background preloader

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

Social computation and creativity Knowledge market is a distributed social mechanism that helps people to identify and satisfy their demand for knowledge. It can facilitate locating existing knowledge resources similarly to what search engines do (the name social search refers to this). It can also stimulate creation of new knowledge resources to satisfy the demand (something that search engines can’t do). The goal of this post is to compare several free knowledge markets created by 3form, Naver, Yahoo, Mail.ru, and Google to identify their common elements and differences. Background Free Knowledge Exchange project was launched in summer 1998 in Russia and its international version became available at 3form.com in February 1999. Prior to 3form, two ways of collective problem solving on the internet were available. Korean Naver played a key role in popularizing the concept of knowledge market. Free knowledge markets are currently abundant with numerous implementations. Incentive systems Features Common features comparison:

Memetics | Meme Hacking At PivotCon 2010, Douglas Rushkoff made some extremely cogent arguments about why brands cannot go viral on social networks — even when there’s plenty of activity on companies’ websites and Facebook pages — and why it’s pointless to try to push brand concepts (such as mascots) around as memes in the expectation of driving actual product sales. This talk is exceptionally amusing both for its venue — he’s at a branding conference talking about social media — and for the fact that he opens the talk by saying, essentially, “you think you’re talking about what’s happening, but you’re not.” He managed to rankle more than a few career marketeers who oversimplified his message to mean “marketing is evil”; the mild antagonism to this particular audience inherent in his message did not go unnoticed by PivotCon organizer Chris Shipley who made no bones about the reason they decided to schedule his talk dead last.

Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins Elizabeth R. Hubbell Home Page Internet and memetics Garry Marshall School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, London N14 4XS, England. e-mail: Garry2@mdx.ac.uk Abstract The functioning and usage of the Internet are examined in terms of memes and memetics. 1. Memetics provides a powerful new way to think about things such as, for example, creativity (Gabora, 1997). The Internet, like all computer networks, is designed and constructed in a layered fashion, with layers of software added to the basic hardware. In fact, as this paper shows in a limited way, the functioning of the various layers can be interpreted memetically. 2. We begin by considering the World Wide Web. Routing is, in essence, achieved with routing tables. This way of achieving adaptive routing can be interpreted as a memetic system. 3. Agent technology is becoming ever more widely used on the Internet as a means of supporting services, notably search engines and 'push' services. The question that arises is: How should the agents co-operate?

Les outils collaboratifs renforcent-ils la cohésion de l'entreprise ? Afin d'éviter le débauchage de salariés, les compagnies ont intérêt à rassembler leurs équipes de recherche en groupes de travail. Réels plus que virtuels, ces derniers visent surtout à souder des liens existants. Pour éviter que les individus talentueux associés autour d’un projet, ne soient encouragés par la concurrence à quitter l’entreprise, il faut renforcer le travail d’équipe, notent dans un rapport des chercheurs de l’université Carlos III de Madrid. Les scientifiques se sont intéressés à une entreprise high-tech en particulier : IBM. Ils soulignent que ce sont souvent les acteurs clés, dont l’expertise est déterminante pour faire avancer tel ou tel projet de R&D qui sont "courtisés" par des sociétés concurrentes. Ainsi, paradoxalement, les personnes les plus impliquées sont dans certains cas celles qui ont le plus de chances de quitter l’entreprise. Préserver l’unité du groupe Restructurer le travail collaboratif

FINAL REPORT | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. We include here the findings of three years of research on kids' informal learning with digital media. Summary - Summary of Findings Two page summary (pdf) White Paper - Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (pdf) Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Book - Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media Ito, Mizuko, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr, Heather A. Dedication To the memory and ongoing legacy of Peter Lyman. Contents

Lateral Thinking Problems - Fact Lateral thinking problems that are based on fact. 1. A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink of water. Hint: Please do not try this at home. Solution: The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun. A Colombian man accidentally shot his nephew to death while trying to cure his hiccups by pointing a revolver at him to scare him, police in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla said on Tuesday, the 24th of January 2006. After shooting 21-year-old university student David Galvan in the neck, his uncle, Rafael Vargas, 35, was so distraught he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide, police said. The incident took place on Sunday night while the two were having drinks with neighbors. Galvan started to hiccup and Vargas, who works as a security guard, said he would use the home remedy for hiccups of scaring him. "They were drinking but they were aware of what was going on," one witness said. 2. Hint: This may have occurred anywhere between 1862 and 1990. 3. 4. 5.

