Background

As many of you are aware, I am obsessed with the potential of enabling and integrating our digital 1/0 lives into our human emotive sides.

I don’t just want a quantified self I want a qualified self.

Giving me more numbers and graphs and charts can be helpful but providing me with more things to compete over does nothing to enhance my joy and presence with others or provide me with the tactile and unmeasurable benefits from getting a hug or whacking a table with a boomwhacker [as I recently observed when over 200 geeks gleefully demonstrated at YxYY].

We have a long way to go in how we think and design tech to enhance our lives, maybe it’s a silly and impossible goal and we shouldn’t even try. However, as someone who loves, lives and breathes tech and believes that the stuff we can’t often measure is where the human spirit lives, I think it is worth a try.

Situation

Three major events pulling me in a roller coaster of emotion.

Two weeks ago my Facebook feed become ground zero for demonstrating the psychic and emotional schism of our connected lives. My feeds where filling up with comments, conversations and reactions from three very distinct events:

• YxYY: Enthusiastic preparations by over 400 geeks and creatives as they anticipated the second year of YxYY. As one of the co-founders of YxYY, my heart swelled as I saw all the amazing projects and enthusiasm about to be unleashed over three days in Palm Springs. I was proud and excited and content.
• At the same time, the turmoil between Israel and Gaza was picking up and my friends and family in Israel were running for cover from rockets raining down on them. As I read each post, my heart sunk. I was angry, sad depressed and frustrated – feeling impotent in how to empathize from so far away with my second home and also filled with the stress and fear, anger and sadness that accompanies living in a state of war.
• World Cup – a distraction an emotional release with a beginning, middle and end to each match – cathartic and global and physical and fun. Particularly, because the matches this year demonstrated great sportsmanship between players and the best the sport has to offer the world. There was even a running joke on the day of the Brazil vs Germany debacle on how ‘Israelis are calling Brazilians to see if they are OK’.

Post YxYY the turmoil in Israel was a full fledged ground war and for every beautiful photo and post I liked and commented on from new friendships born at YxYY, there was another post on a funeral, someone called up to fight and the moral debates and toll of civilian deaths in Gaza. My world had gotten very small and very dichotomous. It was an extreme example and observation of what we all live in the midst of on a constant basis as we each deal with the mini “emotional yeahs and neighs” that fill our digital lives in a constant stream.

Experiment

So, I did the least logical thing – I decided to jump into the deep end of the pool and I downloaded the Red Alert app. [Red Alert was created for Israelis to warn them of rocket attacks. You can find plenty of stories about it around the Net]. I wanted to see if I could feel a different sort of empathy – an in the moment sense of what living under rocket threat and war feels like. Could this app – stripped of the physical boundaries it was created for impact me and how? For the past week, I have gotten all red alert notifications on my phone.

Observations

• I was stressed. At first, it was traumatic – every 30 seconds another notice – my stress level went through the roof even as I sat alone on my couch in San Francisco. What would it be like if I lived in Ashkelon and had to physically run for my life this often?
• Would an app like this be helpful to the media in this or other situations? It is always difficult to report on “non-events” if reporters not in based in Israel had Red Alert would they understand the impact without the ‘death/injury numbers?
• Can we design other apps that enable empathy and catalyze people to action in other ways?
• This experiment was also a cautionary tale. By the end of the week, I started to get a bit numb – with no real impact on my life, the alerts became an annoyance [of course part of this is the design of the app – needs more finesse – even my israeli friends had to turn it off.
• The app highlighted a need for those from afar to connect to thos e in stress. I want to be able to connect and reach out to specific friends, people – to engage them during hard times not just empathize alone on my couch

Takeaways

What does all this ‘connectedness yet oddly disconnectedness’ do to us on a regular basis – this may be an extreme moment in time for me personally, but we are all constantly managing this state of being – no wonder we often feel stressed and at odds. This is not simply about ‘Information Overload’ or ‘Getting Shit Done’ or ‘Inbox zero’ – it is about the type and nature of the information that flows passed us.

• When news and information are not just an intellectual exercise, how do we handle it?
• Are we psychically wired to deal with so much and such radical shifts in our emotive state?
• How can we build better tools to help us deal with this in positive proactive ways?
• Can we build these tools with a knowledge of not just empathy but action and emotional connection and support?

Ironically, during my experiment, I read that the Yo! app built as a joke [think of it as a global internet based “poke”] that I often made fun of as a sign of social media jumping the shark – is potentially integrating with Red Alert. Amazing. The fact that a lightweight joke app designed to ping a friend can integrate with a practical highly functional app like Red Alert so that I can send a supportive note to a friend thousands of miles away in a bomb shelter, is a good sign indeed for the future of our psychic connected selves.

In emergencies my coping mechanism is action, I am a problem solver and a doer and it helps me deal with the emotion – I need to act. This experiment had given me pause to think about an entirely new area of apps – call em – digital empathy catalyzers. These tools not only enable us to connect but perhaps to feel and act.

I am hopeful. I have no other choice.

Originally posted on my blog

[Note: This post is meant to take a look at emotional dichotomy and its impact on our digital lives, it is not a forum for political discussion. As I have stated online numerous times, I rarely post about Israel because the situation is complex and I don’t think the Net is the best place to have civil dialogue on a complex topic fraught with emotion And yes, I am conscious of the irony of this as it relates to this post].

