John Winsor

Never Lose Your Keys

LaCie has just introduced a new mode of storing and transporting digital content.  LaCie, who is recognized as one of the leading manufacturers of computer peripherals, is offering three styles of it’s USB key drive: itsaKey, iamaKey and PassKey. The USB keys were designed by 5.5 Designers, recipients of the “Grand prix de la creation” by the city council of Paris. The keys mirror that of a standard house key, which is compact and fits easily onto any keychain. Being made of metal, the keys are virtually resistant to destruction.

The LaCie Keys are available now, starting at $9.90. The itsaKey and iamaKey store up to 8 gigabytes of flash memory, whereas the PassKey has a microSD card reader.

180 Degrees South

I'm really looking forward to this.

Be More Human

Note: Today I had three conversations about the power of improv in business. Powerful. It reminded me of a piece a wrote in my book, Spark.

A recent experience I had reminded me how important being human is in our work lives. I first met Johnnie, a Branding Consultant who’s based in London, on a video conference call to discuss the BrandShift weblog in which we had all been invited to participate. I was a little nervous going into the meeting knowing that I was, by far, the most junior in a group of otherwise experienced bloggers including Jennifer Rice, Andrew Lark, Alex Williams and Hylton Joliffe.

For a long while during the conference call I sat and listened, feeling very intimidated by the team’s incredible knowledge. They were throwing out basic blogging ideas and terms that I did not understand at all.

            

It wasn’t until Johnnie started talking about some of the principles of improv that I started to participate in the conversation. This idea of allowing everybody, no matter the level of knowledge, to participate in a positive dialogue really intrigued me.

            

However, it wasn’t until after my interview with Johnnie that the magic of improv really started to become apparent. I had posted a provocative thought on my own weblog only to get a couple of pretty sarcastic and aggressive responses. Being a person who always wants to be liked and doesn’t deal with conflict very well, I was unsure how to respond.

This same feeling happens to many of us, including me, in our work environments. I have always had difficulty understanding how to deal with aggressively differing opinions. And often these positions get calcified, creating great rifts in companies and on teams.

            

After thinking more about Johnnie’s interview and the tool of  “Yes, and?” I started to apply the principle to my dialogue with those people on my blog who expressed radically different opinions. By saying, “I understand where you’re coming from and, in fact, here’s something to add,” I was able to focus on the areas of common understanding and build from those in a positive way, instead of thinking about the differences and focusing only on those.

What would happen if you used the principle of “Yes, and?” in your interactions with your coworkers and customers?

Note: Today I had three conversations about the power of improv in business. Powerful. It reminded me of a piece a wrote in my book, Spark.

A recent experience I had reminded me how important being human is in our work lives. I first met Johnnie, a Branding Consultant who’s based in London, on a video conference call to discuss the BrandShift weblog in which we had all been invited to participate. I was a little nervous going into the meeting knowing that I was, by far, the most junior in a group of otherwise experienced bloggers including Jennifer Rice, Andrew Lark, Alex Williams and Hylton Joliffe.

For a long while during the conference call I sat and listened, feeling very intimidated by the team’s incredible knowledge. They were throwing out basic blogging ideas and terms that I did not understand at all.

            

It wasn’t until Johnnie started talking about some of the principles of improv that I started to participate in the conversation. This idea of allowing everybody, no matter the level of knowledge, to participate in a positive dialogue really intrigued me.

            

However, it wasn’t until after my interview with Johnnie that the magic of improv really started to become apparent. I had posted a provocative thought on my own weblog only to get a couple of pretty sarcastic and aggressive responses. Being a person who always wants to be liked and doesn’t deal with conflict very well, I was unsure how to respond.

This same feeling happens to many of us, including me, in our work environments. I have always had difficulty understanding how to deal with aggressively differing opinions. And often these positions get calcified, creating great rifts in companies and on teams.

            

After thinking more about Johnnie’s interview and the tool of  “Yes, and?” I started to apply the principle to my dialogue with those people on my blog who expressed radically different opinions. By saying, “I understand where you’re coming from and, in fact, here’s something to add,” I was able to focus on the areas of common understanding and build from those in a positive way, instead of thinking about the differences and focusing only on those.

What would happen if you used the principle of “Yes, and?” in your interactions with your coworkers and customers?

Developing a Sixth Sense

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry, from the MIT Media Lab, shows the possible future of using the virtual world to help enhance physical interactions. So cool.

Crowdsourcing 101

A lot of people are trying to figure out what crowdsourcing is and what they can do with it? It's always good to go back to the source, Jeff Howe.

What's the Difference Between Co-creation and Remixing?

Have you seen Thru You yet? It's worth checking out. An artist, Kutiman has taken samples of YouTube videos and made them into quite interesting songs. It begs the question: What's the difference between co-creation and remixing? Are you still co-creating if someone else has used your material and remixed it with something else? Either way, it's another example of the power of the collective. With so much information flowing in so many interesting directions, peopel can act as shapers and editors creating new genres of anything.

Here's one of Kutiman's creations:

Crowdsourced Art

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

Thanks to Peter Majarich for sending along a link to Ten Thousand Cents. It's a cool example of the possibilities of crowdsourced art. Here's what the project is all about:

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...Barter?

With the economy in the current state it's in, people are going back to the old ways of exchanging goods and services with others. This is nothing new, as people have been doing it for centuries. What is new, is that thanks to the internet, your reach and possibilities are infinite.

According to the Associated Press 2/25/09:

Bartering ads on Craigslist have increased about 100 percent since last year, said Susan MacTavish Best, a spokeswoman for the online classified advertising service. Traffic is also up at local organizations like the Midwest Barter Exchange, a Kalamazoo, Mich.-based outfit that acts as a go-between for about 1,000 business clients.

As well as being cost-effective, bartering can also be quite fun. Heather Wood, a beautician in Boise has traded her services for daycare, as well as dental cleanings, and even a car pain job. She states, It's fun, and it builds a whole different kind of a relationship...They're getting what they want and I'm getting what I want. I would much rather do that than make cash most of the time.

Gary Forman, president of Dollar Stretcher, a company that publishes methods for saving money feels that people are yearning for more human interaction and that, [t]he human element and the relationship between buyers and sellers becomes more important when we get involved in bartering transactions.

Seems like a win: win situation for everyone.

Quote of the Day

"Mysticism peoples and cultures alive. Logic, too emphatically embraced, is what undoes the mind."

-G. K. Chesterton

(Seen above the door at Larry's.)

All a Twitter

I've been fascinated the past couple of weeks by all of the buzz around Twitter. John Stewart had a pretty funny segment about Twitter, while Roland Hedley on Doonesbury has been having some fun with it. Celebrities seem to be getting into the swing of things, as well, with Shaq and Aston Kutcher leading the way.

I've been playing around with Twitter (you can find me at @jtwinsor) and am finding it pretty useful as a research tool. Once you have enough followers, it's great to launch questions out and get killer thoughts and ideas back. Tools like Tweetdeck, Twitter Search, Twitterfeed and Twitterfall make it an even more powerful tool. While it's not for everyone (fellow CPBer Alex Bogusky has signed off) and might not be for me, in the long run, it's fascinating to watch a group form around a new media channel. The social boundaries and rules are fluid.

It will be interesting to see how all of this sorts out.