Our new URL is www.nuanceintelligence.com.

See you on the other side.

Here’s the great one-liner from Google Search Guru and former Technorati CTO Kevin Marks’ blog Epeus’ epigone that sums it all up:

I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

He’s right, and it’s interesting to see this meme finally coming online. What does it mean? A viral phenomenon is one that uses its hosts to ensure its own growth. An organic one nourishes the host.

A good friend, John Siewierski, said this to me another way a few weeks ago, “think about what you are doing for your network, not what your network is doing for you.” Pretty organic, John.

“Ask not, what your country can do for you…”

From their announcement:

We believe geographic and business/organizational data will be a powerful characterization of publishers’ audiences, especially as advertisers begin to evaluate online media opportunities on a more targeted basis.

I thought the localization of advertising started in the ’97 and ’98 not ’07 and ’08, but it’s great to see the trend coming around again through another sales cycle.

In addition to talking about online reputation and Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses as a platform to support social networking and rapid development, he showed me some of the next generation graphics toys on the web (Jim was the first to tune me into Second Life, three or four years ago, where he was running an early online casino).

So, enjoy these:

1. PicLens – Firefox plug-in that provides a whole new way to surf images from lots of foto feeds, including the big photo sites, as well as Google image search and others. Lets you see entire collections (including dozens of pages of Google image search results) in one ‘photo wall’. Check this out now.
2. Photosynth – Microsoft’s newest image searching and matching technology takes a series of images of a particular area (they demonstrate with an ancient city center somewhere in Italy), and places the images in a 3D map of the area, as well as sorting by similarity, and estimating where each photo of the same location was taken from. Very cool, even if it doesn’t run on my Mac.
3. Havok – This graphics engine powers some pretty incredible online games and movie special effects. Their new physics engine provides eerily-real effects that is providing breakthrough reality for the way things work in the graphical realm.

Have a good weekend, and don’t spend it all in front of PicLens!

1. It’s run on an open WIKI server, demonstrating real trust in the community.
2. It’s got a relatively active social network attached, with good comments and lots of shared knowledge.
3. Slides are posted. I strongly recommend two based on key metrics for social network development (but search around for others):
   1. ROI for social networks. Good walk-through of the creation of a business metric to justify investment and measure return.
   2. Viral marketing performance metrics. Although set in a silly pirate metaphor, the review of a full viral marketing campaign reviews several key performance metrics that define web 2.0 campaigns

What’s the nuance? It’s another great un-sung benefit of all these groovy web 2.0 tools – the outer ring access to conferences and other curricula that provides something on the order of a 50-5 Proposition, which considers that you may get half the value of the conference by spending 5% of the time to carefully read and review the site, slides, presentations and comments. This is not to say that it will replace the conference – so much of those are about who you meet and how you connect – but it’s nice to glean key learnings from a distance.

The site is building local guides for cities around the US (to start), and will be merging them with the usual social network tools. They’re just about ready to mix-in commerce, which has the eco market quite excited. Casey told me that there are over 120 green businesses in Boulder without a storefront, and no easy way for people to locate them. He’s committed to organizing that market.

Surrounded, as we were, by the beautiful people at Boulder’s Saxy’s, Casey reported that he’s got all engines running full-ahead, and it looks like the group is hitting the green zeitgeist at just the right moment, with businesses of all sizes knocking down their doors and investors lining up in record time. They have made enormous progress with new hires, a new site launch and many milestones coming up in quick succession.

Look for Casey speaking at just about every stop on the eco.nference tour this year, opening up for Da Mayor Michael Bloomberg in NYC at the GoGreen Expo.

It’s going to be a crowded marketplace as green media brands vie for the attention of the socially green generation. Will this shade of green prevail?

1. Channel 9 is all about the conversation. Channel 9 should inspire Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice. Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation tool.

2. Be a human being. Channel 9 is a place for us to be ourselves, to share who we are, and for us to learn who our customers are.

3. Learn by listening. When our customers speak, learn from them. Don’t get defensive, don’t argue for the sake of argument. Listen and take what benefits you to heart.

4. Be smart. Think before you speak, there are some conversations which have no benefit other than to reinforce stereotypes or create negative situations.

5. Marketing has no place on Channel 9. When we spend money on Channel 9 the goal is to surprise and delight, not to promote or preach.

6. Don’t shock the system. Lasting change only happens in baby steps.

7. Know when to turn the mic off. There are some topics which will only result in problems when you discuss them. This has nothing to do with censorship, but with working within the reality of the system that exists in our world today. You will not change anything by taking on legal or financial issues, you will only shock the system, spook the passengers, and create a negative situation.

8. Don’t be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.

9. Commit to the conversation. Don’t stop listening just because you are busy. Don’t stop participating because you don’t agree with someone. Relationships are not built in a day, be in it for the long haul and we will all reap the benefits as an industry.

So, where’s the nuance? Granted, Chris and those other guys had this figured out more than a decade ago, but it’s good to see the goliath at least continuing to reinvent and evolve.   And while on one hand, it’s obviously full of folks who have drunk the Redmond cool-aid, at the same time, there seems to be some reasonable debate tucked inside a bunch of typical inter-personal blather.

The Brits, both at the Financial Times and Economist (subscription, and well worth it) allude to the possible motivation as a hefty financial bail-out for stock-owning banks, who could collectively receive up to half of the estimated $18bn offering. All papers note that MasterCard’s shares are up 400% since their May 2006 IPO.

The Economist highlights key statistics report from “Nilson Report, a trade publication, [who] estimates that by 2011 55% of transactions in America will be cashless, up from 40% in 2005.” And all papers report that over $3bn will be set aside for anti-trust and unfair pricing claims now pending in various courts.

Never mind the fact that this will be the largest IPO is US history (read about that ad-nauseam), what’s most interesting is Visa’s structure and origins.

Originally designed by Dee Hock, Visa is (was?) a unique non-stock, membership-owned institution that pioneered a collaborative form — called ‘chaordic’ by Hock — which transcended the narrow interests of each bank, and resulted in the creation of one of the world’s most venerable brands and services. Visa is one of the world’s largest decentralized organizations, and yet it issues no cards nor makes any loans (member banks do this).

After Hock left Visa he became an author (Birth of the Chaordic Age), organizational guru and hero of progressive thinkers, and while his work inspired many organizations, including the Chaordic Commons, no chaordic organization ever achieved the success of Visa.

visitors just completely overlooked the ads because they were coming to the site to read the content and didn’t give a doodle about what sat on the way top of the page. And really, when people were reading the content, the ads were too high to see and/or click on and website owners and their advertisers were not making any mula.

I think I first had this argument in 1995. Nice to know I was right (and on the losing side, IIRC).

The editors of Complexity and Social Networkers, a blog from the Institute for Quantiative Social Science and the Program on Netwoked Governance at Harvard, had begun a comprehensive search for social network analysis tools and libraries. Not having found a single wellspring, they posted their findings on Wikipedia, and called for others to help fill it in. As they explain,

Our rationale here is that no single Web editor or researcher needs to carry the burden of building and/or maintaining such a collection, but collectively this goal can be achieved with very little individual effort.
Wikipedia has an elaborated site on Social networks (the Social network analysis site is automatically redirected there). We started to expand the network analytic section by adding a table – which was moved by the community within a day to a new page now called Social Network Analysis Software that allows everyone to add a tool along with a URL, short description, unique feature, platform it runs on, price.
We hereby invite the social network community members to add their tools and/ or to edit/ fill some of the cells in the table.

I like this for three reasons:

1. It challenges the traditional ivory tower mentality in the Ivy League.
2. It uses the web 2.0 tools to help people use web 2.0 tools.
3. It encourages the kind of collaboration that creates new forms of wealth.

Now I’ll have to go figure out why so few of the tools aren’t in there, and then go add them myself.