Connecting the Dots

Rewiring your brain by paying attention

Facing a six hour adventure to get home from New York yesterday, I stopped in an airport bookstore to see if something caught my fancy that would be an immersive read. In the days when I traveled over 80% of the time, I remember buying magazines (then much less than the $5-$10 they are now) but even then most were like needing a good meal and instead sitting down to a plate of cotton candy. Not very satisfying and pretty ephemeral.

The book I chose was Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself. Doidge takes us on a journey into the developments of brain science which has led to the current state of brain scientists understanding that the brain is "plastic" which can be molded, shaped, and rewired, "For years the doctrine of neuroscientists has been that the brain is a machine: break a part and you lose that function permanently. But more and more evidence is turning up to show that the brain can rewire itself, even in the face of catastrophic trauma: essentially, the functions of the brain can be strengthened just like a weak muscle."

There were many aspects of this book that leapt out at me but one key point I'll bring up as I recommend this book: permanently imprinting and creating brain maps (i.e., permanent behavior changes, knowledge permanence, automatic responses and deep, intuitive understandings) only happens when a human or animal is focused and paying close attention.

That's right. Multitasking (Linda Stone positions it as, continuous partial attention) WILL NOT hardwire our brains and anything we're learning, hoping to absorb permanently or habits we're intending to change....won't.

Doidge brings up numerous examples of brain rewiring and plasticity which I'm thinking about now and have lots of questions swirling about: What happens to our brain maps and wiring when our conceptual and spatial awareness extends in to the virtual? (I'll bet you can visualize in what folder on your computer sits that important document or photo...or what's on your friends wall in Facebook from last night). Will automating processes begin to replace the need to hardwire them into our brains? When we all have mobile computers in our pockets and can instantly look up anything, will we need to permanently imprint knowledge?

Quit whining and let's appreciate how far we've come...

On our last day in New York, my son and I had fully intended to head to Ellis Island but alas, timing didn't work out (Northwest Airlines cancelled our flight and other issues). Now facing a six hour adventure to get home (vs. just over three hours) has put my 13 year old in a foul mood, "Dad...I'll be so BORED!" he cries as we talk about ways to keep our minds occupied in the airport, on the flights and the one hour layover until we finally get home.

Oh....we poor babies! A six hour, relatively comfortable flight with nothing to read or DVD's to watch...how can we manage?

Imagine being one of the 12 million immigrants that spent WEEKS on a journey that culminated in arriving in New York and going through Ellis Island (unless you were wealthy or 'upper class' and then you were automatically in). Arduous? To say the least. Boring? Undoubtedly. Smelly, dirty and infested? Yep.

I think about stuff like this whenever I complain about technology: slow, expensive Wifi (like I experienced in our New York hotel); lack of 3G in my iPhone and that I can't use it as a bluetooth modem; or that it's challenging to integrate free, open source software projects. At least I'm not in the middle of the Atlantic with nothing and coming to a land of opportunity and unknown challenges.

Am I grateful for what I (and we) have today? Oh my God yes. I'm also aware how 'soft' we are as a nation and a people since most of us haven't lived through true hardship like our immigrant ancestors (though we may now if the economy continues its downward trend!). I'm aware often that I come from quite modest means and my maternal grandparents, for example, were as close to the poverty line as I'll ever experience (hopefully) and were the salt of the earth...teaching me early the meaning and importance of love over anything else...especially the material. The guidance from them, my parents and the people I've gravitated toward over the years have reinforced this perspective.

The flip side is that whining and complaints is the market speaking and actually is a good thing. We're telling the creators, the vendors and the service providers what is NOT working and what needs to be improved. It's the only way that progress occurs and the inefficient is made efficient.

It's just that whining and complaining works best if it's balanced with appreciation on how far we've come and we approach our suggestions, criticisms and feedback in the spirit of making it better.

I've been invited in to dozens of 'private beta' Web offerings as well as sit on the advisory boards of two companies. Why? I really appreciate where we've been in the space they're attacking (usually one that desperately needs improvement), where we are now (the current offerings in the market), where they're headed, and that my positive whining, complaining, guidance and insight -- if offered in the true spirit of improvement -- is deeply appreciated and results in positive change.

Give it a try the next time you're mad, frustrated or befuddled by some product or service that you think needs to be made more efficient. I'll wager it will be accepted well if it's offered with appreciation and your positive feedback.

History at Your Fingertips

Normally I'm so deeply focused on my clients, my projects and the input into my brain of news and information that keeps me abreast of everything in social media, that I often don't just fool around and seek out what I love: images, video, audio and writings of times past, but it's early on a quiet Saturday morning and I'm off on exploration adventures on the 'net.

Knowing what has come before helps put what's happening today in context. I often bring forth analogies of historical events in ways that helps my clients or audience see the bigger picture and gain insight into ways in which they can predict the future...or at least begin to narrow possible scenarios of what might happen in the future. This is especially important now as many clients ask if they should "rush to build a presence in Facebook or Second Life" or "do a viral video" or "with all these new social media types, what do we do?"

Adding to my thoughts for this post has been my growing feeling of dread about our great economic insecurity with our huge national debt and an influx of money into our supply causing a falling dollar; possible $3 trillion dollar cost for the Iraq war; crumbling US infrastructure; looming Social Security crisis; and the difficulty we're having in finding out the exact nature of our woes and how perilous our situation really is right now.

Yikes. After writing that paragraph I realize how pessimistic it sounds and it's pretty tough for a "glass is 51% full" guy like me to wallow in the crushing and accelerating issues weighing us down right now. So let's move on...

Poking around this morning with all of these thoughts in my head, I searched Google Video for "Minnesota" just to see what was out there. I've found that Google Video's are usually more meaningful vs. YouTube's jumping, lip-synching "musicians" (ooh...I know that's an unfair comparison but couldn't resist) and I found a wonderful historical one entitled, "Cradle of the Father of Waters 1938" which I've embedded after the jump...and was surprised by the thoughts it sparked.

