Life Sciences likes this: Friendfeed:
[Via OpenWetWare]

I’m going to assume that only those currently using FriendFeed will understand the self reference in the title but if you didn’t that’s OK. Just keep on reading, you’ll get it, eventually.

If you happen to be interested or work in the life sciences area I’d recommend you take a few minutes to read Cameron Neylon‘s great post about FriendFeed and how it’s been embraced by the life sciences community.

I won’t go into the details of how FriendFeed works, but it’s been rapidly gaining momentum as a medium for groups of users to network and discuss each other’s shared content.

FriendFeed’s about page states:

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends

The life sciences community has picked up on this great website like wildfire. A recently created room called The Life Scientists grew in a very short period (a week?) from just a few active online colleagues to a whooping 100+ users.

FriendFeed rooms offer a way to share on-topic content and further discussion via comments. Commenting can be done on any shared items (yours or others). This has proven to be useful for rapid input and idea sharing amongst the room’s users.

Amongst the 100+ users of the Life Scientists room, both Cameron from Science in the Open and Pedro from Public Rambling have found FriendFeed to be useful and explain why it works. Both great reads.

This is the sort of tool that can very rapidly connect researchers, in ways that Twitter or Facebook do not. Not only can links be put up rapidly but comments are there very fast. It allows one to ask questions, post answers. It is a lot like how the Bionet newsgroup, which you can still access, used to be back in the old days (i.e. 1993-95) when Usenet ruled the Internet.

This is the online equivalent of the water cooler where you can run into someone and strike up a conversation that could lead to innovative thinking. Only instead of two people having to occupy the same space at the same time, this approach decouples both, permitting a much wider circle of people to be involved.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

from Alexander Rich

Kevin Kelly — The Technium:
[Via The Technium]

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.
[More]

Kevin discusses a specific instance of scenius but the idea is something that needs greater examination. Because innovation, creativity and new insights rarely if ever happen because of a single person in isolation. They happen in a social network made up of the right mix of people to allow innovation to blossom. However, an important aspect, especially today, is that the scene for this genius does not need to occupy the same space. The specific network can be made up of people physically separated.

Now this great discovery was noticed by a pre-eminent physicist, George Gamow, who, to my mind, is one of the great scientists of the 20th century, not only for his own work but for his impact on other scientists. Here is how Wikipedia starts his entry:

George Gamow (pronounced as IPA: [ˈgamof]) (March 4, 1904 – August 19, 1968) , born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov (Георгий Антонович Гамов), was a Russian Empire-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered alpha decay via quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang nucleosynthesis, nucleocosmogenesis and genetics.

Nice, wide ranging scientific career. Look at his accomplishments (again from Wikipedia):

Gamow produced an important cosmogony paper with his student Ralph Alpher, which was published as “The Origin of Chemical Elements” (Physical Review, April 1, 1948). This paper became known as the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory. (Gamow had added the name of Hans Bethe, listed on the article as “H. Bethe, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York” (who had not had any role in the paper) to make a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha beta gamma.)

The paper outlined how the present levels of hydrogen and helium in the universe (which are thought to make up over 99% of all matter) could be largely explained by reactions that occurred during the “big bang“. This lent theoretical support to the big bang theory, although it did not explain the presence of elements heavier than helium (this was done later by Fred Hoyle).

In the paper, Gamow made an estimate of the strength of residual cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). He predicted that the afterglow of big bang would have cooled down after billions of years, filling the universe with a radiation five degrees above absolute zero.

Gamow published another paper in the British journal Nature later in 1948, in which he developed equations for the mass and radius of a primordial galaxy (which typically contains about one hundred billion stars, each with a mass comparable with that of the sun).

Astronomers and scientists did not make any effort to detect this background radiation at that time, due to both a lack of interest and the immaturity of microwave observation. Consequently, Gamow’s prediction in support of the big bang was not substantiated until 1964, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made the accidental discovery for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978. Their work determined that the universe’s background radiation was 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, just 2.3 degrees lower than Gamow’s 1948 prediction.

I have to love any genius who authors a paper that makes such a great pun. Some of the best geniuses are great tricksters (Feynman loved to pick locks or break combination safes.)

But my story is not about Gamow and the big Bang theory. I’ll let this, from Nobelprize.org, discussing the breaking of the genetic code, provide some context for Gamow’s genius, and how he created a scenius that spanned continents:

When the structure of DNA was made known, many scientists were eager to read the message hidden in it. One was the Russian physicist George Gamow. Many researchers are ”lone rangers” but Gamow believed that the best way to move forward was through a joint effort, where scientists from different fields shared their ideas and results. In 1954, he founded the “RNA Tie Club.” Its aim was “to solve the riddle of the RNA structure and to understand how it built proteins.”

