Some of my notes from tonight’s session, mainly Alan Kay’s observations.

“The revolution is old but it feels like it’s just taking off.”

Kay and a bunch of his pals back in ARPA and PARC days remembered Licklider, who wanted ARPA to develop and intellectual amplifier. In those cold war days, money was not a problem. The influential were out to change the world, not to amass fortunes. Licklider called for developing an intergalactic network. Missing the mark created the internet.

Unfortunately, business people are rewarded for making money, not for improving the world. Imagine how business would look at marketing bicycles if starting from scratch. These things have one hell of a steep learning curve. And they are dangerous. Kids are going to ride them in traffic. Our lawyers will be in fits. Forget it.

Appropriately, Kay shared a Churchill anecdote with a great message: The future is cooperation, not competition.

The hostess at the manor party tells Sir Winston she’s just seen a senior peer pocket a solid silver salt cellar. Should she confront him?

Winston walked over to the earl, pocketing a salt shaker along the way. As he pulled the shaker from his pocket, he told the earl, “it looks like we’ve been discovered. Better put them back.”

Kay set a hurdle for software. It should be like the human body, which replaces every molecule in the course of seven years; it doesn’t have to die for maintenance and then reboot. Software should accommodate improvement without shutting down.

The typical Silicon Valley has a little angel on her shoulder, saying “Change the world.” On the other should sits a little devil saying “Get rich quick.”

Why is the movie industry in Hollywood? It’s not just the light. It was as far as they could get away from New York. Similarly, Xerox put PARC in Palo Alto, far from the executive offices in Stamford, CT.

Kay hasn’t seen much true innovation beyond mere scaling.

Business people seem to feel as if God had given them this verdant valley, and they figure it’s their right to strip it bare.

MOOCs? The amazing thing is their popularity. The underbelly is Backlash.

Maxwell (or maybe it was Faraday) gave Disraeli a demo of two small motors. “What are they good for?” The reply: “What are human babies good for?”

Most managers are more concerned about maintaining control than with doing the job well.

I’m spending the first quarter of the year learning experientially by walking around and trying new things.

This blog is turning conversational. It’s me to you. Informal. Personal. I’m returning to the impromptu, stream-of-consciousness style I used when I began blogging a dozen years ago.

I’ll be narrating my work, describing my discoveries before I mesh them into white papers and polished posts. When I’ll post things ready for prime time to jaycross.com, my official blog. Here at internettime.com, you’ll find thought fragments, tips, speculation, and experiments.

If you want to view lots of Jay and ideas in the making, subscribe to internettime.com.

If you prefer just the industry-changing posts, finished white papers, and a more conservative tone, subscribe to jaycross.com.

You may also want to check out my curated topics, too.

Hacked? Last year hackers infected four of my sites with malware. I was at a loss until a friend turned me on to Sucuri.net. They cleaned up the mess and now monitor my sites for badness.

HTML5 plays natively on laptop, pad, and phone.

HTML5, why should I care? When I first grappled with the web, I loved learning and writing HTML. View source enabled me to figure out how people created various effects. I learned by tweaking: do it, try it, fix it. Immediately seeing the result was tremendously motivating.

As HTML advanced, many original conventions were no longer supported. I began getting lost when CSS replaced declarations like <font size=”small” color=”red” />. HTML5 joined my list of things to learn on Walkabout.

Why switch?

• HTML5 automatically resizes for PCs, tablets, and smart phones.
• Flash is on the way out. HTML5 plays all manner of videos natively.
• HTML5 uses vector graphics, which don’t pixelate degraded when you blow them up.
• HTML5 creates pages that are better, faster, cheaper, simpler to develop, and secure.

And more.

Can anyone suggest some good tutorials? I’m starting with HTML5 Rocks.

iCloud ate my most important file.

I store a file named 2013 Jay’s Stories in Apple’s iCloud so I can easily access it from any of my computers. (I have Macs on each of the three floors of my house.)

The file contains my journal, reminders, ideas for stories, to-do list, and plans in Pages. These forty pages are at the center of my life.

I can no longer open the Stories file; it reports that I’m missing index.html. I cannot download the file. I can’t pull a copy from my back-up because Time Machine hasn’t been backing up iCloud. I am hosed.