242 Gbps: An Internet Broadcast to 500,000 People

Something happened last night that I'm amazed has seen remarkably little coverage in the blogosphere or tech press. Thankfully the folks at Skype Journal covered it before and after: a HUGE online event -- Oprah Book Club classes with nine more to come -- with author Eckhard Tolle. This mass, Internet delivered production was put on by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions and sponsored by Chevrolet, 3M's PostIt and Skype (audience questions were delivered via Skype's new high quality video capability).

It didn't go so well.

"Monday night's webcast was one of the largest single online events in the history of the Internet. More than 500,000 people simultaneously logged on to watch Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle live, resulting in 242 Gbps of information moving through the Internet. Unfortunately, some of our users experienced delays in viewing the webcast. We are working to identify the specific causes for the problems experienced and will work diligently to rectify them.

Harpo Productions, Inc., Move Networks and Limelight Networks recognize that interactive Internet broadcasting to a mass audience is still an emerging medium, and we're proud to have been pioneers in pushing the industry forward. We deeply regret that some of our audience did not have an optimal viewing experience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The first session of the webinar will be available in its entirety for viewing on Oprah.com or for downloading as a podcast on Oprah.com or iTunes on Tuesday, March 4."

My heart sings for so many reasons though:

• Oprah continuing to take the high road and bringing thought leaders, big ideas and consciousness raising spirit to the masses continues to delight and amaze me. The emphasis is always on the positive, the connectedness of us all and I believe that the world needs more in the way of optimism, hope and creative solutions to problems

• As a strategic technologist, the risk taken by Harpo Productions and partners Move Networks and Limelight Networks was unprecedented and a remarkable learning opportunity for us all. I know of few organizations or leaders who'd take the risk of potentially alienating a half million people with a bad experience! Wow.

• As you can see in the statement (taken from here), they were authentically transparent and have provided the file for on-demand viewing in several ways.

I'm not an internet architect and my understanding of multicast is slim as is the true nature of congestion on the 'net...or as Senator Ted Stevens so humorously stated "The internet is not something you dump things on like a big truck, it's a series of tubes".  What's clear is that major, visible organizations like this one is a way commercial pressure will be placed on the backbone providers (and Washington) to ensure that the internet will stand up to mass events just like last night's "class".

Bravo Oprah.

Leap Day: Time measurement in an Internet age

In years past I'd ignore February 29th, leap day, since it didn't impact me in any way. Not this year, however, since we're living in an Internet-connected age causing time to become increasingly irrelevant.

Measurement of time is all about being in synch. Since the Earth is just slightly off from a 365 day orbit around the Sun, (to be precise 365.242190 days long), a leap year has to be added roughly once every four years to make sure the calendar remains a valid measurement of a year.

Without measurement of time, getting things done, shipping goods, transporting people, having a church service with everyone showing up together, coordinating and orchestrating process and methods, and just about everything we accept today in a functioning society would be impossible. Without time measurement, something as simple as meeting your friend for a drink after work would likely result in you sitting and waiting...and waiting...or missing your friend altogether.

The germane aspect to this exponential growth in the world getting Internet-connected is the need we're seeing for ever tighter synchronization between people (calling someone on Skype on the other side of the world means being aware of Greenwich Mean Time and what each other's time zone is so you're not calling them at 2am) as well as between machines performing transactions (e.g., financial markets open at various times in the world means any machine in the financial value chain has to be synchronized).

But we're also seeing less need for synchronization (i.e., asynchronous) with activities previously required to be in synch.

Attention at the Atlanta Airport

With a couple of hours to spare when I arrived at the "world's busiest airport", Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International, I headed through security and down to take the tram the nearly 3/4ths of a mile to my concourse when a surprise realization hit me that had to do with attention in the airport and attention to social media.

It turned out to be my good fortune that the tram was stuck temporarily and people stopped waiting and began to walk...by the hundreds...and so did I. As I moved down the aisle between the moving walkways I came upon some of the most spectacular stone sculpture I've ever seen.

Created by artists from the African nation of Zimbabwe, it was, at times, emotional to view them. An example is the photo of one you see at the lower left which is representative of dying-of-AIDS parents with the symbolic child clinging to them. If you're aware of the horrific HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and the millions of orphans being left behind, you couldn't look at this sculpture without feeling its power and how evocative it is of the crisis...and think of those little spirits left behind and alone.

What I understood but still found curious, is that of the hundreds of people moving past these sculptures roughly six of us took any time to view them and most paid no attention (of course, people had flights to catch and were in a hurry but I had the time to wander).

Since I'd just completed a talk that morning on social media for all of the business unit leaders of a large private corporation's strategic conference -- a talk where attention, continuous partial attention, and the participation culture were key themes -- my observation of people not having the time nor interest in paying attention to sculpture so atypical, hard to ignore, emotionally moving and just plain gorgeous, caused me to ponder the parallels as I continued moving toward my gate.

What if all human knowledge was free and accessible?

Imagine that for lunch today you had to go into your storehouse and find the peaches you canned last summer, the meat from the cow you slaughtered and smoked, and the grain you packed away after harvesting it while heading up to the kitchen to prepare it all. Pretty ridiculous to consider for we urban dwellers, heh?  We instead go to the grocery store and get what we need all nice and shrink-wrapped or just head over to our favorite local restaurant for lunch to be served to us all piping hot.

The farming, ranching, slaughterhouse, bakeries, food service and distribution system (e.g., refrigerated trains, trucking, grocery stores) ensures that most of us don't need to think too hard about where we'll get today's lunch or tomorrow's remarkably inexpensive calories. We also expend laughingly few calories to obtain what we need compared to even a generation ago (thus why we're so fat...but I digress) and this whole food ecosystem has allowed all of us to move to a higher level and specialize in our work in ways our great-grandparents could never have foreseen since we're not expending so many calories (not to mention time) to grow, gather up, store and prepare them.

One thing is clear if you're investing any time staying abreast of the acceleration in Internet-centric knowledge repositories (e.g., Wikipedia, Google Knol, Instructables, Connexions), as well as higher learning institution initatives (e.g., MIT Open Courseware), then you'll begin to understand the vision and promise embodied in a new initiative by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Rich Baraniuk, respective founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, called The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (via Smart Mobs).

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

Does this mean that your training, learning, knowledge work or content is going to be free or cause you to give it away?