The brotherhood consisted of 20 regular members (one for each amino-acid), and four honorary members (one for each nucleotide in nucleic acid). The members all got woolen neckties, with an embroided green-and-yellow helix (idea and design by Gamow).

Among the members were many prominent scientists, eight of whom were or became Nobel Laureates. Such examples are James Watson, who in the club received the code PRO for the amino acid proline, Francis Crick (TYR for tyrosine) and Sydney Brenner (VAL for valine). Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as recently as 2002, for his discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.

Early Ideas Sprung from the “RNA Tie Club”

The members of the club met twice a year, and in the meantime they wrote each other letters where they put forward speculative new ideas, which were not yet ripe enough to be published in scientific journals.

In 1955 Francis Crick proposed his “Adapter Hypothesis,” which suggested that some (so far unknown) structure carried the amino acids and put them in the order corresponding to the sequence in the nucleic acid strand.

Gamow, on the other hand, used mathematics to establish the number of nucleotides that should be necessary to make up the code for one amino acid. He postulated that a three-letter nucleotide code would be enough to define all 20 amino acids.

Eight out of 20 won Nobel prizes (although there is some humorous ways to look at this that give better clues on how this was accomplished). Not very bad odds. Much like Kelly’s mountain climbers. The scenius attracts, nourishes and sprouts geniuses. But it is the first scientific scenius I am aware of that was not tethered to a single location and some very critical things came up from these interactions. For instance, Crick delineated the 20 amino acids used to make up proteins as an intellectual exercise, written on a pub napkin. He was right.

This group worked a lot to try and figure out how RNA made protein, thus the name RNA Tie Club (Gamow made sure each had an appropriate tie for their amino acid). There were many informal and speculative papers that they wrote to each other (remember that this was a time where biology and genetics were mainly descriptive. Speculation and deductive approaches to biology were not commonly used.) Many of these approaches were flat out wrong. But these errors allowed them to eventually gain some wisdom.

Some of the papers have become parts of biology lore, because the speculations turned out to be correct and led to really important breakthroughs in the field. Here is the most important one, Francis Crick and his Adaptor hypothesis, the paper for the RNA Tie Club that developed tRNA and a degenerate genetic code as a model. On Degenerate Templates and the Adaptor Hypothesis is one of the most famous unpublished papers I know of.

To get some idea of how this all worked, check out Watson’s response to Crick Adaptor paper for the RNA Tie Club. Watson was at CalTech at the time.

Gamow. was here for 4 days – rather exhausting as I do not live on Whiskey. Your TIECLUB note arrived during visit. Am not so pessimistic. Dislike adaptors. We must find RNA structure before we give up and return to viscosity and bird watching.

Being able to create and foster such a scenius will be an important part of many organizations.

Technorati Tags: Biology, Science, Web 2.0

by aussiegall
What’s Your Internal Social Networking Strategy?:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Nemertes recently noted that eighty-three percent of organizations are now “virtual” meaning that members of workgroups reside in physically separate locations. The emergence of the virtual workplace has radically changed not only how we communicate and collaborate, but how we build social bonds among employees.
[More]

Informal interactions are very important in any social network. They provide secondary routes for information to bypass chokepoints, they permit radically different viewpoints to influence the creation of knowledge and they are just plain fun.

It will be important for any defined internal online social network to provide this outlet. Because, frankly, if it is not provided, people will either ignore the network or find ways, perhaps inappropriately, to create such an outlet.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by flikr
We Do Different Things:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]
The roles many blogs take, not surprisingly, are very different. They fulfill many of the same functions seen in face-to-face social networks: connector, innovator, aggregator, gossip, etc.

We do different things.

There’s nothing more flattering than being lumped in blog posts alongside Robert or Jason Calacanis or all the other folks who also write a blog on the web. But you have to realize that we do different things. (people are welcome to disagree with my characterizations of them).

Robert Scoble writes about really exciting new things, and he shows videos, and he connects humans, and he scours this space for new amazing things.

Louis Gray seems to own the aggregator/repurposing space, with things like FriendFeed, SocialThing, etc.

Seth Godin is a marketer’s marketer, and points out the human experience with products and services.

Jason Calacanis has a strong history in the web space, and also talks from a media maker’s perspective.

Jeremiah Owyang writes more analysis-based posts on social marketing as an industry.

I could go on for a while, but I guess the point is this: we all keep blogs. We all type about things. But we’re different and offer a different set of take-aways from our writing and thought processes.

That is what is so important about newsfeeds and RSS. Using the right software, they bring together all these diverse thought processes. It is almost like have a virtual conference room filled with some extremely interesting and creative people.

