As many readers know there has been a internet blackout on a number of very large websites like wikipedia and WordPress.com and .org on 18th of Jan.

As Clay Shirky sees it – SOPA & PIPA are designed to “raise the cost of copyright compliance” for amateurs by changing the burden of proof so that pretty much all content not owned by “Big Media” is blocked.

The method – use the domain name system to block access – even though technically this is unlikely to work at all. Unfortunately there are other issues better explained elsewhere where the sides-effects and consequences will cause much confusion and collateral damage.

We are used to producing as well as consuming and digital technology allows us to do this when we share content that we originate, that we find and sometime what we change on the way through. (Creative commons licensing is an intelligent attempt to manage content rights.)

My summary – whatever the merits of copyright protection (and clearly that system is very broken) SOPA is not the way to fix it.

Also once a piece of legislation like this is passed it becomes much easier to foist it on smaller countries like NZ especially with the present government (via ACTA).  Remember the debate over the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011. Sadly many of the politicians in NZ had no real clues at the time but these issues need much smarter thinking as they are part of a much wider agenda.

John C. Dvorak on SOPA: Don’t Get Suckered by What Comes Next
John says SOPA is a sideshow for another bill

“This is so that the real bill, Senate S.968. The Patrick Leahy “Protect IP Act of 2011? will pass — while all the nuts argue about and then celebrate victory over SOPA.

The House will quickly agree and rubber-stamp the Senate bill which, according to those fighting these bills, is about 96 percent as terrible.

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Nobody is focusing attention on this parallel bill. Watch this scam get executed like clockwork.”

Last week was the annual TED conference 2011 in Monterey. Would have loved to be there but lucky for us David Cowan was and he wrote up his TED Talks 2011 guide over here - David said

“The 2011 speaker lineup lived up to prior years. You can never tell beforehand which ones will be the classics; this year the standouts turned out to be General Stanley McChrystal, dinosaur hunter Jack Horner, transplant surgeon Anthony Atala, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, poet Sarah Kay, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and fourth grade teacher John Hunter.”

Read more of David Cowan’s guide to TED Talks 2011 over here David rated Salman Khan’s talk as 8/10

In watching the talk I was reminded about 3 ideas that have emerged as themes for me in recent times.

• Idea 1- Salman Khan says Let’s use video to reinvent education: (more below)
• Idea 2- Changing Education Paradigms – Education outside school by way of travel, exploration and rich media if extremely valuable but can be very distracting. (see Ken Robinson talk below)
• Idea3  -Many of us have huge trouble getting work done at work because of too many meetings or other “work” processes that stop us from being as productive as we can be. (see Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work – video link and my comments below.)

Salman Khan on flipping the classroom.

After he did some videos for his cousins – “they preferred him on YT to in person” – because they can learn from him at their own time and own space.

“He shows the power of interactive exercises — and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do you “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

(Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 20:27)

Most intriguing we get to see Bill Gates ask Salman a bunch of questions about “the future of education” from about 17 mins onwards.

Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms

I saw that Sir Ken Robinson was in Palmerston North for the Inspired Impact Teachers Conference education conference back in January 2011*. I was reminded of the animated talk given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA last year. (* if you were there – I would love to hear about it.)

Watch at 4:26 for some thoughts from Ken on the way that our children get all kinds of great stimulation from a huge number of sources and then when they get to school they are penalised for finding the typical class room experience boring or too slow for them.

“Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. …besieged by information.. and we penalise them for getting distracted… from what – boring stuff at school for the most part”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, there are many great teachers and parents out there doing their best for their children to help develop skills and strategies for managing all of the great resources available.

To me Khan’s work represents another step away from the book based learning that I experienced at school.

My daughter was lucky that her teacher brought a pigs brain along to school recently so that the 9 and 10 yr olds could get their science right up close and tactile. We have since supplemented that with videos and books but the shock and delight of having that physical object in the classroom will be treasured by most.

In my post last year 500m in Sight I mentioned the Digital Nation documentaries. There is an episode at the end which gives examples of video use in schools.

It is not just children that need help with managing distractions and over stimulation from media or work processes or general daily routines as Jason Fried explains.