Where will you invest your energy in 2008?

Been really under the weather for two days so was a dud on New Year's Eve/Day (nice timing, heh?) so have been behind on what I wanted to get done and feeling the bum on the fun I missed out on. Today I feel like $900k (close to a million bucks) so have been investing my energy in a bunch of different places faster than normal I guess. Email discussion lists, developing new products with the staff, having strategic discussions with my partner, working on the launch of a new site for Minnesota (more to come) and scrambling around like a madman.

I'm REALLY aware right now -- more than I ever have been before -- that you can only invest your energy once and a unit of time is gone once it passes. So one of my New Year's Resolutions is to pick-n-choose carefully where I intend to invest my energy, be better at saying "no", and place my energy where it can multiply.

Since I underpromise and overdeliver as a matter of doing business and in life, I have a tendency to try to do everything. Over-volunteer, try out and be involved with all the latest gadgets and technologies, read-read-and-read, and continually try to absorb and extract meaning from everything.

As I write this I'm looking at my "Firefox workspace" (a series of sites I have open in tabs): Google's Gmail, Analytics, AdSense, Notebook, Reader; Typepad; Feedburner; Techmeme; Blogrunner; Twitter; Wikio; Facebook; a wiki I'm running; and LinkedIn. That's just my "MAIN" workspace! I have several other bookmarks folders that I can load into new browser windows (workspaces by client project; banking and financial sites; funstuff sites; etc.).

Just writing that made me chuckle with the insanity of trying to stay on top of all that happens inside of each of those tabs. At the same time it's incumbent upon me to stay abreast of what's new so I'm constantly scanning my RSS feed reader, looking at both older and new offerings, applications and trying out someone's new alpha or beta site.

I make my living doing this but Joe Average does not. If *I* am feeling deluged by everything out there, how does Joe feel?

So when the newest site in 2008 comes online and asks me (or Joe) to:

a) Fill out a new profile
b) Invite all my friends in to it
c) Start to invest energy, time and effort into using them...

...they're not a social site competing with another social site or a Twitter vs. a Pownce. They're competing to be SO compelling that I'll want to either give something else up or dig down deep and come up with some energy reserve to give to them. As such, it's going to be even tougher in 2008 to convince people to invest their energy in what you're offering so it better be really, really worth it.

An investment lesson: 10 shares of Apple = $8,000

Rooting around in our safety deposit box recently, I came upon this Apple stock certificate from 1988. Even then I was an Apple fanboy and my wife went out and bought me 10 shares of Apple for roughly $440 and my infant daughter (now 19 years old and working at a local Apple store) gave it to me for father's day.

With splits this has become 40 shares and, as of this writing, Apple's stock price is hovering around $201 per share making this certificate worth just over $8,000. With it's value I didn't want it just lying around so I scanned it at 1200ppi (so I could more-or-less keep it) and deposited it at Schwab.

Before doing so I stopped at my daughter's Apple store and showed it to her and said "thanks". She laughed as she accepted my thank you since she was a month old and it was really Mom that gave it. Still, it was a nice opportunity to demonstrate to her the power of investing -- especially when you have a lot of time on your side like she does now -- and since we'd had a conversation two days earlier about her consideration over whether or not she should leap into the Apple employee stock purchase program or not.

She's a college student and every nickel counts so her reluctance is understandable. Waving goodbye to any money is tough (even when stock is discounted like ESPP programs do) since investing is something "out there in the future" for most younger people.

I hold many shares of Apple and have enjoyed its runup but a P/E of over 51 makes me really, really nervous. That said, Apple hasn't even scratched the surface of increased Mac market share, new iPhones, rumored tablets (which I'm 98% convinced are coming) and what I'll bet is a completely revamped AppleTV that facilitates video downloading and viewing on an HDTV. Lots of growth left and, barring any hiccup like Steve Jobs getting hit by a bus, there's a lot of life left in the stock.

Merry Christmas

3 Strategies to Think. Consider. Mull it over. Breathe...

Do you take the time to absorb new information and let it percolate in your brain awhile before rushing to judgement, making a decision or throwing together a blog post, a tweet, an SMS or comment somewhere?

At breakfast this morning my wife, 13 year old son and I were in a conversation about television. In a poor attempt at grabbing his attention, I tried to set context for him on what is was like for me at 13 -- three networks, one independent TV channel, no recorded media -- and what it was like for him now.

We have DVD's, DirecTV with hundreds of channels, game systems, books galore, two daily newspapers, and an Internet with essentially "millions" of channels. He smiled and said, "Whatever Dad" and went on with conversations about his skiing adventure this weekend! He made it clear that he LOVES all the choice and ENJOYS the constant interruptions his mobile phone, IM, Skype, XBox Live teams give him.

I submit that it is VERY hard right now to turn off the river of news, shut out the Twitter's, the social network alerts, SMS, IM, Skype calls, emails, and all the other interruptions and make 100% certain that you have the time to think, to consider, mull stuff over and just breathe.

What I try hard to do with this blog -- and life in general -- is to ferret out the meaning behind a person's incentives, company/product direction or strategic announcement before going off half-cocked to write about it and/or get involved in conversations. Connecting the dots, if you will.

I frequently turn off every possible interruption in order to buffer myself against intrusions that are accelerating and demanding ever higher levels of my attention. It's the only way I can be assured that I'll be able to place myself in a position of contemplation before taking action.

Here are three strategies that you can do right now to set yourself up to be more contemplative. It will pay off and I guarantee it (or your money will be cheerfully refunded):

Marc Orchant needs your thoughts & prayers...

You know how you meet someone and the connection is so strong that you feel like you've been their friend always? That's how I feel about Marc Orchant and was absolutely stunned to learn that he just had a massive coronary Sunday morning.

Marc is one of the good guys. I can count on one hand friends of mine who I quietly am in awe of as I admire their brainpower, their interview and writing skills as well as their intuitive grasp of markets and technologies. That's Marc in spades.

In this photo taken at the most recent Etech conference in San Diego, Marc is on the right along with my friend and Minnesota blogger, Graeme Thickins (another guy in the same connection status with me as Marc, by the way).