What is often begun as a personal approach towards communication can become, when aggregated, a very rich and very deep conversation, particularly when you add your own perspective on your own blog.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by Felix Francis
Twitter’s growing pains:
[Via Buzzworthy]

It’s hardly news that Twitter is experiencing growing pains, but a couple of items have appeared in recent days that shed some new light on just how bad they’re getting.
[More]

As mentioned below, some of the problems Twitter is having while trying to scale are rooted in its basic communication paradigm. It is much more complex than a system based on the telephone company. It is almost as if every phone call was a 5 or 6 person conference call.

Difficult to do with the best experts. But it sounds like Twitter was somewhat surprised by the direction its technology took and was not prepared for the type of growth it sustained. It is still a very small company and one that may not have had onboard all the engineering help it needed.

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we’re in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal.

Twitter broke ground on a new manner of using Web 2.0 tools. Time will tell if it is able to maintain its initial success.There are some very difficult problems that have to be solved. But there will be somebody who solves the scaling problem because this tool is just too useful.

Google was not the first search engine., just the best one so far. Web 2.0 works by allowing rapid prototyping of new tools as one works towards perfection. Twitter was able to accomplish a lot with really very little. It has hit a barrier now. It will be interesting to see how this problem get solved. It is not too unlikely that a user who is really knowledgeable will propose a solution.

We have kept an eye on the public discussions about what our architecture should be. Our favorite post from the community is by someone who’s actually tried to build a service similar to Twitter. Many of the best practices in scalability are inapplicable to the peculiar problem space of social messaging. Many off-the-shelf technologies that seem like intuitive fits do not, on closer inspection, meet our needs. We appreciate the creativity that the technical community has offered up in thinking about our issues, but our issues won’t be resolved in an afternoon’s blogging.

We’d like people to know that we’re motivated by the community discussion around our architecture. We’re immersed in ideas about improving our system, and we have a clear direction forward that takes into account many of the bright suggestions that have emerged from the community.

To those taking the time to blog about our architecture, I encourage you to check out our jobs page. If you want to make Twitter better, there’s no more direct way than getting involved in our engineering efforts. We love kicking around ideas, but code speaks louder than words.

That would be the Web 2.0 way.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by MrClean1982
Next generation of business software could get more fun :
[Via Washington Post]

Once upon a time, people bonded with their co-workers on office softball teams and traded gossip at the watercooler.

OK, so those days aren’t gone yet. But as big companies parcel Information Age work to people in widely dispersed locations, it’s getting harder for colleagues to develop the camaraderie that comes from being in the same place. Beyond making work less fun, feeling disconnected from comrades might be a drag on productivity.

Now technology researchers are trying to replicate old-fashioned office interactions by transforming everyday business software for the new era of work. The historically dry-as-sawdust products are borrowing elements from video games and social-networking Web sites.
[More]

People are social animals and usually need some unstructured time to blow off steam, relax and generally recharge their batteries. In many business environments there are a host of conventions to accomplish this, from birthday parties to golf tournaments to lounges.

Online work will also include similar processes. As this article discusses, there are many approaches to creating break time in a virtual world. Where these tools can be important in research is that many bright ideas come up from the random interaction of a couple of scientists, often in a bar or a party. Crick famously drew up the list of the twenty amino acids used in protein synthesis on a napkin while at a pub before any real evidence existed.

They will have to be careful that the areas are not TOO much fun. Disney is finding out how hard it can be to shutdown a virtual world years after it has served its purpose. But using aspects of Second Life in a business setting may be important for a truly creative research experience.

There has always been a little bit of randomness in almost every great scientific endeavor.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

myScience: “social software” for scientists:
[Via O'Really? at Duncan.Hull.name]

With apologies to Jonathan Swift:

“Great sites have little sites upon their back to bite ‘em
And little sites have lesser sites, and so ad infinitum…”

So what happened was, Carole Goble asked on the myExperiment mailing list, “is there a list of scientist social networking sites”? Here is first attempt at such a list (not comprehensive), you’ll have to decide for yourself which are the great, greater, little and lesser sites.

For simplicity, I’ll break social software down into social networking, data sharing, blogging, ranking and video. These categories aren’t exclusive, as some sites do more than one of these tasks, but they help to classify the wild wild web of social software.
[More]

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

by miyukiutada
A Moment of Clarity:
[Via Transparent Office]

I do my best thinking when I’m talking. That may sound funny, but it’s true. When I write, I tend to overthink the issues and get ahead of myself. But when I’m talking to another person, or better yet a group of people, I slow down and spit out what’s really essential. (I’m a solid E on the Myers-Briggs test.)

So it’s not surprising that I had a moment of clarity the other day while talking to a customer. The customer had asked me how you launch a collaborative, wiki-based community. We didn’t have a lot of time–I was late to pick up my kids from school–and I had promised him a 60-second answer. What I said was, “Look, it’s really very simple: Structure, populate, review, invite, and garden.” As soon as the words had passed my lips I thought to myself, hey, that’s pretty clear. Maybe I should write it down. And now I have.

