Anyway, my experience is that by sharing your presentations you will get more than you would get otherwise. More leads and valuable feedback. The downside is that you become conscious that giving the same presentation twice doesn’t help your online distribution at all. You have to keep on changing and that’s great for everybody.

I took the views, downloads and favorites stats of all of my presentations and put them on a spreadsheet. This was easily done by looking at the document stats at LeadShare (business extension on SlideShare to encourage leads).

Then I looked at the following things:

• The relative percentage of downloads compared to views. The assumption is that people are more likely to download the presentation if they find it useful.
• The relative percentage of views + downloads for a single presentation compared to all views + downloads for all presentations. This gives you a good overview what presentations are actually leading the way (or have got most exposure).
• The relative percentage of favorites to views + downloads for a single presentation. The assumption is that people will favorite a presentation because they love it or want to store it for later reference.

Of course it’s hard to get an objective view here, because:

• Certain good stuff is picked up by more popular bloggers and some perhaps even better stuff sometimes never gets picked up at all.
• A great enhancer for traffic is also the moment when your presentation gets featured by SlideShare. This has happened to several of my presentations.
• In the other hand, time is here an issue: my presentations are published in around two month intervals since October 2006, not all of the presentations have been available for the same time.

Therefore, the view, download and favorite counts are not good enough indicators of how you are doing, but rather the relative percentages I’ve been calculating. Below you can see my current situation on SlideShare:

The most popular presentation by far is my Web 2.0 Business Models presentation with 40.35% of all traffic. This doesn’t mean it’s the best presentation. If you look at some of the relative percentages, you can see what presentations likely generate most value to their viewers.

Most downloaded presentations compared to views:

18.39% – Web 2.0 Business Models
13.07% – Vision of the future: Organization 2.0
11.43% – Culture Matters – The cultural requirements for Web 2.0 powered innovation, networking, and collaboration
10.69% – Innovation and Microinformation
09.48% – Age of Real-Time: Future Trends in a Digital World

Most favorite presentations compared to views+downloads (I have highlighted the ones that are also in the most downloaded chart):

2.34% – Collaborative Edge: Real-Time Social Technologies in Organizations
1.69% – In the age of real-time: The complex, social, and serendipitous learning offered via the Web
1.40% – Age of Real-Time: Future Trends in a Digital World
0.92% – Vision of the future: Organization 2.0
0.91% – Using Social Technologies to Run Better Events

How would you improve these stats?

A fractal. Latin fractus, meaning fractured. It is recursive by definition.

What comes to my mind is the Mandelbrot set. In 1975, Benoît Mandelbrot first coined the term fractal. Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many “rough” phenomena in the real world. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) he writes:

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

If something is rough, that’s learning. As you approach a new topic, you start from a fuzzy idea of what it could be. As it comes into focus, new details expose themselves on the fringes, enabling you to discover even more interesting perspectives you were not aware beforehand.

Fractals are seen in many parts of nature. Even fractal cosmology exists as an area of study. In a New Scientist article (2007) Labini & Pietronero asked the question, “Is the universe a fractal?“. Their study of nearly a million galaxies suggests that the matter in the universe is arranged in a fractal pattern up to a scale of about 100 million light years.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy in the universe increases over time, as change happens. In layman terms that would be analogous to a room getting messed up over time as people live in it. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in the system that is no longer available. As entropy increases in the universe, at the same time incredibly intricate and detailed order emerges from the details. Think of the human brain on planet earth for example.

Fibonacci spirals also depict the fractal pattern of beauty in nature. Golden ratio is a very well known principle in mathematics and art, first originating in the Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) in the 13th century. Good examples of forms with Fibonacci spirals include the spirals of shells, various flowerings, the branching of trees and arrangement of leaves on a stem.

The internet looks like a fractal.

So what do fractals have to do with learning?

When considering learning, we are pattern recognizers. Just like fractals, our neural networks evolve over time and extend outside of us. As our environment changes, so do we.  As we process information, in addition to entropy, new patterns emerge. By increasing the ammount of information, you increase the possibility of new patterns to be recognized by people.

In the digital world, entropy is information overload and order is the pattern that emerges from the interconnection of such information.

Knowledge is like a hologram. In holograms, even smaller pieces of it include the picture of the whole object. Knowledge is like a hologram. The experience changes as your point of view towards the object changes. The knowledge is not in a single image, but distributed on a network.

This is pattern recognition. And it’s the culmination of fractal learning. It’s a Mandelbrot set that zooms into the details indefinitely. Universe is fractal by nature. So is learning fractal by nature. It’s rough, it’s self-similar, it’s recursive and increasing the likelihood for serendipity is key for building higher structures.