Wikileaks Lessons for Business: Authenticity before transparency December 2nd, 2010 · 1 Comment Wikileaks is offering real time transparency in policy making and statesmanship. Business may think this has nothing to do with them. You are next, I assure you. Here is what you can do to defend yourself. What I mean by this suggestion is that more attention is being paid to whether the leaks are appropriate than whether the conduct they expose is appropriate. Leaders have become so depend on the ability to present their case with different spins that it never occurs to them that there is another way. First, a person thinks about and includes in their communication what will be seen as central to or have meaning attributed to it, by everyone those who will be effected. I have a friend, Bob Mang, who does this with every situation and it sometimes drives me crazy. Second, an authentic leader seeks to represent the same situation in the same way, no matter the audience or situation, because they seek to include the whole in their thinking and interactions.

new article by Lev Manovich: "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data" Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data (PDF). In this article I address some of the theoretical and practical issues raised by emerging “big data”-driven social science and humanities. My observations are based on my own experience over last three years with big data projects carried out in my lab at UCSD and Calit2 (softwarestudies.com). The issues which we will discuss include the differences between “deep data” about a few and “surface data” about the many; getting access to transactional data; and the new “data analysis divide” between data experts and the rest of us. ---------------------------- Reference: Lev Manovich.

Swarm Creativity Blog Réseau social : Devoteam dresse un bilan des 6 mois de la phase pilote Weez, le réseau social interne de Devoteam, basé sur Jive, quitte sa phase pilote pour être lancé officiellement. Des 6 premiers mois d'utilisation, la société de conseil et de services tire de nombreux enseignements. En termes d'adoption, la société affiche de beaux résultats. Sur les 4 500 collaborateurs de l'entreprise, pratiquement un quart d'entre eux se connecte chaque jour à la plate-forme. Le terrain était, il est vrai, favorable à la mise en place d'un réseau social d'entreprise. Les collaborateurs sont à l'aise avec les nouvelles technologies et le fonctionnement en mode communautés (une vingtaine regroupées autour de six grands thèmes) était ancré dans les habitudes. Des espaces de rencontre informels avec les utilisateurs A l'instar d'Alcatel-Lucent, qui a également déployé un réseau social basé sur Jive, elle propose des espaces de rencontre informels à l'heure du café pour aller au-devant des utilisateurs et répondre à leurs questions.

10 Iconic Steve Jobs Moments [VIDEOS] The career of one of America's most innovative businessmen has been more than just a string of moments, but these 10 peeks at Steve Jobs's formidable presence will remind you of why his resignation is such a momentous event. From his cocky early days launching Macintosh, to his triumphant return to the company, to his jeans-and-black-shirt days of the iPod, iPhone and iPad — he kept keynote attendees and employees alike on the edge of their seats until his last "one more thing." That\u2019s impossible How good scientists reach bad conclusions by Ralph C. Merkle Principal Fellow, Zyvex www.zyvex.com April, 2001 This web page is also available at "The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it." Peter Medawar, Nobel Laureate, for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance Introduction Self replicating programmable manufacturing architectures were known by von Neumann in the 1940’s (Von Neumann, 1966). Drexler’s synthesis of the ideas of Feynman and von Neumann implies that nanotechnology is feasible. How can this be? This is, of course, just one example of the slow acceptance of new ideas. While the resistance to nanotechnology and assemblers is just a new instance of an age old pattern, the specifics are still instructive. In the following discussion, names are omitted to protect the guilty. Thermal noise The first and most sweeping rejections were based on general principles. σ2 = kT / ks Power Fear

Related: