am trying to reach those people who will get the most benefit from what we are doing, than yes, we are marketing. If you mean to say we are trying to sell our ideas to more people to just get better numbers, than no, we are not marketing." Unfortunately, for too many people, marketing has come to mean the latter, rather than the former. As I have been telling people through my work on "The Communications Strategy", the goal is not to get sales for the sake of sales (though this is what is still taught at most business schools). The real goal is to find customer's who can obtain the right value from what you are offering and deliver that value while creating a reasonable profit to sustain and grow the organization. The job of marketing is to identify the unique needs of those specific customers and be of service to those needs.

The bottom line is to understand that people are talking about what they are talking about and your company can't control the conversation any longer and you can't ignore what is being said when it is not favorable. Companies need to, as Pat Riley said in his book, "embrace the ugliness" and just deal with it head on. Either you take your stand in righteousness when others are misinforming the conversation, or admit you have a real problem and deal with it as Tara suggests.

With regards to Chevy, it will be interesting to see what there response is to this, and if any of the vaulted General Motors' Bloggers will respond. As of this moment, they are sticking with the contest.

Technorati Tags: chevy, cluetrain, pinkomarketing, opensourcemarketing

More on Web 2.0 Semantics

2006-04-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I wrote a post on Web 2.0 as a state of mind, with it really being an attitude of openness that defines our era. Shelley Powers writes about this again in regards to Doc's thoughts on Business Morality. Since most blogs don't post trackbacks from Blogger (another reason to change platforms), I am cross posting my comment here.

While I still detest the phrase Web 2.0 myself, I feel forced to use it in order to converse with others about the nature of what is happening now and what is different about the emergent practices we are seeing. Shelly is right that there is no version of the web per se, and while the technology has evolved somewhat, I still think it has its place. The phrase Web 2.0 still represents the attitude of this new era as good as anything else I have heard thus far including what I have called it - The Open Web.

The difference that is really touched upon in Doc's post (though with terms I don't really like) is the nature of Open systems versus closed systems and human behaviour within those systems. Systems now really do put people at the core and these new systems are contextually aware of the individual's relationships with other people.

Yes it is still about communications as was the original promise of the Web being bantered about in 1994 after Mosaic's release. But today more then ever, it is about the ease with which we collaborate with one another within organizations and uniquely, in the commons. It is the spirit of openness that manifests itself as participation in services that allow us to more easily gaze into the collective consciousness that every so often gives rise to an insight from the collective wisdom.

For some the characteristics of the technology matter most, just as the numbers matter more to the accountants than the narrative does. For others like me, it is about the differences in human behaviour. The idea behind Web 2.0 is complex and changing and many people are still working to describe it from their own perspective. In the end though, I think Doc was right when he said "I think it's what we'll call the current bubble and the next crash".

Above all else, and regardless of the semantics, it is what we call the time we are living in today, no matter how much we like or dislike the term.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0

Filling the Funnel - the shift that is fueling BrainJams

2006-04-03T16:48:00.000-07:00

I had said I would put my BrainJams post here any longer and I meant it. Instead, I want to point out a pretty long piece I just posted there that really explains a big part of my thinking behind the transformation society is undergoing at this time. To put it simply, in the old competitive model of the world, people fought one another to "climb the ladder", in today's cooperative world, we are all helping one another to "fill the funnel."

Shortly after posting this to BrainJams, I visited Doc Searl's site and read about an idea that was posted over on O'Reilly's Radar that deals with this same subject from a slightly different angle, that of 'business morality'. Supported by our discussions on collaboration at the UC Berkeley BrainJams event, I think Doc is spot on with these ideas. I posted my comments on this over there, but I am really wondering if anyone has any better language to use for describing these loosely joined ideas that are the core of what is happening in our economy.

Technorati Tags: fillingthefunnel, businessmorality

See, US Airways does Suck

2006-04-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

I don't want this blog to become a place that only complains about crappy customer service, but after reading this article about an annual survey on the airline industry, I wanted to share the bad news with you. While there were not major revelations in the survey, this particular nugget was satisfying at least, because it shows I am not alone in being treated poorly by them.

Southwest Airlines had the lowest rate of complaints, 0.18 per 100,000 passengers, while US Airways had the highest, 1.86.

JetBlue was of course the favorite (and I agree), but I was a little surprised to hear that AirTran was one notch ahead of Southwest. In the past, I have purposefully avoided AirTran, even when they were cheaper because I had thought they were not up to par. In the future, I will at least consider them, though my loyalty is now clearly to JetBlue, with American close behind because of my gold status and membership in their Admirals Club.

Unfortunately, this weekend I am flying US Airways for my Boston trip (actually America West planes). We need to be more budget conscious, and I had to use the $190 credit we had leftover from that little incident I wrote about back in November. I was grandfathered into gold status with them last year before our problems with them, so perhaps the experience won't be so bad after all.

Cingular Sucks Ass

2006-03-31T11:44:00.000-08:00

I can hardly believe how incompetent Cingular is. I am almost ready to start a site for people who hate them as much as I do. And hate is a strong word for me, because I love most everyone (except perhaps those folks who backed into our car the other night because they did not bother to look in his rear view mirror, but that is another story I will let Kristie tell). A quick Google Search yielded 492,000 results for "Cingular Sucks".

We have complained about their terrible systems pretty much since the week we signed up. They have occasionally shined, or rather one of the people in customer service did if ever so briefly. I feel sorry for those people, though I remain frustrated with them all. To have such a big corporation in charge which can not get its basic systems of operation and customer service right is incredulous, but ever so true. Cingular sucks plain and simple and I advise everyone to stay away from them at all costs.

What did they do this time? Well Kristie has been kind enough to deal with our latest billing snafus that resulted from her Treo's untimely death and resuscitation, but they forgot about me, or just screwed me after the fact. It seems that they never properly credited our account for returning the phones she bought but returned. When she dealt with this problem last month, they screwed up our plan / service bundle again. The last bill included over $400 in per minute charges, even though we had over 6,200 rollover minutes in reserve. She took care of that problem last week and was told we would get a 30 day reprieve from them taking any actions on the account while they sorted out the troubles.

WED night at midnight however, they shut off both our phones (we are on the family plan) so yesterday Kristie was on the phone with them yet again, explaining the problem to another rep. The rep supposedly corrected the problem and restored service to both our phones. Since my Treo's antenna is broken (anyone have some spare Treo 650 parts laying around?) I did not use it yesterday, but did see that I missed a call last night, which means the service was temporarily restored. Of course, I say temporarily because it is now disconnected once again and pissing me off to no end. The amount of time we have had to invest in correcting their mistakes in intolerable and I have just about had it with them - I think it is time to bite the bullet and switch to Verizon, though I really don't want to lay out all that cash for the new phone and the early termination fee (they should pay us at this point!).

Are there any Cingular folks out there who even listen to this? I suspect not - if I worked for them, I certainly would not be paying attention to the endless stream of complaints, it would probably drive me into the insane asylum. Well, now I get to wait on hold to try to clear this up once again...

UPDATE: 15July2006 - things seem a bit more stable now with regards to the billing, nothing wild lately, but you never know whats around the next bend really. I tried out some of the VCast phones and really lilked the video clip and music download, but I need a keyboard for easier texting. This one is free over at Amazon with their current incentives (will change at some point I am sure) The reviews are pretty good on it, but I have not used it more than putting it through its paces at the booth in the mall. Does anyone have any other reccomendations?

Technorati Tags: cingular, cingularsucks

No More BrainJams Posts Here

2006-03-31T08:58:00.000-08:00

I have written about separating my blog posts topically for quite some time, but knowing that I was getting more reads here than there, was very reluctant to do so. This resulted in me cross posting the BrainJams content to both blogs so that I was able to get the messages out to a wider audience. This also meant that many of the searches performed for the BrainJams stuff I was writing resulted in duplicate search result entries, which was just confusing the situation instead of making it better.

Well, after one week of using the new BrainJams site hosted over at Bryght, I am satisfied that the BrainJams blog has a solid, seemingly permanent home. So I am going to finally make the move I should have done long ago and cease posting official BrainJams announcements and unconference thoughts here and focus this Blog back on Web 2.0, Knowledge Marketing, The Communications Strategy and other items of more personal interest.

Also, if things go well over the next week or so, I am going to finally move my blog over to ChrisHeuer.com and make the switch from Blogger to WordPress. But rather than keeping a separate personal and professional blog, I am going to keep working on Chris' Insytes all together because that is who I am. I was dreading the prospect of rebuilding my link rank all over again, but with the NOLA event coming up and looking to be pretty big, this is perhaps an opportune moment.

So if you are interested in keeping up with BrainJams, please subscribe to the feed via Feedburner or just visit the BrainJams site regularly.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, insytes

WTF - Do they think NOLA is back to NORMAL?

2006-03-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

The fight against Municipal Wifi efforts has reached the streets of NOLA, and its not going to be pretty. I missed this piece last week, but am glad Eran over at Supr.c.ilio.us brought this to my attention. The Telco's are understandably not happy with cities who want to offer free WiFi services which would compete for customers of their services, but are they really fighting the local government in an area where they can not even provide service to half the population?

Red Herring has an interview with Greg Meffert, the New Orleans CIO who opened up the city's WiFi mesh to all residents for free. While the telcom lobbyists fight to get it shut down, Greg vows to fight on until they throw him in jail. Now with a real taste of freedom (VOIP anyone?), there is no turning back for the city's small businesses and the returning residents who are struggling to rebuild. Internet access is proving to be a key public utility and cities who want to help bridge the digital divide are seriously considering this same sort of move all across the country.

Given the situation in New Orleans, perhaps the Oil Industry lobbyists should step in to fight for the rights of the city against the Telcoms. Or better still, maybe someone in the Bush administration can put some pressure on these folks to back off. It would be a small token of apology for the incompetence that they have demonstrated on so many levels, but it sure will go a long way toward helping the city rebuild the local economy. If the legislature stands up for the rights of the big corporations and ignore the needs of the countless small business owners that serve as the backbone of the economy, it shows how corrupt politics really are in the south. The legislature should be rewriting the laws to allow for such provisional use - the camel's nose is already in the tent. Instead they are perhaps thinking about the next elections and trying to figure out how to fund their campaigns without the contributions of BigCorp.

A good synopsis of Greg's story can be found over at Jeff Pulver's blog. I wish I had known Greg was here in San Jose at the VON conference a couple of weeks ago because I would have made it down there to talk to him. Now I will hopefully get to Skype with him in advance on the upcoming BrainJams event down there. If there is anything more we can do to help you Greg, let us know.

Technorati Tags: brainjams04May2006, brainjams:neworleans, wifi, Recovery2

BrainJams New Orleans - Big Announcement!

2006-03-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

On Thursday May 4th we are going to bring the best of Web 2.0 to the New Orleans small business community in what could be one of the biggest Unconferences of the year. This will be a day of conversation, peer to peer learning, and developing a better understanding of how the technology community can serve the needs of this vitally important city as it comes back from the trajedy that was Katrina. Our goal is to help small businesses understand how they can make the most of blogs, social networks, tagging, wikis and other collaboration tools - but I have a feeling that much more will come of this.

In looking at the recovery efforts (and the ongoing clean-up) I have been shocked by the sheer scope of the problems down there and inspired by the resilience of those who suffered through the disaster. While there is no doubt that many in the community still need basic necessities and technology can do little to ease much of the human suffering, I really think we all need to look forward together to the potential of the new New Orleans. From my perspective, the small businesses are going to be the backbone of this revitalization, so I want to empower them with knowledge of how they can use these incredibly useful tools the industry is creating to support their efforts.

For this event, we will be applying all we have learned from our direct experience and the wisdom of other unconference organizers. While the format may be subject to change somewhat, I think that participants will really get a lot out of this structure we have put forth for the event. We hope to kickoff the day with a short introduction/keynote from a local leader to provide a better perspective on the role of small businesses and technology in the rebuilding efforts. We would really like to have Harry Anderson who has owned a couple of small businesses there for many years and is one of the clearest (and cleverest) voices of common sense we have heard coming from the region since Katrina.

The majority of the morning will be spent with our signature one-on-one knowledge networking with the group being split between small business folks and technologists. This is where you have 5 minutes to talk to the person sitting across from you about what you are passionate about and what you are working on now. After 5 minutes, a bell rings and everyone has 1 minute to move one seat to the left. The intention is to share knowledge and resources (sites, books, people etc...) with one another and to see how you might be able to help one another.

The afternoon will primarily encompass three types of activities going on at the same time.

A Main "Confersation" track to serve as an introduction to the most important aspects of Web 2.0 for small business owners - blogs, collaboration tools and social networking.
Open Space sessions where the participants will lead conversations on topics of their choosing which could be focused on everything from rebuilding the local tech community, to developing tools to meet the needs of the local economy to addressing social/political issues.
Peer to Peer Learning, where individual experts will offer their time to share their direct expertise, teaching other individuals how to do certain tasks (like start a blog, set up a web site, use BackPack or other 'mini-lessons')

But this day in May is only the beginning of the process. We intend to build a vibrant community of technologists from around the country to provide ongoing advice and support to the local economy by engaging in genuine conversations. One of the hopes of the event is that this leads to a BarCamp/SuperHappyDevHouse sort of weekend that will build specific tools and information services for the local economy. But rather than being a couple of 'one-off' events, we hope to establish an ongoing collaboration between the six tribes (art, education, for profit, government, non-profit and technologists) that brings involvement from all across the country, and around the world. Indeed, it is our intention to donate at least 50% of any proceeds from the sponsorship revenues to go towards this cause as well as establish a separate fund that can take donations directly. Finally, we hope to inspire the people of New Orleans to embrace this new form of ad-hoc community driven collaboration and put on their own events just like WoolfCamp has done here in the Bay Area.

While we are pretty much starting from ground zero at this point in time and still need Patrons to cover the cost of the event (attendance will be free!), I have faith in our community's ability to pull this all together and make it happen in a big way (Dave Winer? Mike Arrington? you out there?). We also still need a large venue with good power and wifi as well as local technical support, peer teachers, volunteers to support local logistics and local promotion to get the right sort of people to the event, If you are interested in helping in any way, will you please contact me and join the BrainJams community to discuss how we can all contribute to this important cause.

PS - For those of you who have not been to JazzFest before, this is the perfect time to experience the soul of New Orleans that lies in the heart of this great city's music. The second weekend includes some of the best Jazz musicians in the world as well as Jimmy Buffet, Warren Haynes, The Radiators, Robert Randolph, Paul Simon, Lionel Richie and Fats Domino!

Technorati Tags: barcamp, brainjamming, brainjams, brainjams04May2006, brainjams:neworleans, confersations, unconference, Web2.0

Web 2.0 is a State of Mind

2006-03-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

Every now and again Memeorandum points me to an exceptional post. I generally dislike the echo chamber it creates, but it is one of the better filters for the attention strapped among us. Still, I have read so many tales of woe concerning what Web 2.0 means over the past 6 months, I almost skipped this piece from Paul Boutin on Slate since it is getting so tiring.

With my silicon valley influenced perspective (and a lot of pent up frustration with some engineers I have known) I decided we should move beyond Web 2.0 and on to Web 2.1. To move away from the technology focus for the sake of the technology to put people back in the center of our lens. A couple of months ago, I was finally able to put forth a model that I could use to explain my perspective to those outside the meme - the Human Centered Web.

As I have been explaining to friends, acquaintances and anyone who will listen, Web 2.0 is like the proverbial elephant and the 3 blind men. Each one is describing a different aspect of it, each one is right in their own limited view but each one is missing the bigger picture. As with most complex ideas, people need short hand phrases to capture the essence of it, without getting into all the messy details. Of course, this causes confusion from people who can not quickly grasp the bigger picture and are being informed by only one of the perspectives. This is why I am generally OK with the use of the term, though I detest how it has been used and misused.

In his piece on Slate, Paul references three general definitions that are bantered about by different groups of people. The O'Reilly definition that focuses on participation and collaboration; the Web developers perspective on Ajax interfaces; and the opportunists play of making a company from user generated content. Hmmm. I like O'Reillys definition, but it is overly complicated to explain to lay people. The other definitions don't play well either. So what really matters to the non-technical majority of society in this discussion?

Well, I think NewsWeek got it mostly right, which is really good news. It is definitely about the collective wisdom and participation, but I think it is above all else a new era in society, a new spirit of possibility and a resurgence of optimism from which great new companies and ways of thinking are being formed. Web 2.0 is shorthand for representing this new state of mind above all else.