Jason Fried on How Work doesn’t get done at work.

Work day becomes a series of work moments. Watch the excellent video below and for further reading check Paul Graham’s essays on the differences between managers and makers which I wrote about over here..

• What do you all think about these 3 ideas?
• Are Salman Khan, Sir Ken Robinson and Jason Fried onto something we need to care more about?
• How then – do we manage our time and resources better for ourselves, our work and our families?
• Important or not?

Footnote: After I wrote this post I found another example of a teacher using video to flip the classroom that was written about by Daniel Pink in September last year. That teachers name is Karl Fisch and he appears to be using the same approach as Salman Khan.

At this stage I haven’t researched the possible connections between Fisch* and Khan or if there are even any. Ideas can break out simultaneously anywhere but I do think that videos like the TED Talks series make a huge contribution to the spread of ideas.

As it turns out we have written about Fisch before as he made the video for Shift Happens. I really liked a more recent post on his blog where he talks about some of these ideas being developed in medical education as The Learning Studio.

Your homework: Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

Until very recently the trade-off between richness and reach with media and communications tools on the internet has seen mixed results but we are very close to some exciting breakthroughs.

This means news is old when it gets through the media process as savvy consumers have already engaged to some extent in a myriad of ways (mostly online) and this alters the secondary ripples and impacts as well.

The difference between a one to many message and a conversation will continue to be endlessly debated across a range of media and platforms.  It has become much clearer that the overlap between micro-blogging (clogging ?) tools, mobile phones, other user generated content and mainstream media is now producing social dividends and all kinds of unintended and positive consequences.

Social capital has its own momentum and we see everything from instant tweets on earthquakes and elections to a scary washing machine with 15 thousand fans on facebook. Most mainstream media is filtered by the editorial process to become more of a news product. This is good for manicured medium but for a real-time news ticker social media tools are raising the stakes and in a very good way.

Twitter, Facebook blogs and other instant commentary now allows real time crowdsourcing for the equivalent of a live cross on camera – only better online for the most part. I was reminded of some of this when I heard a news item on radio about how Twitter had delayed a crucial update so as not to interrupt the flow of news from Iran.

That this was a news item is interesting in itself but ironically the Twitter maintenance had been and gone by the time the news got on the radio and that was very stale news to the Twitterati who had all moved on hours before.

There were three insightful perspectives I took notice of this week regarding the rise of social capital in these ways.

David MacGregor captured some of these dimensions reproduced below: (Thanks David)

“The social media phenomenon really does change my perception of the way forward. I have less and less regard for brand messages that are virtuoso – you know the kind I mean – the spectacular set pieces of yesteryear, film making fetishism in microcosm. Today I am more like to be receptive to messages that have far greater relevance and, oftentimes, utility – which might be expressed by the facility for me to understand more or engage more with the message personally.

The scale of my engagement is relative. The simple facility to comment or offer and opinion is sometimes sufficient and demonstrates the thought that I, like other people, want to be heard and acknowledged, rather than simply being yelled at or sung a silky siren song by spruikers.”

David writes very well on this an many other related topics. He also notes that all of this discussion is much less compartmentalized than it used to be. And that is a good thing in my view.

“I find it difficult to separate marketing, advertising and brands from society as whole. A challenge for business is surely to overcome the ‘them and us’ model of mass communications to really open the way for more inclusive dialogues.”

Nat Torkington on National Radio caught my ears with his comments on the role of Twitter and other micro-blogging formats in Iran. What was particularly good was the way he managed to make “secure open web proxies” sound interesting and also kept the listeners from being distracted by the mechanics in that wonderful mellifluous mode of his.

Less mediation is also highly attractive to celebrities. Micro blogging of tweets via re-tweeting has helped make a difference and we will continue to hear about the ramifications of all this.

TN: Technology with Nat Torkington from Thursday Technology expert and  Nat Torkington discusses online dating scams as well as Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests.(duration:14mins 28secs)

The impact of these new technologies on groups and individuals is sounding a bit more like the second wave of alternative media as foreshadowed all those years ago by Noam Chomsky. In a sense we have now the tools to manufacture dissent.

