Entries Tagged 'social media' ↓

Last week I had the privilege of attending Le Web ’08 in Paris, which was artfully composed and hosted by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur. It was an interesting event; I always like getting an international perspective on technology and business.

What was perhaps most interesting was the constructive tension between creativity and business on display there.

The theme of the conference was love — a primary human emotion. However, many of the guests and speakers were aggressive, technically-minded business people. But many of the speakers were artists, musicians, and researchers.

I’m fascinated by the complementary roles of “right brained” activity (art, creativity, design, visual thinking) and “left brained” activity (analysis, rule-based systems, quantitative modeling, finance) in business, particularly on the Internet.

Loïc rightly justified the use of the theme of love for the conference by saying that it is the primary emotion that drives an Internet entrepreneur to give birth to a new idea or technology. Surely this is true, but I’d argue that there are deeper justifications for using an emotion as the theme for an Internet business conference.

Developing innovative Internet business ideas requires a sense of play and real play only comes about when people tap into their creative, artistic brains. Not to get all philosophic, but Immanuel Kant stated in his Critique of Judgement that real advances in art can only be made when  art is undertaken for art’s sake alone, that is to say that it is done without any expectation of value, but rather is done merely to satisfy the curiosity of the artist (or designer, or researcher, or scientist).

So, all this means that Internet business people are in desperate need of right-brained influence.  It’s where the ideas come from.

My friend Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, is quoted as saying, “Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”  Love is surely a human need and is arguably a driver for all good design. And aren’t we all trying to design the things that the world didn’t know it was missing?

William McDonough, famed architect and designer, has stated, “Design indicates intent,” and shouldn’t our intent be to love one another and to love our planet?  Isn’t that what we should be trying to achieve in designing our Internet startups?

I was interested to see how many people literally got up and left the plenary session when the subject matter turned to art or music or emotion.  Some people were there strictly for left-brained content (how to raise money, how to survive the recession, etc) while others seemed to be more open to the right brained content.

Personally, I enjoyed the presentations by Itay Talgam (conductor), Chris Anderson (curator, TED), Helen Fisher (researcher on human relationships), and Robin Good (on education) the most. I’d say these were the most right brained. Things I enjoyed the least were the presentations by Messrs. Arrington and Gillmor, especially the unfortunate bickerfest that is the Gillmor Group that ended the conference. This is not to say that this kind of “left brained, rule-based” discussion doesn’t have a role, but it doesn’t generate anything really. All it does successfully is tear people apart; it’s not creative, and it doesn’t fuel anybody’s soul.

So, I applaud Loïc and Geraldine for a really creative and fun event, and one which truly gave me a sense of what is currently going on in the heads of European web entrepreneurs. I would simply encourage steering even further into the realm of emotion, creativity, design, and art – as it’s this kind of content which will pull us out of the recession, as it’s this kind of thinking that will help people create art and beauty for art’s sake alone, and these will be the innovations that the world didn’t know it was missing.

Rock on, Loïc, and let your right brain show; it’s your best side.

Boulevard St. Michel, Paris, Google Streetview

So many wonderful things going on in this photo, and it’s all entirely unintentional. With such a vast quantity of visual data collected for Google Streetview, how many “artistic” scenes lurk within it?  How might one build a machine for finding the art within this dataset?  Can it be crowdsourced?

Want to work on this with me?  If so, ping me.

In the circles I move in, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about Starfish and Spiders; reference to the 2006 book by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

The idea behind the book, which I have not read (why should I have to fund these guys just to understand their point), is that top-down command and control style organizations resemble a spider, and that if the head of the spider is removed, the organization dies.

A starfish organization, in contrast, can survive damage, and in fact after one of its arms is severed can not only repair the arm, but the severed arm can re-grow a new body. Nice enough analogy, and good for getting the point across to thick-skulled CEO’s still mourning the apparent loss of their cheese.

However, I find the analogy a bit weak; the “starfish” concept doesn’t actually explain a lot of the behavioral properties that underlie “starfish” organizations. Folks in the coworking community rightly believe that it is a starfish-style movement: leaderless and self-healing.

Flocking behavior (as seen with birds and insects) is a more instructive analogy to me. On first glance, many naïvely assume that flocks follow a leader. Not true. Individual members of a flock obey just three simple rules, and this is all that’s required to produce complex flocking behavior:

• Separation: Steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
• Alignment: Steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
• Cohesion: Steer to move towards the average position of local flockmates

Quoting from Wikipedia (so it must be true), “In flocking simulations, there is no central control; each bird behaves autonomously. In other words, each bird has to decide for itself which flocks to consider as its environment. Usually environment is defined as a circle (2D) or sphere (3D) with a certain radius (representing reach). A basic implementation of a flocking algorithm has complexity O(n²) - each bird searches through all other birds to find those who falls into his environment.”

The implementation of coworking is flock-like. The spread of coworking is starfishy.

The reason why so many people have trouble defining coworking is because it defies centralized control, or the notion of a flock leader.  The reason why people say, “the only way to understand coworking is to do it,” is because it is fundamentally a flocking behavior which relies on individual execution of the flocking algorithm rules.

Flocking also explains why so many coworking environments end up selecting for the right people, with no defined rules or central control; each bird chooses whether the environment is right for her. The flock self selects.

So, if you’re having trouble explaining why your local coworking group has anything to do with starfish, maybe it’s time to start talking about your flock instead.

There was a time when people only used Facebook email for informal, personal communications; voices from the past looking to catch up, or casual connections that were anything but urgent.

As folks have begun to get more contacts on Facebook, and use it for more of their daily business communications, the walled-garden approach is no longer functional.

Facebook needs to open up its messaging system to POP and IMAP access, allow forwarding to external accounts, and recognize their role as a legitimate email provider.  While I loathe having to have yet another email account to manage, if I could access it via IMAP or forwarding, I could at least manage it. As it stands today, it is really not manageable; in fact the inability for me to archive the data along with my other email communications makes it a liability and something to avoid.

As it is now, Facebook email is actually creating more problems than it solves, and I expect that there will be a backlash against it unless they take ownership of this growing problem. Facebook, are you listening?