When we take a closer look at what constitutes its physical (or rather virtual) manifestation, there are really 3 primary elements that should be explained to the uninitiated (and AJAX is not among them).

The Live Web - As NewsWeek focused on Mary Hodder's quote, this is a key descriptor of one portion of this era. It references the immediacy of the ability to create and contribute in near real time to the collective wisdom and to a lesser degree certain aspects of living online.

The Social Web - This was an underlying element of the NewsWeek piece and referenced often through examples in the Slate piece, but it deserves to be called out separately. This references the network's awareness of our social relationships as well as the fact we are able to organize our social lives and engage one another socially.

The Open Web - Again, this was referenced but not called out by name. In stark contrast to the proprietary standards that marked the launch of the PC industry and the early Web days, we have established key standards in many areas that enable any person or company to create systems that easily interoperate with other systems. The Open Web is not just about published API's and open standards though, it is also the key element of the state of mind that permeates this new era. While it is not something that the majority of society will focus on, people need to understand that this means freedom from the clutches of any single corporation and lowered overall costs for whatever people want to do.

So Web 2.0 is above all else a state of mind that is based on the World Wide Web being live, open and social.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, The Open Web, Web2.0, Web2.1

BrainJams Clarity: The Unconference Community

2006-03-28T12:57:00.000-08:00

Over the last few months, I have been trying to figure out what we were really going to do with BrainJams, and now I finally know.

We are going to keep it as simple as possible and build BrainJams.org into the Web community for Unconferences. The place where you can go to find events in your local area, resources to make the events possible and a willing community of participants who want to learn from each other rather by sharing their wisdom and insights. In short, a place where people interested in Unconferences can go to share best practices and resources so that their events will be more successful.

While this may seem obvious enough to you, it was a very murky vision for me to see in the proper light. Those of you who know me through personal interaction can probably guess why this was difficult for me. I don't want to bore you with a rambling personal diatribe at this time, but this indecision stemmed from the depth of my lifelong personal struggles - continuously generating complex visions for how things could be, biting off more than I can chew, wrestling the demons of ADD, fighting off my fears of failure, suffering through the disappointment of past perceived failures and longing to be understood/embraced by a community of my peers. Simply put, my greatest gift is also my greatest weakness, and it makes seeing things simply hard for me. It also kept me asking deeper questions (can the brand work as a plural? does the word brain create the wrong impression?) and kept me striving to be perfect rather than following Nike's advice to 'just do it' instead of talking about it for so long and frustrating those around me.

So I can now finally put the other big ideas into separate buckets and focus on cultivating BrainJams to fill the people's need that remains unmet today. But I can not do it alone. I really need your help making it real.

To this end, there are many organizational tasks that need to be addressed, but more urgent is the matter of gathering, tagging and organizing resources such as venues that are available, equipment that can be borrowed and people who can help facilitate unconferences like Kaliya. We have established a basic structure within the Drupal site that we launched last week to allow for anyone to join the community and do any of the following tasks:

Organize your own event using our site
List your event for other people to discover
Create a site for your own group
Submit resources via quick blog entries (setting up tag feeds soon to also pull from Delicious and working on a resource directory Drupal module)
Share your thoughts on what works in which situations via personal blog entries and our collaborative guide for organizing your own Unconference

The topical focus of each Unconference is not important to what we do with BrainJams as we want to support Unconferences across the entire spectrum of thought, discussion and practice. We want to help people find out which formats work best in which situations. We want to help people get the most from bringing people together. We want to see the world made into a better place by people like you who know that Panel discussions and talking heads suck ass. We want to support peer to peer learning exchanges like the one we have proposed for One Web Day. We want to make it easier for someone with a desire to bring people together to share with each other. We want others to benefit from our mistakes, so that they can be more successful.

Wonderful things can happen when real people have real discussions with people who are different from themselves. Talking to people who are similar to you, who share the same perspective as you and hold the same beliefs as you will only reinforce the status quo within an echo chamber. So BrainJams should be about bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and holding constructive dialogue between people with opposing points of view without resorting to calling someone an asshole or behaving like trolls. I believe that if we focus on a few things we have in common with those people with whom we disagree, and respect everyone for their own uniqueness, we can come together to solve all sorts of problems. I believe this idea applies equally well to everyone involved with for profit business, non-profit endeavours, educational pursuits, technology, art and government.

But it all starts with you realizing that you have the power to make a difference and wanting to bring people together to discuss and work on whatever it is that holds your true passion. This is my passion, this is my Noble Pursuit and this is BrainJams, The Unconference Community.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, amateurevents, barcamp, brainjams, brainjams:planning, confersations, conversationalintelligence, knowledgeeconomy, net2, socialconference, The+Open+Web, thenoblepursuit, unconference, Web2.1

Lake Tahoe Geekend FR-SUN

2006-03-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

I really have not had as much time to promote this as I would like, but I have been trying to get a bunch of people together to go up to Lake Tahoe this weekend. I posted on Upcoming a couple weeks back and a few people are watching but have not gotten any confirmations from anyone yet, other than Ted Rheingold of Dogster, Kristie and myself. If you are interested in heading up to Lake Tahoe for some geeking out and skiing/boarding this weekend, please let me know by tomorrow, Tuesday March 28. Our house has a foosball table and high speed WiFi. Better still, there is a ton of snow. We will most likely be heading to Alpine Meadows on Saturday.

We will be going up on Friday afternoon no matter how many people are interested...

BrainJams Community - Help with site needed

2006-03-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

I could really use your help with getting the new BrainJams community site together. I have tried to do this on my own for too long, and was wrong for trying to do it all. Nate has helped out a bit, as well as many other friends, but when I finally had a chance to sit down with Will Pate the other day, it all really came together and now we are moving forward in earnest.

This is good because we can now really kick ass on the New Orleans event, as well as forming a local group for New Orleans to leverage into the future.

I have published a BackPack Page to get you an idea of what I need help with. If you are interested and available to kick in a few hours on some of these items, please email me and let me know.

The End of Media Barons

2006-03-17T18:53:00.000-08:00

Finally going through a few of those tabs that have been open forever and came across this very important piece in the MediaGaurdian talking about Rubert Murdochs speech to a 612 year old newspaper association earlier this week. While there are many quotes of note which really means you need to go read the piece, the most striking thing to me was this Murdoch quote:

"Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart"To his credit, he seemingly understands that this is the great power of blogs and user generated content. That the medium alone is just the medium - the real power comes from people touching and influencing other people. The packaging can be flashy and upscale, or as simple as the Denver Tech Meetup. As the 'stuff of [citizen] journalism' resonates with people by feeding their mind and their heart, it changes everything.

Long live the Web.

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, newscorp

Time to Raise the Decorum Levels

2006-03-16T17:09:00.000-08:00

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

What I Want from Amazon's S3 Grid Storage

2006-03-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

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

We Need An Army of Digitial Anthropologists

2006-03-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

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

ZDNet

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.

Tech Tags: freeideas freeideas:chrisheuer digitalanthropologists podtech npr podshow vj videojournalist knowledgeeconomy getv search darkmatter brainjams

Peer to Peer Teaching in the Commons

2006-03-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

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.

---

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

DOJ 0.75 - Google 0.25

2006-03-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

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

Microsoft ReDesigns iPod Packaging

2006-03-13T16:30:00.000-08:00

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

Front Range BrainJam

2006-03-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

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

Xposted Launches - New Way to Monetize your Blog

2006-03-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

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 Berkeley in Review

2006-03-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

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

To blog or not to blog...

2006-03-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

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...

It's Official! - 07/07/07 Wedding - Location TBA

2006-03-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

Well, we have heard enough of the "so when are you going to get married?" bit and after sleeping on the idea for several months it seems that Saturday July 7, 2007 is going to be the date of Chris & Kristie's wedding - So save the date!

For me, the push over the edge was realizing that my grandmother's engagement ring had two rows of seven diamonds - it reminded me of how superstitious my Irish grandmother was and how happy she would be about getting married on such a good date. Now I just need to check with the astrologers and feng shui experts to let us know if it is really an auspicious day for us - JK!

It will be a destination wedding, so if you need to, start saving up now as all friends will be invited. Exactly where is still up in the air - I would really like Big Sur or Napa or The Greek Isles, but I really want my grandfather there so we might end up doing it in Miami Beach, Napes, Key West or maybe even some other Florida beach town. After the last time I brought my grandfather out to California in 2001 (the month before 9/11) he refuses to fly and since he is my only family left, I really need to have him there. His 90th Birthday is coming up next month on April 30th, so it would be really amazing for him to be there for me - he is not only my grandfather, but growing up in his house, he is like a father to me, and since my Mom and Grandmother have passed, he is also a close best friend - in fact, I am probably the only person he really confides in now, though he is pretty much an open book just like me...

Anyways, thanks to my lovely fiance for understanding the importance of this to me and thanks to those of you who were not overly pushy about setting the wedding date. As for the rest of you bridezilla's... well, I hope you are finally as happy as we are.

Love you baby - thanks for being you and loving me as much as I love you.

Technorati Tags: chrisandkristie, 070707

BrainJams: Boundary Spanners in the Commons...

2006-03-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Well, it has been a long and somewhat silent week for me - or at least for my blog because my voice is hoarse from talking to everyone so much. Last week's BrainJams in Berkeley gave me a lot to think about, but it was the right stuff to think about because the vision for BrainJams is getting clearer and so is the story around it. From the feedback I have been getting, it feels as if BrainJams is the early manifestation of a community of people who break through traditional boundaries and participate in open collaboration in the public commons.

This is good. The audience for the message is identified. The purpose is becoming clear. The message is getting simpler (though watch out for the buzzwords that follow). The format for the events is evolving in a great way. The discussions of the past few months are leading to action.

While I am driving the organization, I still feel like I am in the backseat and the participants behind the wheel, so let me put this idea to you as YAPMS (Yet Another Proposed Mission Statement):

BrainJams is a community of people who span traditional boundaries within and across organizations for the purpose of populating, organizing and enhancing the "Public Knowledge Commons" while teaching other's to make the best use of the appropriate tools for their situation to connect, communicate and collaborate within their communities.

From initial discussions this week, it would seem that this resonates, is somewhat unique, matches my original intentions and just feels right, though admittedly it could use some 'wordsmithing'.

While this includes the idea of unconferences as a primary venue for peer to peer learning, it encompasses more then this singular idea for real time human gatherings. In a very real sense, the name brought forth a format and the format developed the purpose as it was within those open space conversations where this idea really grew. Yes it is still about Web 2.1 and the people within it (or as I am fond of calling it now, the Human Centered Web) but it is also about much more.

It is about freedom of expression. It is about standing up and being heard. It is about making things right - because WE can, even when the system can not. It is about the simple fact that the knowledge I need to know, to do what I have to do, is out there somewhere. It is about the fact that technology alone can not get me that information reliably - but smart people like you can with the aid of technology, particularly with the technology of the Human Centered Web. It is about learning from one another. It is about the computer being good with information and people being the source of the wisdom of how to use that information. It is about tolerance for differences and embracing commonalities between us. It is about diversity of perspective and culture. It is about doing what is best for our communities because it is also best for ourselves. it is about seeking out the truth rather than pushing an agenda. It is about taking action as much as it is about discussing which actions need to be taken.

So where do we start? or rather, where do we go from here?

I could really use some help is with the following items:

Hire a grant writer to help us get a grant from a foundation
Build out the community web site completely to align with the vision above
With that grant, to hire a small full time staff to handle the operational aspects of the BrainJams organization (Executive Director, Administrative Assistant, Event Logistics Coordinator and Community Content Editor)
Begin a research project into mapping the history of groups, formats and tools to determine what works in which situations
Begin to map out which groups exist today, what their purposes are and who the members are. This will allow more people to easily find people who are passionate about the same noble pursuit that they share so they can more easily tap into that community for conversation and the knowledge they need to take action themselves directly. This also addresses the fact that many groups exist for the same purpose, but have not aligned in action or understanding yet - in effect to become a "Meta-Group" that helps them span their organizational boundaries.
Planning BrainJams New Orleans for May 4, 2006
Refine all this thinking into a clear plan for the organization

Wish there was more time to dive deeper into all of this, as there are still about 5 or 6 blog posts I need to get out to explain the thinking behind this, but work calls, so I must close for now. Please do let me know what you think about these ideas, whether or not this is too expansive or too restrictive, and how we might improve upon this concept even further...

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, amateurevents, brainjams, brainjams:planning, net2, thetruthtellers, unconference, Web2.0, Web2.1

Most Important Insyte from BrainJams Berkeley

2006-02-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

The fire hose has been turned on for the last 48 hours - both for a client and for BrainJams. So far I have about 7 pages of a word document that needs to be edited and remixed for easier consumption - once I get some rest anyway. Still, I wanted to put this out right away as it is important.

The vision for BrainJams has finally become clear for me - I am fortunate to have the input of some fairly sharp people on this and look forward to further insightful analysis from Shannon Clark and Paul Sas - Christoper Allen and Dave Buerlind - and much thanks to Lee for sticking with my loose experiment - am looking forward to more of his input on these issues as they come into the realm of online conversation.

So the key insyte so far is based on some of what David was referencing as the "SIG of SIGs" concept - but more so by applying an understanding of Paramedia as Cathryn Hrudicka referenced via Web Content Day. Still, it is the more generic pattern that is really at play here - the most important value that BrainJams can deliver is in the meta layer, the mapping of knowledge to situations through collective effort the contextual vision is much wider than Wikipedia, though it certainly benefits from their work thus far. An effort to bring together all the differnet projects and communities out there working on putting knowledge into the public commons. This is much bigger than unconferences, though it does incorporate them and leverage its learnings. It would seem that there is a need for an organization to work in the metalayer across all orgnaizations, tools companies and individual knowledge workers - connecting the dots across organizations and communities of practice with the ultimate goal of seeding the situationally aware knowledge commons.

We discussed the idea of having multiple events in the future for different purposes - this is highly likely to happen and is also so, so 'meta'.

I need to hire a killer 'grant writer' - does anyone have any reccomendations?

The format of the next brainjams is seemingly known now that we have learned what we did from the Berkeley event. The next one we do here will be using a format similar to the one below.

10am - BrainJamming one-on-one)
Noon - Lunch
1PM - User Demos "My Favorite Tool/Tools" - 5 minutes each
2PM - Review Breaktrhough Sessions (more open space)
230PM - Breakthrough Session 1
3PM - Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
315PM - Breakthrough Session 2
345PM - Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
4PM - Breakthrough Session 3
430PM - Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
445PM - Wrap up the day

It is amazing to think that this might be the beginning of something along the lines of what I wrote about with The Noble Pursuit as a real possibility.

Thanks again to everyone who came out on SAT, it was very worthwhile for us, I hope the same was true for you despite the problems with trying the new format I had proposed - mea culpa... Thankfully something wonderful came out of it. Goes to show that the most difficult, crazy processes can still yield excellent insytes and real value when the intentions are in the right place.

Will put more links in tomorrow - off to bed for now...

What We Will Discuss @ BrainJams Berkeley

2006-02-24T23:23:00.000-08:00

Here is a mindmap of the answers we received to the question "What do you want to learn at BrainJams?" Click on the image or here for a larger view. The MindMap file will be available from within the BrainJams Community Site at the end of the day tomorrow along with the notes we are going to take on the topics we dive into deeper.

Unfortunately I have not heard back from the people at MindJet in several weeks, so a lot of things we hoped to do with the MindMaps won't be happening. Instead we will be using the Wiki capabilities inside the Drupal community. Not as cool, but just as good if not better for ease of use.

Social Bookmarking Tools - Commoditization Continues

2006-02-24T00:42:00.000-08:00

Steve Wrubel talks about the crazy, overheated Social Bookmarking space - he is right in that there are too many of these services out there and a shakeup is coming fast, but thinking that the game is over because Yahoo! bought delicious is really Ri.dic.u.lous

I don't believe Google has even touched the market yet, but you can bet it will once things start to get shaken up. More importantly, some of the existing one's will survive and thrive in consolidation. Pluck certainly has a vision for the bigger picture though the verdict is still out and they have not received wide spread recognition yet as I thought they should have had by now.