We’re putting the show on hiatus so we can improve infrastructure and evaluate network opportunities. That’s the concise way to say we want our production process to work as well as possible, so there are minimal delays for you in getting your shows. We also want to bring the show to more people. Many thanks to all our listeners, guests, people we learn with and especially our loyal crew joining us live every week. We’ve got some great stuff coming but would also love your suggestions and anyone you think we should be talking with.

We’re excited for what’s next.

xoxo debs, kevin + heather

Why don’t boards of large companies understand the value in making something good? Why does the focus almost always shift from nurturing an innovation to profit and scale? What made Flickr so great and why did the acquisition halt this greatness so abruptly?

Aspiring #tummel nerd Michael Petruzzo makes his first cameo on the show!

How Yahoo Killed Flickr And Lost The Internet – Mat Honan

Chat Transcript & Storify

Topics include Kio’s ITP syllabus, “bro-gramming”, Zuck’s hoodie, instruments for triangulation, systems of acknowledgement and the tower of Babel that comes from an outward-focussed web.

The group makes a very important distinction that what draws most people online is connectivity – not just information – and that we are in the “nursery school” stage of development as far as building social spaces that work online.

Chat Transcript & Storify Recap

-Lukas Blakk

Lukas Blakk from Mozilla joins us for an exciting discussion about what constitutes actual community – and it’s not just sharing interests.

Lukas defines “community” – a word she finds is diluted of meaning – from her point of view: being raised in a Lesbian household, actively organizing around GBLT issues and now working with volunteer engagement at Mozilla. The question of privilege arises, as for Lukas community was defined as people who rallied around something and came out the other side together.  When joining Mozilla, she really had to find things to care about in open source like she “cared about feeding lesbian women in the woods” (rather than just Java vs. Python).

Highlights of this episode include: the illusion of meritocracies, similarities between Milliken Conference (Wealthy 1% conference which Deb just returned from) and the Michigan Women’s Music Fest, the political implications of forking some code and the end of zero-sum games in a networked world.

Growing The Company, Structuring Volunteerism: My Response To David Eave’s Community Lifecycle Audit | Lukas Blakk

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is | John Scalzi

Storify for this episode & Chat Transcript

The group rallies around the Ta-Nehisi Coates model of journalism before moving onto Alexis’ recent article, The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future. The themes of the article are discussed at length including the stagnation of software, changes in consumer expectations, and the “just grow and then we iterate or something” model.

Are start-ups simply throwing remixes of the same model at the wall to see what sticks? Are new products just attempting to enrich more Advertising Uranium by dowsing it in “social” and “local”? Why are so few companies braving Deb’s “artisinal software” model – instead selling out to giants – and just how long can people perceive the value of content as free?

Chat Transcript & Storify

Tummelvision looks back after 100 episodes! The discussion focusses on the growing value of tummeling in the world since the podcast began, illustrated by phenomena such as the Arab Spring and gigantic shifts in journalism.

What’s changed in the past few years? Kevin says that relationships are moving from static to dynamic, Heather sees emotion beginning to trump data(often not for the best), and Debs observes that people are learning to get together in a moment to solve their own problems.

The show wraps up by looking five years into the future: what seemingly small, incremental changes happening now will be looked back on as the next major shift?

Storify & Chat Transcript

Quoting William Morris, Paul Ford explains that when he wants to learn something he goes out and finds the appropriate software. In the limits of the software you might find a community.

Twelve year olds are now saying Facebook is for old people and Heather makes a 12-year-old’s face at the thought of Facebook buying Instagram. The group discusses Instagram’s future within the walls of Facebook. Will it get dragged into the Menlo Park swamp or will it go the way of Youtube?  An almost purely mobile photo app with few features, Instagram is applauded as a less judgmental environment for people who don’t know how to shoot real photographs.

Spontaneity ensues as Andy Baio stops by.  He is the founder of Upcoming.org, a former CTO of Kickstarter.com, and author of the Waxy.org blog. Andy is a less hopeful and thinks Instagram could very well get sawed into pieces. The conversation turns to “The New Aesthetics” – a phenomenon that Andy says smells like machine vision. Paul Ford weighs in on the topic by way of Aaron Cope and Heather by way of Bruce Sterlings’ closing talk at SXSW.

Here is a link to the entire chat transcript and a highlight reel of the show via Storify!

Show links:

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out | Paul Ford | New York Magazine

Adobe Photoshop File Formats Specification | Adobe

What The Tech Pundits Don’t Get About Facebook’s $1B Instagram Deal | Cliff Kuang | FastCoDesign

Heather’s Instagram reaction to Facebook’s acquisition

Grab Instagrams with GramGrab

Reaction Pictures & Emoticons | MyFaceWhen

Wikipedia list of Acquisitions by Facebook

Facebook is for Old People | Patrick Moorehead | Techpinions

Instagram’s Buyout: How Does It Measure Up? | Andy Baio | Waxy.org (Wired)

An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Bruce Sterling | Wired

Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | Rev Dan Cat

The New Aesthetic | James Bridle

the new aesthetic | Aaron Straup Cope SXSW 2012

Bruce Sterlings closing talk of SXSW 2012

Full chat transcript available here.

