Little bit of a Great Harmonic Google Convergence going on here. Jon Udell mentions in passing his rise and fall from the top of the “Jon” results. Stephen Downes replies in a amusing comment that he defeated Stephen King and Stephen Hawking — only to be conquered by the last of the Norman Kings.

Meanwhile, my colleague at KSC, Jenny Darrow, writes a somewhat frustrated post about people not understanding it’s content and connection that will make them findable on Google — not some secret technical voodoo.

Her response to those that complain their sites are not ranked highly?

I’m not a guru in web analytics but I can tell you a few things that might help you get a higher rank.

Write. Update. Contribute. Link. Reciprocate. Did I mention write?

And she’s right, of course.

I’m no Jon or Stephen, but I’ve slowly floated up past my “Caulfield” namesakes. And while I’ve always known I’d never displace my good friend Holden, I’ve left others in the dust: Patrick Caulfield, Pop Artist. Brian Caulfield, Tech Writer for Forbes. Several CEOs. Many VPs. The secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

The MANY secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

And just a couple weeks ago, I finally made it on to the first page. And I was pretty chuffed with myself.

But here’s the thing. Click to the second page of Google results. Five spaces behind me is my wife, an artist. Apart from getting the URL with her name in it, what did she do? She did her art, but she opened it up to the world. She showed pieces half finished, talked about her technique. She hooked into a vibrant community of practice. She announced new posts on a behind the scenes Google Group she’s on with other artists. She invited feedback. She acted (sometimes) on the feedback. She shared unreservedly her progress with her technique, and kept nothing hidden.

Was she trying to rank highly? Not at all. She was trying to have a conversation about what she did right and what she did wrong, and trying to figure out better ways of doing it. In the process, through quickly absorbing what other people in her community of practice already knew about the medium of colored pencil work, and by making a creative leap past that (once again, guided by this community), she’s invented a new colored pencil technique (involving the use of pastelboard) which allows her to get painterly effects in a fraction of the time standard colored pencil techniques allowed.

How revolutionary is the process? Ann Kullberg, Queen of the Colored Pencil World, said she was absolutely shocked at how much the method improved rendering speed (you have to understand the colored pencil artists are used to putting in as many as 50-100 hours on a work — Nicole can render similar effects in as little as a day, and often with increased vibrancy not traditionally associated with colored pencil).

Ultimately, her new technique represents an incremental step. But it’s an incremental step from precisely the very edge of a community’s knowledge, and that’s what makes the difference. Nicole has amazing natural talent, but she was able through the network of an online community to do what she does better. She was able to get support for what she did, feedback from artists and buyers, technique advice from experts in the field.

And now she’s number fifteen on the Google “Caulfield” results.

But at this point, that’s really beside the point, isn’t it?

The fact that you’re not ranked highly on Google is not a problem. It’s a symptom. It’s a sign that you are not taking advantage of the Networked Age for professional development or communication.

Fix that, and leave the Google results to heaven.

Sony set out to be the iTunes of book-publishing with its Sony Reader. And Sony built a pretty good technical and marketing replica of that iPod model — with an initial online offering that was comparable to Apple’s initial limited selection, with a desktop piece of software clearly modeled on the iTunes client, with redistribution deals with a number of publishers, and at the center a top notch piece of hardware.

And this week, as Amazon released the Kindle, the Sony Reader became a paperweight. The Kindle sports about 100,000 titles compared to Sony’s 10,000. And that makes all the difference — it’s the difference between thinking of books you want to read and finding electronic versions available and having to browse what’s available to find out what you can read.

Nobody wants to buy an ebook device with less titles than their local bookstore. That’s just insane.

All the same, I can’t help thinking of a major flaw in Sony’s “iPod for books” formulation of their strategy.

Here’s what they missed. When the iPod first came out, people were not primarily loading it up with stuff from iTunes. The majority of people’s collections came from either rips of their own CDs or from so-called piracy (I prefer filesharing, but whatev).

An iPod made sense because if iTunes didn’t have what you wanted you could get it by hook or crook.

It occurred to me yesterday that if there had been a vibrant book piracy market, the Sony Reader would have been an easy sell. There would be a huge base. If one could grab a copy of I, Robot or Confederacy of Dunces for free off of a BitTorrent site, you wouldn’t hesitate to get a Reader — and the market penetration of the device would then (as with the iPod) start to drive legal sales.

But every month I would look to see if the book my book club was reading was available on the Sony Reader, and every month it was not. Not once.

And with no filesharing market to turn to for unofficial copies, I had to go to physical alternatives.

Well, you might say, at least the author got something out of that. At least the author got paid.

Nope, sorry. Didn’t happen. Like most people I know nowadays I use Amazon to order secondhand copies from people around the country. The author didn’t get a dime, and neither did the publisher — I ordered these books secondhand.

I think the Kindle is going to be a big hit, because of a number of design choices they made, but even more because only Amazon has the real force to make the industry wake up. Oh, and 100,000 titles on launch doesn’t hurt either.

