Reflect a moment

Tim O’Reilly comments on Google’s Renewables initiative announced this week:

The stakes are high. If our worst fears about global warming are right, we’re going to bring our technological progress to a halt unless we get new sources of clean energy. Google’s goal of beating the cost of energy from coal is critical, because coal is the default lowest-cost choice for electricity generation, and the worst from a global warming perspective.

And let’s be clear, the internet industry we know and love is a huge consumer of power. I love Nick Carr’s estimate from last year that a Second Life avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human. While Nick’s calculations are provocative rather than authoritative, he makes a good point. Our electronic lifestyle has hidden, off-the-books costs. Google is very smart to acknowledge this fact.

Thanks Tim (and Nick). Beautifully put. Point made.

And remember, if we just ignore this, we end up back at Web 0.0, with either no electricity, or no livable planet.

Get the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it again. — and make sure to watch the updates a year later. See? Climate change is accelerating. Bickering about who’s fault it is so 2005. We move on now. We fix this.

Show me the money blog

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Global knowledgy-porridge

There is this wise and beautiful observation from New York Times writer David Brooks, writing about his outsourced mind:

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.

His big point here is that all our actions, blog posts, emails, clicks for goodness sake, become a part of something bigger. All this browsing and commenting and writing and photographs becomes part of something bigger, some store of global actions, events and knowledge. If I get all misty-eyed about the future I’d say something rash like we are making a global consciousness but for now let us just say we’re making a world-sized bowl of knowledgy-porridge.

So what? Well if you want to be a part of something bigger, an optimistic feeling that I am familiar with, then you have the opportunity. Go and click on stuff, recommend stuff, rate stuff, comment, write, make videos, sing songs, podcast, act. Add your stuff to the global soup.

Your stuff persits, or at least some of it does. It may well live longer than you. This is a tiny piece of your immortality, happening today.

You impact is non-linear. The butterfly effect can apply. That comment you make on that unknown blog post might change the whole world or help an important movie to get a major release, or stop something bad happening, or change a law.

Let this sit for a while. I’m going to. Then I’m going to write something about the who, how and why of gatekeepers controlling access to all our stuff in the global knowledgy-porridge.

Pipes to the rescue

I’ve always though that Yahoo Pipes was a pretty cool thing. I’ve done a lot of work inside Scouta working with incoming and outgoing RSS, and the idea of doing ‘arithemetic’ on feeds is intriguing.

So, a problem just came up: for Widgety Goodness, we wanted to feed in all posts about Widgety Goodness and Widgets and Brighton into the WG07 backnetwork, but backnetwork would only accept tagged posts from registered bloggers that have activated their accounts. That limits the amount of blog articles that can be seen in backnetwork, which is a shame. Here’s how I got around it:

1. I constructed some searches in Google Blog Search for appropriate keywords
2. For each of these blog searches, I got an RSS feed, and then fed them into a Yahoo Pipe Fetch Feed block
3. Made a Union of these feeds
4. Sorted by ascending publish date
5. Removed duplicates
6. For each item in the resulting aggregated feed, I added the tag to the item.desciption with a Loop/String Builder
7. Fed the resulting into backnetwork, via a new user created called WG Feed.

Because backnetwork will aggregate all tagged posts from participant’s feeds, these posts now appear in the backnetwork Posts page.

It works nicely. One little issue is that all these posts show up as authored by the WG Feed user, but clicking through to get the full article goes to the right place.

Look at the pipe on Yahoo Pipes.

Widgety Goodness coming to Brighton

There’s been a commotion around the office for the last couple of weeks — as Ivan brings his Widgety Goodness conference to life — Brighton, December 6th.

Widgets matter. As Tom Coates was saying at d.construct this year, your product must be more than your website. Widgets are one of the big ways to spread fingers of your product into many corners of the online and mobile world.

Lib is working on the Widgety Goodness backnetwork, helping to bring people together online before the conference itself and using the back network to richen delegates’s experience on the day. Altogether shaping up to be something quite interesting.

More info about the conference and registration over on the Widgety Goodness website and blog.

Men’s Yoga

Assuntina over at yogabrighton.net is running a Men-only Yoga class on Monday nights in Patcham. I’ve miseed the first couple of weeks, but I’ll be there.

It is sounding great from the comments here.

Case Studies & Styles of Blogs

Here is a helpful take by a PR agency on the 25 main styles of blog. Each style has a case study to check out too.

What they don’t say is that, you can of course use a combination of styles and there are many new forms emerging all the time. Take it to the edge. Be you. That’s all I want to say right now. And as Shel Israel dropped into say on a previous post:

“In Naked Conversations, as I recall, we emphasized that short blogs were more popular and that bloggers who posted brief articles and then posted often, would score well in rankings. We certainly did not intend to say what blogs were MEANT to be. They are meant to be whatever the author chooses them to be.”

Every blog has it’s upside and downside, it’s pros and cons. Each one is unique, hopefully, as it’s creator/s. There’s no magic formula, despite the way these PR folk are trying to package it.