Here’s the chat transcript in full

Some related links below:

SXSW 2012:  A decidedly different show – PR attendance up a whopping 30%

Mike Daisey vs Journalism: Ethan Zuckerman, Director of MIT Center for Civic Media [Tummelvision guest Episode 71]on the Mike Daisey Apple in China media vs journalism vs truth kerfuffle

Sexism in tech – yes, that topic again. Where we are “shocked, shocked to find sexism in tech”. Charles Arthur  of The Guardian used storify to brilliantly summarize the latest uproar

It’s a subtitle almost as big as the Internet itself but it reflects how little concise vocabulary we have (“tummel” anyone?) to reflect the changing reality of the way we’re operating in a more networked world. Often David’s work is explaining things that are realities that any person who is “of the web” or really lives with this midset and trust level knows intrinsically.

On some level the Net itself may be doing the same thing for a reality that was always there: everything connected and flowing… all the intelligence you could ever need just right there outside you, but something we weren’t as aware of in the left-brain rational era and culture until we built something that made us *think* about this as we made it.

David has all kinds of impressive formal affiliations and qualifications, like being a Senior Researcher at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, a Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and being a guy who got a PhD in philosophy and who wrote jokes for a Woody Allen comic strip.  But what’s more impressive to me is that he doesn’t just noodle around abstractly about how life is meaningful, but lives in the moment as an affable guy who cares about connecting and does just that.David’s first book The Cluetrain Manifesto was written with a few other savvy cohorts in 2000 (inc. TummelVision 42 guest Doc Searls) and put into clear language and awareness outside the smallish world of dedicated netizens the way that sharing and conversations work and the way the Net made these things the new picks and shovels of business and any functioning institutional infrastructure.

Links discussed in this episode:

• Too Big to Know
• How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet – Douglas Adams in 1999
• It’s Not Whether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For? – John Battelle’s Search Blog
• SOPA Boycotts and the False Ideals of the Web – Jaron Lanier at NYTimes.com
• If Google predicts your future, will it be a cliché? – Kevin Marks

With this is mind, we invited Amy Muller (@amygsfn) to be this week’s Tummelvision guest.  Amy is what we call a natural Tummler. Connecting people and companies is pretty much akin to breathing for her.  In her current incarnation, Amy is co-founder of Get Satisfaction where she helps to lead the charge of building relationships with customers through Community. She also trains and educates those same customers on how to effectively grow and manage their own customer communities. She has been in the trenches and understands that ‘designing for community” is not just about launching a facebook page or twitter account – it’s an attitude.  Just take a look at the groundbreaking Company Customer Pact and you know that thriving in a networked world is territory she understands.

We specifically send a shout out to the world of hardworking folks known as community managers so we can start building some conversational bridges that broaden and deepen the discussion around catalyzing and connecting people in a networked world.

If you’re trying to understand how to work in a more fluid economy, how your life and work integrate healthily and how the economy itself will shift as growth comes more and more from creativity, Willo O’Brien is a woman worth listening to. Oh, and if you want to get the fluid process of living with social media without all the slimy sensation that comes from self-professed gurus, please listen.

Notes and Links:

• Christopher Alexander on A Pattern Language
• Deanna Zandt: “we walk in many worlds and belong to none“
• Creative Generalist
• Everything is Miscellaneous
• Prototype theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin and Susan Squier
• Dorian Taylor on “Moving Society Past Information Hegemony“
• The Tyranny of Structureless
• Kevin Marks: “taxonomies are a hangover from the physical world“
• Kavin Marks: “says @doriantaylor ‘so I’m working with a directed graph’ ‘you mean a tree?’ ‘no I mean a graph’“
• Kevin Marks: “says @randomdeanna “privilege is a headache that you don’t know you don’t have” @heathr Like having an Apple experience, not Windows“
• Heather Gold: “I just asked: how much of privilege is only knowing one taxonomy?“
• Heather Gold: “‘Real communities are there before you actually need them.’ -@debs #tummel (you can’t parachute in and have ppl just respond)“
• David Graeber “On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet“
• Kevin Marks on “Emergent Aristocracy“
• Tony Comstock on “Climax Ecology: Learning to See the Forest for the Trees“
• Feministe: Steven Greenstreet proves he’s definitely not a misogynist by making rape jokes
• CyborgCamp2010-SallyApplin | Strange Love Live (Talk Show) on blip.tv

Be sure to check out TummelVision sponsor Hover for all your domain name needs. Use promo code “tummel” for a ten percent discount!

If you need to register or transfer domain names, be sure to visit our wonderful sponsor Hover. Use the promo code “tummel” and receive 10% off!

Mark joined us from Australia where he teaches at the University of Sydney’s Digital Cultures Program. He is at work on a book project entitled The Next Billion Seconds and blogs at The Human Network

Be sure to try out TummelVision’s wonderful new sponsor: Hover

Links and Comments from this episode:

• Deb Schultz comments in the documentary MacHeads

• Matt Bai on “What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don’t” in the New York Times

• Andy Warhol’s Meeting With Steve Jobs

• Amazing true tales of Steve Jobs and Apple at Folklore.org

• The Osborne effect

• Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies – The Onion

• MacWorld Boston 1997 – Steve Jobs returns – Bill Gates appeares on-screen

• Women of Apple & Working With Steve Jobs

• An encounter with one of the last of the original tummlers, Fyvush Finkel

• Ada Lovelace Day

And remember to visit Hover for all your web domain needs!