Here is a recent Finnish presentation recording of my talk on the subject at a conference (Verkkoja kokemassa):

Here are my slides from the Distance Education & Teaching conference in Madison, USA (still waiting for the presentation recording to be published):

My presentation is built around the ideas of Stafford Beer, who was the founding father of management cybernetics. His ideas are now more timely than ever, because of the advent of the real-time web. Stafford along with his team built the first real-time computer controlled planned economy at the government of Chile in the beginning of 1970’s. I’m very interested in this because I was part of a team that created Real-Time Economy Community.

Stafford Beer’s project was called Cybersyn. It aimed to create an electronic nervous system for the Chilean economy. As progressive as they were, they included machine learning with a Bayesian filtering (cool in email spam prevention in the early 2000) and social features by letting every citizen and factory worker to influence the decision making. He also included some social innovations too, like having a diverse cross-disciplinary team (rather than a group of generalists) working in a futuristic Opsroom: the ultimate combination of man and the machine.

Cybersyn Opsroom inspired by Tulip Chair design by Eero Saarinen from Finland.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how to implement the real-time web in the enterprise. If there is one guy who really knows how to do it, he is definitely Stafford Beer with his Viable System Model (VSM). The aim of such a system was to remain viable to its users by involving the ability to adapt to changing conditions. This requires real-time data to be generated, reflected and interpreted by every employee (and customer) to lesser or greater extent.

This is very close to what I’ve said in the past that learning is not a separate process to be managed in organizations through training, but rather an inseparable part of all such activity that seeks to avoid stagnation and remain useful over time.

His ideas were more bottom-up than top-down: due to limitations of single or small groups of individuals to comprehend everything what is going on (=top management), one needs communication and conversation with employees, partners and customers – The very ideas that concepts like crowdsourcing or open innovation aim to address.

Stafford’s contribution was also to emphasize the importance of increasing the amount of variety in highly fluctuating systems, where you cannot predict the possible states of the system beforehand. This is exactly what companies like Apple do: by not knowing what applications to run on the phone, keep the number of features (apps) to the minimum and let users innovate and personalize through an App Store. In comparison, Nokia thinks they know their users and load the phones with apps that in general are underused by typical users. The same logic goes with most user-friendly web services (e.g. anything that comes from 37Signals): if you do not know what features your users need, release a limited version, open up the APIs and listen to your customers.

This is exactly how you achieve collaborative edge to provide best services to your customers: in case of doubt, tear down the firewalls and listen. Turn your organization into a complex adaptive system.

On September 11, 1973 (notice the date), Stafford’s dreams came to an end as Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown in a military coup with the support of the United States government. Along with Allende, the project went into grave. How unfortunate, how typical.

My question is, why haven’t we done it yet?

See my presentation here:

Browse the slides:

See also Stafford Beer’s lecture about Cybersyn below (vintage, 1974). Memorable quote about the opsroom chairs:

No paper – there is an ashtray. There is room for a drink and there is a place for a creative session.

Here are the slides, a nice remix of some new, recent and past work:

Some of my advice for libraries:

• Focus on the end-user and customer experience, not just the information.
• Look beyond first hand metadata, to second party recommendations and third-party metadata.
• Utilize open data more, build interfaces for people to do mashups with.
• Transform the library facility to something that encourages participation or new reasons to go to a library.
• Build mobile applications to locate books and get instant social navigation to library books on-location and online.
• Understand the changing framework, not just the the (changing) content.
• Don’t do the mistake of replicating libraries online as it is. They already did the mistake of replicating the classroom online.
• The web is not a destination, but a network of decentralized components. Harness the network properties.
• Look at QR-codes or similar cheap technologies and stamp them into every book for contextual information.
• Look into mass-customization: how to customize the library experience to each individual regarding recommendations etc.
• Understand the technological, social and economical drivers for future developments.
• Rethink the virtual visit to complement physical visits.
• Look into user-generated taxonomies (folksonomies), information visualization and new ways for “putting the same book in multiple shelves”.
• Understand contextuality provided by the web and how to tap into it from the library perspective.
• Stop watching TV and work on (the next) wikipedia.
• What augmented reality applications could libraries develop/use?
• Involve the net generation or experts from outside your own field for rethinking the justification for your existence.

Google’s mission is the same as libraries have had for centuries. It’s time to understand digital convergence in new ways.

10 years ago I started my company as my personal learning environment. Traditional schooling was inadequate to fulfill what I wanted to achieve in life. I’ve learned a lot from my customers, from the blogosphere, from the visionaries I’ve met on the road, from the books I’ve ordered from the web, from the students in my audiences and from the ability to look beyond the box (the course syllabus, the curriculum, the degree, the university, the company, the framework, you name it).

I haven’t had much of a need to subscribe to a traditional course. None have been capable of convincing me so far to join for one, other than as someone who rethinks how the whole thing is run or leads one of the participative workshops.

As a learning technology professional, I have seen a lot of online learning environments and I have to say that Robin Good has the best one I’ve seen so far from the technology perspective, the content is spot on to my current professional needs and he promises to coach me one-on-one for weeks with my pressing needs in my professional life. I also see other top colleagues like Jay Cross at Robin Good’s university, claiming to be a novice.