What it really comes down to once again is that all the talent is dispersed and competing instead of collaborating towards common goals. Though it is supposed to be about the work, the users and real values now, it is still about the money and the dreams of a big GYM buyout or perhaps even public exit... Unfortunately for them, and for us, this is something that 200 different, very weak brands with commodity products will never ever do.

Technorati Tags: delicious, socialbookmarking, Web2.0

A Good, Happy and Free Life - Living The Four Agreements

2006-02-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons for my blog post yesterday on giving credit where credit is due is that The Four Agreements has been coming up again and again lately. Mike Prince of Mobido asked me about it the other night at MashupCamp, I talked about it the other day with Grace Davis at WoolfCamp and I pulled it out the other night to read a few passages. So it seems like a good time to tell a short version of the story of how I came to learn of his work and the good work of one of his students named David Dibble. But first, let me explain what the book is, what it says and why I believe it is so important.

Simply put, I feel he has hit on the core universal truths for living a good, happy and free life. In essence the most important 'rules' for being human. When I looked within myself and touched the things that pained me most from my life, I found that without exception, all of the pains and heartaches I experienced were a result of these things. As a systems thinker who excels at pattern recognition, these were perhaps the simplest to see and the hardest to correct. In fact, I sincerely believe that living by these agreements goes against the grain of our socialization and in some regards, against our very nature.

But I know from personal experience now, that striving to live by these principles is indeed liberating and my life is generally happier because of it (though I still struggle daily with #2 and #3).

The Four Agreements (from Don Miguel's Web site)

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you wonít be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

When I was first introduced to his work, I was on a VisionQuest in Death Valley's Owlshead Mountains with two great guides from Rites of Passage Vision Quest. Mike Bodkin and Linda Sartor are beautiful people who really helped me find my center, though I have struggled to remain there as I often live in my head rather than grounded in my heart - but that is another story for another day. A few members of the group I was with mentioned this book and tried to convey the wisdom it contained. It seemed that the interpretation of one of my fellow questers was a bit skewed and as such I missed a great opportunity to really learn from the book for a few months, but eventually it did jump off the shelves of a local Borders bookstore and it changed my life.

As I finished reading it that night, my head was spinning and my heart leapt with joy as I realized that I had finally discovered this important set of life altering insights. Having recently written my little manifesto, The Noble Pursuit, and with Worldcom's ethics scandal in the news (along with all the others at that time), my first thought was "This is what we need in the business world. I am going to write this book for business." Late at night the following day, I was searching around the Internet to see if there might be something related, when I stumbled upon David Dibble and found that he had already written that book and it was soon going to be published. I excitedly wrote David an email at like 330am telling him my life story and hoping to connect with him.

He wrote back, we talked via phone and he sent me an early manuscript of the book which I devoured and marked up with lots of other thoughts and ideas. He invited me to one of his early training sessions for New Agreements coaching in San Diego - this was even more transformational than the books. It was an incredibly deep, positive experience that really did lay the foundation for a lot of the philosophy I bring to my work around change management and how businesses should operate from authenticity. In fact, it was his suggestion about how to make email more personal that I follow when I sign my emails "With love". I had hoped we would have opportunities to collaborate more, but they never materialized really as I was still seeking my path - though he and his lovely wife Linda have always been within my heart.

More recently, as I noted back in December, I had a chance to talk with him when I was trying to figure out what ice breaker to use for our BrainJams event in Menlo Park at SRI. He was kind enough to teach me about the hula hoop exercise which was a big success there as well as in DC. I hope to find the time and space to collaborate again with him on bigger things, though am not sure what those things are yet - I am going to call him tomorrow to see if he might have any more jewels up his sleeve for our Berkeley event, but given the last minute nature of the call, may not even be able to connect with him via phone. Regardless, The New Agreements in the Workplace is still a big part of the knowledge I share through BrainJams and more importantly, the manner in which I share it - from the heart, as a truth teller and always doing my best.

Technorati Tags: brainjams:related, changemanagement, donmiguelruiz, forBrainJams25feb2006, fouragreements, freeideas, heartofbusiness, daviddibble, spirituality, thenewagreements, thetruthtellers

Getting to BrainJams Berkeley

2006-02-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

We have all the details and some good directions for Saturday's event on the Wiki, but just in case you are more visual, I have posted a Flickr set that will take you from the parking garage to the Lipman Room. Simple, but sweet.

Technorati Tags: brainjams25feb2006

BrainJams Format Changes for Berkeley

2006-02-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

I hinted at this earlier, but wanted to get the details and vision settled before writing it out and trying to explain it. One of the reasons I was so honored to get Lee Felsenstein's involvement with our upcoming BrainJams is that I knew he had been thinking about ad-hoc collaboration for quite some time. In fact, there are several things he always wanted to try, but really could not due to time constraints and traditions with the Homebrew Computer Club. I feel very blessed that we were able to have our own mini-BrainJams the other day near The Fonley Institute offices in Palo Alto, CA that resulted in the following changes to the agenda and the format.

First, though, what might be considered mildly bad news - we are not going to have time for our one-on-one knowledge networking due to changes in the format. Instead, I would ask that you consider coming a little earlier where you can either mix and mingle beforehand - we are hopeful that someone may want to organize a short session to start at 930am, but this is unknown. DON'T PANIC - the schedule, as you will see, is filled with opportunities for what Homebrew called "Random Access" and what we consider "Hallway Conversations". This is an essential part of making the unconference model successful.

I should point out here that we are still leveraging the open space model and still focusing on participant lead discussions. But as I have said in the past, we will always be open to experimenting, trying to improve on our primary goal, which is connecting people, ideas and resources. To this end we have identified four bottlenecks we hope to solve with the new format. 1) The same people choose and lead conversations on the same topics because they are extroverted leaders - this is not a bad thing, but does not allow for a diverse range of conversations in the limited space/time we have available. 2) We want everyone to get the most from the day but this is reliant on the unknown factor of who actually shows up and what knowledge they can contribute. 3) 30 minutes does not allow for people to get into the topics in a manner conducive to deep learning. 4) We need to improve the way that the knowledge shared during the conversations is shared beyond the physical space and encourage the conversations of the day to continue after we leave. We hope this may result in slight improvements to the open space format, but honestly we may find it just doesn't work the way we hope and will make adjustments during the day if necessary.

So what will the day look like?

9:00am - Start arriving, help setup, meet other BrainJams participants, create account on BrainJams community site for sharing notes - coffee, fruit, muffins will be available courtesy of Rate it All

9:30am - Possible knowledge networking sessions (3 mins instead of 5 mins) standing instead of sitting

10:00am - Introductions and review format of day - aka "Tech and Flow". Everyone's three words and Blog URL will be printed in the program, but not their email address - you will need to collect these directly or connect with them through their Blog.

10:15am - Lee and Chris Heuer will kick off a conversation on "Learning from the past" and learning from other disciplines. This is essentially what is happening as a result of their collaboration on the format. But Chris never saw the Homebrew Computer Club format as a model to learn from because he did use the same language. This is an open conversation lead by the two facilitators for the day, it is not meant to be a fireside chat or keynote per se. We want to hear other examples and other insights from participants on this important topic that is at the heart of what BrainJams does.

10:45am - Everyone participates in a large group discussion on what they came to learn for the day based on responses to the registration form questions. During this period of time we will identify the three key themes that will become the focus of the day and each of the three groups. From responses thus far it seems that areas of interest include Blogging, Citizen Journalism, Collaboration, Building Community and just Learning New Stuff.

11:15am - Random Access / Open Hallway Conversations

11:30am - Everyone will choose one of the three groups for initial discussions focused on identifying key issues and/or sub-topics related to their primary group theme. To really have a broad discussion of the theme, essentially mapping out key questions or issues that are of interest to people in attendance. From this we also need to identify if any participants have enough expertise / knowledge to lead a conversation on the most important issues. In a very real sense this serves as an introduction to the theme for people who don't know much about it while enabling those with deeper knowledge to point out what the most important considerations are.

12:00pm - Reconvene. Each of the three groups will have 10 minutes to present the top issues within their theme and get quick positive/negative feedback on their recommendations for the two afternoon Breakthrough Sessions. These will be posted on the board as the afternoon schedule.

12:30am - Lunch will be brought in from Togo's courtesy of Lockergnome and Gada.be

1:30pm - Breakthrough Sessions. This is pretty much as we have done in the past, but based on the group discussions rather than on the individual who claims the spot fastest. There should be one person who is the conversation facilitator/leader who ideally would be an expert on the subject matter, but will not just be a speaker. This person should keep the conversation on topic and moving, while ensuring that everyone has a chance to be heard. Additionally, each session should be recorded to be Podcast later and each session requires a Note Maker who will be responsible for posting the notes to the BrainJams site.

2:15pm - Capture and Process Breakthrough Session - Everyone will have 10-15 minutes to capture their thoughts on the conversation, work with the note-maker to ensure key points are captured and to post any additional questions that are still lingering to the BrainJams community site.

2:30pm - Random Access / Open Hallway Conversations

2:45pm - Reconvene as a large group to discuss content of Breakthrough Sessions. Each note maker will have approximately five (5) minutes to share what was discussed and let us know if the topic for the next Breakthrough Session has changed at all as a result of the first conversation.

3:15pm - Breakthrough Sessions

4:00pm - Capture and Process Breakthrough Session

4:15pm - Reconvene as a large group to discuss content of Breakthrough Sessions. Each note maker will have approximately five (5) minutes to share what was discussed.

4:40pm - Provide feedback on format and wrap up loose ends for the day.

5:00pm - Day ends, clean up help appreciated.

5:30pm - Meet at Jupiter Pizza for a few beers courtesy of Laughing Squid and Rate it All. If we can get their early enough, the manager will let us have an area for ourselves. We will be leaving at about 7pm.

So that is what we would like to do this time. A bit different, but it feels like a good set of improvements. Many thanks to Lee for sharing his ideas on how to make this work better. We are all really looking forward to seeing each of you and learning from you. Much thanks and love to you all!

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:planning, openspace, socialconference, The+Open+Web, unconference, Web2.1

Giving credit where credit is due.

2006-02-22T21:47:00.000-08:00

I have been through a lot of drama in my day with all sorts of different people from different statures in life. I don't particularly care for drama though I have also created my own share of it. Thankfully I have been reasonably good at keeping it out of my life lately - even when it is being forced on me through the actions of others. As Don Miguel Ruiz says in The Four Agreements, "don't take things personally".

This is perhaps the hardest of the Four Agreements to keep - even more so than "don't make assumptions" - but it is often the most important as it can really throw a curve ball in your day when you are bounding along, happy as a lark and suddenly find out that someone you thought was your friend does something or says something against you, behaving more like a competitor instead of a collaborator.

So what to do when you find out that someone you trusted is actually trying to discredit you instead of working together towards common goals? What to do when someone smiles at you and lies to your face? What to do when you hear from other people the wild things they are saying about you behind your back? Simple. Don't take it personally. It is their problem, not yours, so all you need to do is remain true to yourself and keep living your life with right speech, right action and right intent. Easier said than done - my initial reaction is usually one of anger, but with age and some experience I have learned to let go of most of it - even while the deep hurt remains inside as yet another scar to be healed.

Still, it has never stopped me from being the person I am, from trusting again, from sharing my insights with others or from loving everyone I meet - even when I don't particularly like them. The other day I was talking with Kristie about the many places my 'Idea DNA' resides across the Internet. We discussed the many people I have spoken with - who appropriated my ideas as their own or merely built on top of them without even a word of thanks for the inspiration. Instead of this happening inside a big organization where the person leveraging the ideas would be a boss/supervisor/vp, it has occurred across multiple organizations, in the wild wooly entrepreneurial landscape. I can't begin to post all of these experiences here, but there are nearly a dozen companies or products that were influenced by my insights through conversations with founders or key team members. In each case, it would have been great to get some sort of consulting contract from it. It would have been even better to have been acknowledged as a contributing influence.

While I usually don't like to call people out by name for this sort of thing, this is one story whose time has come.

The most prominent example of where I believe my Idea DNA was appropriated without recognition is with BuzzMetrics. (The most recent situation will be written about another day after I have dealt with the matters personally and directly.) I have never written on this situation or publicly discussed this before beyond conversations with friends, but it is a good point of reference for this post with the intention of highlighting the important issue of honesty and attribution together with the issue of how to deal with people who are seemingly your friend but are perhaps working against you. Their recent acquisition by Nielsen, their subsequent acquisition of Intelliseek and some links sent to me about them being sued by New Media Strategies make it a good time to at least set the record straight regarding my involvement in the story.

If you are wondering, I am not worried about being sued for writing this, because it is all true. I am not making any claims against them, and besides, if they decide to sue they will just end up giving me a bigger platform for the truth which could possibly taint the company's stature more than the recent lawsuits. This is the story of how I met the founders of a little known, barely launched portal called PulpFree and how my Idea DNA was imprinted on their company leading to a change in their business model.

I first met Jonathan Carson and Braxton Robason through Matthew Slaughter, whom I believe I originally met at a Netpreneur event on March 7, 2000 via an introduction from Sacha Cohen - it was the same night that Christopher Locke signed my copy of the Cluetrain actually. It felt like Matt was an old soul, who was smart and on the rise after leaving the Carlyle Group to pursue dotcom fame and fortune like all good MBA's did back in 1998-2000. Matt had made an introduction for me to his VC firm which was playing incubator in Old Town Alexandria. The firm was called Paladin Companies and had not yet moved into their huge 32,000 square foot space - in fact we met over in a temporary office on South Union Street in Old Town. The first meeting with all of them (after giving Paladin an executive summary without an NDA - b/c they never sign NDA's) was in early April of 2000 - the VC (I believe it was Michael Hartman, but am honestly not totally sure without digging up the records from storage) wanted to have the PulpFree technical team (Braxton) review my ideas for Conversal on the technical merits - so they brought Braxton in and I had a discussion with him in the conference room, sketching out the basic models for what I wanted to do. Jonathan came in briefly later and I had a separate conversation about the potential of the conversational intelligence industry with Matthew, Jonathan and the VC.

After pitching my plan for developing a conversational intelligence system, laying out the business model and explaining the backbone of the plan being based on The Communications Strategy, I got the usual VC pessimism about how it could not work and how PulpFree was the smartest, greatest opportunity etc... It would seem that after these conversations, and their follow on conversations with New Media Strategies about possibly working with them, that the PulpFree team may have realized their model was not going to make them money at the time. With the bubble bursting, they, like I, were seemingly forced to drop the B2C angle and look for a B2B opportunity (also something I discussed with them at length). [See an Internet Archive/WayBack machine version of their site from October of 2000 and one from May of 2001.] Funny thing is of course, aggregators are the hottest things right now, so in a sense they were seemingly on track with the PulpFree model, just not at the right time.

At the time we first met, Braxton and Jonathan had just finished working on a spider that I believe they called 'Harvest' which was being used to populate what was called in the now immortal words of Matt, "a portal for smart people - for twenty and thirty somethings who were not happy with the dumbed down content offered by Yahoo! and Lycos". I told them I thought it was utter folly to try to compete with the big portals - especially on what I saw as a flimsy premise for distinction, but they were undeterred and seemingly offended by my challenge to their model. Over the next few weeks I tried to followup but got no more responses from their VC. I did speak with Matt though (supposedly with Jonathan on the speakerphone though I don't recall hearing him speak) and given that I was running out of cash myself, I suggested we work together towards using their spider to mine all of the online personal communications out there on personal web pages, message boards, public chat rooms and especially comment systems. We would use it to analyze conversations, identify key influencers, monitor what was being said and most importantly, to enable companies to engage in the conversations where they were happening - to be proactive with customer service instead of reactive. I also referenced this thinking as eCKM (electronic customer knowledge management as opposed to CRM) and have lots of power point decks on this with original time stamps that support the story in addition to several emails with them.

In one phone conversation with Matt, I suggested that if they could perhaps come up with a few dollars to pay me, I could work out a discounted rate so we could all work together towards making this a real success. To see how we might be able to work together. He responded that he barely had enough money to pay the team he had. I never really heard from them again, though I occasionally saw Matt at various events - in fact I still haven't heard from them or spoken with them actually and until recently, chose to stay away from WOMMA and the whole industry as I would rather not be associated with those who talk about "Pimping word of mouth" or paying people to blog about something without transparency.