Notes & Links

• Bower Lab
• Numedeon, Inc.
• Heather: “Whyville is 1st site we’ve heard of that allows avatar changes in context response: taping -bullies get avatars duct taped“
• The view from Salesforce where Kevin, Deb, and Heather broadcast together for the first time in ages.

Got To Shake It Up Now w/Allee Willis – Tummelvision Ep. 5 from heather gold on Vimeo.

Notes & Links

• Culture Kitchen SF

• Building a Hacker Culture in Uruguay – OSCON 2011

• Scotland Yard considered shutting down Twitter – Telegraph

• Paul Adam’s news-making slide deck – The Real Life Social Network

• Heather, Kevin, and Deb at SXSW 2012 – Social Media Influence: We Call Bullshit

• Cooking – Stack Exchange

• LinkedIn map of Kevin Marks’s professional network

• Kevin on “Tags and cognitive load”

Replay the whole back channel discussion via CoverItLive here.

Follow the discussion that unfolded during the recording at CoveritLive.

Dan Gillmor’s current book project is Mediactive and you can find him on Google+.

As you listen to this episode of TummelVision, follow the chat transcript from CoveritLive.

Click here to replay the live chat.

Click here to replay the live chat.

Click here to replay the live chat.

Click here to replay the live chat.

Storified notes from the conversation are here.

Notes and Notes:

• Tantek’s book: HTML5 Now: A Step-by-Step Video Tutorial for Getting Started Today
• New York Times editor Bill Keller on Twitter
• NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted: Jill Abramson took six months off as Times managing editor to learn digital http://nyti.ms/denx5J She returned in five: http://bit.ly/aafNMx
• HuffPo: Bill Keller To Be Replaced By Jill Abramson As ‘New York Times’ Executive Editor
• Jaron Lanier and his book You are Not a Gadget
• YouTube Now Lets You License Videos Under Creative Commons (Remixers, Rejoice)
• One example of a “social graph” (that is, Tantek’s)
• IndieWebCamp
• About Microformats
• The Microformats crew on “how to agree on a standard“
• An example of a Microformats-based search result: http://lockerz.com/s/107152515
• Eli Pariser on The Filter Bubble
• Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s “Schema.org“
• More about RDF: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
• Cory Doctorow on “metacrap“
• Clay Shirky on The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
• @debs: via @t “the way you make standards works is not through fiat but through community – you need agreement across silos”
• Check out the TummelVision itunes page: subscribe, download, review!

As you listen, you can replay the fascinating conversation from our live chat room here at CoveritLive.

This week on TummelVision, Eli joins Heather Gold, Kevin Marks, and Deb Schultz to talk about his book, the governance of the Internet, and online culture.

News and Notes:

• Watch Eli Pariser’s TED talk about the Filter Bubble
• Kevin Marks: “Call off the Search“
• David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction“
• Louis Gray’s blog post: “Why The Filter Bubble Is No Bubble and It’s Not Bad Either“
• Kevin Marks: “There are no influencers. There are only ways of looking at people as influencers.”
• October 20 in New York: Contact Summit 2011: The Evolution Will Be Social
• Mathew Ingram at GigaOm: “Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough?“

As you listen, you can replay the fascinating conversation from our live chat room here at CoveritLive.

News and Notes:

• Kevin Marks has dubbed Deb Schultz a “knowledge bricoleur“
• Video of Kevin’s Ignite talk at Google i/o
• How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet – Douglas Adams writing in 1999
• Tyler Cowen’s new book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
• Films by writer and chat room regular Tony Comstock
• Good Manners in the Age of Wikileaks – Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books
• Eli Pariser’s TED talk on the internet’s “filter bubble”

As you listen, you can replay the fascinating conversation from our live chat room here at CoveritLive.

News and Notes:

• M.I.T. Media Lab Names a New Director – New York Times
• New Director of MIT Media Lab Talks of Encouraging Openness – Chronicle of Higher Education
• Peter Thiel Believes the Future Belongs to College Dropouts – The Atlantic
• A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space – Danah Boyd at Zephoria.org
• Bogus Infringement Takedowns And The Danger Of Relying On Third Party Services With No Backbone – Techdirt
• Zephoria Inc.: About to find out how social media really works – Suw Charman-Anderson
• Finding And Buying A Domain Name – Fred Wilson at AVC.com
• Invaders from Mars – Charlie Stross
• Books by Stross at Amazon
• Manifesto: I Am Not a Brand – Maureen Johnson
• Mark’s page at Empire Avenue (“Buy and sell your friends and own anyone on the social web!”)
• Klout is a Good Start But We Need More Ingredients for an Influencer Recipe – Mark Krynsky at Lifestream Blog

Some links and notes related to the X Prize Foundation and other aspects of Mark Krynsky’s work:

• Mark manages the X PRIZE Foundation websites & services.
• A collection of web services used at X PRIZE
• He has been writing about Lifestreaming for over 4 years, and he is currently focusing on social content readers and personal activity data (Lifelogging & Quantified Self)
• The Autonomous Auto X PRIZE
• Gold Rush 2.0: A Case Study of the GoldCorp Challenge – A.C. Preston
• The X Prize Visioneering Workshop

As you listen, you can replay the fascinating conversation from our live chat room here at CoveritLive.