Today, people ask you what university you went to or what degree you have. In the past before the Average Grading Point, people questioned who was your teacher. Today on the Internet, we go back to those days and claim our teachers. They are online, and the best for me is Robin Good regarding Professional Online Publishing (POP). I will be one of the 25 who are first to join this autumn the one and only Robin Good’s University.

Taking presentations to a new level in this way is a powerful way to spread a message. See any of the viewing stats for the aforementioned videos.

Another came out recently along with the Socialnomics book, talking about social media in numbers:

Social Media Revolution

10 interestings statistics from the video:

1. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
2. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
3. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
4. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
5. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
6. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
7. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
8. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.
9. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.
10. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

Exciting times.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption [...] Twitter, however, has proved that a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular.” says Andrew Lipsman at a recent New York Times article.

What comes up over and over again in Q&A at some of my presentations is the net-gen dispute, the argument being that young people are more fluent with these social media tools due to their somewhat special relationship with technology. As a net-gen insider, I think the whole net-gen conversation regarding age as a demographic is misplaced. The question is about people who have grown up familiar with technology and those who have not.

I know a lot of retired people who are more fluent with social technologies than many of the so called net-generation. The greatest skeptics regarding the benefits of social media are among the so called “net-gen”. How’s that for an anti-thesis?

The greatest challenge will be to drive adoption of such technologies within the enterprise. In organizations, the older you are the more likely you are to hold a busy senior position and have a family, and therefore the less time you have available to spend on learning new tricks that are not urgent for your survival in day-to-day busyness.

What would be the stress point when such demography takes social media seriously within the enterprise as a new source of organizational agility and effectiveness (the stuff I’m more than convinced about)? When the competition figures out the holy grail of digital working environments combined with novel operational models (that would be, too late)?

Adults can drive the adoption of social networking sites. LinkedIn and Twitter are good examples. I’m sure there are many more examples on the consumer market. What is needed is the drive for busy adults to drive social media within the serious business of organizing day-to-day work. That would be the tipping-point. The company has always been a social network. The way how this network operates is changing due to collaborative technologies.

The site design was made by Mikko Kaipio from Dicole.

I will make some of my video recordings available through the site in the future.

Let me know what you think!

The link points at a 3D printer called RepRap that can replicate itself. Yes, it’s a printer that can print out its own design.

“[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment…”
– The front page of The Guardian, November 25, 2006.

The technology has been around for a while, but what makes the device interesting is that it costs 500 dollars to build yourself.

In the future you will go to The Pirate Bay, download a 3D model of Louis Vuitton’s latest bag and print it right out to give to your girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. The chinese factories for pirate goods will go out of business. In short term, they will switch to supplying the market with 3D scans of high-demand goods from all around the world, thus catalyzing the big switch. Stuff will flow into sweat factories, not out.

If you think The Pirate Bay is in the center of a generational shift and cultural transformation, check back again once the 3D models start flooding in. People who will be upset next will be designers, craftsmen, architects, manufacturers and those who supply the market with competitive traditional distribution channels.

Even more interesting will be the creativity of individuals who now with abundant access to virtual models of original physical designs, will create mashups unleashing iterations of cultural artefacts and cultural advancement never seen before by mankind.

In fact, the good itself is not going to be interesting anymore. A new page will turn that depicts the emergence of new behavioral patterns around objects. The mobile phone turns into a device for controlling a web of objects. The objects that we care share a history with us that has been digitally recorded, broadcasted, stored and linked with our surroundings. We will index our environment like maniac librarians.

The bottom line is that our current lifestyle of using material goods is not sustainable. We have to go for it, despite the Luddites who reject the new technology because of it’s potential short term negative consequences. The trade-off is far too great for this opportunity to be missed.

The manufacturers in the world of 3D-printers will be in the same situation where record labels are with digital filesharing or where mainframe manufacturers were with the advent of personal computers. New business models will emerge from this friction, rebuilding new avenues that will propel us right out of the galaxy – or inside our own minds and bodies as we start experimenting with bio technology.

The Pirate Bay for bionics will appear.

I would be leeching and mashing up artificial life and cyborg body extensions. If that doesn’t anger someone, then I don’t know what could. At that very moment I would be ready to upload myself to the digital planetary consciousness just to escape the political nightmare.

Go and read Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things for more.

I did a presentation about the Horizon Report findings at the International Technology in Education (ITK) conference in Hämeenlinna, Finland. NMC Director Larry Johnson was kind enough to participate virtually on stage with me. In the presentation I go through six main trends and give my own take on these:

• Within a year: Mobiles and Cloud Computing
• 2-3 years: Personal Web and Geo-Everything
• 4-5 years: Semantic-aware Appliations and Smart Objects

The slides and the video recording are available below. For english speaking readers some of the slides are in english.