So, I’m driving to the nearby Barnes and Noble to use their Wifi and get some work done. Plus I get a discount on their coffee. I get a voicemail on my iPhone from my Mom saying she hopes I’m not in downtown Seattle, that it looks like a real mess.

Not having a clue to what she was talking about, I checked Google News. I found a couple of articles like this one, about a man wandering around near the Courthouse with some sort of device on his arm. The police has him in custody and were examining the device.

Then I ran across this article which quoted a Police tweet about the incident:

In a tweet, Seattle police said, “Adult male in 300 block of James has made general threats against persons and property. He has taped an unknown device to his left hand.”

Whoa. I had not thought about that at all. You can follow the whole incident on their Twitter page! Here is a picture of the description so far:

Jeez. They have a picture of the device online already! Who would have really thought 5 years ago that information about something like this could not only be readily available but that organizations, such as the police, would be on the front lines of providing it. we no longer need to wait for the evening newscast or the paper the next day to get informed.

And as I finish this, the Twitter feed states that the downtown streets have been reopened.

by aslakr
[2b2k] Clay Shirky, info overload, and when filters increase the size of what’s filtered
[Via Joho the Blog]

Clay Shirky’s masterful talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September — “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” — makes crucial points and makes them beautifully. [Clay explains in greater detail in this two part CJR interview: 1 2]

So I’ve been writing about information overload in the context of our traditional strategy for knowing. Clay traces information overload to the 15th century, but others have taken it back earlier than that, and there’s even a quotation from Seneca (4 BCE) that can be pressed into service: “What is the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles the owner could scarcely read through in his whole lifetime? That mass of books burdens the student without instructing…” I’m sure Clay would agree that if we take “information overload” as meaning the sense that there’s too much for any one individual to know, we can push the date back even further.

[More

David Weinberger has been one of my touchstones ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. I cried when I read that book because it so simply rendered what I had achingly been trying to conceptualize.

Dealing with information glut today leverages an old way of doing things in a new way. It uses synthesis rather than analysis. Analysis gave us the industrial revolution. Breaking the complex down into small understandable bits allowed us to create the assembly line that could put together our greatest creations, such as the Space Shuttle, with more than 2.5 million parts.

Yet a single O-ring can destroy the whole thing.

Synthesis brings together facts, allows us to see them in new ways. But to attack the really complex problems of today, we need to utilize synthesis from a wide range of viewpoints, all providing their own filter. As with the story of the 5 blind men and the elephant, no one person has all the information. But a synthesis of everyone’s information provides a reasonable approximation.

David discusses this view:

A traditional filter in its strongest sense removes materials: It filters out the penny dreadful novels so that they don’t make it onto the shelves of your local library, or it filters out the crazy letters written in crayon so they don’t make it into your local newspaper. Filtering now does not remove materials. Everything is still a few clicks away. The new filtering reduces the number of clicks for some pages, while leaving everything else the same number of clicks away. Granted, that is an overly-optimistic way of putting it: Being the millionth result listed by a Google search makes it many millions of times harder to find that page than the ones that make it onto Google’s front page. Nevertheless, it’s still much much easier to access that millionth-listed page than it is to access a book that didn’t make it through the publishing system’s editorial filters.

It is through synthesis that new technologies allow us to deal with information glut. And this synthesis necessarily involves human social networks. Because humans are exquisitely positioned to filter out noise and find the signal.

I’ve discussed the DIKW model. Data simply exists. Information happens when humans interact with the data. Transformation of information, both tacit and explicit, produces knowledge, which is the ability to make a decision, to take an action. Often that action is to start the cycle again, generating more data and so on.

This can be quite analytical in approach as we try to understand something. But the final link in the cycle, wisdom, is the ability to make the RIGHT decision. This necessarily require synthesis.

New technologies allow us to deal with much more data than before, generate more information and produce more knowledge. However, without synthetic approaches that bring together a wide range of human knowledge, we will not gain the wisdom we need.

Luckily, the same technologies that produce so much data also provide us with the tools to leverage our interaction with knowledge. If we create useful social structures, ones that properly synthesize the knowledge, that employ human social networks that act as great filters, then we can more rapidly compete the DIKW cycle and take the correct actions.

by etcname
I Should Have Majored In Psychology:
[Via Chuck's Blog]

Way back when, I thought it useful to do two courses of study. I wanted that CS (computer science) degree, but the whole topic, while fascinating, seemed so self-contained.

At the time, I thought adding coursework in economics was the right thing to do. Even way back in the late 1970s (yes, I’m that old), I could see the two interweaving in very interesting ways.

I was wrong. I should have chosen to add in psychology rather than economics.

Because — at the end of the day — I’m finding that success with technology has more to do with how people perceive things rather than the hard facts we all work with every day.

Ever Rolled Out A Big IT Project?

I have. Several times, as a matter of fact. And — each time — I spent an inordinate amount of time lining up approval and support for what I was proposing to do.

The least of my problems was making sure the darn stuff worked as expected. My most daunting challenge was usually changing perceptions with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of people who had a vested stake in the outcome.

