Author: Christopher Carfi

Great people make all the difference.

Sweet.  If you have an iPhone, you now have free wifi at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots.

Related:  Even if you don’t have the iPhone, it’s easy to get free wifi there with their "loyalty" card thing.  Use the card once a month, and you get free access.

Also Related:  If you have an iPhone, these look great, by the way.

Nice liveblog here of Day 1 of the Social Media Strategies conference in San Francisco.  Rajiv, Darius and I had a blast on the "Thinking Vertically" panel, which starts at 1525.

From BrandWeek:

"Don’t be surprised if a comment left on Twitter gets a faster
response than a call to customer service. Companies are
increasingly monitoring social media sites like Twitter, Facebook
and blogs for negative customer comments and then responding
directly, even publicly, to those comments within minutes.

Companies including Southwest Airlines, Boingo wireless and
Edmunds.com have developed speedy, informal response teams to deal
with the fact that consumers are happy to air brands’ (often
entertaining) dirty laundry in public."

I just voted!  If your state allows you to do so, you can, too.

For San Mateo County, CA, the early voting locations are here.

Heh.  Looks like Dave voted today, too.

We all get tied into the the things that we "know" are right.  Those are the safe options.  (Back in the day, these were the things like "no one ever got fired for buying IBM.")  We may tweak things a little bit, here or there, but we never venture far afield from our comfort zone.

Had a great exchange with Nicole Lazzaro, a couple of weeks back, that really brought out the fallacy of that logic.  Our exchange:

nicolelazarro: Sounds like this conversation is a step backwards from efficient vending machine purchase to a shared cup of tea before buying a rug in the bazaar.
ccarfi: is that really a step "backward?" it’s transaction v. relationship. Relationship is more valuable.
nicolelazzaro: Exactly. A step forward is actually back to our roots. Fond memories of Istanbul, where merchants and customers have not yet forgotten the art of conversation.

The key here is that things that look like a "step backward" may be exactly the things you need to do in order to get out of a rut.  You may be near the top of the hill, but the next feature over might be a much higher mountain.  You need to go down the hill in the short term (away from what locally looks like the "best" answer), in order to get to the real best answer.

Related: Tabu Search

I’m just back from the Future of Talent (note: sound) retreat in Tiburon, California, where I facilitated a session entitled Community…The Real Deal.  The retreat is the effort of Kevin Wheeler and his great team at Global Learning Resources.

As always, a huge highlight was the opportunity to work with Eileen Clegg, a visual journalist who creates real-time murals of sessions such as this one.  (N.B. She’s also working on a very, very cool project for O’Reilly Media, chronicling the career of valley legend Doug Engelbart.)

Here’s another version of the mural with all of the details visible.  Click on it to expand.

Angel Island Fire – October 12, 2008
by Christopher Carfi

Seth writes:

"The web comes down to bumping into things we might disagree with. That’s my favorite part. It’s where the learning happens."

Yes, and…it’s more than just the "bumping into" that matters.  It’s actively seeking out the edges where different ideas, approaches, industries or histories intersect.

Edges are where the interesting stuff occurs.  Homogeneity is boring, predictable and unremarkable.

Bob Frankston (more) once told me "If we’re not disagreeing, we’re not making progress."  (Note: The reason I couldn’t agree with Bob’s statement at the time is an exercise left for the reader. 🙂)  And his point was spot-on — mindless, or even mindful, agreement can’t create something new.

If you’re disagreeing (civilly, I trust), you’ve found an edge.  Explore it.

One of the books that has most influenced me over the years is entitled Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly.  It’s a collection of real-world examples where "biology" and "technology" intersect.  Perhaps the most salient chapter is the one on the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.  To whit:

"Life keeps rising. It rose again and again inside Bio2. The bottle
was fecund, prolific. Of the many babies born in Bio2 during its first
two years, the most visible was a galago born in the early months of
closure. Two African pygmy goats birthed five kids, and an Ossabaw
Island pig bore seven piglets. A checkered garter snake gave birth to
three baby snakes in the ginger belt at the edge of the rain forest. And
lizards hid lots of baby lizards under the rocks in the desert.

Urbanization is the advent of edge species. The hallmark of the modern
world is its fragmentation, its division into patchworks. What
wilderness is left is divided into islands and the species that thrive
best thrive on the betweenness of patches. Bio2 is a compact package of
edges. It has more ecological edges per square foot than anywhere else
on Earth. But there is no heartland, no dark deepness, which is
increasingly true of most of Europe, much of Asia, and eastern North
America.

The messy living thing knitting itself together inside Bio2 was pushing
back. It was a coevolutionary world. The biospherians would have to
coevolve along with it. Bio2 was specifically built to test how a closed
system coevolves. In a coevolutionary world, the atmosphere and material
environment in which beasties dwell become as adaptable and as lifelike
as the beasties themselves. Bio2 was a test bench to find out how an
environment governs the organisms immersed in it, and how the organisms
in turn govern the environment. The atmosphere is the paramount
environmental factor; it produces life, while life produces it. The
transparent bottle of Bio2 turned out to be the ideal seat from which to
observe an atmosphere in the act of conversing with life."

Find the edges.