HighTouch

Wave: All those other collaboration strategies...

2009-11-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

We all have our red flags. Those things that make us sit up and take notice. For me, one of my biggest red flags is when people say, "I don't get it!" When I hear that, I almost always translate it to, "Holy crap, there's something really big going on here."

Peep: What new and interesting thing are you playing with?
Me: Google Wave. It's amazing.
Peep: I got an invite and tried it, but it was just a time suck and way too confusing.
Me: How long were you in there?
Peep: A few hours, but I haven't been back in a long time. How about you?
Me: I'm in Wave pretty much all day long. It's where I work.
Peep: Seriously? I just didn't get it!

If you are working any collaboration strategies other than Wave you're just wasting your time. Seriously, it's going to be huge. I still have some invites if you'd like to give it a try.

Gina Trapani from the Web 2.0 Expo on Google Wave:

Faceless Facebook and other organizational social media strategies

2009-11-13T04:01:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've spent a fair amount of time reading university social media policies over the past few weeks. Here's an example that is representative of how most universities are approaching it:

University Officially Recognized Social Media Accounts
The University has established an application process for groups to be recognized by the University as official social media accounts.

The policy only applies to social media accounts created to represent groups, departments, programs, entities, etc. and does not apply to private individual accounts.

In other words, you're only allowed to participate as a department or some other organizational entity. No personal identities allowed. If you're using your real name you're on your own. Do not speak for the university. Don't even think about wearing your university hat.

This is sad. It's the old industrial era concept of a work and personal life. Like we're naturally schizophrenic? We all know this is a total myth. These attempts to remove the person from their social media strategies (and that's what they are, strategies) are doomed to fail.

I found the whole exercise of looking at the policies a bit depressing. So when I saw this blog post by Andrew Douglas it spoke to me: B2B's Big Hurdle: Developing a personality in social media:

Know what doesn't work in social media? Twitter or blog posts by nameless corporations. And that's going to be the biggest hurdle for people like me who do B2B public relations.

The rules of successful social media engagement -- frequent updates, transparency, engagement with other users, personality -- don't mesh with corporate PR 1.0.

Or university PR 1.0. The approaches the universities are taking to social media are not going to work. They are not designed to be engaging, conversational, or transparent. They will lead to the old push, broadcast, sterile world of old. This is not what the people are wanting. You can't get real while hiding behind an organizational facade.

So here's my advice. Dump the policies. They aren't going to work anyway. Turn your faculty and staff loose. Tell them they represent the university 24x7. Just like they represent themselves 24x7. The only policy required is common sense.

HighTouch Book Club reading: Total Engagement

2009-11-13T03:37:00.001-05:00

I'm a little late in posting about the next read for the HighTouch book club. I've already begun reading Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete by Byron Reeves & J. Leighton Read (Harvard Business Press, 2009.):

Imagine the value if you could transfer the excitement and focus found in great games to the office. What if your employees could solve customer problems, design new software, or configure better shipping routes working inside a game environment at work?

This isn't just possible, say Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read; it's inevitable. As employee productivity and engagement become more critical, the user experience provided by game technology offers a tantalizing solution for business. This is far more than a quaint metaphor or a twist on e-learning. Game design elements can address a host of business problems with morale, communication, and alignment while honing skills like data analysis, teamwork, leadership, and more.

I've finished chapter 1 and will begin the discussion thread later today. If you'd like to join the discussion please join me in Google Wave. Otherwise, you can follow the discussion by choosing the Total Engagement link on the book club's Waverz page.

HighTouch Book Club to Wave

2009-11-12T11:52:00.004-05:00

I have moved the HighTouch Book Club off of FriendFeed and over to Google Wave. You can see it outside of Wave here: HighTouch Book Club. This is done through Waverz which is a very cool service, btw.

If you'd like to participate in the book club through posting and commenting you'll need to do that in Wave. If you have a Wave account you can get to it here: HighTouch Book Club wave.

If you're not in Wave and would like to participate I have a few invites left. Let me know if you are interested.

Is Wave IMS compliant? BWHAHAHAHAHA!!!

2009-11-07T08:55:00.006-05:00

curiouslee via Flickr

I found this amusing: Google Uses Educause Meeting as Focus Group for Wave. Here's the big moment:

At one point, a college leader asked the panel from Google if Wave would be compatible with IMS Global standards, which helps education software from various vendors work together.

