LinkLog: Internet - A Resource for Going Green

From Why Internet is an Innovation - our Best Resource for Going Green by Courtney Webster

As an entirely online resource, the Internet can be used to share information across the world, without ever having to waste natural resources. Online bank statements reduce corporate mailings, while websites like www.photobucket.com allow us to share our pictures without making eco-costly prints. When shopping online, using credit cards and online order confirmation, we save the paper and ink that would other wise be used to print cash and receipts, and without making the trip to the store, we’re reducing our carbon footprint in the process.

There are several businesses that can do this, especially ones with mostly knowledge workers. Courtney points out Project Nvokh, a fascinating effort in going green.

Technology Trends Talk at TiE Chennai

I gave a talk on Technology Trends and Gleaning Opportunities at TiE Chennai today. It was gratifying to hang out with the participants and swap stories. I just uploaded a copy of the presentation (in PDF format). Here is the link -  technology-trends-jun2008

I also uploaded a copy on slide-share. Here is the link to the presentation.

I would love to hear from you. I am going to keep updating this presentation and incorporate suggestions. I am also planning to spend some time expand my list as well as tools for tracking trends.

Blogs - Keeping Content Current

I watch my blog stats once in a while (used to be a daily routine once). I notice that there are lots of readers for some of my old posts even though some of them may be outdated. When I noticed this, I stopped covering news on my blogs. I even wrote a post titled Does Currency of Information Matter?

Once in a while, I feel compelled to revisit a post and make some minor adjustments - add some new links or add a comment to updated information. I have been thinking about keeping my posts (at least a few of the popular ones) updated. Here are some ideas.

1. Keep updating the posts with current information when relevant, but keep a copy of the old version. Obviously we need to use the same permalink (so that people see the latest version), but does that violate the concept of a perma link?
2. Keep the old blog but change the beginning to link to a new version of the blog
3. Write a new blog and give a new version number with a link to all the old versions (in case people want to follow entries and comments)

I may try all these different techniques. I am sure that some one already solved this problem. If you did, can you share it here? If not, any thoughts?

LinkLog: What Kind of Software Would People Actually Pay For?

A great blog post and a discussion thread on reddit. Some snippets (read the blog for a very insightful discussion):

Software that re-defines a category (Google and Amazon come to mind)

Software that saves businesses (and individuals) money (figuring out the benefits to your customer)

Software that helps business earn more money (making it compelling)

Piggyback off where people are already spending tons of money (choosing your marketplace)

Become easier to choose and you become harder to leave (by building and managing excellence)

shrink a market or disrupt your competitors

Get bold initial customers who will take the risk and are willing to share their experiences.

You don’t have to be the guru of an industry; you can often make a huge difference by bringing a computational perspective to the domain (think how you can apply technology to solve real problems)

Find out what they have to do but hate doing and find a way to simplify or automate it.

This is the kind of blog post that I would book mark and read several times, think about it, find more similar ones. It will also be a nice exercise to keep this list some where and grow it based on actual experiences of successful products. Peter Christensen’s articulates so well some of the things I kind of know but never really reflected a lot about.

I think blogs are the best knowledge sharing network you can think of especially If you are lucky to discover ones like Peter’s.

LinkLog: Cognitive Surplus?

This post triggers a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas. Clay Shirky talks about Social Surplus and Cognitive Surplus. Some nuggets:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively…

The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible…

People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

It’s [cognitive surplus] so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

There are all kinds of interesting and useful projects cropping up all over the web. They promote the architecture of participation. Some of them are physical meets, some of them are shared col laboratories mostly powered by wikis and many of them promote sharing. I have my own experiments in this space - one on teaching and learning and another in setting up an incremental innovation lab. I will report my progress in a few months.

Resources: 7 Things You Should Know About

This is one of the most useful resources I found yesterday. It is called Seven Things You Should Know About from Educause Learning Initiative. From their page:

7 Things You Should Know About…pieces provide quick, no-jargon overviews of emerging technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts. Any time you need to explain a new learning technology or practice quickly and clearly

They cover a variety of emerging technology topics.  For each topic, they describe:

1. What is it?
2. Who is doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications of teaching and learning?

These questions (and the description) provides a much better overall perspectives of the topics covered. The coverage is non-technical and is a great way for any one curious about the topic to get a useful overview.

I like this format so much, that I plan to create a template and use it for our learning wiki.

Why, How and Why Not?

As children, we are always questioning people. As we grow older, we question less and less and accept more.  Corinne Miller, suggests that this may be because of the perception that asking questions is a sign weakness and describes how we can change this.

“What’s your favorite question? Over the years we’ve found that the most popular answers to this question are ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why not’ in that order. A trend we’ve also observed is that those who ask ‘why’ are typically more holistic or whole-brained thinkers, those who ask ‘how’ are typically more box thinkers, and those who ask ‘why not’ are typically the challenging thinkers. All types, of course, are equally valuable and equally required for innovation!”

Questions stimulate the brain! Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions. The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.

This article questions why people do not question and suggest ways of changing this.

• Why as you become older, we question less and less?
• How do we build questioning into a part of  business culture?
• Four steps in developing question banks - identifying, collecting, organizing and refining

One of the habits I am trying to develop among our interns and students is to keep a log of the following activities.

1. A question log
2. A learning log (things that they learn on a daily basis)
3. An idea log

I personally use a personally wiki for this. After reading this article, we may want to extend the wiki to act as a question bank for each project.

Innovation Propagation

Democracy was probably one of the greatest innovations in the world. How did it propagate? For a visualization of this story visit March of Democracy. While you are there explore other maps too.

Where has democracy dominated and where has it retreated? This map gives us a visual ballet of democracy’s march across history as the most popular form of government. From the first ancient republics to the rise of self-governing nations, see the history of democracy: 4,000 years in 90 seconds…!

This is a great and a very powerful way to track how a certain event or movement propagates around the globe. This is also a great way to teach history. Moving from the video, to the meta problem it solves, we can think of a tool to track propagation of innovation and other events. Many examples come to mind:

1. Historic events - spread of religions, spreading of culture, propagation of ideas. These and many others originate in one or two places and spread globally over a period of time.
2. This may also be a great tool for teaching economics, history and diffusion of various other types of innovation.
3. I would love to see a map of the way Mathematics or Science spread.

With the advent of internet, ideas spread through packets. Bloggers, definitely are catalysts for propagating information and ideas. Hopefully, we can trace the spread at a more granular level and understand why certain ideas spread and why others dont.

When You Solve Your Own Problem…

When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you’re passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you’ll truly use it and care about it. And that’s the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.

This and other great ideas in a book called Getting Real. It is a book about smaller, faster, better ways to build web applications. Some great ideas about building software. Here is a list of my favorite ones.
Build Less
Less Features means you can get the product out earlier into the hands of the customers. You get to hear what they really like and what they would like. This can be invaluable.

Fund Yourself
You can focus on doing something good instead of spending time looking for money. Meebo did this and so did lot of others. In fact, this is the norm in many of the Web 2.0 startups.

It Shouldn’t be a Chore
I love this one. If the app does not get you excited, it is not worth building. It should be fun to build. You need to enjoy every bit of the process. And if you built it for your own use, make sure that the experience of using it is fun, as well.

Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
Build incrementally. With each increment, make it more useful.

Check out the following advice.

Hire Less and Hire Later
You Can’t Fake Enthusiasm
The Blank Slate
Context Over Consistency

Open Doors
Ride the Blog Wave
Promote Through Education

Feel The Pain

LinkLog: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I have been a regular watcher of videos on TED Talks.  It is one of the most inspiring channels of information.  If you like the talks, you can help them spread.