No, not a Cannon...a Canon.Here are 2 definitions that I like:1: a rule or especially body of rules or principles generally  established as valid and fundamental in a field or art  or philosophy;2. The collection of books received as genuine Holy Scriptures, called the {sacred canon}, or general rule of moral and religious duty, given by inspiration;History has a canon. Anthropology has a canon. Most fields have those works which are considered indispensable or "must reads." Up until now, the 2.0 world has largely had a canon of definitions but Venkatesh Rao has blogged a post which starts to establish the case for a 2.0 canon of books. I know, seems a bit ironic to be proposing something as decidedly 1.0 as books as essential reference points for understanding 2.0 but there ya go.  Over there on the right is Rao's visualization of this 2.0 canon - again with the irony of creating a visualization of text-based works. I think its a good start....can you hear the "BUT" coming?Of course there are holes - the great pleasure is in finding the holes and proposing the works that will fill them. Here is my start [I'd love to hear/see your additions] (fair warning - I also include magazine articles):The Wealth of NetworksAs We May ThinkThe New Age of the BookThe Black SwanEverything is MiscellaneousThe Social Life of Information...now those are just the quick ones of the top of my head...help me with the rest......or is it just an exercise in futility to compile a list of static books that seek to describe such a dynamic phenom? Should we also have a canon for videos like The Machine is Us/Using Us, Did You Know? and anything from Common Craft? What about a canon of del.icio.us feeds or people to follow on Twitter - or does the definition of a canon reject such ephemera?

In case you haven't seen it, allow me to introduce Calliflower. Calliflower began life as a conference call tool used in conjunction with Facebook. It looks like it has grown well past that interesting start.This is definitely in the same class with GoTo Meeting but I think there are a couple of differences worth exploring. First, if you look at the pricing - they are roughyl similar. All the Calliflower pricing plans allow for unlimited participants, the difference in pricing comes in how many organizers (people who can set up calls) you want w/in your organization (for 2 organizers the annual cost is $500).I do like the features that Calliflower brings to the table like: Document sharing (yes, others do this too) Easy calendar integration via iCal. As someone running an Outlook calendar and a Google Calendar, this is very helpful SMS Event reminders - love it MP3 Recordings - Record the call either via the Web UI or your mobile phone iPhone App - Love this. This is not just the ability to dial into your call via the phone but rather a  full-fledged mobile interface to the call (screenshots here) Skype/TringMe Integration - Awesome. Mobile VOIP. ROI? Done. I guess what it comes down to with something like Calliflower - essentially a different version of a capability we already have - is not the new features but the fact that it seems that the designers started from a user perspective versus an admin or IT view. That makes it tremendously more attractive - especially when you add in the innovative mobile UI, similar pricing plans and integration with cost-saving apps like Skype and TringMe. Plus - what's the migration cost? Um...little to none. So here is a challenge for 2009..let's challenge entrenched systems who's ROI is hazy at best. Let's ask to see the work that went into selecting sub-standard, dangerous browsers like IE. Let's challenge our installed base of authoring tools, LMSs and LCMSs. Let's not go after new simply for the sake of it being new but neither should we stand by and just accept the status quo when valuable innovation passes us and our learners by.

15 ways to improve your presentations in 2009: Great list. Yes, there is some self-evident stuff but that's not shocking - more of us just need to apply these principles. I would also add, read Slide:ology. Jane Knight's Predicitions for Top Tools in 2009: Jane is the Queen of updating all of us on what is the latest tool/capability available so when she makes predicitions about which ones will hit in '09, might be worth a listen. Time's 50 Best Websites of 2008: Yeah, I know, MSM rating the online world right? Still, I found some on the list that I wasn't aware of - like Trip Kick - which actually breaks down which rooms are good in a given hotel.ARCHAEOLOGY'S TOP 10 FINDS: Yes, this is a personal fav. :-) Deal with it.  Instructify has a couple of great, list-laden post. This one includes Best Books of 2008 and 77 Colorful Words. This one has rules for making a good first impression and things they need to teach in high school.  Enjoy!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

