Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Collaboration Is IT's Last Chance to Matter
"When you don't give your employees a vote, you give them a veto. Vetos are more expensive. Anything that requires the employee to have coordination with the IT department or getting the IT department to do something, it will have worse propagation properties. This is how PCs and spreadsheets. Perimeter based defense works great except with two kinds of companies: those with vendors and customers. People use IM and Wikis because those ports aren't blocked. How much can an employee do on their own and be able to collaborate with third parties determines that technology will trend away from IT." /Many-to-Many/
Five reasons social networking doesn't work
"Social networking is laboring under the inescapable weight of the dot-com curse: you have to find the money. No matter how cool your idea is, it's dead on arrival without an actual business plan. At least, that's the theory. If that's true, though, why has blogging, which seems like a neat idea dependent on interest but without a concrete revenue stream, managed to not just thrive, but really dominate the Web? How is it that free instant messengers are as indispensable as any search engine, and little guys like Trillian are still going strong? Is it really true that free services can't be effective business plans? Or is it possible that--gasp!--social networking isn't really that tenable an idea after all?" /CNET.com/
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Social Fabric
"The Social Fabric is a representation of your social world, displayed as a single visual array on your mobile phone... Your phone's screen shows a crowd of human figures, each an avatar of one of your friends, acquaintances or relatives. The frequency of all digital communications between you and each person, which the system monitors, determines that avatar's posture: an alert stance indicates frequent recent contact, for example; a lethargic posture or turned back means neglect. You can also register non-digital contacts manually. The avatars can be grouped manually according to sentiment, category, and so on, or programmed to begin clustering together before an upcoming event: your family before a birthday, say." /Social Fabric/
Neuroimaging for Intelligence Interrogation
"Is it legal for the US to use new brainscan technologies during the interrogation of foreign detainees? Sean Kevin Thompson wrote an in-depth legal assessment that will be published in the Cornell Law Review this fall." /Boing Boing/
Collaboration, Contribution, Social Capital, Reciprocity
Howard Rheingold: "I've seen a lot of half-baked advice on how business organizations can leverage the power of online community. This post on Collaboration Requires Contribution is one of the few that has both a solid theoretical grounding (complete with citations) and practical advice that makes a lot of sense in my experience. The two tips in this excerpt are just the beginning." /Smart Mobs/
Enron: Social Network of Evil
"Using the Enron e-mail archive as a motivating dataset, we are attempting the marriage of visual and algorithmic analyses of e-mail archives within an exploratory data analysis environment. The intent is to leverage the characteristic strengths of both man and machine for unearthing insight. Below are a few sketches from a preliminary exploration into the design space of such tools." /exploring enron | visual data mining/
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
IBM to simulate the "entire brain"
New Scientist is reporting that IBM will attempt to simulate the 'entire brain' in collaboration with the Swiss Brain Mind Insititute using a specially modified computer system dubbed 'Blue Brain'. It seems from the news reports that the system will attempt to simulate the physical properties of individual neurons and their connections - a science known as neuroinformatics. Both the New Scientist story, and another from Business Week, are a little light on detail however." /Mind Hacks/
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Rapid Visual Prototyping
"It only takes the click of a button to turn on a projector or print out some blank storyboard pages and tape them to the wall. The real value from this exercise comes not from the pieces that you collect, but from the combined creativity of the people involved.
"When you start tapping into the creative power of your team, you'll be able to conduct some rapid visual prototyping of your own to figure out the strategic stories that your audiences are waiting to see and hear." /beyond bullets/
"When you start tapping into the creative power of your team, you'll be able to conduct some rapid visual prototyping of your own to figure out the strategic stories that your audiences are waiting to see and hear." /beyond bullets/