Clay Shirky manages to summarise many of these key points about the rise of social capital and media activism over at TED Talks.

Clay says:

“New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting.

In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.”
Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody.

One point Clay makes is the increase in professional amateurs – something we wrote about some time back and was a topic for another great TED talk by Charles Leadbeater which was  called “The rise of the amateur professional” see the 19minute video on TED. Charles said

“Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t.”

If the video embed doesn’t display on your device try this TED link for Clay Shirky.

As Clay notes we are watching “The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.” How to cross pollinate conversations and mass media in real time. We now have a “many to many”  communications channel.

Note: Local TV stations has all improved their websites recently as they finally begin to understand they are less TV and multi-channel amplicasting is bigger ironically just as viewership on their broadcasts drop – their website traffic is going up and changing the business.

Amplification of tweets gives rise to far more authentic news sources than we have seen – ever!  Citizen reporting has flow on effects and when those stories follow the news we begin to see social transformation.

Asynchronous media and the amplification of all the surrounding content eco-systems is a big deal and we should be using this for good connections. Consumers are producers are consumers. The network itself is ubiquitous and omnipresent.

There are no single messages any more and media participation is higher than ever. Media revolution is here.

What do you think ? My twitter ID is @dialogCRM feel free to tweetback.

As always you can tweet this below and leave a comment or reply to the tweet for this post on Twitter. You can also engage directly with the three / four sources I have used today.

• To follow and engage with David on Twitter go to @joegreenz
• To follow and engage with Nat on Twitter go to @gnat
• To follow and engage Nat on Twitter go to @CShirky
• To follow and engage withTED on Twitter @TEDchris

As beings it seems to me that  - we are all wired to look for patterns partly to decipher meaning but also because the sheer amount of information we get can be so overwhelming.

We are also constantly comparing the “news” to our own reference points and expectations to  weight the content and relevance to our own situations.

Now the media stories seems to overshoot much of these expectations with so much coverage splashing over the metaphorical sides of the tea cup that we actively discount “news” when it gets too saturated.

One example is swine flu coverage. It is definitely an important story but the way in which it is being covered paradoxically switches many of us off the full significance of the event. There are two key facts about previous pandemics we should be picking up on (key patterns?.)

1. In 1918 and other pandemics it was the second and repeat waves that were more lethal once the virus has been through larger numbers of humans and mutated a bit more.
2. The secondary story on swine flu is how disorganised we have been  with group planning on previous disasters with very fragmented responses.

In 2007 Laurie Garrett: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic? presented this talk at TED based on real analysis of earlier pandemics and global health planning.  Most of use can point to more local health issues to see that not much has changed.

Moving right along – Does this thinking apply to other “news” stories and events like the global financial crisis for example?

In recent weeks I have been fascinated to see surveys of business confidence go lower and lower and last week they have suddenly topped out at the highest for some time.

“(NZ) Business sentiment has perked up this month – the National Bank’s survey has recorded its biggest monthly gain since December 2000.“

We want to see better news after months of coverage fatigue about the global financial crisis and so expectations appear to be over shooting again.

Two weeks earlier we had Aust economic index at 26-year low New Zealand is not more resilient than Australia although I’m beginning to think that we all have outrageous optimism partly because most local business markets are shallow and tough.

We could argue that Australia’s commodity boom has slowed them into the slide andc so NZ is ahead of the cycle and our primary commodities and huge fall in exchange rates has provided an early upswing of confidence that differentiates the NZ economy.

Translation NZ business sectors and local markets are small, highly developed and very demanding and so any glimmer of hope from export markets or the “weighless economy” has us revving our economic engines.

Central banks are aware of this tendency and so the Reserve Bank Governor Bollard was at pains to signal interest rates should stay low for at least a year to 18 month longer.

The lag between recovery of some market segments / indicators and actual local recovery can still be long enough to cause serious medium term issues for many of us.

The March exports number was way higher than the imports number and that has boosted confidence as have changes to housing and employment markets. (Trade deficit melts as imports shrink)

“In the same article economist Bagrie notes Structural imbalances, like negative household savings rates and a large current account deficit, needed to be corrected and that would not be quick or easy..” and we know rationally that is true but still the survey overshoots the hope index.