So I feel really very remiss about not blogging so long. Oddly enough, its not how I used to feel. "Back in the day" ...like a year ago...when I'd have a couple week hiatus from my blog for whatever reason, I'd feel guilty in a production sense - like I hadn't been kicking anything out and just letting ideas pile up and not get to them. Its different now.I have really become quite addicted to Twitter (see graph, courtesy of Tweetstats). It didn't start out that way for me...when I first looked at Twitter, I Saw a bunch of "going to the store" and "I'm sad" kind of Tweets (that's what you call the micro-posts you put out on Twitter) and I really didn't want to keep track of all that. Now however, Twitter really seems to have hit an age where it is incredibly interesting. To be sure the "going to the store" crap is still out there but I have a higher tolerance for it and a better understanding of how to filter it. I say I have a higher tolerance for it now because it is usually mixed in with really great, thought-provoking posts from people I respect and I'll take a couple of "store" Tweets from them - its a positive ROI. On the filter side, I'm also learning the gentle art of the "unfollow" - that is electing to stop getting updates from a particular person in Twitter. "Follow" is what you do when you want to track what someone else is tweeting. There is a whole emergent layer of behavior that is being mapped out in real-time as people explore and probe at the edges of this new social environment. What is acceptable? What is not? Is it rude to unfollow? How about "locking" your Twitter account so you actually have to approve people who want to follow you?Back to my feelings...Twitter is both a powerful and dead-on simple intake and output medium. 140 characters...that's it. Gotta love constraints for forcing creativity. So instead of blogging, I have been pusing a lot of stuff out via Twitter - stuff that I would be hard-pressed to make into a whole blog post. I've also been getting a great deal of feedback from that stuff that I sent out too. So much more feedback than blogging...I think that's really a key to the addiction is the immediate feedback...the feeling of actually being "in" a conversation instead of the monologue that blogging can feel like. So I am going to try to blog more again...there is ROI in the longer form but if you really want to jump into the conversation, then follow me on Twitter. :-)P.S. I've posted before (1,2) about the insane number of Twitter tools that are now available - with more and more coming online and a ridiculous pace. There are even a number of Twitter "How To's" coming online like this one from Webware.

  Now this is how you mobilize a conference. TED has worked with VenueM to create a great iPhone app (launches iTunes) that lets you access a truckload of content from the past and present TED conferences (content not yet created is not available). The app includes video and audio and the ability to bookmark and "share" - via email. My one little wish would be that the "share" would include the ability to push favorites to social networks. Now this is thinking. I mean TED is clearly a diff animal...$6,000 a year for 'conference membership'? You have to apply for membership. That's a lot of process and a lot of money but the quality is undeniable. I mean I think we've all watched at least one TED video and just been inspired by it right? How many times has that happened to you at other conferences- where you walk out of sessions just inspired to your core to do better, be bolder?The trick though is that TED also gets it...they carefully engineer their face-to-face experiences BUT they also release tons and tons of content and this iPhone app is just the latest step in that regard. Wow. What if conferences really carefully thought about how to engineer some amazing experiences for their attendees? What about that? What if "amazing" or "inspiring" was your baseline metric for an attendee's experience? What if you gave away so much of the content of the conference that #1 people could see what kind of F2F experience they were missing and #2 you actually created a vibrant and interested community around your conference? What if, when you posted all that content....you offered no less than 4-5 ways to actually download that content and oh yeah, users can rate and comment on that content as well and you embed the capability to share that content through an array of social networks?What if.....

So, I want to try and make sure that I have a complete picture of what is considered to be all the components of our little industry.I'm interested for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is to see the variety of opinions that are coming in. I asked this question earlier on Twitter and some of the answers are below.One of the other reasons is to better understand how change might flow or be stopped as it tries to ripple across our little pond. I'm still developing this thought but I'd love your help. I'll include what I already have below and I'd hope you'd add what you find to be missing. Thanks! (Oh and please feel free to suggest larger/Meta categories)                                                                                                (photo attribution) Components: Product Vendors Higher Ed/Degree Programs Gurus Critical Analysis Design Concepts Clients Designers Developers Conferences Expo Stages Wireless Locations Social Media Speaker pools Pre-conference input Traditional lecture setups Consultants LEARNERS CLO's Physical Locations Classrooms IT Access Locked down desktops Tensions Academic vs. Corporate Strategy/Vision vs. Front Line Upper Mgt vs. Training Dept Professional Organizations Certifications I should also include Harold Jarche's excellent post on the eLearning business

