I’m simplifying and cleaning up my sites for the new year. I’m not quite finished weeding this online garden, but things are a lot more tidy than last week. I’m particularly happy with the way the Stocks & Flows page is turning out. My home page is less cluttered but still suffers aesthetically.

Who’s got a site worth stealing ideas from? What are your “Oh, wow” favorites?

I’m experimenting with WordPress plugins this morning. Chris Brogan recommends these:

“ShareThis” was a cinch to install. In the plugins panel, search for it and install. The little tags that let readers forward posts to Facebook, Twitter, eMail, etc., automatically appear on every page now.

“Yet another related post” selects and displays related posts. You can tweak the selection algorithms. I made a minor tweak to the way the list is displayed.

Since mobile is increasingly the way of the world, I’m alos going to try WPtouch.

WPtouch: A simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone applicatio

Description Installation Faq Screenshots Changelog Stats
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

Increasingly, posts about learning will appear in the Informal Learning Blog. More tentative, experimental, and personal items will show up here on the Internet Time Blog.

Insights and pointers on learning, corporate performance, research. Informal Learning Blog Left brain dominant	A group of us contribute our best thinking on working smarter. Internet Time Alliance Lots of brains	Experimental, tentative, zany, and personal items. Internet Time Blog Right brain dominant

I sort connections by volatility. Stocks are persistent; flows are transient. Rapid change cuts the shelf-life of stocks. Yesterday’s stock becomes today’s flow. It’s a loose definition at best. Stocks are often pushed. Flows are invariably pulled.

Flows: The babbling brook of new information and news: Internet Time Blog & history Informal Learning Blog Informal Flow Jay’s Learnstream Twitter, Daily, Amplify Visual Flickr Tumblr YouTube

Stocks, more timeless information, wisdom, and relationships jaycross.com homepage Del.icio.us Jay’s Launchpad Jay’s Research page Collaboratively Internet Time Alliance Community

Conference hosts should take a lesson or two from Matt Mullenweg. Today’s Wordcamp San Francisco was simply great. Great line-up of speakers. Glorious weather. Some participants were so enthusiastic as to call for revolution and world domination by WordPress. (They see it as a platform, not a mere blogging tool. Most participants were making money from designing or installing WordPress sites.)

Admission was $50. It costs about $250/head; the difference is made up by sponsors. I didn’t hear an attendance figure: I’m guessing we had 600 people in attendance.

Ex-Google, ex-Zillow Vanessa Fox gave great SEO tips. Vanessa has a new book out. She’s one hell of a good marketer. (Her personal site used to be “vanessafoxnude.com.” No, there weren’t any pictures, just lots of visitors.)

Barbecued brisket & chicken and live jazz and great conversations.

Many opportunities to schmooze.

Some people think Richard Stallman a god for writing Emacs and inventing Free Software. No matter what his accomplishments, he struck me as a mean-spirited jerk. Criticizing the Apple “iGroan” and the Amazon “Swindle” is one thing. Saying that anyone who doesn’t openly give away his code is malicious and manipulative is nutty.

Host Matt Mullenweg is friendly, suave, well spoken, and simply cool. His staff are super-competent happy people.

May Day! May Day! May Day! May Day! May Day! May Day!

For support, I rely on the kindness of strangers. That may be you.

Hackers are polluting this blog and informl.com.

When I search for a prior post, I often find nothing but names of drugs repeated again and again as both title and content. I click…and get back to the original post.

These are WordPress blogs that I host. Running the latest version.

Well, my friends, any pointers?

The web and social networks are evolving their own conventions of appropriate behavior.

People have learned to avoid cluttering mailboxes with broad cc’s. Flames are far fewer than in the old days. Most bloggers no longer feel they must blog every day. Most people know that it’s worthwhile to lurk when joining a new community to identify its standards before jumping into the fray.

One area that noobs fail to understand is that it is not cool to “scrape” other people’s blogs. By scrape, I mean taking an entire web post rather than taking an excerpt and linking to the original.