In today’s TED talk videos is a new 7 minute  presentation by Sean Gourley: The mathematics of war

“By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war — and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts.”

I won’t pretend to understand what Sean is saying in this 7 minute clip but I know the patterns he is discovering appear everywhere and deciphering the economic news is every bit as mathmatical as it is for any major human induced crisis.

The group dynamic does plot patterns and we can use some of that to make sense of the overall trendlines.

Sean does a good job of explaining the “so what” part of this analysis but at 7 minutes this is really a teaser and we need to go deeper.

For example I’d like to see the analysis of Iraq right as the end compared with  Irelands history and the transformation of the IRA into a more credible polticla rather than military force.

I think with maths the risk is that we can describe events much better but unless we go compare with other histories we can still miss the underlying out takes.

In the “Fog of War” did a much more personal analysis which we seem to have forgotten.

Now I’d like to see Robert (b 1916) make some personal sense of Sean’s math but for now I’m pleased that we have a chance to think about clustering information and media through some new filters.

I also caught part of a radio dicussion yesterday which described “belief” as a recessive gene. The idea being that as a society we have become much more evidence based but that is not something we see on the actual regular news.

For me Jon Stewarts satirical Daily show makes far more sense of the news than regular media as it acknowledges the bizarreness of the human condition.

So a recap formula might look like this

Sean Gourley + Robert McNamara – Jon Stewart  = many a true word is spoken in jest – we just need to know which ones and if our math/model makes sense.

The other week I was dropping a neighbours kid home from an after school programme. He asked me why my car wasn’t a flash new one.

I wanted to say that I’m trying to reduce the size of my carbon footprint and I’m hoping this is the last petrol powered car I will ever own – but that seemed like wishful thinking.

However this week there was a new video release from TED’09 of a bold new plan for electric cars. What is intriguing and significant is that the car industry themselves could miss this new direction (with some notable exceptions.)

Only yesterday I was reading about how Holden in Australia could be the first local car industry to go bust.

”Australia’s car plants are losing money faster than a drunk at a casino and there’s no feasible way of turning this around.

”The Australian car industry can re-focus on small cars, green cars, blue cars or red cars. None of this will make the slightest difference.”

Mr Clive Matthew-Wilson (NZ) believes the government money would have been better spent by giving it to the affected car workers

I wondered what would happen if AU car industry started putting electric motors into their cars but the view seems to be that globalisation of manufacturing costs just makes Australia non-competitive.

I’d still think that higher tech approach for electric cars is worth pursuing and maybe Renault and Holden should be talking?

 In fact Australia is part of the Better Place electric car project already. The car 2.0 is avery bold plan for Australia that will make a difference. Obviously Clive missed all the news about Better Place in Australia.

Shai Agassi’s  plan offers a huge ray of hope for the future of modern civilisation and energy futures generally.

What I love about this story is that the innovation happens around the business model. That is: separating the batteries from the cars in terms of the overall cost model.

Shais thinking is bold and clear and his actions have prompted backing from governments who can see the future. Check Shai s background here. A very impressive career at SAP prior to his Better Place project.

New Zealand Transportation policy is firmly oriented towards supporting electric cars. To quote from some of that report.

5% market share (for electric cars) is way too conservative and NZ has an opportunity to do better. We have one of the cleanest electricity generation systems in the world.  We should be on the phone to Mr Agassi  ASAP.

“Major vehicle manufacturers (17) recently made a commitment to commercially develop electric cars, with reports suggesting that these may be available from as early as 2010. Our scenario assumes electric vehicle sales reach five per cent of market share in 2020, followed by a period of rapid growth that reaches a plateau of 60 per cent by 2040. “

However the practicalities and other logistics of the cars have been difficult until this project.

“Shai Agassi wants to put you behind the wheel of an electric car — but he doesn’t want you to sacrifice convenience (or cash) to do it.

When horrific climate-change scenarios elicit little but endless chatter from governments and entrenched special interests, the difference between talk and action represent an embarrassing gulf. Meet Shai Agassi, who has stepped fearlessly into that gap. His approach to solving the puzzle of electric automobiles could spark nothing short of an automotive revolution.