After moving to Silicon Valley in 2001, I saw that they had moved offices to New York and changed their name to BuzzMetrics. I tried to reach out to Matt at that time, but never heard back from him. In fact, he is still pretty invisible in the online world and I can find no real traces of what he has done since. The interesting thing is that although they had access to my business plan and I explained my philosophy behind conversational intelligence in detail to them, I feel that they still have not gotten it right - then again, their experiences likely morphed what they did as a result of the needs of customers. While admittedly they became successful with the idea and I did not - I rest comfortably with my opinion that they really never got the big idea and have yet to do it right, despite the fact that others look to them as 'leaders' in the industry - this is a huge opportunity and why I have chosen to invest my time helping others who do 'get it'.

A friend just asked me if I thought they stole my intellectual property - to which I replied that ideas are a dime a dozen, though good ideas like this one was worth considerably more. All I can say for sure is that I feel my ideas influenced their direction and it seems that the DNA of my idea may have been a key chromosome for the birth of their company. If they had just been more open to collaboration instead of seemingly focusing on their equity positions, we all would have been the better for it. Is this sour grapes? No, though I obviously have a tinge of disappointment that I did not make it as big with Conversal - but that was my fault and is separate of my reasons for writing this now despite what all the trolls and attackers may say tomorrow.

So why share this today? Because this is just one example of how I believe my Idea DNA is within the foundations of many different companies which choose to not recognize the contribution - how many other people has this happened to? Millions. And it is just wrong and has no place in The Open Web that is called Web 2.0 - it has no place within an open society that collaborates in the commons. I am reminded of the old VC adage, "100% of nothing is still nothing - you need to share the wealth in order for it the idea to grow".

For me, it has always been about the recognition of the contributions. So when I take pains to recognize the contributions of others with honor, respect and link love, you now know why I do so. When other people, who approach me with hand extended in friendship, seek input or ideas on what they are doing, I gladly offer my insytes and will continue to do so. After all, it is better to have the ideas living in the world than stuck in my head. I just wish I did not keep running into assholes who seem authentic outside but are seemingly still holding onto narcissistic, 'fuck everyone else' beliefs behind false facades. I have gotten better at identifying those people, but occasionally one slips through the cracks as happened recently.

As much as I want to sit at the cool kid's table like everyone else does, I am happy to be me and surround myself with truly genuine people who are respectful, loving and willing to share - and who give credit where it is due. In fact, I prefer to be with genuine people who are respectful of all people rather than those only concerned with power, fame and fortune. Everyone we meet has something of value to contribute - it is our job to figure out what that is.

It is important to point out here that I don't want money and I don't want to stir shit up (though I suppose it probably will given the stature of these guys now). I just want the truth to be set free and I want us all to make sure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated as the market begins to heat up again. I would like to see that the values of authenticity, transparency, honesty, collaboration and accreditation is at the heart of this important era of our economic recovery. For if it is not, we are doomed to repeat ourselves and watch a bubble boom and then bust.

[Disclosure: While I am now consulting with BuzzLogic, a company that might be considered a competitor of theirs, I can assure you that this has nothing to do with why I am sharing this story today. In fact, BuzzLogic would probably prefer I did not write this, but since it is truth and I am now active in this industry in many ways, it is time to set the story straight and also time to speak up to prevent it from happening again. In the future, I won't be as silent as I have been for the past six years.]

Technorati Tags: co-operative, goodsense, conversationalintelligence, The Open Web, The+Open+Web

Don't Spread Germs!

2006-02-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes leading by example isn't enough. So I guess it is time to make a louder statement.

So I launched a new web site/wiki last night with the hope of spreading the message. Don't Spread the Germs (http://www.dontspreadgerms.org/) is a simple WIKI hosted over on PBWiki where I hope people will contribute more ideas, posts and other knowledge about how we can stop the spread of flus, colds and other nasty bugs that make us all sick and miserable.

Maybe we can come up with a viral message to stop the spread of the viral biology...

Or maybe we can just spread awareness of the idea that people who are sick should not be going out in public and getting others sick. I know some people think the possibility of a Flu Pandemic is some conspiracy or something, but history shows us that such a global pandemic is indeed possible if not highly likely. According to an Australian study reported on CNN, a Bird Flu Pandemic could take up to 142 Million Lives worldwide. The economic devastation would plunge the world into a deeep depression that would take quite a long time to recover from. This is why Kleiner Perkins recently announced a $200 million pandemic fund - these guys are some of the smartest in the business and they know where to place their bets.

Many of us have the technology to work from our homes when we are sick, so why don't we? Because we feel compelled to get outside, we want to have the opportunity to meet the right person, we think we have to do it. We don't need to - we need to respect our associates, co-workers, friends and ourselves enough to help other people stay healthy. Don't Spread the Germs! Stay home and maybe one day this attitude can save a few million lives...

If you agree or disagree with this, tag your posts with 'dontspreadgerms' and lets see if we can all work towards making a difference.

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, economics, flu, goodsense, pandemic, dontspreadgerms

Brainjams Berkeley: Your Input Required

2006-02-21T22:44:00.000-08:00

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

Funding BrainJams as a Non Profit Sevice Provider

2006-02-20T10:43:00.000-08:00

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

Too Many Tabs...

2006-02-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

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:

Had to take a pee break, forgot what I was in the middle of

That damn phony thing going ring a ding ding

Diving down the link hole chasing wabbits

Wanting to write about something really, really badly, but not enough to write it right now

Finding a very important blog post that I need to read, but don't need to read now

Wanting to comment on something but not knowing what I want to say

Having to actually work on something

Not using an RSS Reader and visiting everyone's blog personally and directly

It's too damn easy to open a new tab and/or new window

Following the referrer links from MeasureMap to my blog

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:

To read

To blog

To comment

To re-read

To print

To send to someone

To save to my PDA/phone

To call someone about

To borrow from

To save for a presentation

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

Not going to THE party tonight...

2006-02-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

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

Wrubel Moving PR People to Analytics

2006-02-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

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

SF PIllowFight Club

2006-02-15T07:31:00.000-08:00

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

It's supposed to be A-Z, not A versus Z

2006-02-14T10:22:00.000-08:00

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

Yahoo! 'gets' Web 2.0 and then some...

2006-02-14T00:38:00.000-08:00

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

Technorati 'Authority' - the cool kids' table

2006-02-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

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

Brave Mohammed Cartoon Counter-Protesters

2006-02-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

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

Hard choices come down to values...

2006-02-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to be leaving this evening for Northern Voice 2006 in Vancouver, but I have finally succumbed to the fact that I should not go. Yesterday evening, the occasional hacking cough went deeper and now today I am running a slight fever with body aches and general tiredness.

The importance of this great blogging conference is high for me - not only is it a chance to see friends I have not connected with personally for many months, but I was also planning on debuting a very early release of our BrainJams Unconference Community during my talk at MooseCamp tomorrow morning. On both a personal and professional level, I can not begin to tell you how disappointed I am that I will not be there. One of the worst things at the moment is that my head keeps telling me I am good enough to go, and I do indeed feel better at the moment, but my heart says I should stay home...

Normally, like many others I know, I would still go to this conference. However, I have made a commitment to myself to live from principle centered leadership - and stopping the spread of germs is a principle that has begun to mean a lot to me as I see more and more people playing the role of martyr in the work place, riding public transportation and going into work, spreading their illness to countless others. In this age of potential flu pandemics, in a world that is wired as it is, there is no reason, however compelling, to put myself on an airplane and attend a conference, further spreading the germs that inhabit my body - especially with the chance of getting my friends sick.

I respect them and myself too much to let this spread further - so off to bed I go, for rest and recovery, even though choosing not to go means I am also pissing away several hundred dollars (US) for the hotel and airfare costs.

I don't hold any bad feelings for anyone (especially friends) who may have done this recently themselves - I just wish more people would make the hard choice and stay home, despite the perceived social/business value of going out into the world while sick. Personally, I feel bad enough about having gone out yesterday not realizing I was actually sick - so to the friends I saw yesterday down in Palo Alto, my sincerest apologies to you, I hope you have good health and avoid this nasty bug.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, MooseCamp, northernvoice2006

BrainJams25Feb2006 to be held at UC Berkeley

2006-02-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

Much thanks to Bill Allison for working very diligently over the last couple of weeks towards securing the UC Berkeley Office of the CIO to sponsor our next event on campus. We are awaiting final contracts on the room before we can announce exactly where on campus, but I can say that the room being secured is perfect for us.

In addition to being very excited to have a space lined up this far in advance (over 2 weeks ahead of time!), I am completely stoked that this simple idea has garnered such incredible support. I am continuously humbled by the fact that people like Bill are out there contributing their time and effort to help make these unconferences happen. Of course, it would not have happened if the UCB CIO, Shel Waggener did not get behind the idea and agree to pay for the costs of the room rental - he and Bill are even encouraging key staff to participate, which should bring a great perspective to the day.

This next event will be bringing together the old and the new (more announcements to come shortly) - so it is particularly gratifying to know that one of the reasons Shel agreed to sponsor the event is because he is working hard to ensure his team is committed to technical innovation while still effectively managing their large, industrial-scale information systems. That is the sort of leadership that is sorely needed from IT around the world - the reaching out beyond the walls of traditional silos to connect with other types of people, gaining a deeper understanding of what people need from different perspectives.

Kudos and thanks to Bill, Shel and the rest of the IST Department.

With Lockergnome / Gada.Be sponsoring lunch, Rate-it-All sponsoring Refreshments and Laughing Squid as a supporting sponsor covering administrative costs, we are actually able to get everything paid for and set up in advance without the last minute stress we have experienced in the past. This one is going to be fun and probably full, so please go register today...

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:patron, brainjams:planning

Homebrew Flavored BrainJams in Berkeley

2006-02-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Great news to share with you. I have just returned from a meeting with Lee Felsenstein, one of the original founders of the Homebrew Computer Club. Lee has agreed to collaborate with us on a few ideas of mutual interest and to co-facilitate our BrainJams25Feb2006 event in Berkeley, CA.

In many ways, Lee's facilitation was a crucial aspect of empowering the PC revolution that created so many incredible (and large) companies we now take for granted. When I first met Lee at the SDForum Collaboration SIG event a few weeks ago, I was left speechless when I discovered that what we are doing with BrainJams and BarCamp is pretty much just following in their footsteps. Since they are pretty big shoes to fill, I thought it might be a good idea to bridge the 30 year gap between our foundings and try to learn as much as we could from what they did back in the day.

I can't begin to tell you how honored I am that he said yes and how much I look forward to learning from him, and collaborating with him in the near future. Thank you Lee for being so generous with your time today and with the goodwill you are showing BrainJams in our endeavours.

PS - the photo is one that I took wtih Kristie of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - yes, if you did not know previously, what Lee did with his cohorts back in the day via the Homebrew Computer Club is that important.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:bayarea, unconference

Swicki TagCloud

2006-02-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

Was taking a moment to check the RSS feeds for BrainJams posts when I ended up on Swicki's aggregator search page - forgot I set this up a while back. While it still needs some beefing up, it is actually a pretty cool way to get an insightful look at key concepts I have previously written about across the blogosphere. Well, at least for me it is...

Job Hunting Gets Tougher

2006-02-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

From the looks of it, the people wanting to ensure 'Equal Employment Opportunity' (EEO) are really mucking things up for everyone, including the people they want to serve most. From this article on CNN Money, I was shocked to learn of the new requirements for both employers and job seekers which seem extremely confusing and difficult. Perhaps it is even not to ensure EEO, but rather to make it more difficult. Regardless, it is the exact sort of excessive regulation we should be striving to push out of government.

According to the article, one of the elements of the new regulations you need to watch closely concerns:

Keep your resume up-to-the-minute current. "The rules allow companies to pick a random pool of applicants by searching the job boards for 'most recent' qualified applicants," Crispin [Gerry Crispin from CareerXRoads] notes. "In those cases, no one will even look at a resume that is more than two or three weeks old." Yikes.

Hopefully, I won't be searching for any 'real' jobs in the near future...

Technorati Tags: jobhunting

BrainJams04May2006: New Orleans!!!

2006-02-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday I got some fantastic news via an email newsletter. JazzFest is on this year for the last weekend of April (4/28-30) and the first weekend of May (5/5-7). My first thought was "let's go down there and organize a BrainJams between the two weekends". After some back and forth with Kristie concerning our hectic travel schedule for the first half of the year, I took the plunge and have made all our travel arrangements. Now all we need to do is find a venue.

This is a fantastic opportunity for us, and incredibly good news for one of our favorite cities in the world. Given my feelings about how everyone screwed up on every level of government down there after Katrina, this is a good chance to move beyond the couch potato rhetoric and contribute to the solution instead of the volume of complaints. Of course, it also a great chance to have an incredible time listening to some great music. I feel very blessed that I was able to see NOLA before the Hurricane, going to Jazzfest last year for the first time.

We would very much like to have a discussion about the best way to approach this very special BrainJams. It would be great to perhaps revive the discussion around Jeff Jarvis' Recovery2 and perhaps Sam Perry's work on Reliefopedia. Then again, we could just focus on how people can use technology to rebuild their society after a disaster. Of course the great thing about holding BrainJams is that we don't really need to figure that all out until everyone gets in the room together, but I do think we need to set our intentions around an organizing principle first and foremost.

Regardless, we need local volunteers to help coordinate logistics, we need a space for 120 people (if interest is high enough, perhaps double that) and we would like to very much involve the local government, chamber of commerce, non-profits, musicians and technologists. If anyone knows someone from BamaWorks, we would really like to get them involved too.

If you have any interest in being there for this incredible event, I recommend booking now since our hotel is already sold out for those dates and airfares are still relatively inexpensive.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams04May2006, brainjams:neworleans, NPTECH, reliefopedia, Recovery2

Skype Beats Cell Phone Again

2006-02-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of blog posts I am working on, but this is so sad and funny, I had to get it out right away. So I was talking with Greg Narain on our cell phones a few minutes ago, and the connection just went bad - it was all static and dropped words. So rather than trying to call each other back, I just sat down at my computer and we switched to Skype. The clarity was 10x better than mobile and it makes me think I will one day soon be using Skype as my primary channel of voice communications...

Technorati Tags: skype

BrainJams DC: Small but powerful

2006-02-01T15:44:00.000-08:00

Our BrainJams here in DC on Monday validated many key ideas and taught us many lessons. While we had expected around 35 people or so, 16 (plus Kristie and myself for 18) showed up for the morning BrainJam, in which I was finally able to participate. The good news is, it is a start - and a good one at that. Everyone I spoke with thanked us profusely for doing this in DC and was really enthusiastic about the format, the people and the insights shared. The afternoon Breakthrough sessions began with two groups, one for newcomers and one for more advanced discussions, but they merged during the course of the afternoon.

I have lots to share that I learned from the great people in attendance, as well as thanks for each of them for coming out on a Monday, even though many said "I didn't know what to expect, or even what it would really be". A few photos are on Flickr, but we did not get a chance to take many since we were so involved in the conversation.

Yesterday and today, I received a few emails which really tell the story of the event better than I can.

Matt Gallivan from NPR said:

"It was a great chance to meet a lot of interesting people in the community and to talk about a lot of interesting stuff."

Mirsada Pasalic, an emerging 'fresh face for aging advocacy' said:

"First of all I want to thank you for a FABULOUS day yesterday. I truly enjoyed myself and learned a lot. It was a great mix of people and the "energy" was all good, so thank you for putting it together!"

Camille Preston, an insightful leadership coach, said:

"Thank you so so so much for a truly powerful, inspiring and learning day! As I was describing it to a friend last night, all I could say was that it was fabulous and that my mind was literally truly jammed with so many new insights and perspectives. (as an extraverted nerd - I loved the intensity of learning and wished I'd planned to join the evening!) It was a truly wonderful opportunity to jump into something I "knew I should be doing"... but didn't know where to begin! There are a few things I'm ready to dive into - and I know that the learning will continue."

So all in all, BrainJams30Jan2006 makes it way to the win column. Best of all, it seems as if there will be a community of people willing to do what it takes to do this again and again...

Woolf Camp: because she can

2006-01-25T22:34:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to tell you that Grace Davis is organizing Woolf Camp down in Santa Cruz over President's Day Weekend. She is opening up her house to other bloghers (and bloggers ;) to just come together and be. Her original blog post is a good indicator of the wonderful energy she is cultivating.

Come, evolve with us. Come teach, come learn, come eat a lot of M&Ms, come hang out.