Google Alerts emails me when sites take my content lock, stock, and barrel. Every week I come upon sites that break one or more of these taboos:

• Do not re-post someone else’s blog posts in their entirety.
• Do not imply that you wrote a post if you did not.
• Do not strip out author names and links.
• Do not use frames to make it difficult to get to the original post.
• Do not remove links to the original material.

I’ve been happy to share my thoughts in blogs and free articles for more than a decade. I enjoy the exposure. But I don’t enjoy being abused.

One association takes my every post, puts it behind a members-only wall, and puts its copyright notice on the bottom of every page. A now-defunct university posted an entire white paper by Clark Quinn and me but stripped our names from it. Several automated blogs repost my work with ads alongside. My colleagues at Internet Time Alliance are experiencing the same phenomena.

What’s your take on this issue?

*If you are not reflecting, you are not learning. Here are some things I learned from in the past six months.

I bought a Flip HD

The Flip UltraHD camcorder is a breakthrough learning device. Two hours of high-quality video from a cam that slides into your pocket. All for less than $200. Here’s a sample:

I continued to experiment with learning video. I prepared these videos to show at Online Educa.

• Verna Allee describes Value Networks
• Mark Oehlert discusses Identity and Authority
• Ellen Wagner summarizes the Future of Learning Technology
• John Foster talks about People Policy at IDEO
• Kevin Wheeler and Murray Christensen laugh at Talent Management
• Eileen Clegg explains Visual Learning
• Michael Allen tells about a futuristic, object-oriented authoring system
• Workshop participants practice project elevator pitches
• Dart Lindsley explains Business Architecture

Design Thinking

Had my design consciousness raised at Overlap ’09 in Monterey. The press thought our meeting nefarious.

Business Week tells you “what went on at the clandestine affair.”

This year’s motley bunch included an assorted portfolio of designers; businesspeople, investors and MBA graduates; a tech systems architect who was also a former Navy Seal; and a tai chi master. The mean age was in the high 30s, with several people over 60 and a few in their mid-20s. “Despite coming from different backgrounds, we’re all risk takers We don’t fit in normal places so we make positions for ourselves,” says Dila, 45, who also has a PhD in philosophy.

Internet Time Alliance

Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and I formed the Internet Time Alliance to help organizations innovate in learning. We are outspoken advocates of curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning. Organizations call on us to grow ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, and where all strive to be all they can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s learning with business impact.

Last month we selected Charles Jennings to be our CEO; I will serve as Chair. I am really looking forward to working with my esteemed colleagues, who are also great friends.

Chair and CEO of Internet Time Alliance

Provided marketing and distribution advice to half a dozen web 2.0 companies, all of whom wish to remain anonymous.

Learning is Not Enough

Began to embrace idea that Learning is not enough. “Learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for working smarter. Dictionaries define learning as acquiring knowledge and skills. But we all know skilled, knowledgeable people who don’t get things done, don’t we? Learning that doesn’t lead to doing is no better than not learning at all.”

Articles

Informal Learning 2.0

In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their customers.

Networks reduce transfer costs to zero, enabling companies to focus on what they do best while outsourcing what others can do better. Networks also speed things up, often at a terrifying rate, making the corporate world unpredictable. In sum, networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change, as well.

Productivity in a Networked Era: Not Your Father’s ROI

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

More Human that Human

My last column called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning.

Whose Learning Are You Responsible For?

Last month I conducted several workshops to inject informal and social learning practices into hidebound organizations that were anxious to ramp up to the future. I encouraged them to address the needs of people who had traditionally been left out of the corporate training agenda.

Come Together

Organizations have woken up to the power of people working together. Collaboration gets things done and is the most powerful learning tool in the CLO’s playbook.

Workshops

I conducted several onsite workshops to inject informal/social learning practices into hidebound organizations that are anxious to ramp up to the future. My intent is to challenge a couple of dozen managers to each come up with a major change project and shape up a pitch to sell the idea to their organization. I intend to coax them to plant dozens of seeds. If one or two take root, it may ignite the process of organizational transformation. This has me thinking about where companies should be placing their bets.