Agassi stunned the software industry in 2007 by resigning from SAP to focus on his vision for breaking the world’s fossil-fuel habit, a cause he had championed since his fuse was lit at a Young Global Leaders conference in 2005. Through his enthusiastic persistence, Agassi’s startup Better Place has signed up some impressive partners — including Nissan-Renault and the countries of Israel and Denmark.

“Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer—yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.” – Wired”

Here is the best video you will see ever on the future of electric cars.

The NZ government should be rolling out the red carpet for Shai. More background on Shai’s plan.

So will we get electric cars anytime soon?

I’m much more hopeful than before. We need to look at energy futures much more seriously than we have been doing and Shai’s vision is a very good place to start.

While the TED 09 Conference was on we featured Twitter feeds from two of the attendees as a stream of updates in the sidebar.

Now the conference is over we have taken down the live feeds but included snapshots of some of those comments down below.

Remo from Sydney who has attended several conferences in the past at Remorandum These are in the nature of status updates and are 160 character answers to the what are you doing? Examples of both are below.

Remo used photos taken on his mobile which is another options.

1. Wisdom is “moral jazz” … knowing when to make exceptions to rules. A wise person is made not born. Barry Schwartz at #TED 11:53 AM Feb 7th from TwitterMail
2. http://twitpic.com/1dkhl – #TED: Nearing the end. Standing ovation for Chris and the TED team 11:49 AM Feb 7th from TwitPic
3. http://twitpic.com/1diko – Six Eyes at #TED. 3ality demonstrates updates in 3D technology 10:32 AM Feb 7th from TwitPic
4. http://twitpic.com/1dhs7 – Nicholas Negraponte back at #TED to report on One Laptop Per Child 9:56 AM Feb 7th from TwitPic
5. http://twitpic.com/1dg9k – Chris Anderson responds to criticism that GFC somewhat ignored at #TED 8:45 AM Feb 7th from TwitPic
6. Exclusive: RSW Unplugged. TED Founder interviewed by ME at #TED2009 re: genesis & metamorphosis of #TED. Unedited video: http://bit.ly/FsCG 2:20 AM Feb 7th from TweetDeck
7. Back from #TED Party at Long Beach: Chock Full of Interesting Folk … including many who claimed to feel very bonded to REMO brand. Nice. 12:03 AM Feb 7th from TweetDeck
8. RT @TEDchris: #TED Interview with Bill Gates re economic crisis, Malcolm Gladwell, oddball teachers & his legacy http://tinyurl.com/b4jj4r 11:34 PM Feb 6th from TweetDeck

And Sean Gourley who is a TED Fellow this year.

1. back in Santa barbra. Here 7 days ago, feels like yesterday. Time is wierd like that at #ted about 20 hours ago from mobile web
2. @chrisalbon his models were a little bit black box. We also know that models need to be sensitivity analysis. I’m not convinced. about 20 hours ago from mobile web
3. ted prize a lifetime achievement award? Or something to help you realize a dream. #ted 12:40 PM Feb 7th from mobile web
4. where to start on the journey to interact with politics. #ted 12:36 PM Feb 7th from mobile web
5. we are handicapped by waiting for the experts to give solutions. We all have capacity for collaboration and innovation. #ted 12:35 PM Feb 7th from mobile web
6. liz Coleman asking some really interesting questions about the current state of our liberal arts colleges. #ted 12:28 PM Feb 7th from mobile web
7. Thomas Jefferson getting some love. #ted 12:27 PM Feb 7th from mobile web
8. wouldn’t have been able to do my research using a reductioist approach. Connections are too important to leave out. #ted 12:25 PM Feb 7th from mobile web

This year there are some vidos already live and a number of photo collections including this Bestof TED2009 on Flickr . The whol;e event can be quite overwhelming and thankfully the TED website only release a few of the video presentations each week as they would get lost if they all come out at once.

The TED prizes for Conference 09 were online again this year.  I watched but must confess that I was somewhat surprised  that the SETI search got a prize this year. (SETI=Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

I may have imagined it but at one point I thought I heard Jill say they were still searching for signs of intelligent life on earth.

Astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter,

“I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”

Deep Sea explorer Sylvia Earle,

“I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films! expeditions! the web! more! — to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Maestro José Antonio Abreu

“I wish you would help create and document a special training program for at least 50 gifted young musicians, passionate for their art and for social justice, and dedicated to developing El Sistema in the US and in other countries.”

I find it surprising that no mass orchestra programme appears to exist in the US that is like the Sistema approach.

There is a connection between social justice and the orchestra as a learning and co-operative model that might be its real strength.

It’s true I’m a TEDhead and if we’ve met it would be unusual if I didn’t mention the TED conference videos at some point.

One of the incredible delights of the today is that even though we read less; if we can find time to watch an 18 minute video – paradoxically we have even greater access to some of the best minds in the world  via TED and sites like it.

In my house we call it Teducation and personally I just love being able to get an idea of what the best subject matter experts in the work are thinking about their chosen topics and what they actually care about.

Even better when they have only 18 minutes to express their passion (which is the standard TED format) that is short enough to be useful but not too long if the presentation sucks.

This week TED announced A TED Fellows programme for this year and buried away in the detail was the name Sean Gourley described as  Physicist/military theorist; Rhodes Scholar. New Zealand

Sean has been away in the UK on a Rhodes Scholarship for the past few years but his background from Canterbury University is

Bachelor of Science with Honours and Master of Science in Physics
Sean researched nano-scale blue light lasers for his first-class BSc(Hons) degree in Physics and self-assembled quantum nano-wires, for his MSc before enrolling for a DPhil at Oxford University, researching complex adaptive systems and collective intelligent systems.

Over on younoodle it says that Sean is a

“New Zealander, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, PhD in Physics specializing in ‘networks and complexity’, just finished a research fellowship at Oxford in the quantitative analysis of war and terrorism. “

So what is the Ted Fellow award and how can we be involved?

I think we can all be involved in scouting for the unusual suspects. Anyone can become a member of TED. As at today’s date there are apparently 908 NZ linked members on the network. My TED profile is here but anyone can join – check the joining TED blurb here.

Getting into a conference and paying the $US6k in fees plus the travel and other costs of getting there and back each time takes some serious effort for most of us so it is fantastic that there is a TED fellows sponsorship programme.

Go Sean Gourley @ TED .  For more detail download the TED fellows PDF and check page 21 of 45. Some of the other Fellows like Patrick Awuah we have seen in action before and I have also spent time on Jennifers Brea‘s blogs in the past as well. Her work on Africabeat is worth reading.

If you read this Sean – make sure all of those guests know that NZ is not just a rock in the Pacific or Fiji with snow – but a really vibrant community of creativity and world class thinking.

Update:4th Feb We are following Sean via his twitter feed in the top right sidebar / see comments.

Sean says

• Talk to me about – Politics, Venture Capital and innovation, Mathematics, Physics, running, single malt scotch, the latest book I have to read or movie I should go see.

For background on the Fellowship programme:

Ted Fellows

“Introducing TED Fellows, our new international program that will bring 50 eclectic, up-and-coming world-changers to our Long Beach and Oxford conferences each year….

All TED Fellows will receive special benefits including pre-conference programs, training from world-class communications professionals, the opportunity to give short TEDTalks at TED University, the opportunity to spread their ideas on TED.com, a private social network and more. Of course, TED will cover their conference fees, travel and lodging.

We’re targeting individuals aged 21-40 from all of TED’s many disciplines, including of course, technology, entertainment and design but also science, humanities and the arts, entrepreneurs, NGOs and political and community leaders. We’re focusing on candidates from five regions of the world: Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. However, anyone 18 and over is welcome to apply. The first application cycle begins February 23rd, 2009.

These men and women were selected for their achievement but especially for their promise. Each of them shows real potential to create positive change in their field — whether it’s technology, entertainment, design, music, art, science, business or the NGO community — in their country, and even around the world.”

However ;  I can’t help thinking that some of our brightest TED prospects are now outside the university systems especially in the creative sectors.