Another of Marc's friends and colleagues, Oliver Starr, thankfully posted about it and asked for others to please repost which I've done after the jump (and have posted it in its entirety).

I love you man....get better and I'll stay alerted to your progress. Best wishes to Sue and your family and now for certain we'll have to connect up you, me and our brides when we collide in some miscellaneous city again!

Happy Thanksgiving

Posting will be light for the next four days -- or not at all -- as I help my neighbor search for one of those dang turkeys, hang with family and think about something other than connecting dots.

WWII Era Jeep: Riding in a piece of history

Friday and Saturday I helped out my friend John with re-architecting his computing gear. He took delivery of a new 30" display, needed to migrate all his old Powermac tower stuff to his new Mac, and get his wireless network to be perfect. What I thought would be a couple of hours of tech assistance turned into six hours over two days.

As I left Saturday morning (satisfied as hell everything was working!) and as he effusively thanked me, I casually mentioned to John that I hadn't told him about my "payment for services rendered." Looking a bit taken aback, I mentioned that all I wanted was a ride in his newly acquired and restored World War II era jeep. Looking relieved he said, "It's a beautiful day so why don't we go now?"

Though his 30 caliber machine gun wasn't mounted and, in fact, has been neutered and won't fire (something about "laws" against working military ordinance was mentioned) we flipped down the windshield and took it out for a ride.

Damn...we talk about the sacrifices the Greatest Generation made and they deserve our thanks, recognition and undying gratitude for sure, but I never imagined that just riding around in one of these vehicles was a huge sacrifice in and of itself!

The seats were uncomfortable, there wasn't any leg room, it was bouncy as all get out, it seemed pretty unsafe on 30mph suburban roads and yet I've always wanted to ride in one (or drive it actually). It's amazing how far we've come militarily what with helicopters, GPS, satellites, night vision and more and yet our brave young men and women are today dying in thinly armored Humvees not much more robust than this nearly 70 year old vehicle.

At least those driving around in this open and amazingly unsafe jeep in the early 1940's knew that the future of the world was at stake and they were fighting fascism, to protect our homeland and that their leadership was, in fact, able to locate their posteriors with both hands.

Google "doing evil" by invisibly observing?

Google is known for it's internal guiding phrase "Do No Evil". What I've never seen is a strict definition of what "doing evil" really means to the folks at Google. Have you? Should you care? What data is Google looking at when you're online?

An article in SLATE yesterday entitled, "Google's Evil Eye" about summed up what I've talked about previously (a key post is here and another handful are here, here and here) and all of this should at least make you stop and think about all the Google services you're using and how much you're simply handing over to them:

Google's fingerprints aren't just on your e-mail. Last week, the Senate held hearings regarding Google's proposed acquisition of Doubleclick. Google dominates the micro-end of Internet advertising with its text ads. Doubleclick is the leading provider of banner ads, like the one at the top of this page. A combined Googleclick would be a force in Internet advertising—Google makes 99 percent of its profits from ads—and have an awesome ability to track your online behavior. Google will be able to inform advertisers what sites your browser has visited, what ads have been clicked on, what search terms have been used. The company can also get a good idea of your physical location from your computer's IP address. And that's just the tip of the data iceberg. If Sony wants to target teenage PlayStation 3 owners in Southern California with a special promotion on flatscreen TVs, who do you think they are going to call?

When I was at Vignette during the dotcom heyday, I recall the Doubleclick controversy in 1999 that showed, for the first time, the unprecedented capability of tracking and measuring. From Wikipedia:

"In 1999, at a cost of US $1.7 billion, DoubleClick merged with the data-collection agency, Abacus Direct, which works with offline catalog companies. This raised fears that the combined company would link anonymous Web-surfing profiles with personally identifiable information (name, address, telephone number, e-mail, address, etc.) collected by Abacus. This merger made waves and was heavily criticized by privacy organizations. Controversy grew when it was discovered that sensitive financial information users entered on a popular Web site that offered financial software was being sent to DoubleClick, which delivered the ads."

That was over seven years ago which is an eternity in internet time.

Storytelling: The way people remember

It was a dark and stormy night. The wind was howling and rain was coming down in sheets out my home office window. Dressed in sweats with the furnace on as temperatures dipped into the 40's, I sat before the glow of my flat panel display and read articles that were coming through in my RSS aggregator, content to be indoors absorbing new material and exploring new business models on the internet. What I didn't know was that this activity -- which pleased me since it fits perfectly my strengths of gathering input and learning -- was going to present me with a surprise...one that may make you sit straight up in your chair as you realize the same thing I did.

OK....that one paragraph told you a story. You learned what I did last evening, what two of my top five strengths are, and that I learned something surprising on the internet. It also left you (hopefully) with a cliffhanger incentive to continue reading this post.

No one is certain when language first appeared or when human knowledge truly began capturing that knowledge through writing, but one thing is certain: humans have developed a profound capacity for learning, storing and retrieving stories.

I came to the surprise (that a company had built a business model around storytelling and is delivering it via the 'net) through Australia-based Anecdote. The company, 50 Lessons, is based in the UK and they've coupled storytelling with Internet video and created an offering that captures lessons from top business leaders:

Experience is the best teacher – people have learned through stories for centuries.

Fifty Lessons is the world’s leading digital video business library. Using the power of storytelling, our mission is to equip ‘next-generation’ leaders with the experience and wisdom of the most respected and influential business leaders in the world.

We serve corporations, government agencies, academic institutions, small to medium-sized businesses and individual professionals, to help them suceed in an increasingly complex business landscape.

To date, over one hundred and fifty of the world’s foremost business leaders have participated. Their contributions are housed in a fully indexed digital library of over five hundred short videos.

This content is published in multiple languages in both digital and traditional formats, including internet, print, broadcast, and audio and can be experienced on devices such as PCs, Mobile Telephones, iPods and Handhelds.

Fifty Lessons content is distributed globally by our partners, who include Harvard Business School Publishing, Vangent and Sun 3C Media in China.

This is big company, enterprise stuff and they sell access to these top global leaders geared to organization-wide access. What about small-to-midsize businesses or individuals?