But as they move forward, it might be good for both Amazon and the publishers to realize it often takes a little unauthorized use to jumpstart an industry — at least until the gaps are filled in. That’s the real lesson of the iPod, and one that Sony apparently missed.

So I saw through someone’s feed on Facebook that National Novel Writing Month is going on. This is an improvement — I usually notice this when it’s already over.

I dithered a bit on whether I should attempt it with the month half gone and so many other things in the works here.

And then I thought, what the heck:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/259250

By posting this, I ensure people will ask me how it’s going, which ensures (I think) that I’ll pound out a dozen or so pages today…

Ah, zee blogs…

So I’ve been away a bit, working on the college’s AT vision plan, which I wiki-ed out over a period of a week with some other folks.

That turns out to be interesting from a process standpoint…we did some marathon work on it the past two weeks, and presented it to an appropriate steering committee, and I think the initial perception might have been, given how far along we’d gotten it, that we had been working on it for months by ourselves. And in a shared-governance institution, that can be a problem.

In other words moving too fast and having a working document too early is a very suspicious thing.

We corrected that assumption, but it highlighted a couple things for me:

1. Wikis really do accelerate collaboration, and they do so because they recognize that if you can roll anything back you can avoid having interminable layers of approval in front of decisions. The default mode of Web 2.0, and the new world of media in general, is if it can be undone, don’t put a dam in front of it.

2. Both the speed and the attitude associated with this method can be jarring to organizations. I think it’s similar to what happened in programming when compile time came down and run-time languages came into their own. There was a period where the organization surrounding the tools lived in a state of cognitive dissonance. If you’ve ever seen someone make a state change diagram or Yourdon chart for something pulling data from a db and throwing it into a skin, then you know what I mean.

3. But change is inevitable. When it comes to their methods, programmers are some of the most religious people on the planet. Yet the industry changed. Sure, there are still some places you’ll find people putting a three month design process before the first script is run, but this has become the exception. And lightweight methodologies like Extreme Programming are no longer seen as fringe methods used by “sloppy” programmers (and heck, it only took a decade, right?).

My point? I guess it’s the title. Wiki is to Authoring as Perl is to Programming. (or Python, or VB, or Swing, or MUMPS: no need for a holy war…).

Of course, I’m sure someone has already said this… I was just struck by how much the moment we are in re: wikis matches a cultural moment we were in programming a number of years back….

So there’s a front page article today in the Wall Street Journal. The subject? My political blog, Blue Hampshire. The title?

“Have a Laptop? You, Too, Can Sway New Hampshire Race.”

 Subtitle?

“Self-Appointed Bloggers
Get Candidate Face Time;
On the Bus With Edwards”

You know, there’s so much insecurity in that headline that I’m nervous for the WSJ. I really want to pat them on the head and tell them it’ll be all right.

Personally I think the article is a catalog of the traditional misconceptions about bloggers, sort of Andrew Keen without all the bombast. The weird thing is it’s not a hatchet job (well, except for the dot portrait that looks nothing like me). I mean, it’s an honest attempt to understand this phenomenon through the lens of tradmed. It captures what we do, but then places that into the culture of access, status, centralized control, and nonparticipation that is predominant in tradmed. And the result is that we’re portrayed as just reporters running around with less professionalism.

Am I happy about the article though? Extremely. Front page WSJ, man. The people who get what we’re about will see that and visit us. The people that don’t won’t. That’s fine by me.

A couple weeks ago I applied for a grant from the Knight News Challenge for creation of a microreporting infrastructure — an idea I’ve been batting around for about a year now but haven’t had time to implement (check out, for example, this ghost town).

Not sure if I’ll get the grant or not, but here’s hoping.

The idea is actually pretty simple. A corps of volunteer microreporters report news and gossip as it happens through text messaging or email. Those microreports of one or two sentences are posted in real-time to a common site where they can be community rated and commented on.

The idea is partially informed by a thing I’ve noticed at Blue Hampshire: occasionally posting a small skeleton story on a site filled with insiders generates a really full story via people volunteering information in the comments.

So in the world of microreporting, if you witnessed an accident (or more likely the aftermath) you might write

Motorcyclist down on West st. In front of T-bird mini mart. Ambulance and cops arriving. Looks like skidded out in turn? Not sure. Traffic routed thru tbird lot.

Which is on its own is worth something — if you were worried about someone who is late, for example you could check the site, and if you are going somewhere you could make sure you avoid West St.

But the real benefit would come with user comment and ranking. If it’s an important story, readers would push it to the top. If multiple reports come in, readers would be given a facility to group the reports. But most importantly, people could correct and expand on the stories. A reader listening to the police scanner could fill in details. If someone a day later heard something about the accident, they could add it. A person familiar with that intersection might also comment about whether there was a pattern of such things.

Assuming people did this non-anonymously, under their own names, a reporter or blogger could look at the original microreports plus comments and with a couple calls for verification very quickly put together a story.

Such a system would allow the reporter or blogger to focus on story selection, verification, and storytelling rather than the more mundane work of finding and assembling the smaller pieces from which such stories are composed.