World peace through blogging,
GraceD

Besides Grace being a great writer and all around cool person, she has doubly blessed me by citing BrainJams as one of her inspirations (along with BarCamp) and dubbed me as one of the "techies who are not afraid to be human". Ever since I first saw that kind tribute, I have been wanting to hang out with her and get to know her better. Now Kristie and I have our chance and we are really looking forward to it. Might even go down FRI night beforehand and stay somewhere on the beach...

Will be a good chance to work on posting some of my old poetry and perhaps writing some new stuff. But given the wonderful home spun schedule she has proposed, I just might be too busy "Invent(ing) entirely new art forms and genres of bloggity literature or maybe doing something "workshoppy" while "shyly wander(ing) onto (her) flower-filled deck".

Technorati Tags: amateurevents, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:related, socialconference

BrainJams30Jan2006 - Quick update

2006-01-25T15:23:00.000-08:00

Wow! Once again I am amazed at how people can just come together without a lot of planning and make something cool happen. After reaching out to a few of our former Patrons to help with DC and Berkeley next month, things are feeling really solid.

Not only will be have the right sort of people showing up (including a few Web 2.0 luminaries and a few main stream journalists who really get it), but Lawrence Coburn from Rate It All just stepped up to sponsor the refreshments for BrainJams DC on Monday and to be a supporting sponsor for our Berkeley BrainJams on Feb 25. Shortly after hearing from Lawrence, I got a call from Scott Beale at Laughing Squid who also just signed up as a supporting sponsor for both events. Both have been with us since the beginning and I cant thank them enough.

And now the link love is growing and the word of mouth is spreading...

I am writing another post to go deeper into what we are doing Monday, but in the meantime would like to hear your feedback on this idea: At traditional, academic conferences, researchers submit papers for consideration by the conference. Why not borrow a little from this idea to create a better framework for our conversations at BrainJams? So for Monday's BrainJams event, I propose that everyone submit a Blog Post for consideration by other participants concerning what you want to talk to people about on Monday. Once you do so, please tag it forBrainJams30Jan2006 (just copy and paste the code below into the bottom of your blog post if you do not know how to tag blog posts yet). Another alternative is to write the blog post and then tag it on Delicious or Furl or wherever you place your social bookmarks. Alterantively, you could tag something that has already been written elsewhere that you would like to discuss or just submit the link to the blog post you want to talk about in the comments to this post.

I have already tagged 2 posts to Delicious I think would make for good conversation and am working on writing an original one - so what do you want to talk about?

Technorati Tags: brainjams30jan2006, brainjams:patron, brainjams:planning, forBrainJams30Jan2006

Silly Promotions: Business 2 learning Biz101

2006-01-23T15:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, so we all see the silly credit card offers with useless shwag, and quite a few other funny ones that come in the mail, but this one took the cake for me. Just the pure irony I guess, but Kristie didn't think it was that big of a deal. Why Business 2.0 magazine would offer a useless no-name organizer like this I dont know. Perhaps stretching the readership a bit to a wider, non business savvy audience? Even then, at least get a Palm or PocketPC device.

I expect they will ship me mine and I, likes thousands of other subscribers who have PIM on my phone and in my Palm, will end up throwing it away - a not so great use of landfill space if you ask me. Perhaps if you would just be so kind as to give me the extra dollar back off the subscription price, or perhaps donate the money to a good non-profit lilke Creative Commons, Internet Archive or maybe even that new little startup non-profit BrainJams I keep hearing so much about ;)

Actually, that would be a great way to do promotion like this sustainably - let the subscriber choose a cause to which the magazine can donate, and perhaps even cover in the magazine with regular updates.... hmmmm

BrainJams DC: A slow but steady start

2006-01-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Having just begun promotions for the DC event late last week, I was happy to see that we do already have 12 registrations (other than Kristie and I) this morning, including 2 people who already sent in the suggested donation of $10. At least we have made our minimum number of participants already and I expect the word of mouth to start picking up today and through the week as I get back to blogging (and reading blogs) and making some more new friends.

In addition to Kristie and myself, 2 of the brightest Web 2.0 luminaries from DC have registered - Stowe Boyd and Ken Yarmosh. Everyone knows Stowe - he is one of the driving forces behind Corante and Ken is fairly famous for his innovative use of tagging via the blogosphere as a means for convening a new form of online conversation via the Blogoposium1 tag.

I just got off the phone with Greg Narain who is working on his new startup called SyncPeople. You may have heard of him from his Beercasting days. We can directly trace the lineage of BrainJams back to him - because if it was not for his random phone call one day last spring from my registration for a beercasting event in Florida, I never would have went to Gnomedex, which means I never would have met Will Pate, which means I probably never would have gone to BarCamp - where I met the people who inspired me to take action myself. Which in the end, is what I am really trying to get across to people - that anyone can take action using the amazing and free, easy to use Web tools that are available to bring people together and make a difference.

So the excitement builds....

Technorati Tags: barcamp, brainjams, brainjams30jan2006, Web2.0, Web2.1

Blogging: The need to specialize

2006-01-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

As the ideas behind Web 2.0 get more and more complicated and far reaching in their scope, I am finding it nearly impossible to write about all the great things I am discovering from others and insights I am personally developing. With my time now being taken up by client work, as well as BrainJams, I am in dire need of creating a more specific focus for my professional blog. It is tough for me to do with so many topics of interest receiving so much attention these days. I often find that I have 40+ tabs open at any one time I want to write about, but don't have the time.

This really hit me as I was reading through Dion Hincliffe's blog and came across some great posts he has written lately: Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence, Notes on Making Good Social Software and The Web 2.0 Revolution Spawns Offshoots.

I am not entirely sure what angle I will be taking yet, though with my interest in The Noble Pursuit, People Powered Search and Brainjams that it will involve collaboration, innovation and collective intelligence. To this end, I plan on moving my professional insights, over to Insytes.com and keeping a personal journal site in addition to using BrainJams as a group blogging platform.

Would love to hear some more feedback from those of you who keep separate blogs for such things as well as those of you who keep one blog to rule them all...

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, Web2.0

Innovative Media: Cash Cab on Discovery

2006-01-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

So I was just going to set up the Tivo to record something when I ran across this new show on Discovery called "Cash Cab" - the folks who thought this up are brilliant. Shot in New York City, Cash Cab is billed as the only taxi ride that pays you. In short, a trivia/quiz game show format in a cab. They cruise around picking up fares like a normal cab and then the taxi driver becomes a game show host, awarding cash for every right answer - unless you get 3 wrong before you get to your destination, in which case 3 strikes and your out... of the cab too.

Strange that no one I know talked about this one.

This is just the sort of thing I hoped to see happening with the decreasing cost of media creation tools and our further exploration of creative freedom. Now mass media players are taking a grassroots, bottom up approach towards creating informative entertainment (Cash Cab runs on Discovery). The show has a built in audience with all the people looking for them on the streets, all the people who love New York and the reality show fans - just throw in a random bunch of New Yorkers and voila, instant reality tv meets game show mashup success.

It could have just as easily been done online exclusively, but they are running on Discovery! Great job - now whose great idea is next?

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, newmedia, user generated advertisers

BrainJams30jan2006 to be held at DC Improv

2006-01-13T14:18:00.000-08:00

Just finished meeting with John Johnson, the manager of the DC Improv, and it looks like we have a venue for our Monday January 30th event! While we may not be able to get WiFi going in there, it is a perfect location, about 1 block from the Farragut North Metro station.

There is room for about 300 people in their comedy club layout, but we are going to cap the registrations at 120 people in order to keep Mr. Dunbar happy. (I realize his limit is closer to 150, so perhaps that can be the Law of 10 Dozens instead ;)

We have a long way to go to pull off this event, but I know we can do because we did it before. I have web pages to put together and we need an event page on the Wiki. We really need some sponsors to step up as well. This will be what I get to do when I get home this weekend (in addition to seeing my friend Chris Magoon race tomorrow, meeting with BrainJams team members to work on the technology plan and spending some time with Kristie after a long week away here in DC.

If you are in Washington, D.C. and want to spend some time sharing ideas, resources and insights with your fellow Washingtonians, this is the place for you. Some basic logistics

Monday January 30, 2006 from 1030am to 500pm, registration starts at 10am

Location: DC Improv - 1140 Connecticut Ave, NW Washington, DC 20036

BrainOff Happy Hour from 500pm to 600pm

Morning session we will be BrainJamming - knowledge networking which is akin to speed dating concept

The afternoon will be participant lead discussions on Web 2.0 related topics such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarks, social networks, AJAX etc...

The key to the success of the event is everyone contributes, so if you are planning on coming, think about what you want to share with everyone and what you want to learn

Well, it is time for me to go and start heading through rush hour to get to the airport (IAD from downtown DC). Many thanks to my little, little brother, Brian Kellog for making the introduction to John and much gusto thanks to John of the DC Improv. I am really looking forward to working with them to make the next BrainJams event a real winner!

Great way to explore Delicious

2006-01-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to post a brief note about a cool, very new mashup I ran across via the Delicious Popular bookmarks page, Expialidoci.us lets you look at tag clouds from your Delicious account over specific time periods using a sort of time frame selector similar to the one I love in MeasureMap, but much simpler in design.

This is still early, but a good idea - am looking forward to seeing how other people use it and how he evolves the concept. Have some other ideas here, but no time to write about them now...

Technorati Tags: tags, tagspaces, Web2.0

Flashback 1995: Hyping the Internet

2006-01-05T20:47:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research and chased a little rabbit down a hole to find this article from my early Internet days at Guru Communications / Sobe.com / VCN. Some of it is actually useful to the story today, some funny, but mostly it makes me say duh - strange that many people still don't get it....

So What?

Almost every time you turn on the television or open a newspaper, it seems there is another story about the Information Super-Highway. In 1993 there were 25 articles published on the subject during the entire year. Recently, on February 17, 1995, there were 42 articles published on one day; and that number continues to grow. For the computer novice, which seems to be a large percentage of the population, several questions inevitably arise. What is it? How does it work? Where is it? Who owns it? When will it be available? Why is everyone talking about it?

In short, most of you are probably saying "SO WHAT?"

While the answers to these questions could fill an encyclopedia, every single person on the face of the earth is, or soon will be, affected by this somewhat mysterious development popularly known as the Information Super Highway. Today there are an estimated 35 million people who have access to this new medium of communications. This figure is expected to double by the end of 1995. More immediately, America Online and Compuserve will open up their services so that their four million members will be added to these ranks. When Microsoft debuts its next version of Windows in a few months, the Information Super Highway will be a "mouse click" away from millions of additional consumers with an ease that equals turning on the computer. [same can be said now of Windows Vista and RSS]

This requires an understanding of what these events and technological advancements mean to society and yourself as an individual. It would certainly help if you understood how computers work, but that knowledge is really not necessary. What you do need to know is how the technology can work for you.

The Information Super Highway, now being paved as a network known as the Internet, is not so much about computers, as it is about communications: About removing geographic and cultural boundaries; About eliminating financial barriers to commerce; About developing new opportunities; About being more efficient. More importantly, the Internet is about the people who use it and what they do with it. [still working on that cross boundary stuff after all these years]

Society is about to cross the threshold into the new millennium. As we review our history, we have marked the evolution of mankind with important milestones and technological advancements. The use of fire, stone tools and the wheel. The use of paper, ink, the written word and the Pony Express. The cotton gin, the mass produced automobile and the telephone. Radio, motion pictures and television. The personal computer, the fax machine and now the Internet. The culmination and integration of thousands of years of evolution of mankind is requesting your presence and it is not going to wait for you.

"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." -- Antoine de Saint-Exuperay, 1939

What is the most important knowledge we have gained from witnessing these milestones in society? The single most important insight is that change is inevitable and necessary in our continuing evolution. We have also learned that resistance to change is also inevitable. Through the efforts of a few brave souls willing to challenge the status quo and bring forth change everyone will benefit - even those who may oppose it. Today, once again, we are witnessing this revolutionary change and it is happening at a staggering pace through numerous technological advancements.

The Internet, however, is delivering more than mere technological advancements. The Internet is creating a political, economic and social revolution on a scale so large that it will change your life regardless of your interest in it. Representing what is known as an "enabling technology," the recent union of man, telephone and computer enables you to perform old activities in exciting new ways, and entirely new activities in a manner previously discussed only in popular science fiction.

For perspective, imagine being one of the first people to see the Wright brothers fly at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Imagine hearing a startled Alexander Graham Bell shouting -Watson, come in here, I need you." Imagine all of your neighbors and individuals from around the country watching moving pictures of "Uncle Miltie" in a dress. Imagine communicating with a frightened student from China during the recent attempt at revolution; his only link to the outside world was through the Internet. You do not need to imagine these events because we know that they are possible, they have all occurred, and they changed our lives forever......such is the importance of the Internet.

Now, imagine reading the newspaper, communicating with a friend in Europe, virtually traveling to Africa, following an expedition up Mount Everest, or watching portions of a Rolling Stones concert live at your desk. Imagine researching important matters in your life, without having to search the library for countless hours. Imagine buying all of your groceries through your home computer, or buying the latest Compact Disc without shopping the racks, or paying all of your monthly bills without wasting countless hours on tedious errands. These time saving, relief filled devices are all possible, or soon will be, through the Internet.

Does the Internet sound like something that merits a little more of your attention? Unless you live in another dimension or want to be secluded from the world at large, you cannot avoid this important development in the history of humankind. By beginning to gain a greater understanding now, and coming to terms with the many ways the Internet can begin to benefit your life today, you will be prepared for tomorrow. Tomorrow is not a far off distant place of unknown potential and technology. Tomorrow is here today, and it is called the Internet.

For a somewhat funny photo of me in my vest wearing, goatee sporting, Mac SE surfing best, check out the original article (complete with a 'sand' tiled background)

Technorati Tags: thereframers, Web2.1

Merry Christmas to all and to all a great life!

2005-12-25T15:46:00.000-08:00

Been really struggling with what to say this year in my irregularly annual Christmas message. So many great and important things are happening in the world right now. Yet many of us carry a heavier heart when considering all of the not so great things that are going on as well. So many things that we would love to see made right, and so little of our effort available to help make it so. It all seems too overwhelming at times - so much though that we get caught in analysis paralysis, considering the thousands of possibilities for things to go wrong with different appraches.

But I know a secret which you also know deep down inside. We all have control over one thing that trumps this sense of overhwheling if we can only remember it is available to us. We have absolute, 100% control over ourselves and what we do with our focus and our energy in the present moment. In other words, we should not worry about what happened in the past, we can nor worry about what might happen in a far off distant future. Rather, learn from our past, imagine the best possible future and put all your efforts into making the most of this very second.

The most important thing each of us can do is to be present, awake and aware of each and every moment in our lives, be happy and make the most of it. I try to meditate in order to hone my ability to be present and pay attention, but it is hard. I will be trying harder in 2006 for sure. I may even try to get together with a small group of people to meditate together since I never did find a sangha that fit me.

I will also be investing more energy in what I do best, which is generating innovative ideas for new companies, new programs, new projects and other activities. Unlike in the past though, I will be giving many of them away here in my blog and tagging with 'freeideas=chrisheuer', One of my latest realizations concerns the need to capture and share the ideas we generate more quickly, in their barely formed state. For if it is true that the universal consciousness does bubble up the same ideas in different forms in different places (like we have seen with people powered search during Q4) it is truly best to engage with those other people in conversation. It is even better when these same people can find a way to collaborate with one another by sharing their insytes and building upon them with even greater innovations.

It seems this is another aspect of what we are doing with BrainJams. It is also why I will be using my blog to give suggestions to companies for how they might improve - some unsolicited advice. It makes you wonder how different things might be if companies had a deep understanding of how to listen to the conversations people have about such things. It makes you wonder if it is even possible for them to listen and respond sometimes. These posts will be tagged with 'suggestionbox:COMP_NAME=chrisheuer'.

It just seems to me, that if I can be more present as I meet each moment of my life, bringing my whole self to each moment, that I could develop some understandings that would make things right in many small ways. So rather than being overwhelmed at the size of the task, I need to embrace each moment and take charge of my attention, connect with my true intention and take action in some way. Cumulatively, these small acts will make real impact.

Better still - as more people become connected wth the open web to also do these things. The power will be magnified a hundred fold. I am proud to say, "this is my Noble Pursuit".

The Google Doodle

2005-12-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

I like what Google is doing with their Google Doodle. I am actually interested to see what it becomes when it is all lit up. Let's hope it is worth the wait...