Biker identified with iPod: Adam Finley

Turns out that the 30 year old guy, Adam Finley, who was hit and killed on his bike near Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis last Thursday -- and was identified only because the police worked with Apple Security First Tech Apple experts to identify him from the iPod he was carrying -- was a blogger and TV Squad is reprinting some of his articles in memoriam.

It also brought back bad memories since I was hit by a car jogging on that exact same intersection when I was 29 years old, carrying no identification and listening to a Sony FM Walkman at the time.

A drunk was making a left turn westbound Lake Street and fortunately was going very slowly. I turned and saw him at the last minute simply coming at me and it gave me time to leap up in the air, landing on the hood of his car. I slid off, he hit the brakes and the rear tire ended up six inches from my head.

Others snagged his keys and kept him there until police arrived, and I was just damn lucky I wasn't killed -- it just tore my jacket and gave me a few bumps and bruises. Adam's untimely death -- though I didn't know him or read his blog -- really has given me pause about how quickly things can go the other way, how lucky I was and how I've carried identification ever since when I'm out running or biking.

Take a moment and think about how interesting it is to live in a time when digital breadcrumb trails can be left by people like Adam in blogs, podcasts, MySpace pages...or by you...and how good it is to remember someone partially by the contributions they've made. I think often about preserving my blog and podcasts to be discovered by some interested descendant of mine who might wonder who I was and what was happening when I was alive. In a small way, I now have a glimpse into Adam Finley whose life stopped far too early.

Blogging hiatus is over...

Just a quick note to explain why -- after two and a half years of almost daily blogging -- I have gone one week without a post. It's pretty atypical for me and many readers have wanted to know why.

If you read me you know that I had a great first half and decided to take the summer off and cleared the decks accordingly. Never done this before but needed to for many personal reasons. As it turned out, the serendipity of me doing so was I could act as the primary caregiver for my 94 year old father-in-law (who moved into our home for a short while) and my 81 year old dad to get him through a medical procedure. I'm pleased I could serve them and be in the unique position to have time available *and* that they're both doing phenomenally well.

This year's end of summer rush toward finishing projects, our 8th Annual Dad & Son adventure with my boy, getting ready for school, buying new audio gear for use in our business objectives (and a return to podcasting!) as well as finalizing all the stuff for my dad and father-in-law has really pulled me away like never before.

I love blogging too much and get far more value out of it than the effort I put into it so it's unlikely I'll go this long again. Thanks for reading and for the queries as to "What's up. You OK?"

Heat, Power and Web 2.0

This summer has been a scorcher across the world. Here in Minnesota it's been in the 90's consistently and the drought is horrendous. I haven't seen it this bad in my lifetime. In fact, the Earth's temperature for the first six months of the year was the second-warmest ever recorded.

Yesterday's power outage in San Francisco -- which knocked out several high profile Web 2.0 sites as well as this blog for hours since it brought down Six Apart, Typepad's owner -- may be indicative of what we should brace ourselves for going forward.

How are these two related?

There is an increasing demand for power at the same time global weather patterns are changing. In the same way that the desert Southwest of the United States and other oppressively hot regions in the world have been settled in no small way due to air conditioning, the demands on our crumbling power grid (via GigaOM) are increasing. Burgeoning information technology services, an acceleration in building with air conditioning to cool our sweltering bodies (though that has slowed recently), are all rising concurrently with a global growth in population which alone will drive demand for power.

My bride and I are enamored with Scottsdale and have been seriously considering a second home there. We're second-guessing that decision when I analyze water issues there, consider those issues within the context of global warming, and continue to scratch my head over how a growing desert Southwest can possibly support an exploding population with water (this article at CNet about sums up what I've experienced and am thinking through).

The Internet and a Graying World

My posting has been light since my 94 year old father-in-law has been living with us -- after a fall and before he transitions to assisted living -- and now my 81 year old dad is going in for major colon surgery tomorrow. I'm honored to be serving these two men and have been doing so with a lightness in my heart and a lot of love and expect it to consume my summer.

This time serving our dad's has been a profound learning experience on many levels. Since I write about technology and the meaning behind it, I'm not going to leap into the spiritual aspects, a discussion about honoring our elders or even how I'm worried I won't capture their stories on audio or video, but instead about the macro trends of a graying world.

An experience like mine makes me think deeply about mortality, aging, and my work (Internet and Web centric management consulting) and what it means when a HUGE part of the Internet-centric market are Seniors with the time, inclination and interest -- not to mention a higher net worth than any generation in history -- embrace the Internet.  All of us in the Web/Enterprise 2.0 game need to figure out how to cater to this group of folks.

This is NOT just a US-centric phenomena...it's a global graying one. The National Institute of Aging produced this report Why Population Aging Matters: A Global Perspective which provides a succinct description of population trends that are transforming the world in fundamental ways. The report, using data from the United Nations, US Census Bureau, and the Statistical Office of the European Communities as well as regional surveys, identifies nine emerging trends in global aging and starts off like this:

We are aging—not just as individuals or communities but as a world. In 2006, almost 500 million people worldwide were 65 and older. By 2030, that total is projected to increase to 1 billion—1 in every 8 of the earth’s inhabitants. Significantly, the most rapid increases in the 65-and-older population are occurring in developing countries, which will see a jump of 140 percent by 2030.

Long Now Foundation membership...

Since I first heard about the Long Now Foundation and its mission I've been delightfully intrigued by it. It's mission: "The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

* The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years."

Yesterday's mail brought my charter membership card for the Long Now Foundation. It's made out of metal (hmmm....guess it will last awhile) and I haven't been paying attention as they began taking memberships and, as it turns out, there were 995 people already as members! I quickly signed up (I'm number 996) and they're at 1,084 members as of 5pm CDT (GMT -6) on July 4th.

One reason I'm intrigued is how they'll make a clock that will last 10,000 years and be positioned in a geologically constant place that will potentially be unaltered for that length of time. I like thinking we may be around that long and not be forced to flee the planet as we use it up, pave it over or excrete enough carbon so that all the world is like Phoenix in the summer.

