Endless Knots

2010!

As promised, back after a digital break. Those used to seeing me affixed to a screen have been asking what it was like to go offline for nearly two weeks. Quite pleasant. I liked being free of the burden; of sitting without wonder as to whether I'd received a response -- or of fidgeting with guilt because I hadn't responded to a request. In the interest of honesty, that dreaded cloak, I did log on twice to deal with financial matters. I did answer my phone and respond to texts but missed a number because I didn't keep my phone by my side. And, since I apparently cannot live without some modicum of guilt, I fretted that I hadn't informed some people that I would be taking a break. But all of us survived. Try it sometime.

Stop(ped) the presses at 140 papers and counting

Ian Lamont, editor of The Standard, alerts us to this great/concerning/comprehensive "Best blog on the business of news(papers): Reflections of a Newsosaur. If you're not reading it, start now." I've done a few tear-stained posts here, including referencing Paper Cuts which the Newsosaur mentions as its blogger, Erica Smith, is keeping a map of where newspapers are disappearing. As per the title, 140 in 2009 gone, kaput.

For any of us who got our start getting high on newsprint and printers' ink (legal but so addictive that at 16 I preferred reporting from 3-11 at The Pottstown Mercury to going to the drive-in to meet boys), the transformation from packed newsroom and the ca-thunk of presses churning out papers to sitting alone and googling for sources--while charming in its own right and oh-so-efficient--is nevertheless unnerving and filled with loss.

The biggest byte yet

I thought what was interesting about Nick Bilton's NY Times story was its headline: "Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data." OK, we're info hogs; we can quantify it; the number is soaring, etc. But talk about burying the lead: we now have a word for a VERY BIG NUMBER: a zettabyte, or, start counting now, and continue into infinity, a billion trillion. Sounds like something a three-year-old would say, no?

Collectively, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information of all kinds in 2008, the researchers estimated.

A zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. A single zettabyte is equivalent to 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress, or as the report says, seven layers of textbooks covering the continental United States and Alaska.

Internet history in a few short screens

Cameron Chapman has put together The History of the Internet in a Nutshell beginning with ARPANET in 1969. Worth the look when you have the urge to know how we got here. Lots of other tributaries have fed into the history, of course, like Doug Engelbart's contributions, and, no doubt, a zillion, I mean, a google others. One thing worth noting: if you look carefully at the first graphic (I enlarged it), you can see how many of the original machines on ARPANET were from Digital Equipment Corporation--PDP10s and PDP11s. Sad that the company who gave us this miracle couldn't survive the explosion of the web.

One other "tiny" nit: the 2008 presidential candidates' use of the web mentions Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton but alas omits one Barack Obama.

Nice work, Cameron.

If it's Friday, it must be Adobe Connect

All of a sudden, the webcams, used principally for family connections for years, are workhorses (so to speak). All of the meetings we've had with Cisco of late have taken place in Webex, culminating in the extravaganza last Tuesday that combined Telepresence, Webex, and Cisco IPTV.

Then on Friday, for another client who shall go nameless but whose name you know, another webcast, this time via Adobe Connect, topic = "Leading and Motivating Remote/Virtual Teams."

An increasingly familiar format: slides on the left of the screen, occupying about 50% of the layout, me in the upper right, then a pastiche of chat, presenter, and poll windows that popped up to survey the crowd, none of whom was co-located either.

The polls serve a useful purpose. For example, how many of you are multitasking, we asked? 100% responded 100%. (At least they were paying enough attention to respond, I quipped.) Feedback like this mid-presentation helps guide what to say next, much as it does in a face-to-face preso when you ask people to raise their hands.

At the same time, people were throwing questions into the chat box, a long list of which now await answering as there wasn't time to in the session to respond. Likewise, the questions help frame Part 2 of this webcast "series." Last week's event centered around the most scarce of current resources, real-time interactions; the next centers around over-time communication.

Which brings up this last point, which really belongs in yesterday's post: If people are spread all around the world and the time difference spans 15 hours, where is the meeting taking place and what time is it? Online and cybertime are the obvious retorts but think about it. If our communication travels via packets, all split up into tiny digital bits, where is "here," and if it's 6 AM for Amy, 9 AM for me, 2 PM for Jim, and 9 PM for Neil, what time is it "now?"

A little history on the Computer History Museum (and MassNet, RIP)

A comment today on another post by Harry Stevens prompts this post. Harry asks whether I've ever visited The Computer Museum in Boston and if so whether they would be interested in the donation of a server with his ground-breaking software, Participate, on it.

Long before most reading here were even thinking about email (or for that matter computers), Harry Stevens had developed Participate, computer conferencing software described below. Visionary and its basic design still underlies most really good discussion software.

Alas, The Computer Museum in Boston exists no more, having closed in 1996 (what does that say about our history), its collection now belonging to The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (i.e. Silicon Valley), which opened in its current location in 2002. Watch what's coming there: next year they're opening an exhibit called "Computer History: The First 2000 Years." Bold. I also will refrain from commenting on the endless rivalry between Silicon Valley and Boston's MIT/Route 128 cultures, evidenced by the museum ending up in "their" vicinity rather than ours. Harrumph.

Why am I writing this post really? Because for a few years before and after 1995, a group of us, including Jeff Stamps and me, volunteered to create a new initiative here in Boston that would engender the kind of collaborative culture that, for all its cutthroat competitiveness has characterized Silicon Valley: "MassNet: Collaboration for the Commonwealth," which leaves but this small trace on an MIT server.