If you work in IT, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion — the technology will probably be ready far in advance of people’s willingness to embrace it.

Accelerating Change Creates Value

I’m not just talking about IT here — I’m talking about any leadership role in a large organization. To create unique value, we have to change the way we do things. The faster we can change and adapt, the more value we create for our organization and our stakeholders.

And — more often than not — it’s people’s perceptions that stand between where we are — and where we’d all like to be.

A while back, I was chatting with people who put together MBA coursework. Since I tend to work with freshly minted MBAs here at EMC, they wanted to know what I found missing.

My answer was pretty clear: they need at least some sort of background in behavior psychology if they expected to be successful in any organization.

After all, organizations are nothing more than collections of people.

And If You’re In Marketing

I don’t see how anyone could be successful in any form of marketing these days without a deep and empathetic understanding of the human psyche, and how it manifests itself in your target audience.

Yes, showing ROI and “business value” is essential. But I’d offer that’s just table stakes. There’s so much good technology out there today that there are many ways to solve a given enterprise IT requirement.

Worse, when we as vendors come up with something new and interesting (as is frequently the case at EMC) but is a departure from conventional thinking, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get people comfortable with the new approach.

People will often say things like “well, we need time for the technology to mature”. Fair enough. But more often, I’m thinking it’s less about the technology, and more about time needed to have perceptions change.

One of the most frustrating recent examples for me personally was enterprise flash drives. EMC launched them at the beginning of 2008. They worked absolutely perfectly at the time. But adoption was slow, mostly because it was an entirely new idea.

Adoption started to pick up dramatically during 2009. Not because the technology was any better — it was simply that people had gotten more comfortable with the concept.

Since EMC’s business model involves investing a lot in new and disruptive technologies, this inherent psychological barrier to “something new” is often front-and-center in my mind.

[More]

Read the whole thing. This is a great discussion by someone on the ground, detailing ow hard it can be to get people to adapt to new technology.

I’ve written about how change and innovations traverse a community. A better way to facilitate such things is to put disruptive innovators and mediating early-adopters in place to evaluate new technologies. That is what they are really good at and actually enjoy. If they see the value, especially the mediators, they can often speed up the rate the new technology diffuses.

Because, after all, failure is just another change. and organization that deals well with change will have little to fear from failure because it knows that is a faster route to success.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Dave Delaney and his company, Griffin, put on quite a great little project with CESBound. They took an old VW bus, after hours, and restored it, and then drove it from Nashville all the way to Las Vegas for CES. Along the way, they made media, met friends, told stories, shot photos, froze a bit, played music, and had a blast.

When they arrived at CES, the thing they kept hearing (and I heard it when I visited the booth, too) was, “Man, it’s so cool that you restored this bus and took it on a huge road trip. That’s so much more genuine than renting a nice car and putting it in the booth.

The side of the van was covered in little Polaroid photos from the road trip. The back of the van was playing some of the CESBound TV episodes. Everyone around the bus, whether they were from Griffin or not, seemed really happy.

Dave and the whole rest of the team (we know Dave because he’s one of us, but there’s also Melanie Pherson and tons of other names that Dave or someone will add when they see this post) really did a lot to make the >Griffin Technology CES story into more than just a company selling iPhone and iPod accessories.

They made a special site, CESBound.com. They befriended the VW community via some forums, where they were told that, when the bus breaks down, someone will come and help them out, no matter where they are in the country. They did all kinds of gatherings and other on-the-road relationship building on the way to the event.

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This is a nice example of how the creativity of people who have a vested interest in an organization can be harnessed in completely novel ways. New technologies now allow the end users with the most passion to create the materials they need, without having to rely on outside vendors.

Using photos, videos, the web and more Griffin produced something quite novel, something that helped demonstrate their brand as well as show what a ‘fun’ company they are.

But, while these technologies allowed them to produce material cheaper and more directly, the success of this project really still depended on how they connected with other human beings. They needed to create, activate and stimulate human social networks in order for this to be a successful project.

As Chris mentions, they connected with a wide variety of people, including many who would not be at all interested in an electronics convention. They extended the reach of their social networks and produced a project that almost markets itself, with continuing connections as people find their website.

What this tells me is that Griffin listens to its innovative talent instead of ignoring their disruptive actions. This is really necessary for an organization that has to remain nimble and resilient in an industry that changes daily. Being able to leverage its own internal creativity increases the chance that Griffin will continue to be successful.

Being able to use technology to enhance social interactions is a given these days. But having the organization that successfully takes its own creativity and extends it with technology is rare. It requires a set of management tools that are not well codified in many MBA programs.

It seems to me, though, that Griffin is one of those rare companies.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Web 2.0

by NightRPStar
In science, data is nothing without purpose:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

In an article on TechFlash, a VC, talking about trends in 2010, had this to say while talking about increased IT needs in cleantech and biotech

Both areas are generating terabytes of data and it is no longer just about science — it is about digesting mountains of data.