Heather Gold writes that Andy Carvin may be the most “successful” tummler on the web:

We’ve wanted to have Andy on for some time. I got to know him a while back and noticed how involved he was in the tech community , how open and vulnerable he was on twitter about his own life and things he’s personally coped with and how much he seemed to commit to crisis camps, in which web and IT folks get together and hack on problems to help an ongoing humanitarian crisis, such as the recent earthquake in Japan.

Andy’s commitment and knowledge about the web, community and human rights all converged into a really critical moment for the web on twitter at the end of 2010 as revolution began bubbling in Tunisia. Andy tummeled the hell out of what was going on there on the ground. He then became a key point on the web and for western journalism (possibly beyond the west too, but in the spirit of Andy’s work, we could not verify this so we’re not asserting it). Andy connected first person sources, organizers, social media participants, journalists and many regular folks around the world who just became all of these things as the world was astonished by the organizing and democratic movements that swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In doing so, Andy showed by example, how to create community, connect people, verify and ask for verification about news. And rather than just being a digital strategist and community advisor at NPR, he now seems to be a journalist and a story as the web, revolution and tummelling shift what all those things mean.

Enjoy our conversation with Andy!

News and Notes

• The Huffington Pose: Using the seductive and tantalizing tricks of a modern-day courtesan, the new media mogul puts a brave new world under her spell – Hephzibah Anderson in ADWEEK
• Here Comes Everybody – Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen – Kevin Marks at Epeus’ epigone
• The Human Blog – 2006 profile of Arianna Huffington by Emily Nussbaum in New York magazine
• Conversation is the New Attention – Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney at A List Apart
• The “Donahue” app – “Ideas and Experiments in the Art of Presenting”
• Heather Gold on Unpresenting
• My Sarah Jane: Remembering Elisabeth Sladen – Tor.com

At 18:08 in this episode, we starting diving deep into Andy Carvin’s work. Here are some links and stories related to his global tummelling:

• We highly recommend you check out the Chirpstory transcript of twitter conversation during the recording of this episode.
• Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage – Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc)
• Report: “Digital Natives” a Myth – Suw Charman-Anderson at ComputerWeekly.com
• Marshall Kirkpatrick on Apple, Google and other socially awkward companies – TummelVision Ep. 33, Sept. 2010

While you listen, you can follow the smart comments from our lively chat room by replaying the CoveritLive discussion.

If you’re interested in hearing more conversation with Andy, check out the supplemental discussion in episode “62.5.”

cc 2.0 by somethingstartedcrazy

Here’s a piece producer Andrew brought to our attention about Digital Nomads. It’s becoming increasingly common for web folk to travel as they work.

My life was totally like this on the road when I did #<3trip in the fall.
Sean Bonner who writes for boing boing lives like this and made its connection to the rise of minimalism really nicely. Staying in motion or moving with emergent impulse is an embrace of fluidity. This means you are working from the moment which is key to making agile development (software) and lean start ups (businesses) work and tummeling and UnPresenting as well. You can’t create conditions for engaging conversation or action if you do not embrace fluidity.

See also: gender as a textbox on Diaspora discussed in TV 45 with Willow Witte and Sarah Dopp

News and Notes

• The Twitter pile-on – as aggregated by Techmeme
• A sense of bewronging – Doc Searls
• Nobodies: The New Somebodies – Josh McHugh at Forbes.com
• In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives – a new book by Steven Levy
• Jane! Stop This Crazy Thing! – Clay and Susan Griffith on “The Jetsons” and dystopia at Tor.com
• The Tragic Death of the Flip – David Pogue at The New York Times

While you listen, you can follow the smart comments from our lively chat room by replaying the CoveritLive discussion.

If you’re interested in hearing more of Courtney’s fascinating insights, check out the supplemental discussion in episode “60.5.”

Searching for words to describe Silona’s tummelling skills, Kevin Marks says: “she founded the League of Technical Voters, Citability.org, she’s been the ACLU and EFF liaison to Texas Republicans, and she manages to make a party for 1200 people at SXSW feel like an intimate gathering of friends.”

Enjoy this conversation with the godfather of online tummlers!

For me, the point of 20,000 web geeks squishing into a few blocks of downtown Austin for a week is to hugely increase the chances of having interesting conversations with old friends, and making new ones.

It’s the Peer Group and a Stiff Drink principle made manifest. If you want to understand it, read Laura Fitton‘s excellent introduction post.

If you want to find us, here are our speaking sessions (and those of our guests), and the one’s they’re attending or tracking.

As Laura says, keep your eyes open as we’ll be around plenty of other places too.

Juliette and the gang offered some practical tummelling tips, discussed collaboration across disciplines, leaderless revolution, and the social dynamics Dutch schoolchildren (really).

