Feb 27, 2011
Two years ago, I found myself taking a crash course on influence, advocacy and online behavior. We had taken in a family in need and leveraged the web, specifically Twitter, Paypal, a blog, and most importantly, our real social network, to raise nearly seventeen thousand dollars for the family.The velocity of the effort — nearly twelve thousand dollars was raised in less than twenty four hours — was amazing and made me realize that the old model of a few people controlling information and distribution is giving way to a new, highly distributed, individually empowering system that leverages social media. In this case, I had enough influence and trust with my core network to create a ripple effect that spread to other networks, which were transformed into advocates for the family. This is the new, emerging model of influence.
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Feb 26, 2011
Facebook, which began as a way to connect students at Harvard, now has a population greater than most countries. The site has become a staple in the lives of many of its 600 million members. It is where people store and share photos, plan and organize events, communicate with the people in their lives. It’s become a hub for news and link/video sharing. It’s a marketing tool, a place to promote one’s business and professional endeavors.
It is also ruining our lives.
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Feb 25, 2011
While it seems that many are tinkering around with measuring the ROI for their investments in social media, some have turned their attention to the waste associated with search. Naturally, just as the former eludes most of us, the latter is hard to avoid.
Experts like Thomas Vander Wal, a scholar and a poet, while advocating the virtues of tag augmented social search, leave us speechless when we find they don’t tag shit.
No matter. This slide deck redeems our favorite technosocial architect who not only sees the irony in not wanting to be labeled, but may well not give a tinker’s cuss if we do.
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Feb 24, 2011
The Charlie Rose Brain Series explores one of sciences final frontiers, the study of the human brain. We will also look at scientific discovery and advances in technology, in the hope that someday terrible illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s will be history.
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Feb 24, 2011
As many have observed, modern science has become a religion, at least for Western man. Like other religions, it has a priesthood, roughly organized on hierarchical lines. It has temples, shrines, and rituals and it has a body of canons. And. like other religions, it has its own mythology. One myth in particular states that if, say, by experiment a scientific theory is confronted in reality with a single contradiction, one piece of discontinuing evidence, then that theory is automatically set aside and a new theory that takes the contradiction into account is adopted. This is not the way science actually works.
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Jan 1, 2011
The reason why people must trade dollars is that there is no other alternative, and the computer algorithms that control the value of the currency have yet to tell us otherwise. That’s it, really. The questions remain, how, why, and when will people stop working for it and what will they work for which can replace it?
This will not be as simple as living in yurts, trading cheese cultures and tweeting about it. Complex infrastructure like a judicial system, transportation, medical care, clean water, energy and food production rely on a financial system that can capitalize and securitize whatever the replacement currency may be.
Influence vs. intention
The latest twist in the new currency movement is the idea that on-line influence can be used to support a currency. There is no shortage of noble leaders aspiring to “define the standard” in their own image as a service to the lesser masses who seek their respective place in the great new economic void. PeerIndex and Klout are the two main players that promote a social score based on influence, ostensibly to mimic the credit score upon which all currency depends.
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Dec 31, 2010
During challenging economic times, the relationship between employees and employers is often tested. Frequently, executives are forced to make decisions that broadly affect their workforces and alter what matters in the workplace. Today’s business environment is no exception; it appears that the recession has diminished two important forms of business currency: trust and ethics.
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Dec 14, 2010
Imagine this: An expectant mother decides she will go to the hospital because it seems that the baby is coming, no time to wait. Her sister carries the bags to the car, helps her sibling get in and they leave for the medical center.
So it was with Rose Mirielle Exumé and her sister Alta Grace Garcon who one Monday afternoon left their home in Deerfield Beach, Florida to travel the 15 miles or so to Broward General.
What is normally a routine journey on I-95 was for this family anything but and Olivier Jean Paul Exumé was born in the fast lane in the back seat of his auntie’s SUV.
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Sep 4, 2010
I remember watching Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and feeling at the end that something profound had just happened. That was in 2007, not that long ago really. Around the same time I watched Shift Happens and was left similarly inspired by the rate at which my world was changing.
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