Let me rephrase the question:

Is this going to eliminate my job bottling knowledge? Will faculty be able to engage students in learning without using our million dollar Learning Management System? Are we going to need some policies that will keep faculty from using this? Just saying, cause this would be really bad for our budget and my job security.

Allow me to take a stab at answering this question around IMS Global standards. Please dear God no! I'm sure if you wanted to write a gadget to collect all of the required metadata to turn Wave into a last decade Learning Management System that you could. It would keep many IT people employed for decades to come. It will have as massive of impact on learning as IMS has had in the past 14 years, which of course is none.

The person asking the question was a very astute observer. They cut straight to the chase. They could see the threat of Google Wave and thought, "We better get this under control before it eliminates our reason for existance." We can only hope.

All this money being spent on these silly control-freak standards could be much better spent cutting tuition costs. When was the last time you heard a university leader talk about cutting costs and making their institutions more affordable? There are plenty of places where costs could be cut. Learning Management Systems would be a good place to start.

Freeranging Profile: Jason Fried of 37Signals

2009-11-05T21:07:00.000-05:00

Great read in Inc: The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals:

We don't have big, long-term plans, because they're scary -- and they're usually wrong. Making massive decisions keeps people up at night -- I don't like to make those. The closer you can get to understanding what that next moment might be, the less worried you are. Most of the decisions we make are in the moment, on the fly, as we go.

Great stuff! Freeranging in action.

I'm looking for more stories just like this. I'm not living under any illusion that there will be lots of these stories, but that's the way emergent practices are. If there were lots then they wouldn't be interesting. Your pointers to more stories would be most appreciated.

Added a Google Friend Connect Widget

2009-11-05T16:57:00.005-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

Google has added new features to Friend Connect that look very interesting: Google Friend Connect, now more personalized.

Visitors to your site can get to know each other better by sharing details about themselves that are relevant to the site they're on....

The enhancements intrigue me enough that I want to take a closer look. So, I've added a new widget for Friend Connect, and hope you'll join me in testing. I know that not many people actually visit this site, and instead subscribe to the feeds, but I'm interested in kicking the tires on this for other reasons. If you'd like to help me see what this is all about please consider joining.

Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars

2009-11-04T20:29:00.002-05:00

Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars. Amanda Goodall, 2009. Experts, not managers, make the best leaders

I think I will take the contrarian view. Maybe looking backwards it might have made sense, but I'm not so sure looking forward. Experts (scientists) are not the best for dealing with complexity. Increasingly the issues facing higher education are complex not complicated. I will agree, however, that we don't need managers either.

How about leaders who sense that the world is changing, and have the guts to try bold new experiments in response.

Posted via web from Kevin's posterous

Three Ways to Thrive in the Age of Streams

2009-11-04T20:20:00.001-05:00

via feedproxy.google.com

This is your wake-up call. The world has changed dramatically in just the last three years.

Posted via web from Kevin's posterous

Copyrighting government produced information

2009-11-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

The State of Oregon claiming copyright over their laws: Oregon Tries Claiming Copyright Over Gov't Materials Again:

But, again, can anyone provide any good reason why any government document should be covered by copyright?

I've been waiting for an answer to this question for a long time. Declaring all-rights-reserved copyright... Anyone?

Facebook and the network effect

2009-11-01T08:12:00.001-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

I was having lunch with some colleagues this past week when I mentioned this Louis Gray post from earlier in the week: There Is No "Osborne Effect" In Web Services. The Osborne Effect basically states that buyers will wait to purchase something if they know a better or newer alternative is right around the corner. This causes a decline in sales of the current product, and in the case of Osborne Computer was cited as the reason for the company's failure.

I commented, "We should be so lucky as to have an Osborne Effect. Waiting is good. That's not the threat. The danger is that we have a network effect and what is going on around Facebook is not only scary it's also very dangerous." This comment brought on a look of confusion, and a demand for clarification. It was then that I mentioned this other recent piece of news, Google Vs. Facebook

In the UK, Facebook accounts for 15% of the total pageviews (or 1 in 7). In the US Facebook accounts for, now get this, 1 in every 4 or 25% of our total pageviews. Unbelievable!

ONE IN FOUR PAGE VIEWS! This is what happens when we have a network effect in social media. A single site, in essence, has become the Internet for a majority of people. They go to this single site and they never come out. It has becomes the only lens through which they view their world.

