Joyent asked a few of us at Web 2.0 Expo to define cloud computing. I can’t tell from this if we agree or disagree.

The sextet shares a few non-learning sites that may interest you.

Jon Husband’s Wirearchy blog provides an alternate point of view on corporations, technology and organizational development. Jon’s focus is on the “social architecture for the wired world”.

John Brockman’s The Edge is the place to eavesdrop on amazing conversations and dialog among the likes of Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell- Mann, Benoit Mandelbrot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, Steven Pinker, Steven Levy; Naomi Wolf, Annie Dillard, Ken Kesey, Steven Levy, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Robert Paterson writes about a wide variety of subjects, ranging from renewable energy to new business models. Rob provides the unique perspective of an ex-investment banker turned independent consultant now living on Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Digital Inspiration - Amit Agarwal writes a very accessible, inspirational and popular technology blog that includes tutorials and how-to guides related to software, computers, and internet.

Junk Charts is a blog devoted to analyzing and critiquing visual displays of information, a great read if you use numbers in your work and want to improve your visual literacy.

Lifehacker - A number of authors contribute to this blog devoted to discussing software and websites that actually help you save time.

Engadget & Gizmodo - sites that track the latest technology gadgets with a slightly snarky attitude.)

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. You can zoom back in time. If you prefer, check out the recordings of Grateful Dead concerts.

The New York Times Navigator is used by New York Times reporters and editors as the starting point for their forays onto the Web. Its primary intent is to give the news staff a solid starting point for a wide range of journalistic functions without forcing all of them to spend time wandering around to find a useful set of links of their own.

In my quest to lose weight. I’ve given up ports and a DVD drive.

Steve Jobs is a mastermind. The Mac Air is just enough smaller and sleeker than its peers that it’s in a different category than the MacBook it replaces. I cart this little slab around the house with me.

Architecture can be jarring. This is just south of Market, San Francisco. Glide Memorial Church to the left, the Jukebox Marriott straight ahead, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum on the right. The black cube pierces the side of the handsome brick building, a one-time PGE power substation designed by Willis Polk.

Today Uta and I drove to Half Moon Bay for an impressive motorcycle concourse d’elegance. Slide show.

When I was 14, I bought a Peugeot BB Sport cyclomoteur, a 50cc motorbike, the perfect ride for an American teenager living just outside Paris for a couple of years. Back in the States, I had no occasion to ride a two-wheeler until a college buddy dropped by my house on his BMW R50. I borrowed it for a quick spin around the neighborhood, dropped the front wheel into a pothole, flipped the bike on its side, skidded along the pavement until my elbow was peeking out from my flesh, and have never ridden a motorcycle since. Nonetheless, I still love the look and lore of motorcycles, especially Italian machines from around the early sixties.

Some of the bikes on display were antiques. Typically, a hundred-year old motorcycle looked as if it were brand new.

Others were flat-out racing machines.

…and some bikes are rolling art projects.

I wish I knew how to ride the beautiful machine. Pant, pant, pant.

New York Times coverage

As Harold mentioned yesterday, half a dozen kindred spirits are engaged in dialog to improve our individual learning and to “eat the dog food” of network effects. Yesterday we experimented with adding our abbreviated, outside opinions to a workshop I was taking part in.

(Click)

The workshop was an in-house, intensive session on innovation taking place at a Fortune 200 manufacturing company in the Midwest. When issues arose that workshop participants lacked the bandwidth to grapple with at the time, we recorded them on a “big issues parking lot” flip-chart page.

Here’s one of the three issues I emailed to members of our group in late afternoon.

New managers in the Asia operation are quitting to join other companies that promise them more responsibility, sooner. How can we accelerate their development? The newly-hired managers are impatient.

The outside group deliberated on our private discussion board and wiki. The next morning I provided a ten-minute summary of thoughts, for example:

Do the newly-hired managers have good reason to be impatient? What are other firms doing? Turnover may be to suboptimal acculturation. Are we being overly risk-averse because we have not been in this marketplace as long as our competition?