You’ve just got to blog, surf, listen and engage with the blogosphere – and let it all emerge. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. You’ve got to listen to yourself. Hmm, I think I’ve said that before somewhere… ;-)

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More ideas on what to blog about

Here are some recent links to other blogs that will help you come up with your own answers to this question.

See also our other posts in this category.

Personal v Topical. Find your niche. Google it.

Augustine’s Quiz for Bloggers Wondering What to Blog About

Evil Genius with Scoble and others

And all I did was Google “What to blog about”.

So if in doubt – go surfing!

What shall I blog about?

What a good question. I forget that we can get stuck, because I’ve been so busy lately getting posts up as responses to all these great questions you all keep asking.

So there’s the first idea. I’ll keep adding to this category again soon.

1. Answer people’s questions

Be useful! Become a resource people want to come back to. But how do I know what their questions are? Well – ask them. When you’re in conversation with others, listen out for what their fundamental questions are, really listen. Make notes.

2. Answer your own questions

Ask yourself! What are your questions? Authentic blogging has, at it’s heart, the potential for profound learning. Ask yourself the big questions, the little questions, the whimsical, the skill or project specific ones, the one’s no-one else is willing to ask.

“What’s the best way to attract new clients / partners?”

“What do I already know about what works / doesn’t work?”

3. Come up with new questions?

If you want to start a conversation, come up with a good questions and leave it open. Invite others to contribute, even if it feels a bit “off topic” or outside the immediate frame of reference you give yourself and your blog. The linear path is rarely the best. That’s just not how life works. That’s not how blogs work. You have to trust the magic.

Here’s an example. I blogged a question “Who’s going to clean the toilets when we have all reached our potential?” then sent a link for the post to two thinking bloggers I knew would grab it like a bone – Biff and Leah Landau. What’s that got to do with Authentic Blogging? Well wait and see what happened.

These two blogging stars launched in to contribute. There was a spark in their minds. They bounced off the post and the comment prior. See comments under the post.

Then I reposted a meta-cognitive (ie. thinking about my thinking) follow-up piece that nakedly opened up a new can of worms and back they came (I send them I very quick email to let them know it was back).

So what’s the next question? Deep learning, philosophy, good conversations. The educational academics and thinkers all seem to agree. It’s about continually formulating useful questions.

As one of the world’s most evolved and influential educators Paolo Freire has stated:

I believe in the pedagogy of curiosity… the pedagogy of the question and not of the answer (Freire in Papert, late 1980s).

Let’s stay curious! Keep those questions evolving.

Outcomes? Why bother? Good question!

-    At least three people have engaged pretty deeply with some questions that we think really matter. We have learnt about ourselves and each other. We learnt a little more about how to express our ideas online, to others, in a safe, effective and appropriate way. I know for one participant at least, this is a profound step forward into happiness and potential. It’s not the magnum opus, it’s a step. That’s part of why the banner image is a foot. Each step creates a complete journey.

-    This conversation is now available online, for ever. People will find it, they may add their own reflections. They may be sparked to think about things for themselves.

-    I have made stronger connections with two people that really matter to me. Not because they are necessarily going to become clients or students, but they might (actually one already is and the other is a new colleague / muse). We know more about each other. We have co-created something kind of special. Maybe not to you, or to everyone, but to us. And maybe others. You know that feeling you get in a healthy team when you working towards a common goal and you get there. Lovely stuff. It’s a bit like that. Maybe we will find and “see”, listen to, witness the thinking of others and through this, add to the global consciousness of the web. Maybe they will help me attract more Authentic Bloggers to attend our courses. Maybe they will keep contributing to the research and thinking we are doing. Who knows! I just thought they might enjoy a good yak about something we might all be interested in.

I’m delighted with the results. Thank you Biff & Leah for all that you are. I wouldn’t be me without you (but that’s another Buddhism inspired post for a later date).

MsLiberty

x

Editing the self

Just out of interest.. I added the bunny ears around “thought leader” in between sending the last post out as an email to some current students, and putting it up publically.

Why do that? Why tell you I did it?

I was editing myself. I was thinking carefully about how I wanted to communicate. I was listening to myself. I was learning, as I am right now in this moment, very very deeply.

In the first version I was uncomfortable with calling myself a thought leader due to the perhaps pompous nature of appointing yourself as that, yet is has some meaning. But I knew I was in a more closed conversation with people that had intimate, direct experience of any credentials I might have in that way.

I was uncomfortable with the use of it for two reasons. One – it makes me sound like a tosser to include myself in that category. Two – in context, it was ironic due to the inherent hierarchy implied. My authentic self sees everyone as potentially thought leaders, and that’s a part of the potential blogging offers. That’s the deepest part of the conceptual space we are developing here. Lead your own thinking. Listen to yourself first.

In the second version -  I used the bunny ears for “thought leader” to suggest the questionable use of the expression, as if I was quoting some else in using it. Which I was. Earlier I spent some time (on an off day when I should be in bed recovering from a cold) looking at some of the world’s top, self appointed “thought leaders” who might want me to join them at the top.

I guess I’m not quite ready to go there.  I think the view and sense of interconnection is better from the earth, not up on the mountain looking down. I hate heirarchies.

There. Lesson to self finished. If anyone else gets anything from it, that’s a total bonus.

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