Geek Field Trip to Anchor Steam Brewery

2005-12-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Ted Rheingold and I organized a Geek Field Trip to the Anchor Steam Brewery. Totally forgot it was the winter solstice when booking the reservation, but it worked out just right. Unlike most other tasting rooms, the folks at Anchor Steam are pretty generous with their pours and we all got a good buzz on for the afternoon. The photos that Kristie and I took are over on her Flickr account.

A few interesting things we learned during the tour:

The first Christmas Beer was the Liberty Ale (a mighty tasty one still)
Their Steam beer was the first brewed in the US after the end of prohibition
They produce about 85,000 barrels every year with only 54 employees

Pretty cool folks, excellent facility and great beer! We were very honored to meet the owner/saviour of the brewery, Fritz, who graciously signed our Magnum's of the Chrismas Ale.

We are planning to do other Geek Field Trips next year - stay tuned for more details...

BrainJams Connects the Open Web of People

2005-12-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

This is from a Press Release that I wanted to send out, but did not after conferring with others. It is just too long for a piece of PR. Writing for the blog has let my brevity skills wither...

The emergence of the knowledge economy is changing how we gather and share information, transforming business, community and social networks. BrainJams, a new not-for-profit social venture, takes this idea to the next level by applying the ideals of the open source community and new ideas around knowledge networking to connect ordinary people with extraordinary potential. The idea is to get people outside of their traditional ‘box’ to see the world from different perspectives.

With the primary mission of “connecting the dots” across traditional organizational boundaries, BrainJams facilitates knowledge networking events where people can share their ideas and experiences within a loose structure often referred to as an “Unconference”. While contributing relevant insights to many different people, participants receive much more than they give, just as they do with online communities. The intention of the event is straightforward - share your knowledge with others and everyone gets ahead. These ideals have been proven in the open source community across multiple cultures with diverse people working towards common goals. In essence, BrainJams is striving to apply the knowledge learned from experiences within such virtual communities to real world, real time, real space communities.

The format of BrainJams events can be ‘borrowed’ by anyone and improved upon under the Creative Commons Share and Share Alike license. BrainJams is in the process of building a community of unconference practitioners to share best practices and learn how to best organize similarly intentioned events. Aspiring BrainJams organizers from around the world can use the BrainJams wiki to promote and organize their events. It is expected that there will be no single format that defines BrainJams events other than each event having a simple organizing principle, setting the intention of sharing knowledge and utilizing some basic forms of structure for facilitating the given event.

According to Chris Heuer, founder and Executive Director of BrainJams, “There is no box. The only constraints we have on our thinking are the ones we imagine. Why not get people together from different backgrounds, set a good intention and see what happens? Everyone has their own noble pursuit, and mine is getting sharp people together and watching the magic unfold when they are engaged in ad-hoc collaboration, talking about their individual passions and ideas. The world will only continue to be the way it is as long as people believe it will – getting people to talk about their ideas and how they might affect change is the all important first step on a very long journey.”

Building on the recent success of the BrainJams event held on December 3rd, 2005 at SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA, the community continues to grow with numerous volunteers and contributors joining our efforts each day. BrainJams is now officially establishing itself as a non-profit entity with 501c3 status to further promote the sharing of knowledge across traditional boundaries, and educating people in the practical uses of Web 2.0 technologies (in other words, teaching people how to connect with other people using Open Web technologies). Today, Heuer is pleased as punch to announce that David Gutelius of SRI, Jennifer Myronuk of Storyfield and Kristie Wells of Gupta Technologies are joining him on the Board of Directors. Wells is Heuer’s fiancé and his right arm in developing the organization, while the advice and support of Gutelius and Myronuk has been invaluable in solidifying the plans for BrainJams’ future.

Heuer has also formally announced his intention to raise $1.5 million dollars in 2006 for the purpose of touring the United States, hosting BrainJams in communities large and small. Before the national tour however, BrainJams will be held in select cities as we work out the logistical and ideological nuances of the event format. Dates have been proposed for BrainJams events in Washington, D.C. on Monday January 30, 2006 and Berkeley, California on February 13, 2006. Volunteers and patrons are actively being sought for each event as are event locations. (Heuer prefers to call those who donate money to sponsor the event ‘Patrons’ in the same way that Renaissance artists had patrons who supported their creative work.)

BrainJams is striving to make all of its events free of charge, preferring to seek donations from those who support our vision. Through the generosity of several participants and event Patrons, the BrainJams event in Menlo Park made $290.15, which will go towards incorporation fees. The first BrainJams event was held in San Francisco in October 2005 under the name of “Web 2.1: A BrainJam for the rest of us”. That event garnered enough support to cover all expenses and to donate $1,300 to the Internet Archive and $130 to the Creative Commons.

BrainJams will be operated as a transparent organization with open accounting principles and the open deliberation of issues via Open Web technologies. Notably in this regard is the use of Heuer’s insights on TagSpaces to facilitate conversations of importance to the organization across the blogosphere, through social bookmarking sites and other community tools. The knowledge from the event is captured and shared for others to build upon.

Heuer further states, “The time is right for good people everywhere to rise up and tear down the traditional silos within corporations, across organizations and within their various industries. BrainJams enables people to make new connections across traditional boundaries with the people, ideas and resources that they often could not access elsewhere. These diverse connections are very powerful with the potential to inspire new insights, create new organizations and empower people to make a difference in their communities.”

The BrainJams community Web site is still under development expected to launch late February 2006 though some information is available there today along with a Wiki and a Blog.

Technorati Tags: brainjamknowledge, brainjams:planning, socialconference, tagspaces, The Open Web, unconference, Web2.1

Web 2.0 Mashup Idea

2005-12-18T23:15:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the political map of the US and the whole Red vs. Blue thing just now. What would it look like if it were colored based on musical interests. In particular, I was thinking about who listens to more heady acid jazz like Groove Salad radio and who listens to poppy mainstream and who listens to country music. I think we could all find some interesting insytes and understandings from such an information tool when correlated with other data points (like overlaying the musical interests against a red/blue map or perhaps a blogger feedmap).

We would need some sort of music sales data coupled with Zip codes overlaid onto Google Maps - but I think the results would give us something pretty interesting - probably already a commercial version of this in some record industry office somewhere being used for a different purpose already. If we could find the data source and get it built somehow it would be pretty cool. I would suggest a UI that enabled people to create their own sorts of comparisons based on different data sources and displayed vis-a-vis zip code based maps. People could then write insytes and commentary on the results. When people entered combinations that had previously been entered, they would see other people's entries and be able to comment on them as well as create their own new insytes. Certainly valuable for a multitude of business purposes as well as for creating a broader sense of understanding.

Anyway, just the seed of an idea at the moment as I am thinking about new forms of community forming social media tools. I am going to start blogging about more potential social media models over the next couple of weeks since they just keep coming and I don't have time to pursue them all. Maybe someone else does...

Technorati Tags: brainjams:freeideas, freeideas

Chris & Kristie's Christmas Party Wrap Up

2005-12-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who showed up last night. We had a blast and stayed up way past our bedtime...

An interesting piece of news I overheard and wanted to break here - there is now an 'unconfirmed' rumour that The Onion is buying Supr.cillo.us for $50 per Feedburner subscriber. Not only is this cool news for the snarky Web 2.0 site, but good news for the rest of us as we now have a new metric upon which to value our blogs! Mine is now worth over $1200.00!!!!

My bet is that if they wanted Snarky Web 2.0 stuff so bad that they bought Supr.cillio.us, they will probably be buying Geek Entertainment TV next!

Congrats guys - you deserve it!

Technorati Tags: Web2.0

MindMaps from BrainJams3Dec2005

2005-12-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

We are still working on how to best distribute the knowledge and ideas from our last BrainJams event, so please view this as an open experiment. We would appreciate it if you could please post your comments here with any feedback regarding these maps and this process. You can also add some suggestions to the Wiki, where I have posted a page that links to all the maps available for download, or send me additional notes to include in the maps. I need to work through a few more things to get the RSS feed working, but wanted to get this out before the week ended.

We have also published the maps as Web pages. I will not get too deep into analytics here because I don't waste any more time in getting these out, but here is a basic overview of what is available.

Rather than publishing 10 maps as I had initially though, it seemed better to create one big map for the afternoon sessions. The reason being the different note taking styles of our volunteers just seemed to dictate this format. we only have them because of the efforts of Nate Koechley, Charles Merriam, Andy Kaufman and Tom Blosson from MindJet. The tag for this map is BrainJams3Dec2005:AfternoonSessions

The end of day "surveys" we did were all organized into a separate map and tagged with 'BrainJams3Dec2005:Feedback'. With thanks to Kristie Wells for putting this one together (and learning to use MindManager).
A simple web page is located at http://www.brainjams.org/mindmaps/ which will be the location for all maps from all events.

Each map has its own tag created within the BrainJams3Dec2005 'tagspace'. A tagspace is a new concept I have proposed for dealing with tags. I won't get into it in detail, but the idea is pretty simple - create a pattern of words which average people can adopt to whatever it is that you are doing that is also easily searchable by the different search technologies. Another example of a Tagspace is BrainJams:Planning or as we are using with the sessions from the afternoon BrainJams3Dec2005:AfternoonSessions (which follows the eventTag:portionOFday format. At one point I almost dropped the proposal for Tagspaces but Chris Pirillo has encouraged me to move it forward so I am.

That is all for today - more to come over the weekend.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams3dec2005:afternoonsessions, brainjams3dec2005:feedback, brainjams3dec2005:mindmaps, brainjams3dec2005:teenpanel, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:planning, Web2.1

The Rise of Amateur Conferences

2005-12-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of years we have talked about the rise of the amateur. I first heard the term at the Internet Everywhere conference back in 1999, but am sure it was talked about before then. The rise of amateur content has been driven by 3 primary factors cheap and easy to use tools, cheaper distribution and frustration with the status quo of few to many media. An underlying element here is that most people long to be involved in genuine conversation, not talked at. Remember what it felt like when your teacher (or some arrogant prick) talked at you, telling you they know better in that arrogant sort of way. This is the frustration that brings about change when coupled with the right socioeconomic factors like we have today.

The same thing is happening in the conference space as evidenced by our successful BrainJams event from last Saturday and the dozens of other similar events that are popping up everywhere. For the sake of clarity, my take on the types of events are:

1. Meetups/BBQ's - usually a night time event where drinks and demos are the central stars

2. BrainJams - a day long unconference focused on participant interaction and conversations, borrowing from the Open Space model (and inspired by BarCamp), but unique in other ways

3. BarCamps - usually weekend events that involve more technically inclined folks, with some sleeping the night away in office spaces where the events are held, also borrowing from the Open Space model

All of these events, regardless of the format, share one common thread. They are organized by participants with support from Patrons/sponsors for the purpose of ad-hoc collaboration and communication. In the case of amateur events, they are also driven by the same factors as amateur content and they are often driven by the additional desire for average people with extraordinary ideas to participate and contribute.

This is especially the case when participating in the primary "confersation" costs more than 3% of your company's budget, or you are self-employed or perhaps even un-employed, between jobs. Unless we are all doomed to judging a book by its cover, I don't believe that one's ability to pay upwards of $2,000 for a conference is directly correlated to one's ability to contribute. It is, however, a convenient way of determining this and ensuring that the people who attend are there with a shared purpose, so I am not knocking regular conferences here, just analyzing the evolution and pointing out the differences. (In fact, the Fast Company Real Time conferences were so invaluable to me that I once took out a loan just so I could attend.)

But when people start getting bored by a conference before even getting there, you know it is time for things to get shaken up a bit. At our recent BrainJams event, many of the people who showed up had no idea what to expect, but invested a Saturday with us anyways. They were excited. They were in charge (ok, not totally, but mostly). Unlike the top down taxonomy of a traditional conference, BrainJams presented them with the chance to develop their own Folksonomy for what their experience would be like. We just provided a framework in which they could move, much like the canvas is a framework upon which one can paint to create art or a small club is for a group of jazz musicians to create music.

I don't want to get much deeper than this today except to say that there has been a lot of talk lately about how to support conferences where people don't pay to attend? Our experience (and the experience of TechCrunch and BarCamp) shows that you can do it - but it is not easy. If Judith from BSTV had not come through at the last, last minute, we would have lost a bit of money. However, when the purpose of the event is not about making money, but is instead about making meaning for people, wallets open and smart, wonderful people come out of the woodworks to lend their energy and support. Kristie mentioned that all day long she was pulling 1's and 5's out of the 'tip jar' at the last event. We even received around $50 in private donations after the event.

Brian Dear of Eventful wrote a good post on the financial aspects of Amateur Events using the term "user generated advertisers" which was picked up by BusinessWeek. Peter Caputa of WhizSpark correctly points out that this has been around for a while, though I disagree with him in that it has not been thought about in this context. When user generated content, meets user generated conferences, meets user generated advertising, wonderful things can happen... and that is one of the keys to the success of BrainJams.

BTW - We never even got mainstream media's attention for what we did (still don't really have it despite the piece on KRON4 and a nice article on Internet News) and yet, all the right people showed up, we did not lose money and the patrons received value for their contributions. Am still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but do want to spread the word wider so we will be issuing a press release next Monday about the prior event and the future.

Also, I should point out that a friend and colleague is working on this problem with his recently announced company SyncPeople in which I was briefly involved that also addresses this problem form a more holistic perspective which I think is right on target.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, amateurevents, barcamp, brainjams, brainjams:planning, confersations, net2, socialconference, The+Open+Web, unconference, user generated advertisers, Web2.0, Web2.1

Where is the Netiquette?

2005-12-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

It used to be a given. The leaders of the Internet 'revolution' were all focused on providing an open space that invited people in and made them welcome. They lead by example, and people like Howard Rheingold set a damn good example in how he conducted himself (still does) which was expressed in the book Virtual Community (free read on his site).

Now we have (unnamed) folks who would rather "efff good sense" and "effff civility". Maybe these statements were merely meant to be antagonistic or just frothy, but I suspect they were generated more from group think that developed amongst a portion of the conference attendees. Those statements certainly shocked me and made me stop to think about this matter deeper, so I am glad for that if not the sentiment.

The trouble is, these are the new leaders and this is the example they choose to set. Sounds a lot like Charles Barkley exclaiming he is no role model and dismissing the notion that he should be a responsible leader. Well guess what, he was a leader/role model and so are you. While anarchists (not referring to any individual here) have some appealing ideas and arguments, those arguments tend to be narcissistic and inward focused. Which is fine if you want to live in a world where no one is looking out for anyone else. But if you truly want people to be empowered and to become self-reliant beyond government hand-outs, we must lead them. In order to lead them we must communicate with them and educate them. As any good parent will tell you, we lead by the examples we set. How we communicate, how we conduct ourselves and what attitude(intention) we take when interacting with others are the most important things every individual has in their direct control. So take control of it and let's all work towards our common goals while respecting each individual and being more tolerant of the situational and cultural differences.

History has some lesson here I am sure - most likely in the fall of Roman civilization, but I am no historian so that is as far as I will take that point. We do however, stand at a defining moment in our history which could determine the success or failure of our society. Either we continue to wage wars and behave crudely like violent animals, or we can rise ourselves up above all that by being more conscious and aware of the world around us and how we interact with it.

Howard Rheingold wrote an important critique of a paper that presents quite an opposing view to this which I just found researching this post. Am so glad there are people with his insytes in the world who share them so freely. Am so glad that smart people have had the chance to enter the conversation - I certainly don't want to shut them out as we have done with the political system in America. The biggest problem with American politics (for those of you not living here who can't see it) is not that the system is broken as some suggested in the back channel. It is that the loudest people with the most aggressive personalities have shouted down and intimidated the moderate centrists who actually represent the majority of my great country. And yes, I am a proud citizen, not for the many stupid things we have done over the course of our history, but for the incredible, soaring spirit of possibility that beats within our hearts and the hearts of millions of people who have come to live here.

So I am glad Mena confronted Ben, but wish she would have done it better. I also have a lot of respect for Ben standing up as he did, but I wish he could have just said why he felt Mena's presentation was Bullshit. Most of all, I am glad this conversation has come to light at this time - it is seemingly the most important thing to come from Les Blogs. Don Park has one of the best points I have read so far in all this on Ben's blog post about 'the civility incident'.

