Goethe on "action"

• “Doubt can only be removed by action.”
• “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.”
• "One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going”
• “There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.”
• “Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine”
• “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

OpenBusiness

OpenBusiness is a platform to share and develop innovative Open Business ideas- entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the project are to build an online resource of innovative business models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.

Links of relevance to TBE:

• Democratizing Innovation - A conversation between OpenBusiness and Eric von Hippel
• The Value of Attention
• The Business Plan Archive
• Public Knowledge

Your market

How to Find Untapped Needs: Clay Christensen in HBR reinforces a point that made last summer: Don't analyze your market by age and gender demographics, and your products by attributes, analyze your marker by affinity (community of common wants and needs) and your products by the tasks they do. Men aged 35-49 don't need a 1/8" drill -- do-it-yourselfers need a 1/8" hole. It is at the intersection of affinity and tasks that you'll find the untapped need, and all the clues you need on how to design the appropriate product and who to design it for.

LINKS:

• Business Innovation
• Click here to view the original Webpage.

How to tell the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Matthew Paul Thomas

Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Transparency in the Web 2.0 World

37signals puts in their 2cents about transparency and openness in business, pointing out that 1) it's a Good Thing; 2) it's easier said than done; and 3) if you're going to throw your doors open wide, you'd better keep them open wide. This is playing out right now in Google-land. "Don't be evil" is great bumper-sticker material, but the actual implementation is giving them some headaches.

blogspray on Learning 2.0

Lot's of articles on learning and educational microchunking. The concept seems to be roaring through these community like blogspray. There's even a conference already in June.

• Microlearning2006

  A conference, focusing on "Micromedia & eLearning 2.0 :: Getting the Big Picture" (June 8 -9, 2006). Sponsored by Nokia. One day will be concentrating on the micromedia/microcontent side, the other day on microlearning/microknowledge. The Call for Papers is out (send a proposal/abstract until February, 28th) and can be found at the conference website.

• Nanolearning and Aggregation

  [...] There is a worldwide trend to break things down into their smallest logical components, called microchunking. We no longer buy music CD's, we download just the songs we like. Amazon.com would like you to be able to buy just one chapter, instead of an entire book. Microchunking has not seen great acceptance in the learning community, despite apparent acceptance of the concept of a learning object. In learning there are few tools and no markets for learning objects, so it isn't surprising that NanoLearning has not taken off.

  If you can microchunk learning objects, you can open up a whole new world by aggregating them. Suddenly my learning object doesn't stand alone, but it can be part of someone else's 'favorites' or the learning equivalent of a playlist. My learning object could be part of a thousand different playlists, given a unique context in each circumstance, to be part of a learning experience that I could never have created or even imagined. [...]

• Microlearning at Media Companies ...

  This one got quoted a lot recently. Randy S. Nelson from Pixar's (of Nemo fish fame) "university":

  "The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together. We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners."

  Sounds great, of course. But John Hagel, analyst of Media 2.0, from whom a strong link points to Umair Haque, brilliant thinker on "micromedia", has some criticism in a brilliant and important post:

  "But the red flag is the narrowness of the vision. No matter how many smart people Jobs [Apple just bought Pixar via Disney] manages to recruit, there needs to be a recognition that, in the words of Bill Joy, 'there are always more smart people outside your organization than inside.' The challenge is to find ways to connect with as many smart people as possible, wherever they reside, and to develop relationships that motivate and enable all participants to get better faster by working together."

  That other way of thinking is labelled "micromedia" by Umair Haque in this seminal ppt ( must download). So here's the question: Has this consequences for a more philosophical concept of "microlearning"? Is it too short sighted to speak just of "learner-centric learning"? Do we have to create a "culture of learning" that goes beyond people, towards people-embedded-in-networked-ideas? Because no matter how smart the individual learners may get - they still may be not smart enough, that is: not as smart as "microlearning networks".

The Story Doesn't Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart

ENCYCLOPEDIA HANASIANA

Sean Stewart on writing for ARGs..

[...]

What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.

[...]

We could call it patio space or—if you’re in the South—front porch space. It’s clearly inside in some ways, but it’s public in other ways.

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

The campaigns [I’ve worked on]—“The Beast”, “I Love Bees”, and “Last Call Poker”—one of the things that makes them interesting, artistically, to me is that they are part of a very small set of works of art that I can think of that deliberately exist in porch space. They have audiences that are literally collective and talking and engaged, both with the project and with each other. If you and I go and watch a movie, you have a unique experience and I have a unique experience, we just happen to be sitting in the same room.

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place.

What is the other place?

This behavior—this sort of creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavengering behavior—is something that we call by another name when we direct it, not to entertainment, but to the physical world. We call it science, as it’s been constructed since Newton and the Royal Society, and that’s worked out pretty well for us as a species.

Where do you think it’s going? Is this form of storytelling going to be as popular as novels?

Something will be. What will happen is, twenty years from now, someone will be using the web for a storytelling platform, and here are some of the components that I am nearly positive will be part of that art form.

One of the things that we do that I think will continue at some level is platform independent stories. They might be in print, they might be in film, they might be on the web, they might be a cellphone message. The story doesn’t care. A kid who’s 15 now, in 10 years—when they’re 25—their cellphone will be their TV, their computer, their phone, their whatever. It will be pointless to say, “I only do the kind of storytelling that happens between a printed page.”

Well, it won’t be pointless. There will still be books. God, I hope so, because I have a stake in that. But I think that the art form we will look back on as being the dominant art form of the 21st century—as we look back on film for the 20th—is one that will take advantage of the web’s basic nature, which is that it’s all ones and zeroes. It can be digitized and delivered through any kind of platform. The story doesn’t care. I think that’s going to be part of it.

Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience—that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”

It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets. [...]

How New Social, Interconnected Applications Give Way To The Untapped Potential Of The Semantic Web

Robin Good's Latest News [CLB: Interesting Blog overall]

Examples of the fragmented web

• Ebay has a huge database of people selling stuff, which it matches to people looking for stuff
• Google has a massive index of web page content, which it matches to search phrases
• Friends Reunited has a database of where people went to school
• Car Harbor is a solution (currently in development) that will match people looking for car parking with people who have free space to rent
• Loads of dating sites have databases of people wanting to find people who want to find people
• LinkedIn has a database of businesspeople's information, and links between them

I could go on. What these applications have in common is that:

• They all try to match information with needs-for-information
• They all have their own databases that contain a small proportion of the information out there
• And their scope is limited to only the data they hold themselves

In other words, they all have part of the picture.

This means they can only try to find the best answer to what you need with the information avaialable.

It doesn't matter how much bigger or smarter these systems get, they're limited by the fragmented web version 1.0. Google or Ask.com will never be able to know what you really want when you search for 'home run'. This is because the current web is still locked into reductionism. Because all these applications are just part of a disconnected world of data, they're forced to reduce everything to their basic component parts.

[... read on for proposed solutions - Web 2.0]