WeBlog

clipped from itc.conversationsnetwork.org

IBM researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are the creators of Many Eyes, a new kind of social website dedicated to data visualization and analysis. Members upload batches of data - about politics, weather, or anything else - then chart, interpret, discuss, and even re-visualize one another's data. The process is fun, and it also points toward a future in which our collective interpretation of the world is more firmly rooted in data.

Both Viegas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

Many Eyes

IBM Visual Communication Lab

clipped from www.mckinseyquarterly.com

As companies reach beyond their boundaries to find and develop ideas, they are exploring new models to manage innovation. In projects that tap external talent, questions quickly arise about process management, intellectual-property rights, and the right to make decisions. Some executives have been at this game longer than others. Mitchell Baker, chairman and former chief executive officer of Mozilla Corporation, has devoted the past ten years to leading an effort that relies extensively on people outside her company—not just for creative ideas, but also to develop products and make decisions. The result: Mozilla’s Firefox browser, with 150 million users, has become a rival of Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer.

As Firefox flourished, the process that created it became a model for participatory, open-source collaboration.

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

In Mathematics, a Graph is an abstraction for modeling relationships between things. It is no different from a Network, which is a more common term for describing the same thing. Graphs consists of nodes and edges, or things and the ways that things relate to each other. As it turns out, Graphs are very powerful modeling tools for modeling natural and man-made systems. Diverse things like the Web, power grids, economies and even cells can be represented and analyzed as networks.

Note: Images above are from the Visual Complexity Gallery

What is also remarkable is that a lot can be said about a graph by looking at its structure; and the evolution of the structure. For example, epidemiologists use graph structures to predict the spread of an epidemic. The very same model can be used to understand how wild fire spreads, as well as how to engineer a viral marketing campaign. The better we understand the structure of a system's graph, the more we can control it, predict it and analyze it.

clipped from mediacology.com

Ever wanted to know what it’s like to drive in the Information Highway’s slow lane? The International Centre for Physics has created one so you can see how it feels to be in the losing spectrum of the digital media revolution. Try it out at ICTP Digital Divide Simulator.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com

Why is it so hard for marketers to fully embrace the digital revolution? Old habits die hard, says Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi's worldwide CEO. And there's foot-dragging in all quarters.

Here's what to watch out for:

Scaredy-cat clients. Clients -- from brand managers to CMOs -- are the most risk-averse animals the world has ever seen

Cunning Old Media. The old folks -- TV, radio, print -- already have all their metrics in place.

Geek-o-phobia. Agencies have done a lousy job of integrating digital people into creative departments.

Finance Department Fascists. Because we have a research industry that can't measure or predict emotional involvement, we just fall back on conventional measures of ROI

We need a metric that captures the many nuances of involvement a consumer has for a brand. Nothing warms the cockles of a CFO's heart like an expanding pie chart, or a trend arrow pointing at the heavens. Until we get that, we're stuck trying to quantify thing like "passion" and "love."

clipped from www.socialmediatoday.com

The McKinsey Quarterly recent edition says “Innovation has become a primary force in determining company growth, performance, and valuation. Unfortunately, a wide gap exists between executives’ aspirations to innovate and their ability to execute.”

Piers Gibbon writes about “The Innovative Conversation” The title was inspired by the researchers who have shown that “rich conversations”¹ have more value in business than “dehydrated, ritualized”¹ presentations. That “Connections and Conversations … provide the fuel for innovation” ² and companies need “to create a climate … where everyone feels the responsibility and desire to contribute to the organizations innovation performance.”

In economics, business and government policy,- something new - must be substantially different, not an insignificant change. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value.

The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental changes to products, processes or services.

clipped from web.media.mit.edu

Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death.

Alyssa Wright began working on Cherry Blossoms last semester, wondering how to think about — and feel about — the civilian war deaths in Baghdad. Alyssa’s genius was in sacrificing herself. After all, it’s not an easy piece to perform. You don’t know when it’s going to blow. It’s shocking and loud, and one has no sense of how others will react. Of course, she won’t get hurt by the compressed air, but she might well be confused for a suicide bomber (or, more appropriately, a mooninite) and arrested.