LinkedIn Throws a Little Upcoming Into the Site:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Funny, I used to crap on LinkedIn for now putting new technology onto their platform, and now I’m starting to sway the other way. LinkedIn just announced a new event application. So it’s like Upcoming.org for businesses. I dig it. And then, I wonder what else we’re going to do here.

This is just a starting post. I have more on my mind, but I’m writing a book and attending a conference at the same time.

What do you think? If LinkedIn’s doing all kinds of apps, what do YOU want them to slip in there? (And if you say Twitter, I’ll poke you in the nose.)

LinkedIn is becoming more and more useful/important. Being able to examine events will be pretty nice. At the moment, it seems to filter the events a little arbitrarily (i.e. if I select ‘Greater Seattle Area’ it returns events in Chicago and New York). But this sure offers some real possibilities.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by foundphotoslj
Teach the People- Facebook app for creating learning communities:
[Via elearningpost]
From techcrunch:

“Teach the People is a Facebook application that provides a platform for online education. The application lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set share it by setting up a Teach the People learning communities with 1gig of free storage. The learning communities provide educators and students with all the standard learning management system tools that are standard on existing systems (Blackboard, Moodle), and some not so standard like video chat and VOIP.”

It will be interesting to see how this develops. There is some discussion of certifying teachers and such.

Technorati Tags: General, Web 2.0

LinkedIn Applications: I just added my blog and slideshare content! Wow!:
[Via Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

LinkedIn is a professional network for business and (and nonprofit professionals.) It is often described as an online social network for job seekers. Perhaps because initially your profile was structured like an online version of your resume. Let me tell you, LinkedIn can be a terrific place to develop professional contacts, grow your business, and promote your work and opportunities. There are many good reasons why nonprofit professionals use online professional networking sites liked LinkedIn.

Earlier this week LinkedIn announced its applications platform that includes a small number of well-chosen apps that can enhance your professional networking profile. You can add your blog content, slide shows, reading lists, files, business travel, and more. (Chris Brogan calls the addition of adding your business travel schedule “dog clever.” Since LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site that can help you find job prospects, works prospects, and

For my profile, I added BlogLink (it posts my blog posts to my profile automatically) and SlideShare’s Application. (In the video above SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha demonstrates the application.)

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild tm
Seven rules for the KM-lords in their farm of cubes:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

David Snowden has expanded his three rules to seven principles. Now I have to wonder if there are nine rules somewhere. And if there is One Rule to Bind them All. Rendering Knowledge (rules excerpted)

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. [original]
• We only know what we know when we need to know it. [original]
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
• Everything is fragmented.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. [original]

The four new elements sound familiar from David’s other writing. Taking time to think about these principles and the additional context David gives them, they begin to sound like common sense. Of course people learn from failures. Of course we build things from fragments of other things. But then why do we forget this common sense when building approaches to knowledge management? Maybe not so common?

Yes, these are common sense but so often not observed. Many organizations do not tolerate failure, making their lack of innovation obvious.

When I was in Junior High School, we played a game called bulls and cows. One person tried to guess a 4 digit number the other person had written down. If the guess has a number in the right position, it counts as a bull. If the guess has the right number in the wrong spot, it is a cow. So the correct answer results in 4 bulls.

Now there are about 4500 possible numbers (assume no repeated numbers and you can’t have a zero in the first position) so having some sort of system helps. Like start with ‘1234′. But the absolute best answer is ‘no bulls- no cows.’ Complete failure to guess the number.

This results in the removal of 40% of the possibilities in a single guess. No other choice is as helpful in narrowing down the possibilities. Failing actually gets you to the answer sooner than an initial success of 1 cow.

This game taught me that failure can be much more helpful than a slight success. We see that so much today. Failing does not usually cost too much and can get the group to success much more rapidly by reducing the degrees of freedom one has to work with. It is generally corporate culture that hampers this path.

Those organizations that can tolerate failure will learn faster and innovate at a much more rapid pace. Not necessarily because they are smarter. They are just informed by their failures, narrowing down the possibilities that eventually result in success.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by jetalone
Slides from Design and Development: Behind The Scenes:
[Via Blue Flavor]

A few weeks back Jeff and I spoke to a very engaged and fun group of folks at the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session in Atlanta. It was a great conversation where we went into quite a bit of detail about our current redesign, the design and development choices we made along the way and the goals behind those choices. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about our business and the thinking behind all that we do at Blue Flavor.

