Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Monday, May 12, 2003

eLearning Forum
I'm speaking about Socialtext at the eLearning Forum meeting this Friday morning in Mountain View with Jason Shellen. Like I told Jason and Ev, if you are having trouble blogging externally with all the cool confidential stuff going on, take up stamp collecting:

I'm prolific... at work. Craig Silverstein of Google told the crowd at ETech that we released an internal version of Blogger in Google. I thought I would tell you a bit about it since it's been interesting and helpful for us in our recent development efforts.

Remarkably, we tailored our internal version of Blogger for Google by the end of our fifth week in our new digs. For short 'Blogger in Google' is BIG. A tip for all you smaller web services who get purchased by larger companies, release an internal tool that your co-workers can't live without! Sure, we went from answering tech support for the masses (Blogger Pro, et all) to answering tech support questions in the lunch line but it's been worth it. Our public version of Blogger will benefit from this round the clock scrutiny. All in all it's been a lot of fun, plus I didn't quite make the blogging A-list the first time around, but I have a second shot at work. My internal blog, The Shellen Conspiracy, has certainly seen much more attention than shellen.com in recent months, sorry. :( It's just that I can be a bit more open in my internal blog. I think I'm still finding my balance between what can be blogged here and what I keep as competitive info.
If you want to hear more about BIG, I'm giving the June 10th Keynote: 'Where Weblogs Matter' at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference in Boston. If you can't make it to Boston, I'll be speaking about Blogger at the eLearning Forum meeting this Friday morning in Mountain View. Hope to see you there. [shellen.com]

7:53:08 PM    comment []

Brain Development

Reading - Brain Development and why school is in such trouble.

I spent two days last week with Dr Doug Wilms, one of the top researchers in the world on the topic of child development.

There were many aha's - here is one of them. Human development is linked to trajectories. When we are 2, small differences in vocabulary, of only 150 words, will drive the type of trajectories that my poor diagram tries to show you. This small difference at 2 spreads out by 15 to a 10 year spread in grade 10. The upper quartiles will have the cognitive ability to work at second year university. The lower quartile will be at the grade 5 level. Those in the middle will be therefore 5-7 years off the extreme at both ends. The same is true say for journeys. If Columbus's three ships stated off from Spain with a 3 degree difference. One would have landed in Greenland. One in Hispaniola and the other in Argentina. Small differences over time slope out to be large and not fixable.

Some conclusions:

In Chaos Theory, we know that "Initial Conditions" are important. This graph shows us why. Only 150 word difference at 2 drives over time a huge differential. The effort to change these trajectories builds on a log scale. We can do a lot with a little when we are very young but by the time we are about 15 we are locked in. Most of the remedial work is done at school where it will have little effect. Especially by grade 4. The optimal time to ensure that your kids will do well is to read a lot to them from 4 MONTHS ONWARDS. You might say that this is ridiculous. A Baby can't comprehend at 4 months. But they build pattern recognition. Their vocab is built as a direct result of the vocab that you use with them. So read up a level all the time.
To read to a 4 month old demands that you hold the baby as well. Touch is the other driver for development. We know that monkeys that are not touched and we know that orphans that are not touched develop very poorly. So reading to babies hits the two big drivers - vocab and touch.
The revolution in development will come less from a revolution at school and more from our recognition that the optimal time to learn is before 6!
Infants and young children learn only one way - from play based experience - the opposite from how we teach at school.

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

This is precisely the kind of research that freaks parents out. Apparently I'm behind in my reading to my 11 month year old and done with my six year old. Never explicit realized the snuggling benefits of reading. But it has to be said that while parents should be aware of early development drivers, simply doing your best is more than enough to raise great children and obsessive compulsion has a big downside.

My 11 month year old is experiencing a language explosion of Cambrian porportions. Unfortunately or fortunately he thinks that all things dangerous are "hot." When he is inside, everything is "hot, hot, hot." When he is outside, everything is a "flower" and eats lots of dirt.

2:50:41 PM    comment []

Boyd's Law
Stowe Boyd highlights a research report he just wrote on Time to Get Real: Challenges for the Real Time Enterprise. Most of the report is on systems that realize economies of speed, but he also offers his own law:

I get the opportunity to dig into the value of real-time communities, explore the rapidly emerging real time enterprise architecture from folks like Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, and examine the explosion of instant messaging and its impact on business. I explore Reed's law and extend it into the real time context:

"The third law [explored later on as Boyd's Law] is what I call synchronization amplification: As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets, they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise. This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real-time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners � passing information from application to application, or conducting real-time communication between people. As a result, the latency in information transfer decreases. This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to take action on this lower latency information, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise."

Boyd's Law is one method of achieving economies of span. When a company effectively integrates vertical production functions, sequencing results in lower transaciton costs. This can happen both at the system economics and firm-level.

2:29:42 PM    comment []

Conversational Relationship Management
George Dafermos on eCRM: Promises and Challenges:

...No matter how simple this may sound, there are plenty of corporations struggling to respond �in a personalised� - or simply humane - manner to customer enquiries via email. For CRM applications to provide tangible value both to organisations and customers, this is a chasm that e-CRM practitioners have to cross. CRM has to reconcile the tension between centrally manipulated customer information and an enhanced user experience. The role of User Interface knowledge is thus of primary importance, however, theory should be complemented with practical and easy-to-use (on the user part) technologies that maximise the potential for direct, humane marketer-customer interactions. In my opinion, the technology/social process best positioned to take e-CRM to the next level is Weblogs...

His report has a small background section along with suggestions and thoughts on four dimensions:

automation, web services and component-based development
personalisation
weblogs
cross/up selling opportunities & price and service discrimination

READ MORE

8:05:48 AM    comment []

Technorati API
Technorati API 0.9. I'm proud to announce the first public release of the Technorati API, the application programming interface to Technorati's weblog index and search engine. [Sifry's Alerts]

Remember all that blogspace innovation that happened with Google's API. Double that.

7:31:02 AM    comment []