Check out Juliette’s recent  discussion on the impact of the social web on the Middle-East revolution[s] with Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov on BBC’s WHYS blog. Bonus: She is a fellow Canadian along with Heather.

As part of their reporting on recent events in the Middle East last week, NPR ran a story called Internet Freedom and the US State Department. The story is an interview with Alec Ross, co-founder of nonprofit technology provider One Economy and now Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While dodging hard questions about US companies selling restrictive or invasive technologies to repressive regimes, Mr. Ross made a statement that jumped out at me from my car stereo:

“[T]echnology itself is value-neutral. It depends on how a government chooses to use these technologies.”

I believe this is an unproductive, misguided, and all too common way of thinking about technology.

The rest of this essential post.

Molly joins Deb Schultz and Kevin Marks to discuss the implications of IBM’s Watson winning jeopardy, the hidden links between architecture and interface design, and whether “shipping code” is the only measure for creating value.

A few links we discussed in this episode:

Molly’s work in her own words

“I’m writing about interactivity and its origins in architecture — human-computer interaction in architecture and urbanism. Right now, I’m focusing on Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab. He was trained as an architect and then founded the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1968 (which later became the Media Lab in the 1980s). He tried to apply big ideas of artificial intelligence to architecture and urban planning. Think of Watson winning on Jeopardy — now imagine a Watson that could design cities and buildings in a close relationship with a person. That’s what Negroponte had in mind in the 60s and 70s. Obviously, the technology simply wasn’t advanced enough to do it — but the thinking was provocative and really interesting.

The interesting thing to me is that figures like Negroponte, Christopher Alexander (who wrote A Pattern Language) and Richard Saul Wurman (who coined the term “information architecture and founded the TED conference) are all architects by training who had a major impact on our digital worlds. Alexander’s idea about patterns were important for object-oriented programming languages, not to mention for game and interface design. Wurman is one of the godfathers of contemporary information architecture. I wonder why these architects didn’t fit well into the field of architecture but mesh so well with the ways we design today for interactivity.

Outside of my academic work, I’m also interested in mobility, mobile phones and future-casting research. I’ve spent a summer in India researching how people share mobile phones — and as we look at sustainable ways of using objects, sharing gets to be important. I’m working on an amazing project with the Institute for the Future that I can’t talk about… I’ve looked at how friendship is changing in China and England thanks to social networking sites.”

Paul on Twitter: @ftrain

Quote of the Week: “There is a new role for individuals in the web who serve as ‘antennas’ who collect and feed back to the crowd” – Paul Ford

More links and comments from this episode:

• Danah Boyd on Orkut and flag-waving
• Egyptian Google executive Wael Ghonim’s electrifying interview
• UK Open Rights Group pledge conversation
• Cory Doctorow responds to Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion – We need a serious critique of net activism
• Douglas Rushkoff says “we’d write for free for Arianna, but not AOL” – Huffington Post and AOL: the end of Web 2.0
• The leaked AOL “master plan” memo – The AOL Way
• Farhad Manjoo in Slate echoes Paul Ford’s doubts about the Huffington Post business model – HuffPo’s Achilles’ Heel
• Paul Ford’s instantly influential post that pegged “Why Wasn’t I Consulted” as the fundamental question of the web – The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
• Paul says The Awl looks like a blog, but it is actually an important magazine about culture on the web [not that blogs aren’t important]
• Readability, an incredibly useful tool with a new model for rewarding producers of great writing
• See also Longreads, Arts & Letters Daily, and the collective highlights of Instapaper
• Kevin Marks recommends Among Others by Jo Walton to “understand how books can love you back”
• Paul Ford’s entertaining and informative Ftrain FAQ

Umair is an old pal of the tummel-crew. Four years ago when I first met Umair  we both had a meeting of the minds on the fundamental shifts impacting business and culture in a networked world.  Our major rant at the time was that this is much bigger than new technology and a new distribution channel.  People were missing the point that social software and the social web are changing the rules – they are empowering individuals and groups and slicing into old economic models. This still holds true today.  Most businesses are still trying to slam the proverbial square peg in a worn out old round hole while missing the fact that the hole is not round anymore and the peg – well it is now comprised of lots of little pegs [ok -done beating a dead metaphor].

Umair  has been shaking things up with his great blog over at HBR and has just published his new book The New Capitalist Manifesto where he lays out many of these fundamental changes. We are proud that Tummeling fits right into the midst of it all.   Please join us this Thursday for our live chat and podcast where we discuss Tummeling Capitalism – two words that many people might think are at odds with each other when in reality they go together like peanut butter and chocolate!

Brian on Twitter: @zisk @sfmusictech @futureofmoney

Quote of the Week: “If you don’t like what someone says it’s your responsibility to not let them drive you nuts” -Brian Zisk

More links and comments from this episode:

• Paul Kedrosky on how human curators are beating search by algorithm – Curation is the New Search is the New Curation
• @debs: “So, a tummler is like a business development person who doesn’t get paid?”
• The original music and tech tummeling space – The Pho List
• Tantek Çelik‘s self-hosting with replication approach in Falcon – On Owning Your Data
• The suddenly-popular service Quora takes a clumsy approach to regulating their community – Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality
• Principles for community health cited by Brian: “Tools not rules,” “own your words”
• The Well – an exemplary online community – sample thread mentioned by Kevin: Topic 400: State of the World 2011: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky
• Twitter blocking as a “bozo filter” – Derek Powazek: Press the Magic Button and Dave Winer: Why you got blocked

He even started a blog about Tummeling called Everything in Moderation 8 years ago.

