infoarch

Just before the weekend I wanted to share this interesting 10 minute talk with you about hierarchies and networks. For one because it's just fascinating to watch how RSA visualizes this talk. Secondly because of the talk itself. Manual Lima's talk about "The power of networks" is fascinating. He gives an overview of how we used to try to structure everything in hierarchies and trees, because we like order and simplicity. And how we now shift to using networks more because trees simply can't describe reality. Knowledge, species, bacteria, our brain, our body, societies, etc. are highly connected. He wraps up his talk by asking if there is a universal structure? Well, do you think there is one? Of course there has been lots of thinking and talking about what this means for organizations, people and technology. The shift Lima describes is the shift 'social business' and 'enterprise 2.0' is describing. And it's the shift social technology is...

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long... How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload. I described how I keep up with what's going on  in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better? Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank . There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web , which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information. The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're do...

Love this quote by the CEO of Kodak, Antonio Perez (the highlighting is mine): In my experience, there are three key elements in the path to disrupt a mature, well-established market--meaningful technology breakthrough, significant supply chain management improvement and valuable business model innovation. The more elements you bring to the table the bigger the disruption and the easier it will be to make money from it. However, before any of the above will have any meaning whatsoever you need to find out the most important part of the recipe--that is the existence of "opportunity," or what I call Notorious Decadence .

A colleague of mine (and ex-carpool-er) just started a blog I'd like to point you to. It's called 'Fragmented Living' . Thinking back of all the discussions we had about knowledge management, information management, innovation, living and complex systems and organizations, etc this blog should be interesting to follow! Good luck, Harold! Tags van Technorati: complexity , blog , knowledge management

This is just one of those examples why I love blogging and the blogosphere. I've been following Luis Suarez's blog for some time now. And then he points to the Headshift blog on which Oliver Amprimo writes wonderful stuff. Luis pointed to one post in particular I really liked: "The Museum and the Zoo" . What an amazing post! You should read it all. But here are some highlights of the parts/statements are liked most and totally agree with. Hopefully this will trigger you to read the entire post. The consequence [of current business education and specialization] is that people master the " what ", sometimes the " how " but hardly the " why ". They don't capture the reason why these processes are put in place, how they relate to corporate strategy and how the organisation relates to its environment. The result is straightforward: in organisations, people focus on their own limited sphere of responsibility. (...) Another consequence is...

Ran into this on the O'Reilly Radar . Very funny and it reminds me of something... Post to Del.icio.us / Furl It

Something for the weekend, to watch and re-watch. Wow, this is so good, you'd almost think you were faked. Thanks Jan & Rob, for pointing me to this. Post to Del.icio.us / Furl It

Business Week published an interesting article on "The End of Work As You Know It" . It tries to give us a peek in the future, based on mechanisms that many books have laid out for us, such as "The World is Flat" and "Wikinomics" . The article ends with: All that raises a fundamental question about technology's ultimate impact on workers. Will this be a new world of empowered individuals encased in a bubble of time-saving technologies? Or will it be a brave new world of virtual sweatshops, where all but a tech-savvy few are relegated to an always-on world in which keystrokes, contacts, and purchases are tracked and fed into the faceless corporate maw? It's safe to say we'll see some of both. But perhaps we can comfort ourselves by realizing that, while technology will change the nature of work, it can't change human nature. "All of these technologies," says Charles Grantham, executive producer of the research group Work ...

Wow, ran into this on Nova Spivak's blog ! Just to inspire you. The "genius" who makes these 'robots'/'creatures' is a Dutch guy by the way. (Yes, most of the time I'm proud to be Dutch...)

Good for National Geographic ! They wrote an article about a difficult but very interesting topic: Swarm Intelligence. Basically it deals with trying to understand how complex systems work and how you can model them. I've tried to apply this technology to documents in the past. Thanks for the tip, Joost !