(Link)"The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked differently, and that the present may have looked very different itself. Experts like Krugman and Nesse are, by definition and training, not participants in the humanities game of memory, comparison and synthesis: rather, they are experts. Experts, like the fox of Isaiah Berlin, track down the single series of facts towards knowledge. They come out of laboratories, where they have performed minute studies of a single experiment where terms like "promiscuous" and "chaste" are fixed as a supposition of the game. Experts judge the workings of the brain by the newest findings, not by comparison with Aristotle or Machiavelli. Hedgehog intellectuals, by contrast, agglomerate and compare: this definition of good behavior with those five more relative or strict versions that societies have enforced at different times; the perspective of gender studies with that of sociology. Their training in the humanities acquaints them with thinkers classical and modern; it teaches the keen eye for other cultures, the rapid absorption of information about pamphlet and canvases in everyday time. Hedgehogs generally are made not in laboratories but in libraries, where they have learned to compare dictators and democracies across time and space, dealing with the primary texts of alien societies - learning, that is, from the natives on their own terms. Hedgehogs are assimilators, and they’re friendly with the locals. Lately they do not come out of the libraries so much, and the forum is brimming with foxes."This is a wonderful article and IMHO, I think we need more hedgehogs.

So there is a wonderful conversation getting underway at Spaces of Interaction: An Online Conversation about Improving Traditional Conferences. As someone who goes to a lot of conferences, this really interests me. As part of looking around on that topic, I found this article about Webstock 2009, a conference that just wrapped up in Wellington, NZ. The post that caught my eye was one in which people were putting together the business case for attending the conference. I thought they had some nice ideas like (Oh, and keep in mind that my comments aren't directed at Webstock, which I assume is awesome but rather at us in the learning/training field and our conferences): Webstock is an unparalleled training opportunity: that's a great claim - what do we think it would take to change it to a metric? You’ll be better at your job: again - that's awesome - what's the best way to achieve that? The speakers are some of the best in the world - but they should bring relevant messages as well or else they're just marketing fodder. I'll never forget being at one conference where Rudy Giuliani was a speaker - before he was a candidate - not only was he one of the most wooden and dreadful speakers I've ever seen but he also failed to adjust his pitch one whit to map to the audience in front of him. You’ll come back better networked - this is awesome but is the conference actually deploying tools. technologies, opportunities to achieve this? Here is a crazy idea - offer a couple of stations set up using something like a CardScan business card scanner - now offer to let people use this station to scan in all the biz cards they collect and email themselves electronic copies of them before they even leave the conference. That is facilitating networking.  Webstock is run by people who care: Again, that's great and might sound superficial but there could be something deeper here as well. What if instead of having companies who's biz model is driving attendance to shows and selling booth space - we actually had conferences run by people who may have those elements as part of their model but who at base, care about the industry? So what do you think? Any hope of changing conferences at a genetic level? What would it take?

So the upshot of this article is that the NSA is joining an ongoing effort called "A-Space" within the intelligence community to share info. Its big news because the NSA is just a wee bit on the secretive side - a friend of mine who works there, never had business cards as a minor example.Beyond the fact the freaking NSA is learning how to open up and yet we still have non-classified government organizations and corporations who act like the use of these systems wold compromise their HR databases (BTW, if the use of these systems will do that - you need to hire a new IT department). Beyond that though - this line caught my eye "Political appointees and policymakers are denied access to A-Space to encourage honest collaboration among career professionals and to speed analysis." I just started wondering, if we stood up these networks in our own environments, would we have to exclude anyone to get that 'honest collaboration'? Should you be able to create your own closed enclaves within a larger corporate sphere? Maybe amongst those at your same rank or below? What about an assessment loop?I tend to think of pushing for ever more open networks so this one has me thinking a bit. Maybe some fences do make good neighbors.