I’m happy to share with you the slides from that event. I’m not sure they’ll make complete sense without us talking over them, but I hope they’re useful to someone out there.

Slides from Day One which focused on design, branding, marketing and the like:

Webmaster Jam Session: Design and Development Behind the Scenes Day One

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design development)

Slides from Day Two which was centered around development, CSS frameworks and Django.

Webmaster Jam Session: Design and Development Behind the Scenes Day Two

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design development)

These slides are very useful for anyone looking to upgrade their website. Having just gone through this process, I can say that they cover all the major points. Without an effective site, the conversations that can occur are greatly hampered.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by Dyl86
Failure as an event:
[Via Seth's Blog]

I try hard not to keep a running tally of big-time failures in my head. It gets in the way of creating the next thing. On the other hand, when you see failure as a learning event, not a destination, it makes you smarter, faster.

Some big ones from my past:

The Boston Bar Exam. My two partners and I spent a lot of time and money building this our last year of college. It was a coupon book filled with free drinks from various bars in Cambridge and Boston. The booklet would be sold at the bars, encouraging, I dunno, drunk driving. Lessons: Don’t spend a lot on startup costs, don’t sell to bar owners and don’t have three equal partners, since once person always feels outvoted.

The Internet White Pages. This was a 700 page book filled with nearly a million email addresses. It took months to create and IDG, the publisher, printed 80,000 copies. They shredded 79,000 of them. Lesson: If the Internet Yellow Pages is a huge hit (it was), that doesn’t mean the obvious counterpart will be. A directory that’s incomplete is almost always worthless.

MaxFax. This was the first fax board for the Mac. It would allow any Mac user to hit ‘print’ and send what was on the screen to any fax machine. We raised seed money from a wealthy dentist, built a working prototype and worked to license it to a big computer hardware company. Lessons: Don’t raise money from amateurs, watch out for flaky engineering if you’re selling a prototype, think twice before you enter a market with one huge player (Apple knocked off the idea) and don’t build a business hoping to sell out unless you have a clear path to do that.

One of the important lessons is to fail as soon as possible and learn from it. Then move on. Today, the most rapid path to wisdom and success is to crank the innovation cycle as fast as possible. Here are a couple of other lessons from Seth:

Prepare for the dip. Starting a business is far easier than making it successful. You need to see a path and have the resources to get through it.

Cliff businesses are glamorous but dangerous.

Projects exist in an eco-system. Who are the other players? How do you fit in?

Being the dumbest partner in a room of smart people is exactly where you want to be.

And the biggest of all: persist. Do the next one.

There are lots of things failing around us everyday. Moving beyond that to success requires persistence and a vision. And a high threshold for dealing with failure.

Besides, maybe one of your failures will be epic.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by Only Sequel
Using Twitter to Monitor US Voting on November 4:
[Via Portals and KM]

Here is a great use of Twitter and Web 2.0. The Twitter Vote Report will use Twitter.com and 1-866-Our-Vote Hotline, voters to provide a new way to share difficult voting experiences (e.g., long lines, broken machines, inaccurate voting rolls) with one another and ensure that the media and watchdog groups are aware of any problems.

 From questions like “where do I vote” or “how do I make sure that my rights are being upheld,” Twitter Voter Report will augments these efforts by providing a new way for voters to send text messages (aka tweets) via cellphones or computers. These messages will be aggregated and mapped so that everyone can see the Nation's voting problems in real-time.

A Nationwide web map will display pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working. Collectively the project particpants will inform each other when the lines are too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know when and where problems exist.

If you are a Twitter user be sure to tap into this network.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by notsogoodphotography
Are scientists missing the boat?;.:
[Via Bench Marks]

….or has that boat already sailed?

I’ve read many a blog posting or magazine article declaring that scientists are behind the curve, and we biologists have been slow to pick up the new online tools that are available. I’ve repeatedly asked for examples of other professions that are ahead of the curve that we can use as models (are there social networks of bakers sharing recipes and discussing ovens?), but haven’t seen much offered in response. I tend to think that it’s not a question of scientists being slow, it’s that the tools being offered aren’t very appealing. Note how quickly scientists moved from paper journals to online versions, which only took as long as it did because of the slow progress on the part of journal publishers getting their articles up on the web. The advantages of online journals were obvious, and in comparison, the advantages of joining “Myspace for scientists” are less evident.