[Update: Apparently Ben does not like the attention as all links to his site are getting the message GONE. If you follow one of those links, just hit the refresh button or enter the URL directly to read the page]

[Background bote: I briefly participated in the backchannel conversation at the end of each day of les blogs and have read through many of the posts about the 'Ben vs. Mena' discussion which I will now affectionately call 'the incident'. I was not there, but I watched the video. I also posted a comment on Ben's blog. This is a much deeper discussion that was brought to light as a result of 2 well meaning people who each would probably wish things went down differently. I saw some people talking about this as if the people being affected were just 'suits' (ie business interests) but the reality is much broader. Even if it were just suits, many people forget that there are people in those suits, and those people deserve as much respect as every other human until they are known personally as being less deserving. Wholesale stereotyping seems to be bad when addressing most groups by many people, but ok when it comes to people in the world of business. This double standard is not fair, nor is it appropriate or inline with the peace/love view of the world that so many of those people are proponents of. Equal justice/opportunity for all, means ALL people, not just the people you agree with.]

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, lesblogs2, newmedia, The Open Web, thereframers, Web2.1

Bloggers are hurting the dead tree people...

2005-12-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time since I used that phrase. But back in 1996/1997 we bantered it about quite a bit when we talked about the Internet revolution. In case you don't know, 'dead tree people' refers to the people who work at newspapers. The advent of the web was supposed to have meant the end of them back then just as it is today. A quick search on Google yielded only 57 results which I find odd considering its prior prevalence as a term of less than endearment.

I was in the process of writing a post about the Ryan Blitstein's whining piece in SFWeekly last week and the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle was working with a direct marketing firm on a new outreach campaign, when I read Mike Arrington's piece on Lee Gomes write up in the Wall Street Journal on the tech blogs elite. I must say that this is one of the first articles I have read from someone outside the valley that really gets it in a deep way. Kudos to Lee - the Wall Street Journal certainly won't be disappearing any time soon, and he is one of the reasons why.

When you build an organization of smart people that are empowered to understand and communicate meaning, you are bound to be successful. This no longer requires really deep pockets to fund it, nor does it require advertising budgets. All it requires are the people, their insights, the tools, the organizing principle and the effort. Wow, look at that, a new acronym - PITOPE. A lousy sounding one, but that is really all it takes...
To his point about some journalists complaining of losing choice seats at PR events etc... we should all remember this simple truth. Marketing people are trying to buy the largest influence for their money. If they know that one key blogger like a Scoble or Arrington can influence several thousand people who influence untold numbers of other people in just a few minutes time, why court someone whose influence is not easily measurable and not in real time who will be filtered by an editor and a publisher with potentially competing agendas? Hmmm, this goes much deeper than time permits at the moment. More to come, but now back to the regularly scheduled post I started before I saw the WSJ piece...
---
The Chronicle has hired a DM firm to do subscriber acquisition for them. Just got the call (on MON):

CSR - "You have been randomly selected for a new trial subscription of the San Francisco Chronicle that runs for Friday, Saturday and Sunday for only $19.95 per year."

ME - "No thanks we don't do print any more."

CSR - "Thank you for your time."

ME - "Goodbye"

I wanted to write about this because of the cover story I saw in this week's SFWeekly where the writer bemoans how Craigslist is making newspapers fire people and reduce the quality of journalism because they are taking millions of dollars from newspaper's classified revenues. The guy forgets that the SFWeekly did the same thing to the Chronicle and Examiner when it launched, and when cable advertising came in and when auto trader launched and when... just about everyone who could come up with an idea for a media product launched. It is called competition and it is seldom good for entrenched monopolies, but usually good for the people over the long term.

In the increasingly connected world in which we live, each of us only has 24 hours of attention each day, so those who can use the least of it and provide the best value for that time are the winners of our economy. Simple is hard. Do it and win.

I believe that the economy favors those organizations who can best leverage the right assets for solving a particular problem. As more and more of the economy is driven by knowledge based products, the right combination of assets is all about collective brain power. Essentially, as Paul Zane Pilzer says, [my paraphrasing] "people's ability to get along is the single most important determiner of value."

Craig understood simple and he is helping others to do the same with their all important causes. A population that is better educated will make a better country as long as they have an efficient way of being discovered and heard by people who are passionate about the same things.

if this means the end of the newspaper, c'est la vie. I certainly hope they wakeup from their slumber and start to innovate and kick more ass like the folks over at KRON4 have done. Not only did they launch a local blog aggregator called The Bay Area is Talking to participate in the conversation and remain relevant, but they have also launched a new Video Journalist program (brief explanation on Wikipedia) with the assistance of the modern VJ movement's principal advocate Terry Heaton. Check out one of Terry's posts from back on 11/12/2004 describing what he saw as the future.

"Here's my prophecy. What will begin as a cost-cutting measure on the part of station owners will eventually lead to a transformation in video newsgathering in the U.S. The ability to edit in the field (or at one's home) will also lead to employment changes and open the door for citizen involvement in the process."

Things are changing all the time but it seems that several people in the newspaper business just want things to stay the same. Maybe it would be better if only those in the ivory towers could read and write - that way they could tell us what to do like the kings and churches did before Gutenberg? At least there would be more trees I suppose...

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, economics, MSM, newmedia, The Open Web, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005: Much thanks and love for...

2005-12-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

... first and foremost to the love of my life and newly crowned fiance, Kristie Wells, without whose emotional, logistical and financial support I never would have been able to do this whole thing and turn a little idea into reality.

There are many people to thank, many of who I have thanked ad nauseum since we started, but first and foremost, thanks to our Patrons who made it all financially possible.

David Gutelius from SRI not only got the space for us this time from his esteemed employer, but offered up a space for the Web 2.1 event, helped coordinate and was an invaluable advisor in thinking about how to manifest this idea.
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch is a sharp nice guy who gets it more than any other lawyer I have ever met. Besides being a patron, I am glad to call him a friend.
Tom Blossom and Hobart Swan from MindJet ponied up cash and prizes for this past BrainJams event and laid the groundwork for future collaboration. I loved their product before they were Patrons of the event, so anything good I have to say about them comes from the heart of a user not the wallet. (I even created my attempt at a resume in MindJet
Pandora has finally tweaked the music genome just right. Again, speaking as a user, these guys rock. Hopefully next time we can try to do the BrainJams radio powered by Pandora idea I had for the conference (where a live pandora station is playing and we all can vote music up or down throughout the day)
Scott Beale from Laughing Squid could not be at the event in person, but was certainly there in spirit. Another person who I am proud to call a friend as well as a patron.
Lawrence Coburn from Rate-it-All has been another overwhelming friend and patron of the event. I can't thank him enough, though I will try at our holiday party next week...
When I met Nate Koechley at TLPTEALP, I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time. A technologist with the spirit of a warrior. One of the few people I have met with the word 'catalyst' on their business card who actually is one. As I said to him, it is not so much the money as the energy it represents...
William Pietri from Scissor came out of the blue, but in the small world we live in, is a friend of a friend. I hope to get to know him better in 2006
Judith Szepesi of Blakely, Sokoloff, Taylor, and Zafman came through at the literal last minute - just as I was about to print the program for the day and go to bed. Not only did she come through big time in paying for most of the lunch, her and her husband Charles Merriam were terrific participants with tons to contribute. Am very glad we had the chance to meet and look forward to talking more directly in the future.

Last but definitely not least, the many volunteers who came over to our house a couple of times and did so much before and during the event.

Rachel Murray has been key to organizing content in the wiki, working through the big issues, promoting the event to other communities and making sure things were running smoothly the day of. For this extraordinary effort, and her contributions to the conversation, we are giving her the first ever Star of BrainJams award - which in the case of this event includes her own copy of MindJet's MindManager.
Andy Kauffman was phenomenal with all around support. Not only did he lend his dynamic energy towards the thinking behind the ideas for BrainJams, he came to my house to run some errands and record a podcast about the event from his mobile rig. Then he showed up and was a ball of fire all day, eventhough he was at a concert the night before till the wee hours of the morning.
Preston was awesome as a co-host - despite the difficulties she faced when trying to get people moving who did not want their conversations to end. She also helped quite a bit in nailing down the ideas for running the event and is just a great source of energy for us all.
Noah Kagan did an awesome job with the teen panel - perhaps we will have more things to do together in the future... And maybe next time, Tara will be in town to see her idea in action rather than listening to it on a podcast.
Nancy Tubbs was a big help the day before the event in setting up and particularly at staying focused. She also suggested the simpler 'ring around the room' as opposed to my idea with multiple circles. It worked, so much thanks to Nancy for all her help.
Brian Shields shot some great video of the event which made it on air over the weekend. He also came to our house for some planning meetings and has been a great friend on our journey so far. Thanks again for your energy.
Shannon Clark is a new friend (known less than a week) but he and Christopher Allen have been very helpful in educating us on what works with Open Spaces and lending their expertise from prior events they have done. No need to reinvent the wheel, but I would like to make it spin better :) I am really thankful to have true experts at this to advise us.
Majida Thalji was a one woman power show. We never met or spoke before, but she showed up and just started working. Amazing! So cool too. This is the sort of self starter I want at my next start-up - someone who just sees something needing to be done and does it. Reminds me of the old dirty bucket of water outside the monastery story - but I wont go there now.

So many others to thank, I hope I remembered everyone, but have not been able to think so clearly with this cold the past couple of days. More to come shortly...

Technorati Tags: brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:patron, brainjams:planning

BrainJams:16Dec2005:Melbourne

2005-12-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note on this development (still working on several other emails and blog posts). I just got off Skyping with Ben Barren from down under. He heard the podcast from The Chris Pirillo show the other day and wanted to see about hooking up with what we are doing with BrainJams.

We talked about how they could build on parts of our successful event from last Saturday and I invited him in to the community so we can all learn about how this can work best from all corners of the world. The Wiki Page is coming soon, but if you want to register you can send email to melbourne@brainjams.org and check out the BrainJams Wiki for more details later.

Technorati Tags: brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:planning, BrainJams16Dec2005Melbourne, Web2.0, Web2.1

some inspiration from Paris...

2005-12-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

I so wish I could have been there. I love Paris. I made it there once with a former girlfriend and Kristie and I will be back there in the spring I hope. We had a real blast running around the city, lunching in the latin quarter, spending way too much money at maison du chocolat and eating/drinking amazing cuisine. We had dinner at one of the oldest still operating restaurants in the world where we had a private dining room just for the two of us. Apparently this was the place the courtesan's used to meet their 'gentlemen' for the evening - the divan's were placed next to brass rails on the walls (hmmmm wonder what that was for?) - but this tangent is over, because the real reason I love Paris is the spirit. It feels like one of those earth vortexes (ala Taos etc...) because the energy just makes it a magical place.

Thankfully, we get to live the event through our live blogging and flickring friend Tara Hunt and to participate in the back channel at irc.freenode.net#lesblogs. Tara posted a photo last night that really caught my eye - I thought it would look good as a black and white with high contrast, but could not make that happen, so after playing with photoshop a little to make it look like something, I came to a certain point and the spirit of Paris and this past weekend's BrainJams event, when I mashed up Tara's photo and came up with this new poster idea.

Technorati Tags: lesblogs2, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005 College Panel

2005-12-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

4 Stanford undergraduates joined 60+ people in Menlo Park to discuss what they think about the latest technology, what they use and why. Noak Kagan from OkDork.com and TheFaceBook.com did an exceptional job leading a sharp, insightful and entertaining conversation across generational boundaries. Thanks to Andy Kaufman for recording this session. This one is for you Tara...

BrainJams:planning 1st key insyte

2005-12-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

There are many to come, but I think the first is:

Event Name/Title = Event Tag

We put the tag (BrainJams3Dec2005) everywhere, on the flyers, on the footer of the BrainJams Journal, even on the router name. It seems that it worked. Check out Technorati to see the latest.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc+collaboration, brainjamknowledge, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:planning, NPTECH, net2, rulesforbetterBrainJams, The+Open+Web, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005:Thanks to all Patrons, Participants and Volunteers

2005-12-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

Not much lucidity left in my body at the moment, but what a great day it was! We had about 75 people in and out, with a core group of 50-60 that made it all come together nicely. Really looking forward to the next one and reading more thoughts on this one. Let's keep the conversation rolling...

All I can say about it now is it all happened because of you - so much love and thanks to everyone who made it work. I will be offline tomorrow and Monday, back with more notes, thoughts and ideas after that. Really looking forward to reconnecting with you again soon.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005: Last minute patrons!

2005-12-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like we might make it through this one without digging to deep into the personal savings account thanks to 2 last minute sponsors. A close friend of mine (fraternity brother, former co-worker, potential co-worker and all around great guy) who works at Fleishman Hillard kicked in $50 this afternoon from D.C. Well, I guess it is as good a time as any to announce we are doing a BrainJams DC in late February.

Then in the lasy possible minute (the checking email one last time before sleeping minute literally and keeping me up an extra hour to work on things a little more) Judith Szepesi of the law firm Blakely, Sokoloff, Taylor, & Zafman, LLP. came through with a lunch sponsorship for $250. That is real big and exactly how the universe responds. I told the 'go to the fridge looking for beer' story previously so won't get into it here - the point, as Zez will tell you, is that you just gotta believe. It really makes a difference sometimes. Way too often it is easier to give up just short of the finish line, but you really do get what you give, so give it all (or as Don Miguel Ruiz says, "Always do your best"

I felt it coming (perhaps because it was already in one of my 20 mail accounts), but the good word from Judith on being a Patron of the event to support our efforts is really, deeply appreciated.

Technorati Tags: brainjamknowledge, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:planning, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005: Last minute patrons!

2005-12-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

Technorati Tags: brainjamknowledge, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:planning, Web2.1

BrainJams3Dec2005 - Last minute update...

2005-12-03T00:40:00.000-08:00

It is way too late to be writing this, but here I am sitting next to Kristie trying to print out name badges, registration sheets and all that other fun stuff that needs to be done at the last minute. I have a couple of last minute updates, but first, a quick word of thanks to David Gutelius for the moral support and of course, the logistical support in securing the space with SRI. Extra thanks to Nancy Tubbs, Rachel Murray and Kristie Wells for helping get the space setup this afternoon so all you folks can move it all around tomorrow morning.

We should have plenty of food and refreshments for the 70-80 folks who will be in attendance and lots of good energy at the SRI Conference Facility. Speaking of which, if you have an extra power strip, it would be helpful if you could bring it perhaps as we have lots of power drops but not enough surge protectors.

For the morning BrainJam sessions we figured out a simpler way to make it all work (thanks to some ideas from Nancy), so I feel really good about those logistics now. I also finally figured out what to do with regards to the Journal/Notebook for jotting down all those great ideas you will get from other people. Nate Koechley helped put the final touches on it by assembling it to be printed as a double sided document (reason for blank page 2&4). You can download and print one out for yourself if you would like.

For those of you kind enough to make the $10 donation, we have a journal printed for you in the morning, though we only have 50 sets, so get it early if you want to use one.

Well, I have another hour or so of work, so I need to go. Looking forward to seeing you all in the morning!

Technorati Tags: brainjamming, brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, The+Open+Web, Web2.1

BrainJams: Are you more 'Techie' or less 'Techie'

2005-12-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

The BrainJams experiment looks to have a solid foundation for tomorrow. There are 65 people signed up on the Wiki (59 of which filled out the registration form) and a few others on Upcoming and a few more who have verbally said they will be there. Who knows what today may bring, but I am very happy and excited we are going to be able to pull this off once again and move forward with developing the BrainJams organization.

In addition to the Audioblog post from yesterday in which Andy Kaufman and I discuss what the day will look like, I wanted to point out what we are going to try to do with the morning one-on-one BrainJamming sessions. In essence we want to split the group into 2, with one being more techie and the other less techie. This is a hard distinction, as I am pretty techie, but not hardcore as I don't write code. We are trying to use the answers people gave about the roles people play to do this better, but you will be able to self direct your path when you register.

Perhaps a better distinction is programmer/non-programmer. Given that the attendee diversity is an unknown, this may work really well for the first portion of the list and then get iffy in the middle and towards the end. Regardless, my real goal is to try to ensure that the programmers of Brat Pack 2.0 dont meet with the other programmers of Brat Pack 2.0 so that everyone can expand their network horizon in new ways and get questions/feedback from people they don't normally talk with.

One last thing. If you are going to give this experiment a try with us, we need you to be conscious that you must be committed to seeing it all the way through the morning. If you start and decide to 'opt-out' this creates a big organizational problem and hurts the other participants who won't have someone to meet when they are supposed to be talking with you...