For some reason that statement scared me. Digesting mountains of data is all about the science. If we forget that, we are in big trouble. Yes, from a pure technology perspective it is about digesting mountains of data, but (a) that has to be looked at in the context of science (sense-making?), and (b) the digesting is a necessary pre-requisite to getting to the science. You really don’t have much of a choice, but if you forget about the science, you will end up with noise, a whole lot of it.

My advice to all the VCs out there is simple. Yes, life science is increasingly data intensive, and to make any sense of that data, you need to look at computing as a core aspect, but never lose sight of the fact that collecting all that data has a purpose, understand our molecular machinery and figuring out how we work, and what makes us stop working properly. If we forget that, a lot of money is going to get wasted.

[More]

Data just exists. Human interaction with data provides context, transforming the data into information.

Concentrating on the data does us no good at all. Finding better ways to store it might be useful but without putting a lot of work into being able to extract the data for human purposes, it is useless.

We need better ways for humans everywhere to interact with the data so that we can deal with the inherent information created.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

[Crossposted at A Man with a PhD]

by gailf548
Participation Value and Shelf-Life for Journal Articles:
[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

Discussion forums built around academic journal articles haven’t seen much usage from readers. Lessons learned from the behavior of sports fans may provide some insight into the reasons why.

[More]

The scientific discussions that many researchers have found the most productive are often those sitting around a table in a informal setting, like a pub. These discussions are often wide-ranging and very open. They often produce really innovative ideas, which get replicated on cocktail napkins.

Check out the scientific discussions at RealClimate, ResearchBlogging or even Pharyngula. Often the scientific discussions replicate what is seen in real life, with lots of open discussion about relevant scientific information.

If journals want to create participatory regions in their sites, they might do well to mimic these sorts of approaches. David Croty at Cold Spring Harbor has such a site. Although it has not reached the popularity of RealClimate, it is a nice beginning.

I would think that research associations, with an already large audience of members, would have an easier time creating such a blog, one that starts by discussing specific papers but is open to a wide ranging, semi-directed conversation.

Technorati Tags: Education, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Part 1: What are Twitter Lists?:
[Via Pistachio Consulting Inc.]

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series cross-posted from adelemcalear.com

WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

[More]

Twitter is a social medium that has varying uses for different people. But it is obvious that it has some use for almost everyone.

When they introduce a new service, like lists, it is useful then to get up to speed quickly. This nice little series discusses the new Lists feature of Twitter. It helps prov ide some important insights into the potentials of lists and their drawbacks.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by Nima Badiey

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists — Is It Likely to Succeed?

[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

The NIH spends $12.2 million funding a social network for scientists. Is this any more likely to succeed than all the other recent failures?

[More]

Fuller discussion:

In order to find an approach that works, researchers often have to fail a lot. That is a good thing. The faster we fail, the faster we find what works. So I am glad the NIH is funding this. While it may have little to be excited about right now, it may get us to a tool that will be useful.

As David mentions, the people quoted in the article seem to have an unusual idea of how researchers find collaborators.

A careful review of the literature to find a collaborator who has a history of publishing quality results in a field is “haphazard”, whereas placing a want-ad, or collaborating with one’s online chat buddies, is systematic? Yikes.

We have PubMed, which allows us to rapidly identify others working on research areas important to us. In many cases, we can go to RePORT to find out what government grants they are receiving.

The NIH site, as described, also fails to recognize that researchers will only do this if it helps their workflow or provides them a tool that they have no other way to use. Facebook is really a place for people to make online connections with others, people one would have no other way to actually find.

But we can already find many of the people we would need to connect to. What will a scientific Facebook have that would make it worthwhile?

Most social networking tools initially provide something of great usefulness to the individual. Bookmarking services, like CiteULike, allow you to access/sync your references from any computer. Once someone begins using it for this purpose, the added uses from social networking (such as finding other sites using the bookmarks of others) becomes apparent.

For researchers to use such an online resource, it has to provide them new tools. Approaches, like the ones being used by Mendeley or Connotea, make managing references and papers easier. Dealing with papers and references can be a little tricky, making a good reference manager very useful.

Now, I use a specific application to accomplish this, which allows me to also insert references into papers, as well as keep track of new papers that are published. Having something similar online, allowing me access from any computer, might be useful, especially if it allowed access from anywhere, such as my iPhone while at a conference.

If enough people were using such an online application then there could be added Web 2.0 approaches that could then be used to enhance the tools. Perhaps this would supercharge the careful reviews that David mentions, allowing us to find things or people that we could not do otherwise.

There are still a lot of caveats in there, because I am not really convinced yet that having all my references online really helps me. So the Web 2.0 aspects do not really matter much.

People may have altruistic urges, the need to help the group. But researchers do not take up these tools because they want to help the scientific community. They take them up because they help the researcher get work done.

Nothing mentioned about the NIH site indicates that it has anything that I currently lack.

Show me how an online social networking tool will get my work done faster/better, in ways that I can not accomplish now. Those will be the sites that succeed.

[UPDATE: Here is post with more detail on the possibilities.]