Are social networks )”Meet collaborators! Discuss papers!”) ever going to see heavy use from the biology community? Or are we starting to see that they’ve run their course in general, and scientists were prescient in not wasting their time?
[More]

There are too many advantages that arise from using many of these Web 2.0 tools (i.e. the ability to leverage human social networks in order to examine large datasets). However, the race will not be to have 5000 friends, as often seen out in the wild.

I don’t think the next generation will shun these tools. They will just have a better idea of how to interact with them more usefully, with a focus that can really help their workflow.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by Erik Charlton

No surprise, it looks like we’re headed for a sustained period of tough economic times.

The hurricane has blown through, metaphorically speaking. Now it’s many long months of cleanup and getting back to normal, or maybe redefining what “normal” might be.

But there might be a silver lining to this economic storm.

A Quick Recap

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know we’re on a journey towards social media proficiency.

We’ve had our internal platform up for over a year, and we now have all sorts of external communities heading towards our external platform group.

But — challengingly — not enough people have been “thinking differently” about how to get things done.

Sure, we can revel in many successes. But against a vast backdrop of people, behaviors and legacy business processes, we’ve only just begun.

Forcing The Situation

It’s very likely that my company, like many, will be rethinking its budgets for 2009.

There probably won’t be a lot of budget for “expensive” stuff: in-person forums, face-to-face meetings, slick advertising and the like.

There’s been no official mandate in this regard yet. But smart business managers (mostly those in the marketing world) can sense the change of economic seasons, and are looking around for more cost-effective mechanisms for reaching and engaging with the outside world.

Besides, even if we can afford a nice event in a nice venue, who can afford to attend?

Randy (who runs our external community group) tells me his phone is ringing off the hook. All sorts of internal groups are coming out of the woodwork, interested in the idea of a near-zero-cost mechanism for achieving their marketing and engagement goals outside the company.

The good news? As a result, we’re accelerating change.

The challenges? None of these new groups are especially proficienct at what it takes to design, build and launch an external community. More problematic, they bring a host of pre-conceived notions about what they think they want, how they think they’re going about doing it.
[More]

Finding ways to be more efficient, to be more productive, will be of prime interest as things go from bad to worse. So many Web 2.0 tools can accomplish this but too many people still do not know how to implement them best for their particular organization.

Some organizations are lucky and already have people who can help educate others. But many companies, especially small ones, do not have those sorts of ‘gardeners’. I expect this will be a useful niche, serving as a gardener-coach, as soon as the organizations actually realize they need something.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by tanakawho
Have a problem: Build a web resource:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

Via a post on Hacker News I ran into the Tulane School of Medicine Student Portal.

As one of the developers writes on Hacker News

Our goal is ‘making med school easier, one less click at a time’. We have no business model, just trying to make our own lives easier.

There is further description on the site

Hello, and welcome to the Tulane University School of Medicine’s Student Portal! This website came into existence over the course of the latter part of the 2007-2008 school year through the hard and volunteered work of a group of students concerned with making the lives of TUSOM medical students a bit easier. Our university community is a dynamic place with much do, and many resources to use on a daily basis. In an effort to reduce the amount of time and energy required to accomplish these activities, we developed this site. Our work has been led, and graciously supported by the Medical Student Government, the Office of Medical education, and the Deans.

This site was developed by students, and for students. As such, if there is a feature that you feel would benefit the community as a whole, please feel free to drop us a line at tmedweb@tulane.edu. We’ll take your suggestion into serious consideration, and see if it within our abilities to accomplish.

That’s the kind of initiative that one loves to see. With hosting cheap, good web frameworks and people increasingly looking to the web for information, not the last time you’ll see something like this either. The key is realizing that often, if you have a problem, you can solve it yourself, and relatively inexpensively. Sometimes you can build a business out of it, a la 37signals

They (or at least Niels Olson) have some pretty ambitious future plans as well.

Online tools are not only cheap, they are also mature enough that it no longer requires a CS degree and years of experience to put something together. Coupled with Open Source, an individual can create pretty complex sites.

A similar attitude is beginning to invade other areas, such as Biotech. So many of the support functions are now available from standalone companies (such as DNA synthesis, sequencing, etc.) that we are almost at the point of ‘garage biotech’, where a very substantial amount of work can be done through contract for much less cost that having to create the infrastructure yourself.

This will never be at the same level as IT sorts of processes but it can have a profound effect on the cost of doing the biotech business. Add in IT tools to facilitate rapid information dispersal and a small lab can accomplish things that required a much larger facility just 5 years ago.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Web 2.0