This year’s theme is The Power of Less.

Introduction to the keynotes: “It’s a tough time out there and we are glad you’re with us to talk about the web.”

“Our sponsors, _____, ______, _______. Give them love.”

“Recycle your programs. We didn’t print enough for everyone attending. If you’re not going to be here tomorrow, leave your program for someone who will be.”

Tim O’Reilly: “2.0 was never a version number. It’s what comes after the dot-com bust. Survivors are harnessing collective intelligence. What’s next?”

The web is like a baby. It’s trying to make sense of the world. It puts things in its mouth to try them out. Is the web baby getting smarter? Tim showed a ‘94 search engine: 250 pages chosen from among a web of 5,000 pages. Then Google four years later: 25 million pages. Google now indexes a trillion pages. And search is getting smarter. The baby is growing up quickly.

“Meaning doesn’t have to be formalized.” Tim, crediting John Batelle, says Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared.

This “less” business. C’mon, now. The electric power grid is 100 years old. A sensor can sniff out what sort of fridge is running in your kitchen, but the grid remains dumb. Also, look at something like USASpending.gov. It’s lightweight; the technology is borrowed from a stand-alone site. Finally, an app like Patients Like Me creates value in and of itself.

Organizations need to create more value than they capture.

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John Maeda gave an advertisement for Rhode Island School of Design. I didn’t like his book on Simplicity. I don’t like him using an event like this for outright business development. Boring.

That said, I enjoyed a few parts of his talk: taxi receipts being sold alongside candy bars in the vending machines at LaGuardia in NYC. Also, I clock that tells you “It’s about a quarter til five.”

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My togetherLearn mate Clark Quinn and I prowled the Expo floor, stopping here to learn more about Blue Kiwi, a social media platform that’s taking Europe by storm.

I’ll post more reflections after getting some sleep. After the reception, hours of schmooze, and a great supper with geek pals, I am exhausted.

The metronome of human progress is swinging exponentially faster. We are leaving the industrial era behind so quickly that even thrill-seekers like me are finding it nauseating.

Jiminy Cricket! The Feds seize control of General Motors?

My view of what’s going on:

 

 

We are re-setting our worldview. A new age is dawning. Things will not be going back to the old version of normal. Don’t bet against the internet.

I’m spending Wednesday at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I don’t think of it as “attending a conference.” It’s more like being poured into a dense soup of experts, mavens, connectors, futurists, entertainers, network theorists, and other humans. My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to suck as much understanding of what’s going on in this world as I can pack into 10 hours. This is the Web 2.0 epicenter. I plan to be a ruthless learner, forever on the prowl for useful knowledge and links.

I’m headed into an ultra-intense period of learning. As in 2009, I’m only doing the free stuff. Here was my take on last year’s 2008 Web 2.0 Expo. The learning bounty was great!

Even if you don’t come within 5,000 miles of San Francisco this week, you can follow a happening like this, and reap the benefits from its online news and updates.

Sometimes I find myself sinking below the flow of information zipping by faster and faster. Instead of hopping all over the place to catch up, I turn to this newspaper view of Informal Learning Flow. It’s an eclectic read, for informal learning requires diving into diverse fields.

This morning I drew a map of some of the interconnected issues the togetherLearn team help groups synthesize.

That’s why Informal Learning Flow covers so many bases. It focuses on a boundless opportunity space.

for Informal Learning Flow

Wonderful short article in Harvard Business Publishing by Freek Vermuelen describes how top-down informationbases actually get in the way of doing business.

The advice to derive from this research? Shut down your expensive document databases; they tend to do more harm than good. They are a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t really store anything meaningful in them anyway, since real knowledge is quite impossible to put onto a piece of paper. Yet, do maintain your systems that help people identify and contact experts in your firm, because that can be beneficial, at least for people who lack experience. Therefore, make sure to only give your rookies the password.

Lately, I’ve been thinking we’re ready to pull down the silos housing, respectively, Training, CLO, KM, OD, and Corporate Communications. Often, marketing would be lumped in, too.

Strategically re-configuring the CLO+KM+OD+Com function needs to bolster the worthwhile functions and shut down the unworthy ones. KM seems poised for a slowdown, the weakest sister in the CLO+KM+OD+Com Learnscape.

Just when I thought I’d found ten free minutes in my life, this comes along:

There are probably 75 colleges and universities represented. If you ever wanted to go to MIT, here’s your chance.

This past Friday evening, Betsy Burroughs and I drove down to SAP Labs in Palo Alto to attend Future Salon and listen to our friend Zann Gill tackle the Engelbartian question of how, “as much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” The title of her session: Evolving Collaborative Intelligence.

Mark Finnern, founder and leading light of Future Salon

Once a month, sixty or so people convene at SAP Labs for nibbles, networking, an invariably fantastic presentation, and discussion. A few years ago I attended every other meeting, but travel and the long drive got me out of the habit. Friday’s session re-kindled my interest.

Zann covered so much ground and presented so many provocative frameworks that I can only offer you a few sound bites from my notes:

• Collaborative intelligence is more important than collective intelligence. Collective intelligence taps the consensus “wisdom of crowds” and harnesses algorithms to transform diverse input into a better-than-average consensual output. Collaborative intelligence taps the diversity of individuals, manifesting principles of evolutionary design to adapt to continually changing ecosystems.
• Nature manifests directed innovation, with a series of “process design” principles that human-computer systems can apply to practical problems faced by enterprise systems (from companies to social networks to cities and nations).
• Innovation networks support cross-disciplinary, collaborative problem-solving as we face our greatest challenge, eco-sustainability. Park Merced, one of Met Life’s post-WWII apartment complexes, is becoming a model eco-neighborhood by overcoming conventional thinking.
• Reality differs from our perception of reality. Is versus as. Odds of a major quake in the next 30 years = 62% but we blow it off.
• What if life itself is a pattern recognizer? What would this imply?
• Group think (with the pressure for answers) vs. keeping ourselves honest. Instead of group think, we can evolve a capacity for emergent pattern recognition and decision-making.