By the way, I can do this with your organization for a nominal fee. Virtual or face-to-face.

Clark Quinn and I gave a one-day workshop on implementing networked learning architecture the day before DevLearn. Here’s a podcast prequel.

Lenora Routon Cross 1920-2009

Mom, my brother, and me (in plaid) in the early fifties.

Largest magnolia tree in the South, on our family’s homestead in Washington, Arkansas

Sitting in Bill’s cabinet room chair at the Clinton Library in Little Rock

Endless rows of FEMA trailers parked in Hope forevermore

Un-books

Released several editions of Work Smarter at $19.95. Changed tag line to better reflect the content: Informal Learning in the Cloud.

North to Alaska

Until you’ve been to Alaska, it’s tough to imagine how large it is. In July, Uta and I joined our son Austin for vacation in Denali and Wrangell National Parks.

Gave a talk on Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era and the VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning in Barcelona.

Barcelona

Stephen and George in Barcelona

Amazing meal at Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava

DevLearn marked a significant shift in the field of corporate learning. Content and planning have become secondary to getting the job done. In today’s world, that means trusting workers to learn for themselves. The natives are taking control. Learning is mobile. Curriculum is toast.

Charles Jennings, introducing Internet Time Alliance.

Heike Philp, putting Online Educa online with simulcasting

Chaired a well-attended session at Educa on neuroscience and learning. I feel we’ve left some of the obvious findings of brain science out of our designs for learning environments. The scientists at the session warned us not to draw too many conclusions from the wiggles on fMRI charts.

Speaking

Here’s my shot at Pecha Kucha at Educa:

I was determined to improve my ability to excite an audience this year. A few months earlier I’d performed an Ignite session on the stage of Gnomedex. I’m practicing now and plan to have people on the edge of their seats a few months hence.

See also the Pecha Kuchas of Daniel Stern, Robin Good, and Heike. More to come.

Talent Management overtook Learning & Development in corporations this year. I led sessions on the future circa 2015 at the Future of Talent Institute Retreat. (I’m on the faculty; hard to believe this was my fifth retreat.) It was my second time at Asilomar in six weeks.

eLearning is not a big cost-cutter

Corporations are flocking to eLearning for all the wrong reasons. It’s cheaper: no travel, no facilities cost, no instructor salaries. This sort of fanciful thinking tripped up eLearning ten years ago. MORE

Informal Learning 2.0

In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their customers.

Networks reduce transfer costs to zero, enabling companies to focus on what they do best while outsourcing what others can do better. Networks also speed things up, often at a terrifying rate, making the corporate world unpredictable. In sum, networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change, as well.  MORE

Free chapters from Implementing eLearning

Seven years ago, Lance Dublin and I wrote a book entitled Implementing eLearning. The cover explained…

Here Is How To:

• Manage the Change to E-Learning
• Successfully Market to Learners
• Create an Implementation Strategy

We wrote that for eLearning to work, you needed to set the stage with change management and sell the stakeholders with the methods of consumer marketing. The message is timeless. People still buy copies of Implementing eLearning today.

For years, we’ve offered excerpts from the rough draft of the book for free. MORE

More Human Than Human

The future is people, not technology

My last column in CLO called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning. MORE

Not Your Father’s ROI

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco. MORE

Thoughts following April Learntrends

Yesterday, Learntrends hosted a series of online conversations on boosting the performance of organizations through learning.

Our goal was honest dialog among as many members as possible. No commercials. No presentations. Few or no slides. Often, we threw three or four great people into an online fishbowl and let the conversation go where it would. At other times, participants simply talked about whatever was on their minds, with a host and time cop occasionally nudging the conversation back to the theme of improving the process of learning in organizations. MORE

Streams, not blogs?