I’m not saying this would always be the case — obviously there will always be a place for traditional source-building and investigative journalism. But for local stories in small towns, which are written on ever-shrinking budgets, the efficiency gained with such a system might make it possible to continue to provide the coverage which helps to hold small communities together. And that, to me, makes this an idea well worth trying.

There’s a story that Will Robinson tells, perhaps apocryphal,  about a student that took their first draft of a paper, and posted it to Wikipedia. After a week or so they took it down, newly edited, fact checked and sourced.

Well, maybe this will work, and maybe it won’t, but I’m involved in writing an academic technology vision statement (along with compratriot Jenny Darrow), and I couldn’t help but think of that story. Why labor in the dark when so many people smarter than me read this blog?

So I’d like to invite any of you that read this and have ideas about what an Academic Tech Vision document should look like to comment over at:

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

The password is highway61. You can upload your own idea of a vision plan, or comment on ours. The idea is, if this is sucessful, to create our plan in a way that is a testament to net-enabled methods of creation.

And it it fails… well, I think it’s a noble act to attempt to eat your own dogfood. So we’ll soldier on. But I really do invite all the people that stop by here occasionally to comment or post their own idea on the wiki… that crowd includes, but is not limited to, Stephen Downes, Jon Udell, Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Leigh Blackall, Bernard Lunn, Royce Robertson, Richard Nantel, Jeff McClurken, Artichoke, Nils Peterson, Harold Jarche, Scott Wilson, Jerry Slezak, Gardner Campbell, Bill Fitzgerald, etc. (sorry I don’t have time to link all those names).

Actually looking at that list of people who have commented or linked here, I’m suddenly struck by how blessed this blog, at less than six months old, has been. It’s kind of overwhelming, really: you get any two people from that above list together, and you probably have a brain trust. Three and it’s a think tank.

So let me add that whether you help Jenny and I out with comments or not, I’m really just stunned how gracious people have been with their comments and links to date, and grateful.

So maybe see you over there? (And if you want to sport a link to the project and invite your own friends to help, as always, very much appreciated…)

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

password: highway61

(The best address to reach me at is caulfield.mike@gmail.com if you have any questions. And yes, after I get this done, I WILL finish the Pecha Kucha project.).

So we’re about 20 hours into this week, and so far I’ve spent over 10 of those hours on drafting an academic technology plan for my institution.

I have trouble explaining why it’s so hard to draft, but perhaps if you’ve ever tried to tie a policy document into the greater fabric of policy documents at your college or large corporation, you’ll understand. What seems to be happening is I’m coming at this downward, from the broad objectives of the college, and then trying to fit my thinking into that framework. Like all policy documents, it has to be a bit of a magic trick — I have to show how the aims of the college have led to this approach to technology the whole time.

But of course, my understanding of technology doesn’t really descend from the aims of the college. It comes from a lifetime of solving problems using computers and networks, from ten years of applying technology to “academic” problems, and from political blogging, where it’s become really apparent to me that even in areas where problems are not technical that a creative orientation to technology can quite literally allow students to change the world.

So here, completely off the top of my head, 15 minutes before the meeting where I will present my tortured institutional draft of the AT plan — here is what I would *like* to it to say:

We’ll use technology to help students and faculty to change the world. Sometimes that means pulling together people to colloborate and solve a sticky problem. Sometimes it means providing a service that no one has thought to provide. Sometimes it means setting up a Learning Management System to automatically import a student roster so that a professor can spend that time with students instead of Excel. Ultimately if you can show us an interesting problem, we can tell you how technology and network thinking can address it better. The more it would improve the world relative to the effort required, the higher it goes in the queue.

We’ll graduate students who think creatively about technology and loose processes. Today’s world belongs to the systems analyst, the person who understands that a loose process is as much a machine as a tightly programmed circuit board. The person that understands where it makes sense to encode a process in a circuit board, and where it makes sense to encode a process in a short verbal agreement. The person that knows how to evaluate a process as a whole, and swap out the defective or inefficient bits, and improve what they do incrementally. Our students when confronted with a task won’t ask where the application is that can do it for them — they’ll assemble new and old technologies in front of them, like a chef reverse engineering a recipe. And they’ll start to mix.

We will bring our own institution (and our learning) into the Networked Age. The Information Age has been supplanted by the Network Age. And while that network is technology-mediated, the ramifications of this transition exceed technology. Students will graduate into jobs that don’t exist yet. They don’t need facts. They need to learn to use the network to learn. We’ll stop teaching them in ways they will never encounter again, and embrace our mission of showing them ways to learn which they can use over their lifetime. This means more wikis and less lecture halls, more Just-in-Time learning, more distributed knowledge. What they need is on the network. Let’s show them how to get it.

==== 

Well, times up.  Have to head to this thing now. That’s not complete, but it’s amazing what you can write in 15 minutes if you start from the direction you entered the issue. And it’s amazing how many hours it takes to write against the grain….

Been trying out Brightcove as a video service. Test film follows below:

If anyone has any thoughts on the use of Brightcove, please share.

I think this video does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become:

(h/t Andy Rush)