This makes me suspicious of the whole iCloud deal. Dare I leave other files out there? Do I have to do manual backups? I’ll talk with Apple about this but I am going back to Dropbox.

Pokey Plug-ins

Brian Dusablon turned me on to a WordPress plug-in that scans your site and calls out slow plug-ins. Called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), it’s free and it works.

Quiet, the power of introverts

Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Today, People, GoodReads, Fast Company, the Guardian, Kirkus Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Inc., Inside Higher Ed, and Princeton Alumni Weekly rate Quiet a top nonfiction book of 2012. I wouldn’t. It’s a good book, but not a compelling book.

U.S. society in general and the business world in particular celebrate the outgoing Extrovert Ideal. Around 1900, America shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality. The Culture of Character emphasized attributes anyone could work on improving: citizenship, duty, work, golden deeds, honor, reputation, morals, manners, and integrity. The Culture of Personality embodies qualities that are harder to acquire: magnetic, fascinating, stunning attractive glowing dominant, forceful and energetic. We became obsessed with movie stars. We all became performers.

We left the farms and citizens became employees. Introverts like J. Alfred Prufrock were forced to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Dale Carnegie became a best seller. Outgoing people were winners; shy folks were losers.

Class at Harvard B-School

Cain goes to my alma mater to check the temperament of future captains of industry. A student wished her luck, thinking that “finding an introvert at Harvard Business School no doubt believing that there were none to be found.”

“The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. The HBS teaching method implicitly comes down on the side of certainty. The CEO may not know the best way forward, but she has to act anyway. The HBS students, in turn, are expected to opine. Half of the students’ grade, and a much larger percentage of their social status, is based on whether they throw themselves into this fray. If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t he’s on the margins.”

Cain is absolutely correct. I should know. When I attended HBS, my Myers-Briggs score put me two standard deviations away from the norm toward introversion. I never volunteered to speak. I rarely said anything. My years at B-School were among the worst in my life.

Nonetheless, I made it through. I wish I’d been able to read Quiet back then. Reading about the benefits of introversion would have made the situation more tolerable. It turns out that introverts are often more creative, more insightful, and more reflective than their outgoing peers. Teams and group action are not the answer for everything. Introverts and extroverts working together are more productive than either group working in isolation.

Twenty years after school, my personality flipped. Myers-Briggs now pegged me as an extreme extrovert. I became more outgoing, starting speaking up, and became fearless about meeting people. My conversion coincided with lifting the cloud of depression. The Black Dog had turned me negative about interactions with others. Choking off the depression made me an optimist. Curiously, Cain doesn’t mention depression in the book.

Quiet is a worthwhile read if you’re not familiar with this subject or if you’re a suffering introvert. You’ll learn that introverts can be mighty contributors and to “fake it until you make it.”

Google Analytics tells me these are 2012′s greatest hits on jaycross.com.

Dan Pink’s new book

Dan Pink has written another best seller. (The book won’t be released until December 31 but is already in its third printing.) The U.S. Government reports that one worker in eight is a sales person. Dan disagrees. He thinks we’re all sales people, even though a lot of us are engaged in “non-sales selling.” Instructors, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and you and I spend a lot of time persuading, influencing, and convincing others to do something even though it doesn’t ring the cash register.

Learning by Doing

Sitting Kills

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Coherent Organization

Organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, for example, communities of practice, the company social network, and close-knit collaborative work teams. You need to optimize participation in all of them.

A Puzzler

What do the following people have in common?

• Mortimer Adler
• Woody Allen
• Julie Andrews
• Gene Autry
• Warren Beatty
• Marlon Brando
• Andrew Carnegie
• Winston Churchill
• Tom Cruise
• Michael Dell
• Charles Dickens
• Bo Diddley
• Barry Diller
• Joe DiMaggio
• Walt Disney
• Thomas Edison
• Larry Ellison
• William Faulkner
• Enzo Ferrari

(They did not graduate from college.)

Formula for Happiness

Here’s the overall prescription.

The world of business is undergoing a profound shift. Workers are making more of their own decisions. They don’t want to be told what to do. They want to learn but they don’t want to be trained. Learning is shifting from top-down to bottom-up and sideways. Collaboration is replacing command and control.