Besides being challenged to look forward for 10,000 years, I can't imagine 10,000 years back when humans were hunter/gatherers and civilizations like Egypt were thousands of years in to the future. The difference now, of course, is that humans could lay waste to this entire planet in the blink of an eye and destroy ourselves and everything upon it. We also might breed ourselves into destruction (the world population is expected to hit over 9 billion by 2050!). It's imperative that we all think about how we're all connected, how what we do impacts our own lives and those of our childrens -- and instead focus on the next several hundred or thousand generations. To net-it-out, that's the goal of creating a foundation with projects like this one...get people to think really long-term.

This is a very serious project and the minds, money and effort going into its creation and deployment is impressive. Poke around the site awhile and consider becoming a member.

Discover Your Strengths

The more you know about yourself, the better able you will be to make the choices in life that will ensure you're doing the right work, taking your optimal path and ensuring you're working up to your potential.

Same thing goes with people you manage, those you mentor or even your kids. If you learn what makes them tick and fills them with passion, they'll have a spring in their step and achieve their greatest potential -- and be in the right place in or out of your organization.

I've been assessed, probed, analyzed and dissected by the best. I've done the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI); Myers-Briggs; Spencer, Shenk, Capers assessments and executive workshops; and many more. Thousands and thousands of dollars have been expended on my behalf to figure out how my brain is wired and who I am.

Here's the funny thing: my bride has never thought anything accurately assessed the essence of Steve Borsch until my executive coaches, George Johnson and Jeff Staggs, had me buy a $35 book and take the online test that comes with it. The book? Marcus Buckingham's Now Discover Your Strengths and the online test done by the Gallup organization.

When I came back from George's place on Lake Superior early last year having my assessment results in my hands, I sat down with Michelle and read her the five paragraphs which laid out my top five strengths. When I finished, she grinned and exclaimed, "Steve, that is THE best description of EXACTLY who you are that I've ever heard!"

Oh how this knowledge has helped guide my client choices; ensured I turned down job offers I previously would've leapt at; and the result is that I'm significantly happier with my work today than ever before (and I can also look back at high achievement past jobs where I performed but was miserable...because I wasn't capitalizing on my strengths).

Fun with Video

I'm not usually trolling for videos online and am typically fairly serious about my examinations of the technology and social moves on the Internet/Web, but this one just tickled me today.

Called "Lip Dub" (and already appearing on dozens of sites and blogs with almost 1M views as of this morning), it appears that it was shot at a young company and done during a Friday afternoon beer bash where the group obviously was inspired to orchestrate lip synching to song. It's just delightful and goes far beyond a couple of people sitting in front of a webcam doing the same thing.

Examples like this are what fill me with unbounded optimism and joy that so-called "user generated content" and the Rise of the Participation Culture is going to change everything. Take a few minutes and watch...

Unleashing the Collective

Just returned to my office from this Thought Leader Gathering (TLG) put on by Heartland Circle and held this morning at Best Buy Company.

Being in a contemplative mood for the last few weeks, today's gathering was interesting on many levels and also brought me back to one aspect of my work: unleashing the collective. The collective of Internet-connected humanity is my work, but I was sort of surprised by how something NOT directly in my strategic technology domain informed my thoughts in such a profound way today.

The event was about WoLF: The Women's Leadership Forum at Best Buy. The leaders, Julie Gilbert and Mary Capozzi, led off with powerfully told personal stories that helped us understand what led each of them to the formation of this forum. WoLF's essence is that it empowers women in the organization and is clearly unleashing their perspectives, their influence and engaging them. Apparently most women had been relatively excluded.

A key aspect to this forum (and the WoLF 'packs' which have formed) is that partnering with the men within Best Buy is critical to bringing women's energy to bear for the good of them and, especially, the company. Read the link above to learn more but what you won't take away was how powerful this has become and the ROI that Best Buy the business is achieving from it.

If you want to get all left brain and quantified and dismiss my relating this event to you as YAWM (Yet Another Women's Movement) consider this: Best Buy is measuring the results of lower female turnover in an otherwise incredibly high turnover labor pool (i.e., retail). Another fact Ms. Gilbert articulated is that, "Women buy more technology products than men — spending $55 billion of the annual $96 billion in technology sales." Hmmm...so engaging women could be good business and profitable...hmmm. 

A Design Story: 11Mystics

Sit back, relax and let me tell you a short story about design, pent-up demand and being positioned well for the next big evolution of the Web.

You know I've talked before on how design matters...a lot. That said, there seems to be a huge reluctance on the part of tools providers to make a tool high function and high design. They either throw in every possible feature or make a tool so stupid simple that anyone serious would be embarrassed to use them.

But in a time of accelerating change around people generating content, increasingly using the Web for communications and participation, there is significant pent-up demand for easy-to-use, highly functional and in-the-hands-of-mere-mortals vs. propeller-headed designer toolsets and some vendors are shipping new tools that are meeting demand in the marketplace.

Last October we embarked upon an adventure to build Rise of the Participation Culture, initially as a Web-based report. It seemed prudent to use content management or blogging engines like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or even Typepad to deliver it, but the realization quickly came to us that we were considering using bazooka's to kill an ant.

I'm revealing for the first time -- and holding myself up for potential ridicule from those who view iWeb, Rapidweaver (RW) or Sandvox as "stupid simple" or "Borsch you should be embarrassed to use it" -- that we used iWeb to deliver the report. It was clearly a 22 caliber pistol to go after that ant and allowed us to quickly deliver the content...and that's what mattered and no one cared if it was created in Dreamweaver, Expression or any other higher level and more complex tool.

As has always been my experience, the stock templates in iWeb are cheesy so I went on the hunt for more professional looking templates (and one that would resemble the look-n-feel of my blog).

I found them at 11Mystics since I was searching for great design that I could map to iWeb and 11Mystics offered very nice templates that would do the job. After buying one and discovering that the PNG images wouldn't render in Internet Explorer 6 (one reason why I wrote When Will Internet Explorer 6 Die?), I queried support and the owner, Suzanne Boden Boben, and I began interacting by email. She provided us with a pre-release version of the template with JPG images instead of PNGs and it was flawless. GREAT customer service.