Q&A was extensive and all over the map. I was disappointed that many people asked such self-serving questions, demonstrating in the flesh that they didn’t buy into Zann’s points about the power of working toward breakthroughs collaboratively.

Follow-up and elaboration:
Zann Gill
Desyn
The Thief (1952) with Ray Milland

Incidentally, since my pocket camera bit the dust on Thursday, these are among the first photos I’ve taken with my iPhone. The shots are not as clear as I’m accustomed to, but overall I’m happy with the results.

Egoboo is a colloquial expression for the pleasure received from public recognition of voluntary work. Of course, first you’ve got to find where you are being recognized. Reporters, researchers, and podcasters interview me about informal learning and its application in business every week. (I’m usually good for a juicy quote.) Perhaps one in a dozen interviewers fulfill their promise to tell me when their stories appear in print or on the web. This makes it tough to respond to questions and comments.

Before social media got hot, you could use simple search engines to see what people were saying about you, for example:

Google “Jay Cross”

Technorati “Jay Cross”

Google blog search “Jay Cross”

Tracking where you’re mentioned is tougher now that conversation on the web takes place on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and numerous other flows. New apps are springing up that tap these sources, among them:

Spy

SocialMention

WhosTalkin

Samepoint

Feedly

I like the way Feedly presents findings but note that it pulled in these photos for “Jay” “Cross.”

As I mentioned earlier this month, I see a lot of potential in searches that draw from a select subset of the web:

Informal Learning Flow

Elearning Learning

Communities and Network Connection

These selective searches cull out references to Jay Cross the author of Dynamic Skiametry (1911), Jay Cross the president of the New York Jets, Jay Cross the professor of veterinary medicine, and the Jay Cross who painted this:

If somone’s trying to find me, I send them to jaycross.com, which features this list:

Flickr/jaycross

Facebook/Jay Cross

Linkedin/jaycross

Twitter/jaycross

YouTube/jakeross1

Del.icio.us/jaycross

Skype/jaycross

Friendfeed/jaycross

Tumblr/jaycross

Integration is on the way, but in the meantime, each of these links serves up a different slice of the pie.

Do you ever look for egoboo? What services work for you?

This past Thursday, I spent an hour walking around the Albany Bulb, as curious a piece of land as you’ll find in the Bay Area. The Bulb is a spit of former garbage dump that projects into San Francisco Bay adjacent to the Golden Gate Fields racetrack.

Nature has taken over the abandoned land. Trees and bushes surround great piles of concrete and rebar. The peninsula is riddled with trails. It’s deliciously unkempt, a great place for people to escape civilization, let their dogs roam off the leash,  gaze at the Bay up close and personal, and explore the amazing collection of folk art created from all sorts of castaway material.

I talked with Jimbow the Hobow, who lives in a ramshackle hovel cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam. Hundreds of books line his walls. A wild assortment of paraphernalia fills his yard. Jim has been writing a book for the last ten years; he’s a couple of pages into it. He’s 55 years old, subsists on beans (he has no teeth), and hangs out here with his Higher Power. He keeps people from trespassing on the humming bird preserve next door. He pointed me toward the best trail for getting to the artwork down below.

The  Bulb is an outdoor museum of indigenous art.

Everywhere you turn, people have converted junk into art.

The guiding spirit of the art scene is the 69-year old attorney led the court battle that kept the City of Albany from razing the Bulb to protect people from the homeless and the hobgoblins the City Council imagined must be up to no good absent control and regulation.

I spent a while watching young adults with spray cans do their thing.

The owners of the neighboring racetrack declared bankruptcy the day I took these photos. In early April, developers will bid on the 80-acre shoreline property occupied by the track and its humongous parking lots. Commercial real estate developers are salivating.

The Bulb is officially part of the East Shore State Park but what happens next door is bound to have a big impact on the Bulb. If you live in the Bay Area and want to see the result of unbridled freedom, you better get over to the Bulb soon.

Sadly, my trusty pocket-sized camera tumbled out of my pocket and suffered a fatal fall onto the driveway when I arrived home. These are its final output. RIP, Olympus EXILIM.

Related:
Bum’s Paradise, the movie
The Bulb on Yelp
Jill Poesener’s photos of the Bulb
Jef Poskanzer’s photos of the bulb

Before my type morphed from INTJ to ENTJ, I was very interested in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It’s a handy tool to spark introspection and a great way for people to explore how they relate to one another. Now I think Greg Kiersey has a better handle on the subject. Whatever.

Typealyzer will guess your type from reading your blog.

We have been collecting sample texts from blog text over the course of 2 years based on research about personality type and writing style. A classifier then runs a statistical analysis of the texts and comes up with a word frequency algorithm for the different types. More.

This blog, internettime.com, brands me an ENTP, a visionary.

My blog on informal learning, informl.com, labels me an INTP, a thinker.

My togetherLearn pals are INTJs, scientists. Well, not all. I didn’t run Typealyzer on Jane’s blog because her eLearning pick of the day, while extremely valuable, is not your standard blog-text.

If you’re not familiar with the Myers-Briggs religion approach, you might check my notes on it, most of the way down my old psychology page.

The types Typealyzer picked for me feel close to the mark.

Run it on your blog (it only takes a couple of minutes). Does your blog-style fit your self-image?