It’s a good, and simple, way to remember how to do it. So I propose “SPRIG” as the acronym for remembering how to launch a collaborative community:
Structure the wiki up-front with stubs and links
Populate it with real content
Review what you’ve done within your core group and refine the structure as needed
Invite a few people who have relevant knowledge and relationships and will be into the idea
Garden the wiki content as things get going.

In my next few blog posts, I’ll elaborate on each of these activities. So stay tuned. And if my tone seems conversational, now you know why.

BTW, “SPRIG” may not be the world’s catchiest acronym. Maybe we could do “SPRING” playing off the first two letters of “Invite”. Any reactions or counter-suggestions?

Acronyms can be very useful. SPRIG is a good one. SocialText uses SPRING, with the N coming from ‘Ncourage.’

Whichever is used, the steps are very important, particularly the last, which is often missed. Not everyone needs to garden but it will not be a useful wiki without a gardener.

UPDATE (6:25 am): No wonder the acronyms from Transprent Office and SocialText are so similar. The author of Transparent Office, Michael Idinopulos, works for SociaText as the VP of Professional Services. I guess I should have clicked the ‘About’ link before I wrote.

It makes no difference. The acronym is as useful as ever.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild the Magnificent
Square One: The Knowing Doing Gap:
[Via Creativity Central]

Let’s go back 1999. Crown Prince Abdullah becomes the ruler of Jordan on the death of his father, King Hussein. Lance Armstrong wins first Tour de France. And most importantly Family Guy airs its pilot episode.

It’s also the year that Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap. Nearly a decade later a significant number of companies have amnesia. A lot of mangers read the book. A lot of managers ignored what they learned.

Their preface does a masterful job of setting up the premise. “We wrote this book because we wanted to understand why so many managers know so much about organizational performance, say so many smart things about how to achieve performance, and work so hard, yet are trapped in firms that do so many things they know will undermine performance.”

In a nutshell: There are more and more books and articles, more training programs and seminars and more knowledge that, although valid, often had little or no impact on what managers actually did.

Nothing has really changed.

[More]

In my rubric, knowledge allows decisions to be made and actions to be taken. Data interacts with humans to gain context and become information. Information interacts with human social networks to become knowledge. While knowledge allows decisions to be made, widsom permits the correct decision to be made.

Knowledge, by itself, does not guarantee that the decision will be the correct one. It does permit a decision to be made, even if the decision is to collect more data. Wisdom often requires several false starts to be taken before the right path can be found. In many settings, groups actually learn more from their mistakes than from a success.

P.S.

If you want to dig a little deeper, here are a few lines in an interview that Pheffer did with Fast Company

“If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework — a tolerance for error and failure — into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack. You need to be able to try things, even if you think that you might fail.

The absolute opposite mind-set is one that appears to be enjoying a lot of favor at the moment: the notion that we have to hold people accountable for their performance. Companies today are holding their employees accountable — not only for trying and learning new things, but also for the results of their actions. If you want to see how that mind-set affects performance, compare the ways that American Airlines and Southwest Airlines approach accountability — and then compare those two airlines’ performances.

American Airlines has decided to emphasize accountability, right down to the departmental — and even the individual — level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it is. So if a plane is late, what do American employees do? They spend all of their time making sure that they don’t get blamed for it. And while everyone is busy covering up, no one is thinking about the customer.

Southwest Airlines has a system for covering late arrivals: It’s called “team delay.” Southwest doesn’t worry too much about accountability; it isn’t interested in pinning blame. The company is interested only in getting the plane in the air and in learning how to prevent delays from happening in the future.

Now ask yourself this: If you’re going to be held accountable for every mistake that you make, how many chances are you going to take? How eager are you going to be to convert your ideas into actions?

So the final point from Square One is that a learning culture driven by creativity and innovation must allow mistakes to be made. The goal of mistakes is to learn from them, not to assign blame. People must be recognized for the attempt, not always for the solution.

One of the strong points of Web 2.0 tools is that they create much more openness and transparency. This makes it much easier to tell identify someone who pushes the envelope in order to help create knowledge that is useful to the organization. If the only way to succeed is never to fail, then the organization will eventually find itself with only followers and no leaders in creativity.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by makelessnoise
Innovation Development:
[Via InnoCentive]
This site uses new tools to solve problems. It essentially acts as a broker between organizations that need problems solved and the large external community that may be able to find a solution.

The rewards can be pretty substantial if someone can become a successful solver. The site not only has problems in specific areas, but there are pavilions sponsored by single entities for directed solutions. The Rockefeller Foundation Accelerating Innovation for Development is one such organization.

So the possibility exists that external investigators could solve internal problems, and make a reasonable living at it. It will be interesting to see if this does become a form of livelihood.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0