Network effects do have some beneficial uses, for example, having a phone that doesn't connect to any other phones is for the most part useless. When it comes to the Internet, however, a network effect is extremely dangerous. Why? Let me make a list:

It kills off innovation. No one will invest their time or money in something different that stands little hope for garnering the public's attention. Doing it on Facebook becomes everyone's default.
The kingpin gobbles up their competition. They purchase or otherwise destroy innovators that demonstrate any sort of threat, e.g. Facebook's recent purchase of FriendFeed.
They use their monopoly position to destroy competitors through illegal means, e.g. Microsoft and Netscape.
They lock-in your data, your very lifestream, so that the penalties for leaving are severe. See roach motel. They do this because they can.

Of course, when people go all-in at Facebook they aren't thinking about these sorts of things. They don't even consider that they are giving their entire in-the-flow life experiences to a private company that will keep it forever, and won't let you take it anywhere else. All they think about is that they are connecting with that old friend from high school. The evil aspects won't sink-in until many years later, and then it will be too late.

HighTouch Book Club Next Read: delete

2009-10-18T20:08:00.003-05:00

Our next read will be, delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Princeton University Press, 2009). A review from John Seely Brown, USC:

Delete is, ironically, a book you will not forget It provides a sweeping but well-balanced account of the challenges we face in a world where our digital traces are saved for life. These issues transcend just issues of privacy but go to the heart of how our society and we as individuals function, remember, and learn. I highly recommend this most informative and delightful book.

The book was just released two weeks ago, and they had plenty of copies at my local Barnes and Noble. I'm off to a conference this week, but plan to get started reading almost immediately. I probably won't post any book notes to FriendFeed until next weekend at the earliest.

I do hope you'll join me.

Voicemail has become completely useless

2009-10-18T07:11:00.007-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Outside the flow==dead! Is voicemail getting old?

A recent study by the marketing research firm Opinion Research Corp. found that cell-phone users, who are under 30, are four times more likely to respond within minutes to text messages than to voicemail.

Google Voice has put it back in the flow a bit by converting voicemails to texts. But, I get so few of these that it hardly matters.

The stark reality-- leaving me a voicemail is next to useless if you have any expectations of reaching me. I suspect I'm not unique in this regard.

This blogger likes the FTC's new regulations

2009-10-17T08:41:00.007-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

From Fast Company: FTC Sticks to Its Regulations as Blogger Backlash Builds

Today, the Federal Trade Commission responded to an "open letter" from online advertisers that asked for the commission's newly updated guidelines to be scrapped because they purportedly "muzzle social media" and, thus, inhibit the freeflow of ideas.

This blogger isn't the least bit offended by the FTC's new ~~regulations~~ guidelines. Articles (and letters) that pretend to speak for the 15.5 million bloggers as if we were united in a single voice annoy me. The FTC's new ~~regulation~~ guidelines mandate transparency. Some of us think this is a hell of a good idea. If you have nothing to hide then there's not a single thing in these ~~regulations~~ guidelines to concern you.

Is it a bad thing that the FTC isn't treating all media the same? Probably. This reminds me of when my teenage children would ask to go to a party. We as parents would do our requisite due-diligence, and when the situation warranted we'd say no. Then we'd get, "But, everyone else is going." And this is supposed to matter? Who gives a crap about the others-- we need to focus on keeping our own house in order.

It's a shame that this has to be regulated. It's also a shame that some people are unethical. Most of us are smart enough to see right through the purchased blog posts, but many of us are not. I'm thinking honesty in our writing makes a lot of sense. I'm one who thinks it's time that the unethical among us come clean. If it requires government regulation-- so be it. I hardly consider this a threat to free speech.

In the interest of transparency I must declare that I take nothin from no-one.

Social networking and social class

2009-10-17T07:27:00.007-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

From CNN: Does your social class determine your online social network?

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

This is supposed to surprise us? If the opposite were true I would be surprised. Why would we expect our online world to not reflect the same sort of social concerns that we see in the physical world? We're going to leave all this baggage behind by waving a social media magic wand?

There is a lesson here. If you value the richness to be found in diversity, you might want to branch out of your comfortable social networking spaces. Get out on the edge a little bit. If the only place you ever go is Facebook you're not going to find much diversity. Your world is more likely to look like a suburban strip-mall than a vibrant suk.

I find little conversation concerning diversity in social networks. The conversation needs to be elevated to another level. If all our followers and friends are just like us our world is going to be a bit myopic and boring.

