Maria Popova, a curator's code for showing how you obtained your mindblowing ideas. Two unicode symbols and a bookmarklet that you download allows you to show how others have assisted you. "The Curator's Code is an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics - first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution. It's a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work."

Interesting distinction between blogging and writing articles. Kevin O'Keefe's blog on January 16, 2014 Blogging is done to engage others in a conversation by recognizing the post is one in a series on a topic. Writing an article is to get your point of view out there. Excerpt: I have always viewed blogging as all together different than writing an article. Blogging is a conversation where by listening to relevant discussion you engage those in the conversation. Social media consultant, Jayne Navvare (@jaynenavvare), made the point as well as anyone in her post today. If you want to post "articles" to the web using a blog platform, fine, but do not confuse that with blogging. Articles are static. Blogging is dynamic. Bloggers do more than just write posts. They socialize. Articles are one way. I write it. I distribute it. You read it. Think magazines, newspapers, and newsletters. Circulation and eyeballs are measures of success. Blogs engage. Blogs mix it up with readers and other bloggers. Relationships and word of mouth reputation are measures of success.

Interesting and VALUABLE links-rich how-to blog post by Wade Foster at Zapier, a distributed company, June 27, 2013 on managing remote teams. Identifies excellent resources elsewhere assembled by practitioners in remote work places. Identifies three key things: team, TOOLS (great list for work team), and processes for success. Team--hire doers, hire people you can trust, trust the people you hire, hire people who can write, hire people who are okay without a social workplace Tools--Campfire for virtual office; Sqwiggle, a persistent video chat room that takes a picture of you every 8 seconds which people can see on their computers and instant video chat; email, Trello for joint to-do list; GitHub for issues and pull requests; iDoneThis for daily digest of accomplishments--notes that "it is great for personal use as well because it can help build habits." Also Chrome profiles, LastPass Enterprise, Draft for easily versioning drafts, and Google Docs, Hello sign (for signatures without hassle of scanning, etc.), and Google Talk Processes--everyone does support on regular schedule to stay close to customers; a culture of shipping, weekly hangouts, weekly learning, monthly one on ones, culture of daily feedback

blog post by Kurt Mackey at MongoHQ, a distributed company, on working remotely and how hard it is to come up with an effective system for engaging workers. It is a work in progress. Need firewalls between personal life and work life--sound has to be managed for one thing. Mentions the blending of in-office staff and remote staff and a 'standard' for everyone to use the same collaboration tools, be available via the same channels, and produce documentation of interactions that are important to share. Has a whole section on the practical (and the tools they use to communicate) prefer async communications! Have a central work tool (Compose to record what is being produced each day); day to day communication in Hipchat, use pre-reads to meetings on a Wiki that get updated on Hackpad during the meeting, open mailing lists, Sqwiggle for face time, and Google Hangouts, too. Final recommendation is to "keep iterating" to build a remote friendly culture.

This article by Matthew Lynch in Education Week, January 8, 2014 speaks to the four ways that technology has changed K-12 education. They are 1) collaboration 2) research online 3) remote learning and 4) teacher prep. Seems that with a few wording changes, the same could be said about digital technology's impact on the workforce. Is the workforce ready?

"A comment on Joho's (Dave Weinberger) blog post--a memoir of blogging--bySuw Charman-Anderson, January 9, 2014. Excerpt: " I wonder too if my lack of blog writing is related to a lack of blog reading. My RSS reader became so clogged that I feared it, wouldn't open it, and ultimately, abandoned it. And then Twitter and now Zite arrived to provide me with random rewards for clicking and swiping, showing me stuff that I had no idea I wanted to read. Instead of following the writings of a small cadre of smart, lovely people whom I am proud to call my friends, I read random crap off the internet that some algorithm thinks I might be interested in, or that is recommended by the people I follow on Twitter. That may or may not be a good thing. We were all aware of the problems of homophily, and the random clickage does help combat that. But the problem with not following people's blogs closely is that there's no conversation anymore. My blogs used to host great conversations, and I would happily engage in fascinating discussions on other people's sites. You can't do that so easily with Twitter, and Facebook. Indeed, most of my interactions on Facebook, which are scarce as I loathe it, end up being pointless arguments with friends-of-friends who turn out to be idiots. I'd love to see a resurgence in blogging. I think, personally, I need to delete Zite from my ipad and find a good RSS reader so I can follow the blogs of those people that I really care about. Not the worthy blogs I ought to read, but the works of people who matter to me. And then I need to get back to commenting, like this, because there's nothing more encouraging than finding out that people care about what you write, that people appreciate it. And David, I really do appreciate your writing - you're as inspiring and fascinating now as you were back in 2001! "

