A quick all-over-the-place post.

MeshU
Once again thanks for the Mesh crew for putting on Mesh and MeshU in Toronto last week. Organizing events like this can be a thankless gig at the best of times. I was lucky enough to speak at MeshU and I will make excuses in saying I had little time to prepare. If you were in my session I hope I was better than a “gaping hole in the schedule”. Something tells me I won’t need an agent anytime soon to handle the flood of requests for speaking engagements.

Awards
While it technically is tooting my own horn, I’m actually tooting the horn for the amazing crew I’m lucky enough to spend my work days with. BrainPark was recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers” by Branham.

I’m more proud of this one, however, as it speaks more to how we do things rather than what we do. We’ve been recognized as one of “WorldBlu’s Most Democratic Workplaces 2009“.

In both cases, we’re recognized amongst some great companies so congratulations to everyone at BrainPark. I’d like to tell you to take the rest of the week of but that wouldn’t be very democratic of me.

I’m fortunate to have to chance to speak at the sold out meshU tomorrow in Toronto. It will, however, be a late night prepping tonight. If you’re attending, please be patient with me and realize I’m a late sub and have had little time to prepare. Make sure to say hi at meshU or Mesh as I’ll be at both events.

Thanks again to Mark, Mathew, Mike, Rob, Stuart and the many others who toil to make these events happen each year.

I’m forever saying, to anyone who hasn’t yet tuned my voice out, that search will soon be like browsing is today. No one browses the web anymore. We all, however, spend too much time searching today, oh the avenues we have available to us. I can search in more places today than I ever thought possible.

Here’s the issue, I don’t want to search. I’m as interested in searching on my computer as I am in searching for my keys every morning or that one sock. It’s a painful means to an end I want stopped. Give me that Alfred dude batman has who’ll hand me my sock and keys just as I’m about to say “where’s my soc…oh, thanks Alfred”.

Add to this that I don’t want to put things in folders, name them creatively, tag them etc, all aimed at surrounding the objects with every conceivable piece of meta data possible in an attempt to predict the exact context in the future in which I’ll try to recall them.

So, examples of a glimpse of a better world? I present Tineye. The most publicized usage for tineye is seeing how other people are using a particular photo. That’s incredibly useful to a niche I’m not in. The usage I’m interested in relate to a more human search.

Check out how Ali used tineye. Here’s what I want. I’m walking home tonight from work. I walk by the church you may have noticed if you’ve been to Guelph. I consider how cool that church would look in various lighting and realize that tons of photos have likely been taken of this place. I pull out my camera and snap a picture. That photo is my search query. Hopefully tineye will show me loads of photos people have taken of that church, maybe even connect me with wikipedia and other information about the church.

Realize what I did NOT do. I didn’t craft the perfect search query. I didn’t tag anything. I didn’t even have to get the name of the church.

Why am I thinking about all this? Well let’s say that at brainpark, we’re hoping to do what I’ve described above with images but with your work product. Allow you to stop searching and get back to getting work done.

Don’t let age or lack of skill get in your way. With Jamie from Brainpark’s help, I’ve been able to live out my dreams, including playing hockey with my local OHL team. Live your dreams people!

hockey

Another Brydon hits slopes

Last reminder, tonight is DemoCampGuelph8. Get out and join us at The Albion! Sign up to attend and introduce yourself tonight.

You can be either a fan of Super Mario bros or a fan for the cartoon characters of your childhood, no matter what character impressed your memory, the most important thing is that you lived a real long lasting adventure following your hero.

We want here to make a list of all the top cartoon characters of all times, in order to give voice to those old cartoon personages who are by now forgotten by many people or that the youngest generations didn’t get to know.

Bobby Hill: this cartoon character played in “King of the Hill” in the late 1990’s. He has a positive attitude, he’s always funny and dreamer, but he probably didn’t get to grow up.

Wonder Woman: this is the most popular female cartoon character who played the role of a common male hero. She is sexy and strong, beautiful and superhero.

Daria: the cartoon series where we can find Daria is called “Beavis and Butt-head” and it’s from late 1990’s. Daria is smart and tries to be herself, her life is like many other teenagers with a boyfriend and stressed out parents.

Batman: who doesn’t know Batman? This is one of the heroes who conquered the fantasy and imagination of many generations. Fast, prompt and ready to transform himself in order to save people in trouble.

Superman: one of the super heroes who is coming back in a revival of the last times. Superman fascinated the imagination of many young spectators of his powerful adventures and has been playing a part in comics during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Spider man: another well known popular super hero who comes from the late 1960’s. He is half human and half spider and he’s still today very loved by many young kids.

As you can see each generation got their superheroes but it’s also a matter of fact that many old heroes come back from the past to fascinate the latest generations.

Each cartoon has its protagonist just like each game has its player. And with an iphone bingo app you can be the real and only one protagonist of your favorite bingo games. Start to see how to play and see how funny it is to play bingo online directly from your mobile phone.

You can bring your games everywhere you go as long as you can connect to the internet.

Some notes from a paper I’m writing here at Brainpark…

In his book Notes On The Synthesis Of Form, Christopher Alexander talks about architecture as form, context, and ensemble:

“The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demand on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.”

Applying this to knowledge management (KM), traditional KM has focused almost solely on the form, ie the resulting documents we have control over. They’ve ignored the context. As Alexander explains, it’s the context that stresses and places demands on that form. Forms don’t fail in isolation, they fail because of the demands of a context. We need a new view of KM that’s aware, and understands the concept, of context and strives for fitness between form and context.

“a discourse actively maps out a terrain of possible and valid statements, sets the boundaries of that terrain and constitutes the legitimate objects of study within it.”

Traditional knowledge management has historically focused too much on the storage and management of “legitimate objects” and not enough on the discourse. In theory legitimate objects inform discourse, however, in practice legimate objects only come into existence through discource not vice versa.

What am I babbling about? At brainpark, we’re working to facilitate and stoke the fires of discourse. Doing so allows you and your team to better understand which legitimate objects deserve your time, attention, and energy. That’s all, just talking out loud.

Over the years, people have commented to me about the look on my face in the photo I used for the front page of this site. I look aloof, I don’t care, I’m mad. I was looking through some old photos and saw the original recently. It goes to show, sometimes it is all about context.

Next week is filling up with SantaCamps. If you can get to Montreal for Thursday, then you want to hit up their CelebrateCamp. Thanks to a gracious invite from Alistair and rednod, I’m heading over, say hi if you make it out.