Online shared intelligence

I have no idea how it is that I never heard of the Falkirk Wheel… it looks to me like the sheer ingenuity, scale and novelty of this engineering beauty should by now have converted it into an icon of these, so highly mediated, times. I found about it in a total serendipitous manner, a snapshot of a Mac product in versiontracker…

I was immediately drawn to the design questions that the endeavor must have created… Just think about it, connecting two channels that run at 115 feet difference in height, how would you do it? What if somebody told you you can’t spend more than 1.5KW of electricity to operate it?

If you feed this blog’s URL into http://wordle.net, you get a word map (where size indicates frequency of words in the page, not tags) that looks just like this:

Word map for this URL

Social networks can (and will) be leveraged to enable powerful transformations… but first they will be used for the most inane, mindless, junk.

This has to be one of the finest anecdotes I have heard in a long time. Perhaps everybody knows it, but nonetheless it’s excellent.

Call me 1.0, but…

A friend asked the question as she started the process of exploring her requirements for collaboration products, which she will use to support a social networking initiative she is about to get going.

Like many other practitioners before her, Lisa found that when it comes to enterprise collaboration, there is a huge difference between wanting to solve a problem and knowing what specific product features are relevant to your needs. In other words, if you want, say, “to empower collaboration in order to create alignment between highly distributed teams in order to improve the product cycle”, how does MySite functionality help you? If you want “to increase intimacy between partners and internal stakeholders”, is that something a blog, a wiki or a forum will produce? How relevant is a forms server to collaboration?

Sorry, I got targeted for spam by some moron, and in the process of deleting the 200 or so junk comments y deleted all previous VALID comments. At some point I’ll recover them from backup, but I am very busy right now.

My apologies

All fantasies of ethical behavior die a slow death in these hyper-commercialized days. The process is familiar, you like a hungry startup because you are hungry for empathy, the hungry startup likes you because… it’s hungry for your attention. You love each other, admire each other, and everything works until the hungry startup makes it. Then, class conflict replaces romance.

Google’s “do no evil” was just a stretcher, a smart tactic to make us think the other way while the company helped the Chinese government censor its people (and probably helping ours censor us as well). But let’s admit it, the romance is gone; Google crossed “to the other side” long ago.

Lately, however, something is starting to happen more and more frequently, which would suggest that the corruption of principle is getting deeper and deeper into the architecture of this money-making machine: search SPAM. Check the search below: can anybody suggest that the Google engine does NOT know the difference between this SPAM result (offering cheap cash) and the technical results I was expecting from an OBVIOUSLY technical search? How many people would you expect to Google for specifications on a software integration and come out saying “Hey, that was cool, getting cheap cash was exactly was I needed for my integration needs!”?

Do you know of any innovative search provider that is still hungry enough to love me? If so, let me know… And if you see Google around, please ask them to come pick up their things or I’ll throw them out of the window  :)

Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

Memory lane on enterprise collaboration: many years went by, buzz-words getting old and refreshed, problems have not changed much: a hierarchical corporate culture of control and power