What do you think -?  Who would you nominate as a representative of your sector, company, organisation or country. Who are the unusual suspects?

Here is hoping that Sean enjoys his time at TED and reports back.

TED 2009 Conference starts 3 Feb (today – depending on your timezone.)

If I was at the conference I’d be keen to see Daniel Lebskind, Oliver Sacks, Herbie Hancock, Dan Ariely and Liz Coleman for starters. Jacek Utko thinks good design can save the newspaper? He will be presenting on that — and good luck with that one from me.

For more on the TED Conference 09  speakers

Really I’d love to be at TED one day but the next best thing is helping a smart New Zealander make it there. Lets nominate some more TED fellows for next year and trust that Sean will have a great time this trip.

The third best thing to being at TED are the T shirts. Premo purveyor of T’s to the thoughtful REMO Generalstore is the TED T-shirt supplier so Australia are already doing their bit for TED.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Founder Remo Giuffré is at TED – Remo on twitter

Footnote: As always if you are at TED 09 – feel free to add a comment here or contact me via TED or LinkedIn.

We really enjoyed David Cowan‘s posts from TED last year (Check the Dave Eggers post) and Brian Sweeney’s notes before that.

The TED prize is webcast live at Thursday 5th Feb at 5 pm US Pacific Time. LA time is currently

For NZ – this makes local time of 2 pm Friday 6th or Friday Feb 6 12 noon for Sydney, NSW readers. For your location you may want to double check the meeting planner.

TED prize winners this conference are deep ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, maestro José Antonio Abreu.   I’m sure they are all great but I especially like the sound of :

Jose Abreu, a retired economist, trained musician, and social reformer founded El Sistema (“the system”) in 1975 based on the conviction that what poor Venezuelan kids needed was classical music. After 30 years and 10 different political administrations, El Sistema is now a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music centers.

Update: Some of this post have also been added to Idealog Blog

Christmas is holiday time for many of us in the Southern hemisphere. Sun, sand, surf, swimming – you get the idea.

It also seems that when we get a chance to have more than a week away from our office and/or jobs a much higher percentage of us rethink our jobs.

Colleagues working in the recruitment sector tell me that this triggers a flurry of activity as people look for new jobs or look for changes to their work situation in some other ways.

I suspect changing jobs can bring with it a higher level of satisfaction on some parameters but the underlying dynamics will have more to do with personal awareness, as well as other conscious and unconscious choices we have made.

Many of us find that our intentions and our level of engagement are not always consistent with our work life. 

For myself I have days where I am totally “in the zone” or flow of my various projects and something about those times means that I am on exactly the right frequency or pitch to respond best to whatever the day brings. 

Other times it seems like I should really move to another project as it seems like there is no “flow”.  Luckily I work on multiple projects so I have more flexibility but that kind of switching doesn’t always improve the flow at all. 

Which suggests that it is not so much the content or subject but something about my approach to the task at hand that can transform “work” into something that energizes as part of the engagement process. 

As it happens two newly released  videos on TED visit some of these ideas in much greater depth and add alternative perspectives from the worlds of psychology and design.

Mihaly Czikszentmihaly presented on flow in 2004 but the video was only released in Oct ’08.

Mihaly  asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow”. His view is that  ”creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives”

And in a partner presentation (21 mins) Paula Scher talks through some of the creative cycle ideas from a different perspective. Her presentation comes from a May 2008 design conference on serious play.

I’d be interested to know what readers think about these topics after having watched both videos and or other insights that you may have. (Mihaly alt video link)
  

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo …) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography. (Alternative Paula Scher video link )

It would be wonderful if we could all just switch jobs the moment they move from being serious fun to being solemn. So love the cycle idea but wondering how it might apply to most.

Also it does rather look like labelling stuff is a recurring theme in Paula’s work but there appears to be no self awareness or recognition of this at all which seems puzzling. That is  - I don’t think she is really changing too much about her content so it is not the subject matter that provides the “serious fun” but rather something else.

Mihaly’s and Paula’s presentations look like perfect companion pieces here. They use quite different approaches to talk about much of the same territory but (ahem) Mihaly would probably be the better dinner guest in my view.