Google Wave: Embracing the chaos

2009-10-16T20:11:00.000-05:00

Image by curiouslee via Flickr

Geez... From Slate, It's Just Fancy Talk: The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good. I might buy that if he ever talked about what was hard to use. He never mentions anything about using Google Wave that is difficult. Instead the whole article is about his own self-consciousness.

Chatting on Wave is like talking to an over curious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you're typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug.

Here's some news, we don't type in "normal conversations" either. Most of the time we use our voice, and sometimes we have difficulty organizing our thoughts, using proper grammar, and from laughing at inappropriate times. So if you don't want to type-- pick up the phone.

Google Wave is more like a normal conversation than conventional chatting. There is something to be learned from watching our fellow paddlers organize their thoughts. Right now, we're all paddlers trying to learn this new way of constructing knowledge. We're going to have to learn to embrace the messiness. That so many are freaked by Wave tells me that there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.

I'm sticking with my original assessment-- it's going to be huge.

Ray Charles on learning

2009-10-15T22:41:00.002-05:00

Clara Ward via last.fm

There is an incredible chapter in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind where James Boyle discusses a single song by Ray Charles, "I Got a Woman" which became a number one hit for Charles in 1955, and is widely credited with launching a whole new genre of music:

The Legendary K.O. samples Kanye West, who uses a fragment from Ray Charles, who may have taken material from Will Lamartine Thompson or, more likely, from Clara Ward (who herself borrowed from a gospel standard). The chain of borrowing I describe here has one end in the hymns and spirituals of the early 1900s and the other in the twenty-first century’s chaotic stew of digital sampling, remix, and mashup. Along the way, we have the synthesis of old and the invention of new musical genres—often against the wishes of those whose work is serving as the raw material... Far from building everything anew, these musicians seem quite deliberately to base their work on fragments taken from others...

This definitely had my interest and I was doing some searching when I came across this interview with Ray Charles by Johnny Carson:

Johnny asks a great question at 2:43 of the interview, "You haven't done any rap yet have you?" and Charles tells Johnny how we think, create, and build upon the works of others. This is how we construct new knowledge. Sense-making in action. And of course, the way Charles learned would probably be illegal today. His work would be driven underground. He'd still find a way to create just not in a way that the whole of society would benefit. The exact opposite effect from what copyright was intended to enable.

QOTD: Dave Snowden on IT departments

2009-10-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

I found this in the Dave Snowden podcast that I posted about yesterday: KnowTech 2009 Keynote

I could take 40% of the cost out of any IT department tomorrow by stopping them managing things they don't neeed to manage anymore.

That is so true. Control-freaks aside, why do we have such a difficult time with letting go and moving on?

This little thing called fair use

2009-10-11T10:54:00.007-05:00

I'm so tired of hearing these people complain about Google "stealing" their content: Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch said. "But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators—the people in this hall—who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."

Of course, he's just blowing hot air. He can stop them tomorrow. He has two courses of action:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Take them to court for violating copyright.

He will lose, as we have this little thing called fair use under Section 107 of the U.S Copyright Act. But, if he really believes they are "co-opting" his content he should take them to court. Good luck with that!

He has two things he can do immediately, and he has failed to act. He'd rather pontificate. So what is his real objective? I suspect he wants to litigate this through the media, and they will make another run at our legislators to further erode our fair use rights with more bad laws (e.g. DMCA). They are not to be trusted.

Dave Snowden keynote (podcast) from KnowTech 2009

2009-10-11T07:25:00.002-05:00

I started listening to this Dave Snowden podcast as I wanted to hear what he had to say about "semi-constrained signification" (more on this later, perhaps). This is a great podcast, and it's a must listen for anyone who thinks they're in the content business (bottled knowledge).

Explicit knowledge has no utility what-so-ever without a tacit presence. The idea that you can take human knowledge and render it into some form of explicit information has been one of the things which has gone badly wrong, and is one of the reasons why knowledge management is on a major downturn at the moment worldwide.

Great stuff: KnowTech 2009 Keynote. When you have finished listening you'll have a better understanding as to why engagement around information objects is not an option.

Nobel Peace Prize photo licensed Creative Commons Share Alike

2009-10-09T20:36:00.001-05:00

How cool is this? The Nobel Foundation uses a Creative Commons Share Alike licensed photo. What's even more cool is that the Obama transition team chose to use a Creative Commons license. If there was ever a time to follow the leader... I hope we're reaching a point where all-rights-reserved is considered inappropriate (and evil).

Questioning copyright-- is this evil still necessary?

