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Originally uploaded by Renaissance Revolution

caleb

Originally uploaded by Renaissance Revolution

I would like to introduce you to my nephew. I am getting hooked on taking pictures with my mobile phone, since that is the only digital camera I have.

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Originally uploaded by Renaissance Revolution

mc dees icecream makes me happy.

I found this video on a blog I have started reading called kottke.org. The video is about a supposed pbs series on intelectual high school students. Hillarious imho

So, I have come to discover that I am addicted to learning new things, reading new books, discovering new places. I am in the processes of determining what my strengths and weaknesses are, and I think this is a part of me, for better or worse.

For Better
I never have qualms about reading a new book, incorporating a new idea into a proposal, or trying out new/beta software to see if it increases my productivity. I am always on the lookout for new trends, ideas, books, or ways of incorporating those ideas into my life.

For Worse
Because I am always in search of new things, I often do not take the time to perfect old things that once were new and are now not. Addicted is the correct term for my habit of learning.

I mentioned in a previous post I am reading Here Comes Everybody, which has the tag line “the power of organizing without organizations”. I am almost finished reading it, and the revelations just keep coming. As I was at Eller, the business college at U of A, I was frustrated by the knowledge of powerful organizational tools out there, and the lack of adoption by entrenched organizational culture. Of course the tools like social networks and wikis were fairly new, and only cutting edge schools were using those tools, it was still a source of frustration for me.

This book is putting into words the feelings I had about past and future organizations. Groups are easy to form these days. They can also break apart easily, and are not necessarily geographically centred. Clay Shirky explains so many of aspects of group formation, and the dynamics today’s digital tools have changed. I get very excited about what companies and organizations will look like once these digital tools become prolific and part of our cultural framework.

In fact, part of my difficulty in choosing a career, has been my preference and search for early adopters of these digital tools. After reading this book, I realize it will take time for these tools to reach a high level of adoption, and for the technology to dissolve into cultural norm, before they will truly become useful. (if I have lost anyone, it is only when you can say you googled something, and not have to explain what google is, that the conversation can be about your chosen conversational topic, and not about the technology involved.)

Despite my desire to be the digital prophet to large organizations, proclaiming the coming of mass collaboration, preaching the benefits of crowdsourcing and customers as partners, I do not have experience or credentials to consult companies on these topics. My ardent passion is not enough to be an outside influence, but I would love to work within a company and encourage their level of adoption. But which company? Who knows.

This is a new section I will be doing. It is basically what it means for me to do stuff online. Sure there are the usual suspects of writing in my blog, or checking my facebook. But somehow I fill up quite a bit of time doing stuff online. Some of it I find quite productive and enriching, some of it a complete waste of time, with onlya sliver of ever having a possibility of ever ever ever being useful (read twitter here).

I hope to uncover why some of the things I do I think are truly useful, and why some of the pointless things are…….. well pointless.

Open Source rocks, so it can only be expected that a partnership between mobile phone companies, software developers, and hardware manufacturers figured out how good it would be for them to adopt open standards. This is not my typical post, just something I am excited about, so read more at a few places like Official Google Blog: Where’s my Gphone?, gizmodo, engadget, or wherever.

Now I have seen plenty of cheesy mission statements in my day (seeing as how I am of such ripe age….) I believe they are important in business, and should be a guiding factor, but inspiring and fun.

If I ever get employees, the will have the option of writing their own personal mission statement, for how they will have fun at work, or how they contribute to the company. Like

• I will only play 4 games of solitare when I am on the phone
• Coffee + Work = good times, work - coffee = nap times, coffee + work + coffee = lots of work done, coffee + work+ coffee + work + coffee = weekend

Hopefully they will be more creative than me. But here is the working mission statement for Eliysys

Help businesses and individuals create and manage their digital identity. We do this through:

• Facilitating online community
• Ongoing training for our current and future clients
• Utilizing the long tail of customer niches

This is a work in progress. There are concepts that I want to incorporate, but right now they are very specific, and need to be generalized. Ideas like the long tail of customer niches, prosumers, and wikinomics all inter relate in my mind, but they need to be applied to my business.

A big question I have, that will have bearing to my mission statement, is how to be an online, locationless, consultant? I do not want to limit my services to only people in my hometown, and I also do not want to fly all around the country. But the way the internet has been going, there are so many ways to telecommute, and interact with potential clients.

We shall see, we shall see.

You: Tags you say? Give me an example, explain with some cool metaphor to real life, then how I can use it to make my life easer.

Coffee Master: You got it. Hows about a picture,

Tag (Wikipedia Definition) : A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.

Tag (My Definition): It is the internet’s manila envelope, with way more features than the dead tree version. Want to categorize your photos by who is in them, add tags of peoples names. Want to organize the same info into multiple categories, add several tags to each piece of info.

I think of tags like that scene from matrix where neo says “We need guns, lots of guns” and whoosh, they all appear. But what if he wanted only semi auto, 9mil submachine guns? Here is an interesting distinction. In the digital world, there is no cost to move things around, or have the same thing appear in multiple places. So those guns could be organized by caliber, or Neo could change his mind, and organize it by how fast the guns could shoot. Within the time he could think of the category of guns, they could be arranged accordingly (or if you prefer, wooshed into existence with cool animation).

I wish I could tag everything in my life like this. My book case looks like it is organized by a schizophrenic anal retentive librarian, never being able to decide if books should be color coordinated, alphabetical, topic, or organized from most frequently used, to those collecting dust.

So we had the description, cool metaphor, now for the application.Think of projects you have worked on before. Are on a team of 3 people designing a cool new phone (heard of any recently?). Then, suddenly, a new person comes on to help with the specs. If you were using email to do the project, you have to sift through each one, bla bla bla. If you were using wikis or blogs or google docs, and had tagged documents according to what was in them, what they pertained to, it would be a simple matter of having the new guy subscribe to those tags, and BOOM, he would have the most current info. Then your boss walks in, and asks to see the latest schematic, you happen to have tagged each of the latest schematics with the tag, you guessed it, schematic + codeword for latest version. Or if it was a blog format, you would see the updates reverse chronologically (recent first).