Reward them with opportunities to work on innovative projects. Partner new managers with old managers on new/innovative projects that give them a chance to learn from the old managers and opportunities to work on cool stuff. Wrap community around incoming training, so they’re getting used to dialog as well as getting up to speed. Coach them. Don’t separate performance from learning, wrap learning around performance: give them responsibility early, but provide structure, support, to turn each decision into a learning situation.

The people who had asked questions found the group’s responses thought-provoking; they gave insight into understanding the issues at work. There were no definitive answers, but questions like these don’t have pat answers.

The veteran manager in the room (the head of the corporate university reports to him) found the exercise useful. It could be more so if the group would bat around issues in a real-time fishbowl environment. People in the audience would swap opinions, Instant Messenger one another as a back channel, and pitch questions into the conversation. A virtual dialog.

Yesterday in the “Blogtropolis” room at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris Heuer signaled me to take a seat in the director’s chair alongside his for a chat.

Here’s a podcast of our chat. We spent twenty minutes talking about building on-line communities, enterprise 2.0, coping with mind-blowing change, the relationship with informal learning, un-meetings, redefining the meaning of conference, and what I plan to discuss with corporate clients in the next two months.

The divide separating the old way of looking at the world and the new, networked vision is so wide that, like the issue of abortion, you’re on one side or the other; no one’s in between, and you’re not going to change the way someone else sees it.

You either believe the net changes everything or you think it’s a passing fad. You believe augmenting humankind’s collective intelligence will change the world forever or you consider this virtual stuff bunk. If you’re one of the people on the side of tradition, my advice is to skip this recording altogether. You’ll think we’re raving mad.

I was reading the collaboration section of a magazine geared to IT professionals when I came upon an article titled Cat-Herding Nightmare.

The first paragraph echoes the Web 2.0-is-good-for-you party line I’ve heard again and again this week:

Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. These apps often include productivity enhancers such as search and tagging. And not surprisingly, vendors are encouraging the trend–Microsoft and IBM have added wikis and blogging capabilities to enterprise apps including SharePoint and Lotus Quickr, while Google and upstarts like Socialtext, PBwiki, and Jive Software are luring corporate users with freebie accounts and dead-simple deployment. provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.

Warning to IT folks: Mayday! Mayday! Turf is being threatened. Put up the shields. Ready the cannon. Mayday! Mayday1

All these wonderful benefits. Too bad there’s a dark side.

Sadly, all IT gets out of the deal is a big fur ball as it struggles to organize corporate content run amok. The potential for exposure of sensitive information or theft of intellectual property runs high, as do concerns about noncompliance with corporate or third-party requirements as end users scatter sensitive information around the Internet. If the company gets tangled in litigation, data relevant to discovery requests may be lurking unknown on third-party servers, exposing the organization to financial or legal sanctions.

Implication: IT can’t trust those pesky users. Possible solution: Get the knock-off versions of web tools provided by IBM, EMC, BEA, and Microsoft. That lets IT continue its battle to maintain control, even if it means dumping all those great benefits. The article notes that the products from the big boys…

…also come with the downsides of enterprise software–longer and more costly deployment than software as a service, and longer lag between upgrades. Enterprises are unlikely to dip their toes into collaboration through a six-figure software deployment. It’s not uncommon to find companies using SharePoint and third-party SaaS products.

The article concludes that IT needs to keep ahead of technologies and provide services before users demand them. That would be great but I am skeptical. IT has rarely come down from its me-first perch. Why should we expect it to stop now? It’s easier for IT to focus on the damage workers might do rather than the benefits an open business gives its stakeholders. Should we really let IT make the tradeoff between the hair-ball messiness of web 2.0 and connecting with the world in order to stay in business? That’s not really an IT decision, is it? Nah, we won’t get fooled again.

I’ve look at this from both sides now, it’s up and down and still somehow, I don’t think we should be picking sides at all. IT should support the business, not the other way around.

Related:
How it’s going to be

“Thank you for calling Big Stupid Company.

We value your business and look forward to serving you.

Your call may be monitored for training purposes.