But it gets more interesting and revealing. I'll tell you why all of this matters to you and how I perceive Suzanne as the poster child for remaking yourself and creating a business where one didn't exist through great design, filling a need and being well versed at conversational marketing.

Eric's Photofest

Heading up to my buddy Eric's lake home this weekend for Photofest. He, his friend and colleague Kevin and I have done this before and it's been great.

The problem with having great gear and a high degree of interest in photography means that your family and friends are *always* agitated as you linger trying to set up a shot on vacation. "Come ON Dad" the kids shout and my bride acts graciously as she patiently waits for me.

The problem is this: photography is all about seeing and you can't see unless you're completely present in the moment. If there are feelings of urgency, guilt and other emotions tugging at you, the shot is hurried, the composition isn't its best and thus the experience isn't one I want to repeat.

The cool thing about this weekend's adventure being photography is that our sole purpose is to simply be and take whatever time is necessary to shoot. After stumbling across the now deceased former Senator Barry Goldwater's photo site, my absolute knowing about being in Arizona -- by myself with no distractions or people tugging at me -- is something I will do and soon. My plan is to go the state I'm beginning to love deeply and drive around for a week or so doing nothing but experiencing that place and seeing it and its people....really seeing it and attempting to capture it photographically.

There are lessons here for anything we do. Not just lessons on presence, but lessons on how to see. If you concentrate you'll see, but if you open yourself completely to the place, the moment, the problem, the people, and feel yourself stepping back to observe, it's stunning what unfolds.

One example: on our last Photofest we headed into a state forest in northern Minnesota. Eric and Kevin headed off on a lakeside trail to shoot and I said, "I'll think I'll stay right here and see what unfolds." The clearing I was in had been logged and new growth made it look decidedly non-photogenic! They looked at me quizzically but understood and left me alone.

I began to see things in the clearing as I slowly opened myself to what was there: a fungal growth on a tree that looked like an old man's face; a rusty coffee can with bullet holes in it that was beautiful in the late day sun; strange plants that looked amazing when shot in macro; a woodpecker's hole in a tree that -- with good depth of field -- looked like a cave in the side of that tree. This was the first time I'd really opened up and I'm pleased with at least a dozen of the 100 or so photos I took that day. That experience taught me a bit about what it takes to really see the beauty in everything and in an area I would've overlooked in the past as I chased the perfect setting...which doesn't exist anyway.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

I'm in Scottsdale, AZ for a client engagement and also seeing several friends this weekend, but today I'm attending David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) seminar.

All my life, as I've dealt with my scattered attention that some label a "deficit" or "disorder", I've learned how to cope with my innate nature of being distracted and simply not having the patience to sit and organize. Though people describe me as "fastidious" and "very detailed", it's all an illusion. As I've aged and developed high level coping skills while enjoying my love of drinking in every photon, soundwave and piece of information that comes my way or shows up when I'm in seek-mode, I've struggled with how to put stuff into buckets that make later retrieval easy. Name a planner or organizational system created by humans and I've used it...and none have worked for me. The last possibility I'm willing to explore (and if it doesn't work I'll keep shoving crap into my desk drawers) is what seemingly all of geekdom has embraced: the GTD system.

Probably the biggest GTD cheerleader is Merlin Mann through his blog 43 Folders (the name is one descriptor of a part of the GTD system). I've followed him for a long time and he points out all the GTD goodness out there (software, approaches, people using it, along with general productivity stuff) but he comes across as a bit obsessive-compulsive about productivity but I really enjoy his energy and love of all things organizational.

I bought David Allen's book and read it through some months ago. It didn't really connect so I didn't pursue the system and then I was chatting with my friend, Marc Orchant, a devotee' of David Allen and his system. Some time ago he convinced me that "....you really have to experience David in person and go through an on-the-ground seminar to totally get the GTD system." So when he mentioned he was going to a refresher GTD seminar in Scottsdale and the timing was perfect, I signed up.

I also have a hidden agenda. We live in one of the top school districts in the nation and yet our District struggles with what to do with someone like my son. He's in the 99th percentile for IQ and is so unfocused and disorganized that he forgets to turn in completed assignments. Labeled years ago with ADHD, their solution is to place him in a class to learn organizational skills. There's more to it than that and his teachers and staff are truly terrific, but when I try to get them to understand how to deal with him, I feel like I'm talking to physicians in the 1600's who still want to perform bloodletting with leaches to cure what ails him.

If this GTD system can be morphed and modified to be something a 12 year old can use and accelerate his own capabilities with productivity, then I'm going to figure out how to do so. There are too many kids like mine out there who think in a parallel and associative way but are being taught by linear, serial thinkers who expect him to organize in outlines.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Vision: THE most important first step...

Nothing happens without a vision. Nothing gets created, manifested, built, or moved forward without a vision of an outcome.

Almost on a daily basis, I'm being bombarded with the benefits of visualization in my work, my personal life and as I guide others. If you don't already visualize before you set personal goals, build a plan or, especially, if you lead an organization, team, or group, then you owe it to yourself to begin.

Just to illustrate how vision is showing up everywhere, at the Web 2.0 Expo's Hybrid Designer session Chris Messina said something that hit me in the face and has stuck with me.  In a discussion about the challenges facing designers with a creative vision struggling to get programmers to see the outcome of that vision so they could code to it, he talked about how he mocked up a visual when they were creating Flock, posted it to Flickr so that the geographically disbursed development team could all get on a call and talk about that vision. Without that shared vision, Chris said, the coordination of the team on a shared vision would've taken 6 weeks and dozens of threads in a discussion forum. Instead, it took 2-3 days.

No question this sharing of vision -- and the co-creating that goes along with that sharing -- is the single reason that I'm so incredibly enthused about the accelerating connection of humanity via the Internet and all the open source projects, Web 2.0 startups, and commercial software companies that are rushing to deliver ever-increasingly functional collaborative applications and platforms.