I don’t know how my friend and colleague Jane Hart does it. In addition to implementing social learning systems for universities and corporations, she leads workshops on social learning and somehow finds time to maintain the most useful learning site on the net, the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. Among other things, the Center maintains a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning. The list compiles the Top 10 lists of 195 learning professionals. It’s a fantastic resource. MORE

Ten years after

“If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look to how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see? What will the mix of Push vs. Pull Learning; Formal vs. Informal supported by the organization? Are there training departments? What are they doing? How big are they as compared to today? What new departments will be responsible for parts of workplace learning? What will current members of training departments be doing in 10 years?” MORE

Ten days ago most of my websites disappeared from the web.

My internet service provider (ISP), the ironically named DreamHost, was experiencing blackouts and mail delays.

Now Internet Time Blog, Informal Learning Blog, jaycross.com, and related sites have migrated to Bluehost, the top recommendation from a cry for help on Twitter. Actually, my cyber-savvy sysop son made the move. Transferring ten years of accumulated posts on five blogs and six MySQL databases is beyond my abilities.

Please forgive any weirdness from here in the next few days. Feedblitz has sent out a few spams from the transition (sorry).

Tell me when you find broken links and 404s; I’m sure they’re out there.

Thanks for your patience and assistance.

October 12

DreamHost Network is down.

Posted (October 12th, 2009 at 10:47 pm PST) by Sandon

It looks like our core router lost its BGP session which took down our entire network (as far as we can tell). We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come. This is affecting all DreamHost services.

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October 11

Networking issues causing mysql and web downtime

Posted (October 11th, 2009 at 6:13 pm PST) by andrea

Unfortunately, we’re experiencing some networking issues that are affecting our web (including PS) and mysql servers. If your site is suddenly not loading or can’t connect to the database, it’s most likely related. We’re looking into this and will be posting updates as soon as available. Sorry about the inconvenience!

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October 10

Packetloss on some MySQL’s and one web-server

Posted (October 10th, 2009 at 3:16 am PST) by Sandon

It looks like one of our edge switches is having some problems causing packetloss which is making the machines extremely slow and unresponsive. This is affecting the following machines:

dewy, huey, cupid, marbles, nanook, donald, daffy, tweety, woodstock, psmysql745, psmysql799, psmysql961, psmysql962, psmysql966, psmysql967, psmysql979, psmysql986, psmysql991, psmysql1829, psmysql1861, psmysql3171, psmysql3228, psmysql4588, psmysql4975, psmysql5278, psmysql6455

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October 8

Network problems causing downtime on some homie machines

Posted (October 8th, 2009 at 3:20 pm PST) by andrea

The following machines are affected by the current network outage. Our admins are working on the resolution, please check back for updates and details. We apologize for the inconvenience!

algiers alouettes angels argonauts avengers baku bayhawks bears belmopan bengals bills blackhawks blazers bluebombers bluejays bobcats braves brewers bridgetown broncos browns bruins brumbies brussels bubsy buccaneers bucks buenosaires bulls bullwinkle butterfish canberra cannons cardinals cavs chapulin chivas clippers cobra colts cowboys crew crusaders d-fenders dhaka diamondbacks dodgers dopey dumbo dynamo eagles earthquakes eltigre eskimos expos falcons fever fire flames foghorn force galaxy grinch grizzlies gumby hawks heat herediano highlanders hornets hurricanes indians inki islanders jaguars jazz jets jetsons kabul kings knicks lakers leghorn liberty lightning lions lizards magic magoo manama mariners marlins mets minsk monarchs nassau nationals nets niners nuggets oilers olympiacos outlaws pacers packers padres panthers patriots penguins phillies pirates pistons popeye predators pride pumbaa raiders rams rangers rapids raptors ravens rays reds redwings revolution rockets rockies roughriders royals saprissa seahawks shock slowpoke snoopy sox spaceghost sparks spurs stampeders steelers stjohns suns texans thrashers thunder tigercats tigers tirane titans topcat twins vienna vikings waratahs warriors wizards yankees yerevan zazu and some of our private servers

And this is a test of the Poll Daddy plug-in for Word Press.

You can make your own fonts here; it costs $9.95. I may make a symbol library.