Listen carefully, for our options have changed.

If you know your party’s extension, dial it now. Otherwise,

For information about our hours and locations, press 1
To use our automated telephone account system, press 2
To report a stolen or lost card, press 3
To talk with a customer service representative, press 4
To repeat this message, press 5

[4]

Scratchy musak.
Please stay on the line. All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. Your call will be answered in the order received.

Did you know that you can order our wonderful products from our website. Great deals await you at bigstupid.com

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 47 minutes.

Our fall line of products come in earth tones! We have hulu knives for everyone in the family. Take a look at our web site, bigstupid.com.

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 46 minutes.

Scratchy musak.
All of our customer service agents are helping other customers. The next agent will be available to serve you in 45 minutes.

Scratchy musak.

[Click]

Translation: We do not want to talk with you.

Get Human

Learning professionals often get their best ideas from outside the field. A small group of us recently began swapping ideas and collaborating on projects. This past weekend we talked about non-learning books that made a major impact on our thinking.

The Cluetrain Manifesto raised my consciousness that in a networked world, authenticity and transparency triumph over deception and secrecy. Ten years ago this month, The Cluetrain appeared on the web, and it’s still there. Read the 95 theses. “Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

Tom Stuart’s Intellectual Capital introduced me to the broader picture of organizational knowledge, beyond courses to ongoing knowledge creation. The notion that we need to capture, share, and improve our knowledge both as individuals and organizations helps create that mindshift to continuous innovation that’s so necessary in these increasingly turbulent times.

Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, taught me the implications of the internet. Translate time, space and mass into speed, connectivity, and intangibles, and traditional boundaries disappear. Speeding up makes measurement continual rather than episodic. If everything is connected to everything and everybody to everybody, then space is not the issue so much as the connectivity. Economic value is shifting to intangibles, as seen in the current shift in focus to talent and human capital online. Speed x Connectivity x Intangibles = Blur. Now eleven years old, I still go back when I need a hit of wisdom.

Reading The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman & Beckstrom only took one day but it’s an illuminating book. Spider organizations are those with centralized control and if you cut off the head, the rest will die. In starfish organizations, cutting off one leg will not kill it, because intelligence is distributed throughout the organism. The authors start by examining the two hundred year struggle between the Apache (starfish) and the Spanish Army (spiders), showing how a decentralized Apache nation was almost impossible to conquer because there was no head. A modern day equivalent is Al Quaeda.

What I found most interesting is that the degree of centralization for an optimal organization depends on many factors, so there is no magic recipe [like informal versus formal learning]. Finding what the authors call the “sweet spot” requires constant monitoring of the environment. Today’s sweet spot may be tomorrow’s lost cause.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler continue their series of books on the rise of the Third Wave, or knowledge economy, with Revolutionary Wealth. As with several of their other books, this one looks at the larger and deeper patterns affecting our economies and societies as certain parts of the world make the transition from the second wave (industrial) economic structure. The three deep fundamentals that most economists do not examine are said to be - time, space and knowledge. Changes in each of these are having profound effects on us. Even more so, we are seeing conflicts between first wave (agrarian) societies with second and third wave ones. In many countries, all three co-exist and tensions occur as each has fundamentally different values, priorities and institutional needs.

The discussions on energy use are a refreshing change from much of the hyperbole in the media and the few references to education are clear and succinct. “The coming clash will set defenders of our existing educational factories against a growing movement committed to replacing them - a movement comprising four key elements … Teachers … Parents … Students … Business.”

Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things was the first book to turn around our perception of the world from the point of, really, user experience. It’s an easy-to-read book that fundamentally changes the way you view the world, and then you move to how to create organizations that can create awesome product/service experiences, and finally to overall customer experiences (cf. Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy).

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb is a practical guide (with exercises) to developing da Vincian powers! Working through the seven da Vincian principles - curiosita, dimostrazione, sensazione, sfumato, arte/scienza, corporalita and connessione helped me think more widely and more clearly about issues and problems, and approach them in different ways than I had before.

What outside inspirations improved professional perspective?