Marshall McLuhan once said that “The old medium is always the content of the new medium.”

He was talking about the way that movies were being morphed into TV but that idea is more than relevant now with all kinds of media being filtered through millions of eyeballs online.

It is tempting to think we will know what the results will be when we mash up content across the media universe but the truth is far more interesting than the fiction.

There is an ongoing need for individuals and businesses to reinvent the way they talk to and otherwise engage with customers- in McLuhan’s description – for the customers to fulfill a extended role in the process and feel themselves to be part of the media / inside the moment.

Peter Hirshberg is one of those  who understood early on some of the implications and the huge social changes coming. He also missed a lot at the time (like most of us) but was able to link a number of the crossover points between TV and the web into a coherent and entertaining story about cultural disruptions and technology.

The video contains a fair amount of archival footage including some classic McLuhan moments.

Peter Hirshberg on TV and the web -31:41 Posted: Sept 2008 on TED

On Peter’s blog he links to a Sept 2007 paper over at HBS If you are an online marketer go read it now.

For digital marketing practice and theory, the last decade has brought two related surprises: the rise of social media and the rise of search media. Marketing has struggled to find its place on these new communication pathways. Old paradigms have been slow to die.

This paper reviews early beliefs about interactive marketing, then identifies 5 discrete roles for interactive technology in contemporary life and 5 ways that firms respond.

It concludes that the new media are rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles than the old broadcast media rewarded.

Key concepts include:

• Successful interactive marketing may be less a matter of domination and control, and more a matter of fitting in.
• There is a human need to assert and present to the world a self-serving identity and to manage one’s personal reputation.

The form of interactivity most attractive to marketing is one that facilitates people’s ability to construct their identity and contribute to the making of meaning.

That was the exec summary – I also liked this quote buried in the abstract.

“It concludes that while meaning-making remains the central purpose of marketing communication, the shift from broadcasting to interaction within digital communities is moving the locus of control over meanings from marketer to consumer and rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles.”

So there you have it – Engagement and roleplay by the consumer.

This goes all the way back to Shakespeare putting those extra scenes into his plays for the groundlings to watch.

Modern marketing turns out to be live theatre at its best playing 24/7 on all of your networked devices and no auditions!  Wait… I feel a Shakespeare quote coming on. What do you think?

When I was 11, I had just the most fantastic music teacher.  For the next 7 years we worked on all types of music together, one on one, in group classes, in a wind symphonia and also in the school orchestra.

Later on we did music tours with a 70 piece orchestra made up of the senior players from the 4 high schools that he taught at.  Wonderful times and just about the best times I had at school.

Since then I have listened to and played all types of music but not as much as I would like to have but it would be fair to say that music still has an important role in my life

The last two weeks have been a bit too busy and so it has be great to hear two quite different takes on music related by two great people.

The first was on National Radio and was wide ranging and engaging. Just the thing for Saturday morning driving around time. Plenty of music history from 1981 and before plus some current music from Dunedin.

Playing Favourites with Graeme Downes
Senior lecturer in contemporary rock music at the University of Otago, and a founding member of The Verlaines (They recorded 120 songs in their careeer) . File Size:13.2MB about 35 mins
Date: (Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:06:00 +1200)

Songs by Simon Comber “Jaws of Life” and “Happened Before” by The Tweaks – (not included in the show as they have been edited out for copyright reasons presumably.) Tono and The Finance Company “Daffodils & a Cashbook.” plus a few others that I missed.

Graeme’s PHD was based on the music of Mahler and his musical journey 30 years on makes for an interesting listen.

Benjamin Zander is clearly a great inspirational teacher on many levels and a Mahler fan.

“A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks”.

Just the thing for the end of the week.

Or go here if the video doesn’t play for you. When Ben plays a Chopin piece the audience is invited along as well. You have to see it to get the back story. My late and much loved music teacher would have been very proud.

I always thought he had one of the best jobs in the world but to hear Zander reframe it as a way “to awaken possibility in other people” does make a huge difference and that is exactly what TC did.

Note: Today is National Poetry day in New Zealand.