“Every time I post to a social tool I feel like I’m losing the stitches of my life into a vortex” -Tara Hunt

We’re grateful for the work of so many of our guests and community who are doing great work to make the web and the people and places in their lives more connected and centered around human needs.

In lieu of a live episode this evening, please enjoy the embedded video below, a classic TummelVision episode with Zoe Keating.  Tara Hunt will join us on December 16th.

Join us live again beginning next week December 2nd with Stowe Boyd. We have a fantastic live chat with some of the more phenomenal minds and wits and we really encourage you to join us live for shows which always include unpredictable, fun pre- and post-show conversations.

Many thanks for their help in the past year to TWIT.tv and Leo Laporte for launching TummelVision, Squarespace for NY studio support, Rob Blatt and Mike Vardy for production help and our former listener now producer Andrew Hazlett.

I find it kind of funny and I find it kind of sad w/Zoe Keating – Ep 13 Tummelvision from heather gold on Vimeo.

Called “a one woman Dickens” by Laurie Anderson, Heather’s work encompasses scores of characters in novelistic performances (see, for example, videos from her piece “As the Globe Warms“).

The TummelVision gang visits with an old friend, Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Some of the ideas, stories, and links mentioned in this episode:

The new “social web browser” RockMelt

Novelist Zadie Smith critiques social networks in the New York Review of Books

Intelligent responses to Zadie Smith from Alexis Madrigal and Ross Douthat

Doc on Walt Whitman

Randy Farmer on why “The Cake is a Lie” – Reputation, Facebook Apps, and “Consent” User Interfaces

Doc on the “Data Bubble”

The Wall Street Journal series on web privacy “What They Know”

A call for a new “Consumer Bill of Rights”

The Vendor Relationship Management Project wiki

Kevin Kelly on the Internet as an enormous copy machine

On the meaning of “trust” in digital parlance.

Be sure to follow Doc Searls on twitter and via his myriad projects.

Doc Searls

On Thursday, November 11, the TummelVision crew welcomes a special guest star, someone who’s worked on the web for a longtime as a leading advocate for customers advocating for themselves Doc Searls.

If you have a question for Doc, or suggestion for topics you’d like to hear discussed, please leave a comment below, tweet @TummelVision or #tummel, or email us at tummlers [at] gmail.com.

Please also join us for the live audio stream of this episode at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on Thursday at Tummelvision.tv/Live.  During these broadcasts (and “after parties”), be sure to check out our always-lively chat room.

As one of the authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls has been a tireless advocate for many of the ideals cherished by the Tummlers.  Among many other current activities, he runs Project VRM as a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. Doc wants tools and platforms to allow people manage the way vendors (companies that sell you stuff and services) have relationships with them.

Doc’s very committed to a more humanized world, so how does tummeling fit into his vision for VRM? At what point do tummlers manage the relationship between customers and the company and when do business recognize they need tummelers to manage the company in a networked environment? How will the new VRM technologies work for real people doing this work? Or was the Cluetrain Manifesto a pipedream and a wish that peopel working for companies treat people as people?

 Doc’s perspective is a rare blend of seasoned wisdom and up-to-the-minute expertise.  We hope you’ll join us for this “very special episode” of TummelVision.

The people in authority who make the rules interfere with the people who know how to do the job and are in direct contact with the situation. The people who make the rules know nothing about the work they’re interfering with.

-Kevin Carson, Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies

Kevin’s post give me food for thought. It’s my preference not to abstract the hierarchy / network thing into information but view it as people problems or challenges. Tummeling is a kind of human self-networking that happens even within hierarchies. Many corporations function because there are individuals who take it upon themselves to make connections and bring people together across “silos” (man I hate that word). Sometimes it’s an admin assistant or project manager or someone with low “authority status” (something else Carson’s post critiques, the mistake hierarchy managers make when they look to what they see as authority rather than actual experience).

What’s most important to me about what Carson refers to as “people who know how to do the work” is not their abstract knowledge but what is experiential. Experience happens in the present. It’s where all real authority and creativity emerges.

The intersection of our human selves and tech were popping up in many conversations and many sessions throughout the weekend.  We are definitely at a unique moment – where the once binary web is just starting to recognize the need to evolve into a more organic entity that better reflects who we are and how we behave – a more reflective  representation of our offline selves.  Let’s face it, we take ourselves with us wherever we are.  In one of the sessions led by Brady Forrest we discussed the need for Social Bots – sounds scary – but really it could potentially be about making us smarter about ourselves and our interactions – these bots could help us maintain our social relationships across many groups, sites, and tribes.  They could even be a personal data stream to report back to me analytics about my life in meaningful ways.  But therein lies the rub – as soon as we start heading down the “manage my life” track – it starts getting complex very quickly.  We  need to ensure that in our effort to create a more open web we provide for the likelihood of ever changing connections and the ability to set permissions and identity as we choose.