2009-10-07T17:13:00.004-05:00

Great video of Lawrence Lessig speaking to scientists at Tokyo University on October 5, 2009 (with thanks to @ethnobot for sending it my way):

The bearer of this certificate, trained in a field of science, is hereby officially entitled to question whether copyright law as currently crafted makes sense for science.

Lawrence Lessig
Professor of Law
Harvard University

What's Google Wave going to kill?

2009-10-07T14:16:00.002-05:00

There are a zillion conversations going on about what current sites or functions that Google Wave will be killing-off: Twitter, Friendfeed, Content Management Systems, Learning Management Systems (we can only hope), email, blah blah blah... Let me be the millionth person to say, all-or-none-of-the-above. Who really knows?

I tried Wave from my iPhone this morning and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked, and how easy it was to get around. To me, this kind of puts a nail in "the interface is so difficult and complex that my grandmother will never use it" argument. If it works on an iPhone how difficult can it be?

When I first fired-up Wave up on the iPhone I was presented with this screen:

I absolutely loved that message, and clicked on go ahead. I logged into Wave with no problem and was presented with my Wave inbox. I then had the tough decision, what to do next? I opted for posting a tweet that would once again rub-in the fact that I had a Wave account, and was getting to have all this fun while the rest of you waited impatiently for your invites. With little effort I was able to navigate to my personal folder and selected my wave for sending stuff to Twitter (a wave that includes the Tweety bot). It was that easy:

It was here, however, that it failed to work. I couldn't get a cursor to go in the Tweety text box. So I couldn't get an iPhone keyboard to enter my tweet. I could place text elsewhere in the blip but not where I needed it. Regardless, I did see the potential for what Wave might become. I also knew that I was using something that I had been cautioned was perhaps not ready for prime time so my expectations were not too high. It was actually much better than I had anticipated.

I'm thinking Wave has the potential to become your interface to just about everything. People are busy building bots to talk to just about every service you can imagine. For many of us we'll be using Wave in custom applications, and we may not even realize we're using it. For others, the native Wave interface could become the place where we spend the bulk of our online time. It definitely needs to get better, but for such a new application what's there right now isn't at all bad. I can definitely see the potential.

I've already been a part of many conversations where people are saying that Wave is a time sinkhole and/or productivity killer. It wouldn't be a sinkhole if conversations and other compelling things weren't taking place there. This is happening with only a small number of users. I can't imagine what this will be like when the folks in my social network all have accounts. When everyone is using it, and has it open all the time (like I do now) Wave has the potential to be our gateway to the entire Internet. There will be no reason to go anywhere else.

Yet another academic research wiki

2009-10-05T18:19:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've said it before, Mediawiki proficiency will be an essential job skill for academics of all flavors going forward. It should be a part of every graduate education program.

So it makes me smile to see that yet another MediaWiki research site launch today. This one funded by the Hewlett Foundation:

Today, representatives from the new nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the opening of their website, http://acawiki.org, to the public. AcaWiki’s semantic-wiki based website allows scholars, students, and bloggers to easily post summaries, and discuss academic papers online. All content posted to the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Also note the Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license. Commercial and derivative works allowed. Just give due credit to those you borrow from. It's so nice to see so many academics that get it.

Share not

2009-09-23T16:36:00.007-05:00

Image by foko_madagascar via Flickr

I continue to be amazed by the lack of understanding regarding copyright in the academic community. It's not that our universities don't try to get our faculty learned-up. You can go to any university web site and you will find extensive resources on copyright, and fair use.

That said, I can also guarantee that with very little effort you can find many examples of copyright infringement on these sites. Universities don't have the resources to police their faculty and students, and as institutions of higher learning they have done a miserable job of teaching on this topic. That old saying comes to mind, "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught." (Siegfried Engelmann).

So it is with interest that I read this study on the use of Creative Commons licenses and what options creators were most frequently selecting: The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses. The study found that for those allowing the creation of derivative works (82%), 71% were also requiring the share alike provision. Which means, if you want to use their stuff, you must license what you create using that identical license: derivatives allowed, and share alike. For most of us, where our institutions insist on a university owned all rights reserved license, the materials we create in the course of our work; e.g. instructional materials we are prohibited from using most of the great photos, videos, music, audio, texts, etc. that have been contributed to the commons.

Most of this great stuff: 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media (thank you @jasonadamyoung) is off limits. When our institutions insist on restrictive, rather than permissive copyrights, we have effectively been removed from the conversation.