After dozens of people my bride and I know talked about the film The Secret, she purchased it. It was very well done and focused on one piece of sage wisdom: The Secret is a feature length, historic and factually based account of an age old secret, said to be 4000 years in the making, and known only to a fortunate few. The Secret promises to reveal this great knowledge to the world - the secret to wealth, the secret to health, the secret to love, relationships, happiness, eternal youth, the secret to life. The secret? The Law of Attraction which is creating a vision of what you want and expect to show up...and how it works when you align your intent, your energy and your focus on it.

Why should I care about vision Borsch?

Why there are no technoweenie, geek or propellerhead comedians

Every April Fool's day I am stunned that -- with 50,000 standup comedian's out of work* -- that technoweenies, geeks and propellerheads are making free jokes.

If they were good jokes I wouldn't mind. If the humor was leveraging the collective consciousness or there was an open source joke ecosystem giving us true hilarity, I wouldn't mind. Perhaps a thousand techies working on a joke might actually get me to collapse in laughter reading/hearing it instead of wondering why my mouth rarely cracks even the hint of a smile.

Imagine a standup comedian at the Laugh Factory telling any of these:

• Why did the Comp. Engineer get X-mas and Halloween mixed up? A: Because Oct(31) == Dec(25)!'

• Q: How many software engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

  A: Sorry, that's a hardware question.

• A mechanical, a hydraulic engineer, and a software engineer were driving along a narrow mountain road, when the brakes fail, the car goes out of control, and crashes into a tree. They are a hundred miles from home, and it's starting to rain.
  
  The mechanical engineer examines the brake shoes and see that they have multiple stress fractures, and need to be replaced. The hydraulic engineer examines the brake lines and sees that the pressure is way below minimum, and that they need more brake fluid. The software engineer looks at the the other two engineers and says:
  
  "It's just a crash. Help me push me push it back out to the road and we'll try it again." 

Oh geez...oh man....those are just hilarious and -- hang on a second -- I'm OK now...I just had to wipe up the milk that snorted out of my nose. (Disclaimer: I actually didn't find them amusing but wrote that sentence for dramatic effect).

But something troubles me about the functionally-humor-challenged people residing in geekdom...

EFF Pioneer Awards

Last night I attended the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Awards. Just simply being at this event and absorbing the vibe was meaningful for me and I'll bring forth a perspective that may be atypical and worth putting into the conversation about EFF.

Nearly four years ago was the first time that I donated to EFF and began my support of this organization. Though I look like "a suit", a Republican and a mainstream sort of guy, I'm an independent, a closet liberal, enjoy some Libertarian leanings and am quite open to growing in my perspective as I learn -- especially legally and politically -- as we all push against the membrane of the future.

Five or so years ago I became more enlightened. I was stunned by the multiple, parallel, onrush of efforts by copyright holders, Congress, world intellectual capital bodies, governments globally as well as intelligence communities, to command, control and infiltrate all aspects of the Internet.  As I started to try getting my head wrapped around even a few of the issues, I realized that there was NO way that I could be competently informed about even ONE of these issues shaping our future....let alone dozens of them at a time!

Enter the EFF. I learned that here was an organization whose mission was to be that competent, informed entity who'd act to intervene, stop or shape the debate about the most important issues facing us in our digital future. With more and more of our relationships, commerce, free speech, entertainment -- you name it -- being created or delivered digitally, I (and you) could either pull the covers over our collective heads or get involved...and support those who've rolled up their sleeves, dug their hands in the muck and are in the fray.

So that's what I did.  Last night was great for a lot of reasons and validated (in spades) the vital importance of this organization and the people who've dedicated money, support and all or part of their lives to the mission.

Mobile Global Grid: When the World is At Your Fingertips

Like me, if you're paying any attention to the signs, trends and foundational elements upon which innovation in technology occurs, then you have to be seeing what I'm seeing...it's sooo close.  Do you see it?

Right there. Don't see it yet? OK then, let's push against the membrane of the future together for a minute.

If you look now you can just make out a mobile device, connected to a ubiquitous wireless network (that you can use even when you're miles from a major metro area, off the autobahn or Interstate highway system, or at some point in the future on the Serengeti plain in Africa) and is so simple to use that you're able to connect and re-connect to the global grid in an instant and have all the world's knowledge at your fingertips.

When you're in your car, at a restaurant, a dinner party, at a business meeting, at school...anything connected to the global grid you're authorized or able to grab is yours for the snagging from a device in your hand.

We're partially there now and more is coming.

Unless you've been living under a rock, Apple's eagerly anticipated iPhone is the closest concept yet to a just beyond the membrane of the future simple to use, multi-function device that will be useful for the masses to leverage our currently decent wireless network...and is one set to expand dramatically.

According to GigaOM today, there are distinct chunks of spectrum that hold the promise of mass geographical coverage and expanding the grid. An increasing number of mobile communications online applications are proliferating (e.g., this list at eConsultant). The World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Initiative adds even more fuel to the fire of a mobile, global grid.

Couple that with the always-on, always-connected, culture of participation (see "Rise of the Participation Culture") and you have a brew from which all sorts of possibilities come forth!

Though I look like some geek when I do this, at least twice a week I'll be in a conversation and someone will say something like, "You know...that ocean...the one by (country here)....what's that called?"  I'll whip out my Treo, go to Google, enter a search string and, I swear to God, almost instantly I can find a reference to that country and there's an obvious link that contains the data where I can answer that question. It's a bit of a conversation stifler at the moment as I futz with the device, but I'm pretty good at glossing over my thumbing on the Treo, we carry on the conversation, and I circle back to the fact and insert it into our discussion. Works great.

Did this at a dinner party one evening awhile back when people were struggling with an artist and a song. No one knew, the conversation continued, and about two minutes later I mentioned the artist. "OH YEAH!" came the head-slap comments and we carried on. Trivial in the scheme of life I realize, but extend this to the DOZENS OF TIMES PER DAY that I look something up on Google, use Google Maps, find a phone number on Directory Assistance, send SMS messages, send a photo/blog post to one of my private client blogs, use Instant Messaging....all from applications that run on my Treo!

So how is this going to transform the world? In ways predictable but mostly ones that are not. Who knows what will be the killer application for the always connected world -- especially when better geotracking is in the mix?  What I do know is that some of it is already here...and if you push just hard enough on the membrane of the future you'll have a good indication of what's coming.