It’s not that training departments have started screwing up; it’s that the world around them has changed. Training departments push training, while workers search and ask for the information they need. Both just want to get the job done, but they’re operating in different eras. The disparity creates a power struggle that the workers are destined to win.

Flipping Corporate Learning
More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

As my research shifts focus from informal learning to well-being, I’m gaining new readers.

Welcome! Let explain where my blog is coming from.

When I began studying informal learning eight years ago, I decided to exemplify what I was talking about. I gave PowerPoint a rest. I became transparent in my work. I began thinking out loud. I shared ideas that were not fully formed.

Soon after Informal Learning came out, I arrived to give a speech to sixty people just as the curtain rose. I blurted out how happy I was to be here because I was looking forward to hearing what I was going to say. That spirit continues to this day.

I’ve been blogging for more than a dozen years. My blog is where I think in public. I’m cantankerous. I like to tease. I go to extremes sometimes, trusting my readers to pull me back from the brink.

I’m getting on in life. I am claiming the oldster privilege of being feisty. I’m opinionated. If you don’t like my opinions, let’s debate. If we find our agreement is fundamental, please go away. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Life’s too short.

Lurking’s cool. I consume lots of information passively. However, I would like to hear from you once in a while. Make a comment. Take issue with me. Expand on what you find. Offer suggestions.

I write whatever’s on my mind. This blog is opinion, not news. I write from experience. Don’t expect footnotes.

What level of objectivity can you expect? I will never knowingly lie to you, but my recollections may be off. I may tell an impressionist variation of a story to capture the moment, so long as the meaning is preserved. In the story of the speech above, there might have been thirty people in the room; there may have been a hundred. I don’t remember. They didn’t have a curtain but that better conveys what was going on than my telling you I was whisked up to a veneer portable podium. Did I lie? Not in my book. The gist was right. This is not The New Yorker.

Speaking of which, I shed a tear for Jonah Lehrer. To me, the manufactured Bob Dylan quote was not that big a deal. I can’t imagine being in Jonah’s shoes: keeping up with neuroscience, being cutting edge, writing three great books, churning out articles for Wired, WSJ, and The New Yorker, appearing in the media, being showered with money, and heaven knows what else. Instant celebrity. He could have been delirious when he answered the phone and lied about the source of the Dylan quote. Give him a break. I don’t consider that such a big deal. All nonfiction is fiction anyway. That’s inherent in interpretation. I’d be surprised if I don’t tell the same sort of white lies here. I also self-plagiarize, retelling tales I’ve told before.

On this blog, timeliness trumps dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. The “b” in blog stands for beta. Expect typos.

I’m not aloof. If you’d like to interact, get in touch.

What else do you need to know?

I have a good track record at describing the future. I was promoting the web, eLearning, blogs, and informal learning before most people had heard of them.

I understand business. I’ve managed start-ups and have a string of accomplishments in marketing, product development, sales, and management. I have an MBA but I am not a business person at heart. I would prefer to be an artist than an investment banker.

I am a optimist and I have faith in the goodness of most people. I give people the benefit of the doubt. Most people are well-intentioned and live up to your expectations of them. My calling in life is to help people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life.

I am contrarian. I like to consider all the options, kosher or not. Convention rarely constrains my thinking.

I am playful. Beware of jokes, puns, and double entendres.

I am a generalist who innovates by force-fitting models from one discipline into another. My mind enjoys toying with such things.

I am visual. Well, we’re all visual, but in my case I go to sleep if there’s nothing but text on the page. I take snapshots. (I have 25,000+ photos on Flickr.) I rarely write a blog post without some sort of graphic.

I am edgy. I enjoy spicy food, bold wines, and stirring ideas.

I can be socially obtuse. (Insensitivity goes along with the ability to hyper-focus.) If you feel I’ve stepped on your toes, call me on it. I probably didn’t mean it.

I am re-reading The Elements of Style. I want to write sentences that grab you by the throat and shake you up. Please help become a better writer by critiquing my writing when it is not working for you.

I believe in the karma of the web. I love to share discoveries. I give to the web and the web gives back. I’m generous but I’m way ahead thus far.

Peace be with you.

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.

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

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!

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?