On a cold January day in 1995, MassNet brought together 250 representatives of each of the area's major sectors--from business, education, the denominations, foundations, healthcare, government...you name it, they were there. Among the event's sponsors was The Computer Museum, then housed next to Boston's incomparable Children's Museum right along Fort Point Channel, which provided the space for the event. (John Marchiony was then executive director of the museum--forever thanks, John).

When not talking about collaboration and how to forge strong links across the notoriously non-collaborative sectors in the area, participants wandered around looking at the first 1000 years of computer history. It was a beautiful space to hold this event and the cast of presenters and participants was stellar.

Among those who spoke: Congressman Ed Markey, an early visionary about telecommunications, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School prof and author who has written often about collaboration, Peter Drucker, yes, *the* Peter Drucker, who participated via videoconference from his home in Southern California, Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivack, late of Twine, Harry Saal, then CEO of Smart Valley, an initiative in Silicon Valley to wire the area (the digital divide was then the major topic among computer aficiandoes), Charlotte Kahn, who leads the Boston Indicators Project at the The Boston Foundation (and was my high school classmate), and others, including, need I say, moi. David Straus, founder of Interaction Associates, led the band of facilitators who conducted the breakout groups.

I could go on with all who participated and how ambitious our agenda was. Like so many great ideas, MassNet ran its course then died, having left a lot of people educated about the value of collaboration.

One last bit of personal history: Jeff's and my book, The Age of the Network, had its launch that night, also at The Computer Museum, where our publisher, Darryl Landvater of Oliver Wight, and our editor, Jim Childs, now publisher at Time Inc., hosted a book party

So, thanks, Harry, for giving me the opening to write about MassNet and...try The Computer History Museum. If they're not interested in a server loaded with Participate, they should be.

BusinessWeek/Cisco webcast: Revitalizing healthcare with technology

My friend John Halamka was on the second in the BusinessWeek/Cisco webcasts yesterday, "Revitalizing Healthcare with Technology," the same series that I was on with another friend, Karen Sobel Lojeski, back in Feb. Karen's and mine was called "Boosting Productivity with Virtual Collaboration," which I also wrote about here.

John, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (and Harvard Medical School), did a great job. I snapped a couple of pictures from the screen and sent them to him right after the show was over.

Not an award-winning photo but just think about it: John's being webcast from the NASDAQ studio in Times Square, I'm watching on the web, taking the pictures with my phone, then sending them to him seconds later. This stuff is really miraculous, folks, and we don't often stop to think about how easy it's all become.

In addition to being extremely knowledgeable, John is a great sport - and an accomplished Shakuhachi player. As previously noted, he's coming to the Margaret Fuller 199th birthday celebration again this year on May 23, as it's his birthday too (oddly enough, it was his birthday last year too - and unbelievably will be next year as well - what a coincidence!).

Webcom-Montreal 2009 - Wed, May 13, 2009 - 6th Intl Conference

What are you doing next Wed? Come to Montreal for Webcom 2009, where the themes are "Digital Identity, Innovation and Economic Development." I'm not entirely sure what digital identity is so I won't be talking about that but I will be holding forth in two sessions: "Leading Innovation When People Are Far Apart" and "The Digital Organization Chart: How to Encourage Transparency Across the Whole Enterprise."

Here's a little "facebook" of all the speakers.

What's extremely cool about this conference is that the afternoon keynotes are free and open to the public.

And there's a party that night. Thanks, organizers, for inviting me. I'll report back in after the event.

"Let's take that online" -- Boston KM Forum

Lovely day spent with the Boston KM Forum's "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, et al. Here's the group, snapped with my phone, just as Jeff and I started our tap dance on virtual teams.

We were followed by WBUR's New Media Director, Ken George, who showed how blurry the lines have become between different kinds of media. Here he asks whether what he's pointing to is a radio program or a web page. The answer? Both - plus a lot more because it's also a place for listeners to participate.

Next up, Suzanne Minassian who took us inside IBM's social media developments. I looked around the room while she was talking and realized that social media had taken over the crowd as a number of people were tweeting as she spoke (including yours t.). Narry a laptop in sight. A big change from just a year ago, when live blogging was the advance guard at this event.

After lunch, Sadie Van Buren from Knowledge Management Associates got best-in-show for her truly beautiful slides. Her four rules for social media are worth repeating (which I tweeted in real time, natch): reciprocate, meaning that it's wise to acknowledge all that comes your way, socially speaking; comment on what you "like" when perusing social sites because this adds to the ongoing promotion of good stuff out there; follow back/accept friend requests/link when people do the same for you (within reason, she pointed out, because the self-promoters will always be out there selling you snake oil); and give it away, meaning post, provide, share, and all the other positive tendencies that are in our nature when we're feeling good about ourselves.

Now to the reason for the title of this post: after our presentation, someone came up to me (apologies to whomever it was and please comment should you see this) to talk about a key point I made about conference calls. Status reporting, research indicates, is one of the worst uses of conference calls. Precious real time should be saved for the tough stuff - disagreements, decisions, conflict resolution, that kind of messiness. Whoever the brilliant person was who spoke to me pointed out that when things get tense on a call, people often say, "Let's take that offline," which led us to agree that the tendency should be just the opposite. Instead, best practice should be to "take that online," air the differences, and move beyond the problem as quickly as possible.

Thanks, all. Great day, and a big round of applause for Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait, who do the heavy lifting for these events.

Shirky: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Clay Shirky's Friday the 13th essay on his blog, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," is being linked left and right because it is original and provocative. I call it an essay because it's way more than a post, extraordinarily thoughtful. It's got the whole package - the history of newspapers, never mind the printing press, and the central point that, regardless of how the information reaches us, we need journalism, even if we don't know precisely what vehicle will deliver it in the years to come. A very nice follow-on to my tearful post about the demise of The Rocky.