As both Elizabeth Churchill [Ep 7 Guest] and Shelly Farnham pointed out, not all of us want 100% transparency all the time.  This leads us into many complex and complicated issues of privacy, identity, control, permissions etc.  We are seeing them played out daily – everywhere – and though computers can do a better job of helping us filter and manage some of these complexities it will ultimately be up to us – the humans and the Tummlers to make it all work seamlessly and organically.  The human brain and heart – are still the best at managing the nuances of our social selves.

The 3 of us were actually in a room together to tummel the first Crowd Conference: a conference about crowdsourcing work.

Huffduff It [what?]

Listen and subscribe on iTunes.

Huffduff It [what?]

[Technical note: Even though Jyri and Kevin helped make the Internet work, they still had some technical problems recording this episode. Unfortunately the audio is not up to our usual standards. We apologise for that and think the quality of the conversation makes this worthwhile listening. We’ll have Jyri back for another chat at studio quality but in the meantime, please listen to some great insights about social media.]

You can read his insightful commentary at the Huffington Post and dip into his interesting twitter stream @magnify.

Joshua Fouts and Rita King run Dancing Ink Productions and study diplomacy and cultural relations in virtual worlds. We discussed their recent project on understanding Islam in depth as well as the recent Tea Party candidate victories and the organizational approach of the Tea Party.

We’ll be back next week!

Marshall is widely known as “The Lady Gaga of Tech” (according to Heather), but he also serves as Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb.

Some links, concepts, and comments mentioned in this episode:

Marshall on the startup social network based on open standards [Only Burning Man Stands Between Diaspora, the Open Source Facebook, and Its Public Launch]

Kara Swisher on Apple’s Facebook problems [Facebook Blocked API Access to Ping After Failure to Strike Agreement, So Apple Removed Feature After Launch]

Kevin Marks on Apple’s move into social [Welcome Apple, seriously]

Marshall recommends the new social search tool nsyght.com as an example of a “tummelly” tool.

The gang also talked about the new twitter-based event tracker Lanyrd and other social tools for the conferencing life (including Pathable and Plancast).

Hosts: Kevin Marks, Deb Schultz, and Heather Gold

Some links, concepts, and comments mentioned in this episode:

Jay’s legendary 2006 post [The People Formerly Known as the Audience]

Another one of Jay’s big hits [He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User]

Sarah Palin as a “media virus” [per Douglas Rushkoff’s concept]

The Daily Beast on Rachel Maddow feeling compelled to cover the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. [Rachel’s Accidental War]

Dan Pink‘s talk animated by RSA (who doesn’t seem to give the illustrator’s name, sorry). This is an evidence research-based translation of some of the basic premises we focus on in TummelVision: that we are motivated *by each other.* That we are not algorithms. The autonomy and mastery that Dan Pink is talking about, in my opinion, is what let’s someone know they are there and not merely a substitutie for a machine. Independence lets you feel choice and mastery gives you feedback and a sense of competence. But the best use of all these skills, the underlying motivator of why they are so rewarding is because they allow you to find ways to meaningfully connect with others and share usefulness and work for others.

In spiritual language that’s called service. Except our economy is now called that too. It’s the intent that’s not always the same. But as this slow thinking and analysis (as in Dan Pink’s talk) eventually moves forward it is slowly proved to people (aka the mostly white algorithm-lovin dudes running western business) that *feels* good is also effective.

-heather

For Xenophrenia and everyone who’s asked about our recent session at SuperNova. Thanks to Kevin Werbach for having us.

This week you can relive our episode that featured Allee Willis.  Check it out here at our regular time (Thursdays at 5 pm PST/8 pm EST).

See you next week!

Zing moments:

Heather bringing in Arthur Miller’s classic line from Death of A Salesman – “A man is not a piece of fruit.”

Debs comment that we “don’t want to live in a world where twitter becomes the form letter of yesterday.”

Brynn summarized the discussion at her blog with much more elegance than any show notes could could capture.

Thanks to Johnny Goldstein check out his stuff at Envizualize

We tend to underestimate the amount of effort needed to coordinate with other people. In one academic experiment, a team of students was asked to build a giant Lego man as quickly as possible. To save time, the team members split up their work. One person would craft an arm, another would build the torso, and so forth. (At least one person, of course, was charged with tweeting compulsively about what the others were doing.)

Often, the parts were carefully designed, yet they didn’t quite fit together properly, like a Lego Heidi Montag. The problem was that nobody was paying attention to the integration. The researchers found that the teams were consistently better at specializing than they were at coordinating.

The skills required for coordination and collaboration are indeed the skills of the Tummler!  Now to discuss the HOW – the how is to reward and ensure that the role of the Tummler is indeed recognized, encouraged and rewarded.

Our argument to avoid the homophily that Zuckerman discusses ? Tummlers, of course!

How interactions on the web are changing
The next stage of the web won’t have destinations, it will be a distributed network of content and people that will get reassembled depending on context and relationships. The increase in people interactions on the web will mean that building and managing communities will be important for responding to customer suggestions, queries, and complaints. Communities will need to be embedded in consumer experiences and not built at a new destination.

Quote from –Paul Adams, UX Researcher at Google – the tummler conclusion is mine.