Technorati Tags: brainjamming, brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:planning, The+Open+Web, Web2.1, your pa

BrainJams3Dec2005 - What to expect at the event...

2005-12-01T21:21:00.000-08:00

Andy Kaufman and I discuss what participants can expect from the event on Saturday December 3, 2005. This is a good primer for those people who are attending and don't really know what to expect. We discuss how the morning BrainJamming will work and what the hope is from the afternoon open space sessions.

BrainJams Equipment Borrowing Requests for SAT

2005-12-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

One of the things I was hoping we could do with BrainJams parallel with BarCamp is to create a simple who has what inventory of some of the equipment we could borrow for certain events so that people (like me ;) don't have to go out any buy something everytime they try to put one of these together.

For instance, at the moment I have available:

* 2 Easels
* an iBook G4 1ghz with iSight
* an old PC that needs work
* a couple of old monitors (biggies but clear)
* Legos
* A cheapie button maker and some parts

But we still need some things for the event, that perhaps other people might have and be able to let us borrow (with all due and proper care of course). It would be really great if we could find someone who has any of the following.

1 - A dedicated Mini-DV or HD video camera and tripod for shooting some of the main session stuff. It does not even need to be manned insomuch as set up to capture the main stage action, but if someone wants to volunteer for this that would be cool. We will buy the tapes as necessary, but if someone wants to donate, that would be great too!

2 - A Pro-Click Spiral Binding Machine

3 - An extra PC that could be setup in the registration area for people to create quick Vlog entries as they register.

4 - A machine that could be dedicated and connected to the audio system for piping in Pandora radio during breaks

5 - A really cool and easy to use button maker

6 - Tons of crayons

7 - ????

You get the idea I hope. If you have any of these things and can let us borrow it for the day, that would be great. As we get the organization developed and growing, we can hopefully have some of these things donated for us to use at all events by large corporations, but for now, this feels cool with me...

Technorati Tags: brainjamknowledge, brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:planning

NetSquared Goes Live! (aka how does BrainJams work with them?)

2005-12-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

NetSquared is simply a great idea. Just got the email from Michelle Shutzer of TechSoup on this - congratulations to them for all the hard work. Here is a good bit that describes their purpose,

The conversations will take place both online at www.netsquared.org through collaborative blogging, tagging and posting, and at Net Tuesdays, a series of face-to-face gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area. (www.netsquared.org/participate). These events offer the opportunity for hands-on learning and exchange, and include demonstrations of these new tools.

I am really looking forward to supporting more of their efforts and figuring out how we can best work together. In one sense, what we are trying to do could be considered a project under the same umbrella, though perhaps it should be considered as more of a joint project with them and people from other sectors. In another sense, they serve and attract one of the most important groups of people to what I hope we can ultimately accomplish as more and more people feel empowered to pursue their own Noble Pursuit in this life. I guess it is more of a paramedia effort perhaps that goes beyond the online world of blogs and RSS with out shared goal of empowering more people to understand and better utilize technology.
My approach vis-a-vis BrainJams starts with building trust and tolerance between disparate types of people to for the purpose of sharing knowledge and ideas about things that are important to them. It could be how to launch an idea like BrainJams, how to increase donations to a non-profit, an idea for a fundraiser, an idea for a new tool, a new perspective on how you have been communicating your big idea or even something as simple as how the 49er's might shake things up to make a comeback or how to cook beer can chicken. Then the next piece of the puzzle is to get people out of the conceptual mode into the practical mode of actually doing things towards accomplishing what they are most passionate about more effectively and efficiently. This is why the afternoon session is about real people sharing their stories of how they get things done using the Internet - showing each other step by step, answering questions and receiving group feedback in real time.

As another friend reminded me, this could be a great business.... but that is not the point, this is only the beginning of the Knowledge Economy, there are plenty other business opportunities to come in the near future, but I have digressed too far. Back to the point.

One of the reasons I love these guys at TechSoup so much is because they are just cool and they get it. The other reason is more kizmic (sp?) - when we first met, I just knew I had found other 'peaceful warriors' with similar life purposes. Here is what Daniel Ben-Horin, CompuMentor’s President and co-CEO had to say about the launch of NetSquared.

“Wikipedia, DeanSpace, MoveOn, Firefox Campaign, craigslist - none of these succeeded because they had faster servers or fatter pipes than anyone else. They succeeded because they understood and enabled the power of user-generated content and the power of peer networking."

As I have said previously, the point is people.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:planning, NPTECH, The Open Web, Web2.0, Web2.1, netsquared, net2

BrainJams Attendee Responses Thus Far

2005-12-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

At the moment we have about 53 people registered through the online form but a few more actually coming since they registered on the wiki or just RSVP'd on Upcoming.

One of the reasons it took so long to launch the new home page (still needing to add the other pages before the event) was the problem with registration. I won't get into that too much, but Wiki registration leaves a lot to be desired for events that involve non-technical people (like how to get in touch with people who just add a name when something important happens in regards to an event or the fact that some newcomers dont understand they can edit the page yet). I have some solutions which we will work on after the event - does anyone know a good programmer who wants to work on a simple registration module?

Back to the point. I was looking at the registrations forms that were completed and it looks like there will be an attendee that is not even a person! Wonder what they are.... Since there are no names on this, take a look at the current responses for yourself. Also of note, a whopping 54% of registered attendees have offered to volunteer! How cool is that?

If you offered to volunteer, someone will be in touch with you shortly, but since this is an open conference process, here is a link to the planning page as well - perhaps you see something there you can just jump on? If so edit the page and let us know who you are and what task you want to do. Hint if you surround your name with '''chrisheuer''' it becomes bold using wiki markup. I particularly want to hear from people who want to lead an afternoon (add your suggestions and perhaps name to the wiki) session and people who want to be the note makers for sessions.

Things are coming together...

Technorati Tags: brainjamming, brainjamprocess, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, The+Open+Web, Web2.0, Web2.1

The 2 Most Expensive Business Problems

2005-11-30T23:30:00.000-08:00

Hmmmm - funny thing what talking to Chris Pirillo can do to someone. Another issue we talked about the other day had me thinking just now about some of the issues I originally brought up with The Noble Pursuit. We were talking about the goals I have for BrainJams and what I hope people can come away with at the end of the day.

One of the main reasons I focus on trying to get a diverse group of attendees is to facilitate people getting to know people who are less like themselves. This exposure not only encourages learning, it also helps people find the similarities we have with each other as opposed to the differences. In short, I think the events can build a greater sense of trust between different types of people. This trust can be the basis for a greater understanding of the world, and a step towards improved collaboration in everything people do. Getting to know someone in the way I envision will happen at a BrainJams event can be a very positive, visceral sort of experience.

Anyway, this line of thinking lead me to my old story about how the geeks and the suits not trusting one another has cost the economy so much money. The other portion of that story is the cost of proprietary systems. Which brings me back to the new insight.

The 2 most expensive business problems I see have to deal with the same issue - compatibility. The compatibility between people and the compatibility between systems. The ability of people to understand and trust one another in order to more effectively collaborate has a dramatic effect on the top and bottom line of a company. This is especially more so in the Knowledge Economy, where connecting the dots and figuring things out together can make all the difference between success and failure. The tremendous effort required to get disparate IT systems working together (because they were not designed, built or purchased from a holistic perspective, but more often than not from a dysfunctional politically charged review environment. Then of course, there is the impact of mergers, system obsolescence, version upgrades and the craziness of trying to keep every user up, stable and connected. USB works though, so there is hope on many fronts.

I wonder if anyone has done a study on the total costs these 2 issues have cost the economy. From missed deadlines that created missed opportunities. From contractual obkigations that were broken. From efforts and large monies expended in a direction to only be abandoned - all in the name of incompatibility of the systems and the people that use them. My best is that it is well over several hundred billion dollars each decade if not trillions of dollars.

Dr. Arky Ciancutti wrote a great book called Built On Trust which is a must read of anyone seeking to further their organizations ability to more effectively collaborate and be successful at what they do.

What might we be able to do to get more people to trust others when their past experiences have taught them not to trust anyone on their word? Does anyone else have some ideas in this direction?

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc+collaboration, brainjamming, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:planning, The+Open+Web, Web2.1

BrainJams Event Planning & Support

2005-11-30T13:13:00.000-08:00

In the true spirit of openness (and a desire to get more people thinking about the logistics), I wanted to direct your attention to the event planning page on the Wiki which I just launched. Should have been done before I left for my trip, but I can not remake the past, only make the best of what we have in front of us now. My apologies to those of you who have worked hard at this who I may have let down in some way by not being more responsive in this regards. I do hope you can forgive my lapse and work with me to create better systems for managing this as we move forward with future events.

There are some ideas which still need to be nailed down in their final form and there are things that need to be done, but most of all, there are things to be coordinated for the event day itself, so I think we are in relatively good shape to pull this one off in just a couple of days.

If you have registered and offered to volunteer, you will be receiving an email from someone shortly about what is needed to be done, but do please review the planning page and edit it as appropriate with your input and/or taking responsibility for items that need to be done.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:planning, The+Open+Web, Web2.0, Web2.1

What are tags anyway?

2005-11-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

I was recording a podcast with Chris Pirillo yesterday when he asked me for my definition of tags. It really drove me into a corner - while I understand them on many different levels and have an idea for tagspaces that would conceivably make the infrastructure simpler, it is really hard to explain them simply.

So I went for the stock answer of tags being keywords plus and then babbled on about explanations and usage (please forgive the babbling, and let me recommend that no one does an interview the day after returning from a 10 day vacation). But this has been bothering me ever since, how do you explain tags to people who don't use them? I really had not been able to come up with a good short explanation until just a short while ago, so I wanted to put this out there and see what everyone thinks - I sure wish I had this one yesterday instead of today...

"Tags are the keywords/phrases that let you into the conversations about things that matter to you and the labels that we put on items of interest such as blogs, photos, and media so that we and others can more easily find them later."

How does that work? Suggestions for improvement? Am I close?

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams3dec2005, NPTECH, tags, tagspaces, tagspaces:examples=chrisheuer, The Open Web, Web2.0, Web2.1

Further Details on Next BrainJams Event

2005-11-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

Wow! I can hardly believe we are doing the first real BrainJams event this Saturday 3Dec2005. Just 72 hours from now, I will be at SRI doing final setup work.

Thankfully, a lot of people have offered to help out and it looks like we will meet our goal of having at least 60 people or so show up, perhaps quite a bit more. At the moment, I know of about 50 or so who are planning on coming and we are still doing new outreach to bring even more people in. As of yesterday, with the addition of Scissor, RateitAll and Keller Williams Golden Gate as Patrons with each putting up $100, we think we have enough money for lunch, snacks and the after party! (though I won't be drinking so we can keep the bar bill reasonable ;) Still, it would be nice if we could get just one or two more companies to step up since the suggested donations of $10 are not really rolling in too fast (which is OK as the events are supposed to be free as long as we can sustain this model)

What we really want to ensure though is that we get a diverse crowd of professionals, particularly for the mornings experiment in BrainJamming (my notes are rough and scary, so please only read them if you have the ability to live with ambiguity - I will be building some graphics to explain this later today) In this vein, Andy Kaufman is bringing a friend who is totally outside the technology industry, which lead us both to come up with an idea that should really make the event worthwhile by extending the diversity of the audience. It's called "Bring-A-Friend". The simple idea is that every technology person who is coming should reach out to a non-techie friend and invite them to the event. It might be that one opportunity for a significant other or BFF to finally understand a little bit more of what you actually do, as well as a chance for them to meet 24 cool people who are doing important things.

The afternoon sessions in particular should be really interesting and open to all levels of understanding as we talk about how we use the Internet to get things done. This is not how to develop a new technology or program something in Ruby - this is covering things like how to do a viral marketing campaign with the new tools, how to search for a job, how to build a reputation as an expert, how to hack memeorandum (ie get attention from the GeekSet), how to pull off an event with no money, how to build a community, how to tag (and why bother), how to organize knowledge with social bookmarking, how to create a cool podcast, how to keep the family closer when far apart, and how to make money from affiliate sales. These are not the set topics though, this is the direction we want to take the afternoon sessions - as Howard Rheingold says, "what it is ---> is --->up to us".

During lunch, a sheet of paper will be put up on the wall where you will be able to sign up for one of the "Break-Through Rooms" to lead a session. This is not going to be a typical conference session where the person leading will be doing all the talking, nor even one where the leader has to prepare some sort of presentation - the leader will facilitate a conversation (which they will begin with their own personal story and demonstration) on a particular aspect of using emerging Open Web technology to get things done (ie Web 2.0 for those of you still versioning things). As many have pointed out to me, this makes it sort of like a "Web 2.0 User Group" where we share our knowledge of which services we use along with hints, tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. Each session will need a "note-maker" who will be responsible for capturing all the knowledge that is shared - this will hopefully include someone podcasting or shooting video of each conversation as well.

[Please note, no company representatives will be allowed to deliver their canned 'use case' pitch. If a company representative wants to participate or lead a session that is totally cool, but they should show how they actually use the service, with their own personal account (as opposed to one with dummy data). We will try to work this out as we go, but I just don't want it to be a company pitch fest - this is about real people using real solutions that are available today.]

We will end the day with a collective BrainJamming session where we create a MindMap of all the sessions that were held, the key user stories that were shared and the services that people use. This will be a guide to the knowledge discussed at the event as well as the beginnings of a way for us to collectively organize and share knowledge about how real people actually use technology, what tools they use and why they use them. I think this is a pretty amazing opportunity to develop greater levels of understanding between the creators of tools and the people who use them. But since this is an attendee lead event and we are just facilitators, this may change a little bit once we get everyone together. As I said with Web2point1, we just want to set some basic structure and a good intention and watch in amazement as it unfolds.

Any other thoughts? Suggestions for sessions? Go to the event details page and add in your thoughts or simply add a comment here.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc+collaboration, brainjamprocess, brainjams, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, brainjams:planning, brainjams3dec2005, Web2.1

I'm Hiring! 1 Top notch personal admin asssistant

2005-11-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

Well, I have lots to do in the next 3 days and I won't have time to manage this, but I do need to start looking for someone now who I might be able to hire in January. Basically I need help keeping my organizer straight, ensuring tasks get complete, making travel plans and general administrative stuff that Kristie and I don't really have time for. The pay is not much in the beginning ($400-600 per week for 30-40 hours plus overtime as needed), but could grow as life moves forward over the next year and we establish better working rapport and more cash begins to flow. Would be working mostly on site in the home office with myself, our 2 cats and occasionally my fiance will be working from the home office. It will be challenging, but I can also promise it will be fun, exciting and a growth opportunity for the right person.

Ideally the right person would be a blogger (at least livejournal diary writer), know how to get around a Mac as well as a PC, understand the Internet really well, enjoy going to networking events/parties and be able to deal with a lot of different projects. A desire to understand marketing, event management, new media, emerging technologies and entrepreneurship is key, because this is what you will be exposed to. Startup/Small Business experience in a similar role would be ideal. It would be best if you live in the city of San Francisco but not required.

If you read this and know of someone, please let me know by contacting me directly or by posting a comment with a link to the person and their blog.

BrainJams Patrons Step Up!

2005-11-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

Without a lot of promotion or pushy salesmanship, we have managed to get enough cash from Patrons to at least cover lunch. Mike Arrington from TechCrunch was first up with $100 almost as soon as Web2.1 was over. Then David Gutelius came through with the venue from SRI, along with great A/V and much good will. Laughing Squid came through with a big $150 when it was much needed, and then Nate Koechley from Yahoo! stepped up with $100 from himself personally (that is so cool). After speaking with Tim Westegren at the Pandora party, Pandora stepped up with $100 and help with music for the day of the event. Out of the blue, Tom Blossom from MindJet contacted me and between him and Hobie Swanson, they came up with $250 and a few copies of MindManager Pro 6.0 to give away. (which completely coinciedentally I use and love as a great Mind Mapping software) Kristie, being the smart girl she is, contacted Whole Foods about getting some breakfast sponsorship and they kicked in a $50 gift card.

This is so cool!

But, we still need a sponsor (or sponsors) for our BrainOff after party from 5-7 at British Bankers Club. If you know of someone, please do have them contact us.

Also, if you have not yet done so, please register today so we have an accurate count of who is coming and who is heading to Paris for Les Blogges ;)