I’m Attending MIT, Stanford & Harvard ~ Mattias Geniar
http://mattiasgeniar.be/2009/01/29/im-attending-mit-stanford-harvard/

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1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes - are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are - not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people's outcomes - not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier?

Outcomes, not income. Connections, not transactions. People, not product. Creativity, not productivity.

Information visualization course

A Study showing potential learning benefits of social networking site like myspace and facebook

Article from Harvard about positives to teens using social networking today.

A new study by Harvard alum Christine Greenhow finds social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have more educational potential than you might think.

I just co-wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation about the use of new technologies in the classroom. We're only on the cusp of this, and we need to harness the energy and interest that kids currently have for these things.

Harvard Graduate School of Education article on social networking as an educational tool

J.K. Rowling: "I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea."

speech by JK Rowling to Harvard graduates passing out day quite inspiring

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

fantastic speech i should watch every day

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. -- You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. " -- J. K. Rowling

"the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” “What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

people do not get the power of twitter. its early days folks.

bbc quoting Harvard study shows most Twitterers tweet less than once every 74 days

Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found.

"Micro-blogging service Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it."

"Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends." - Bill Heil Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found. "This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network..." Nielsen Online figures show that visitors to the site increased by 1,382%, from 475,000 to seven million, between February 2008 and February 2009. It is thought to have grown beyond 10 million in the past 4 months. By comparison, Facebook - one of the most popular social networking sites by number of visitors - has 200 million active users and grew by 228% during the same period. Nielsen firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month. Conclusions: - Twitter is an open micro-blogging platform - It's growing fast but not sticky - RTS does not revolve around Twitter

study claims twitter is really more of a broadcast medium

stats from the nielsen og harvard studies show median post per person 1 and less than 10% active users...

On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.

17 jun 09 / Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.

Via James Graham

Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society. The paper, which includes a helpful survey of the prior economic studies on the impact of file sharing, includes the following:

"I was selling in the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in."

Social media involvement means having live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It requires people - therefore it's not free.

seeding, feeding, and weeding.

Light can be stopped and restarted?

i don't understand how cooling Na helps stop light - or what the "signature" encoded in the light is ...

Harvard brainiac Lene Hau uses Bose-Einstein condensates to "freeze" light, stopping it and effectively storing it as matter.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.news.harvard.edu%2Fgazette%2F2007%2F02.08%2F99-hau.html

Innovation: it's the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong. I'd like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.

"Let's summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics. I've talked to many boardrooms about awesomeness. Beancounters feel challenged and threatened by it, because it feels fuzzy and imprecise. Yet, it's anything but. Gen M knows "awesomeness" when we see it — that's why its part of our vernacular. It's a precise concept, with meaning, depth, and resonance."

Let's face it. "Innovation" feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation — that innovation needs innovation. Why? When we examine the economics of innovation, three reasons emerge.

Philosophy class online from Harvard University.

<<Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world. This course aims to help viewers become more critically minded thinkers about the moral decisions we all face in our everyday lives. In this 12-part series, Sandel challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas and asks our opinion about the right thing to do.>>

out being sustained by people who cared about experimentation and exploration. Sometimes these people were relatives, but sometimes they were neighbors, teachers or other influential adults. A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).

How Do Innovators Think? 5:21 PM Monday September 28, 2009 by Bronwyn Fryer Tags:Creativity, Innovation, Leadership What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Ebay's Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G's A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with HBR contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the "Innovators' DNA" works.This post is part of HarvardBusiness.org's Creativity at Work special package. Fryer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five "discovery skills" that distinguish them. What are these skills? Dyer: The first skill is what we call "associating." It's a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning - an abilit

With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it's likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices

uh oh...social media predictions for 2010 have started - a good article on Harvard Business

mobile

1. less social; 2. corporations scale up; 3. Social business gets competitive; 4. Everyone has a social media policy; 5. Mobile gets important for social media; 6. Sharing is now more than email

via @leebryant

(edit this later)

Law professor Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (which Nesson co-founded), made their position clear. "Recently, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, wrote to Harvard to challenge the university administration to stop acting as a 'passive conduit' for students downloading music," they wrote in 2007. "We agree. Harvard and the 22 universities to which the RIAA has sent 'pre-litigation notices' ought to take strong, direct action... and tell the RIAA to take a hike."

Nesson & Co.

"Recently, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, wrote to Harvard to challenge the university administration to stop acting as a 'passive conduit' for students downloading music," they wrote in 2007. "We agree. Harvard and the 22 universities to which the RIAA has sent 'pre-litigation notices' ought to take strong, direct action... and tell the RIAA to take a hike."

In retrospect, Harvard's eventual involvement was obvious. As far back as 2007, we noted that RIAA prelitigation letters had yet to be sent to Harvard, and one reason for that may have been the quite public opposition of Harvard Law School to the entire RIAA legal campaign.

This website has been developed to provide an evidence-based resource for those interested in the biomechanics of different foot strikes in endurance running and the applications to human endurance running prior to the modern running shoe.

Without a doubt we are in the middle of a game change....finding simplicity in the massive complex, finding personal utility in the aggregation of information.

A dashboard concept is very important as the key to innovation, said Decker. "Increasingly, companies will find ways to leverage whatever social networks you're in, find ways to service those in ways easy for you to access, and try to go for more simplicity," she said. "Simplicity is the single thing people really want. It's going to get faster in terms of technology. There's going to be more opportunities and interconnections. "But fundamentally, removing the complexity and adding simplicity so you can easily access in an open way everything you want, and leverage a lot of social connections rather than going to multiple ones, is how the user experience will evolve.

Internet-connected televisions, social media, and the power of simplicity were all cited as launch pads for future innovation in technology

Harvard

"Increasingly, companies will find ways to leverage whatever social networks you're in, find ways to service those in ways easy for you to access, and try to go for more simplicity," she said. "Simplicity is the single thing people really want. It's going to get faster in terms of technology. There's going to be more opportunities and interconnections. But fundamentally, removing the complexity and adding simplicity so you can easily access in an open way everything you want, and leverage a lot of social connections rather than going to multiple ones, is how the user experience will evolve."

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

April 8, 2009.

Collaboration (conversation) as a mechanism for accelerating growth along the 'experience curve'

Network effects = the value of a node in a network rises exponentially as more nodes are added to it. These are called network effects

rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. These leaps in performance describe the shape and power of the collaboration curve, a new force in our professional and personal lives that turns the experience curve on its side, and explains why the whole of us, working, playing, and, learning together, can often be greater than the sum of our parts.

Collaboration curves. And WoW.

Collaboration curves hold the potential to mobilize larger and more diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value. In so doing they may also reverse the diminishing returns dynamics of the experience curve and deliver increasing returns to performance instead. The evidence for the collaboration curve is, as yet, mostly anecdotal.

via http://www.informl.com/2009/04/08/climbing-the-collaboration-curve/

Today, the meaning is the message. The "message" of the Internet's social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization.

More useful (albeit heavily sprinkled with marketing buzz words and phrases) on the best way of using social media as part of an organisation.