blog post in 2005 about how difficult it was to keep up with all the blogs! "I don't want to lie any more. I don't want to feel guilty any more. So let me tell you flat out: There are too many blogs I like and too many people I like to making "keeping up" a reasonable expectation, any more than you should expect me to keep up with Pokemon characters or I should expect you to keep up with Bollywood movies. I'm not going to feel guilty any longer about my failure. I will read your blog on occasion, either because I've been thinking of you or because something reminded me of you. Maybe it'll be because you sent me an email pointing to a post you think I'll enjoy. Go ahead! I'd love to hear from you."

"Yet I can also appreciate that, with so much being written out there by so many in so many places, and so little time for reading it all, the opportunity to have one's blog be a place for important conversations has diminished. But I think blogs are still the premier means and place for documenting 'unedited' substantive original thought - new ideas, analysis, synthesis, models, and new perspectives. It's sad that much of this important thinking is now lost in the deluge of glib quotes and trivia and news of the moment, and not read because of our frantic pace of life and our endemic attention deficit disorder. But it will still be there when it's ready to be discovered. And as you say in the meantime it will continue to help us formulate and learn and articulate our knowledge and beliefs and ideas, and so equip us to be of more use to the world."

Blog post by David Truss, Pair-A_Dimes, January 4, 2011, on learning at work by professionals, i.e., teachers. Has much more good stuff to say than this excerpt but I find this useful for Information Overload. Another term I ran across lately--practical obscurity--in relation to why we are now part of NSA's scope--because costs have fallen so low to monitor so much behavior online--voice and text--that what was once unavailable without a lot of costs is now quite feasible for someone to monitor, such as NSA, Google, Facebook, etc. Excerpt: "I read a post recently by Jeff Utecht, whom you have worked with, that said this: "Today at school I answered personal e-mail, updated my Facebook status, Tweeted, looked up flights for winter break, and even read articles that didn't pertain to school. And they say we're becoming less productive at work. What really is happening is the line between our work life and our social life is becoming blurred more and more every day." and he continues: "Sure I use some of my work time to do social things, yet I get home from work after 3pm and answer work e-mails, text faculty members about a computer problem, and work on lessons and things that need to be done. So it's an even swap. I'll use some of your time, you can use some of mine.""

Once again, Jarche comes through for me. Tuesday, January 14, 2014 "The keys to motivation at work are for each person to have a sense of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. This is a network management responsibility." Could we do a play on RAMP-R-----Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose in the Studio? Another excerpt that I buy to a point--I don't think networks are the new companies but short of that, I agree with his premise: Most management practices today still focus on 20th century models, such as Henry Fayol's six functions of management [look familiar?]. forecasting planning organizing commanding coordinating controlling I heard these same functions discussed by a workplace issues consultant on the radio as recently as yesterday morning. Notice that there is no function for enhancing serendipity, or increasing innovation, or inspiring people. The core of management practice today has not changed since the days of Fayol, who died ninety years ago. "But the new reality is that networks are the new companies. The company no longer offers the stability it once did as innovative disruption comes from all corners. Economic value is getting redistributed to creative workers and then diffused through networks. Knowledge networks differ from company hierarchies. One major difference is that cooperation, not collaboration, is the optimal behaviour in a knowledge network. In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration."

This post by Bob Miglani (author of best selling book Embrace the Chaos) is the way I want to be in leading the Studio--leaning in with ideas (because we don't have many resources right now), plowing ahead (taking action), and not letting my over-analytical DNA slow me down too much (so that we get lost in the marketplace trends moving ahead of us). I especially love the one line review of his book at the end--"...shows you how to relax and enjoy the messiness of life." So theoretically, it all fits well for me. But where is the $? :-)

explanation by Diigo of its users--those who affiliate for professional as well as personal reasons--and its utility as the "best personal knowledge managment (PKM) on the market."

Iconizer.net page has great tools for working with their images.

Blog post by Euan Semple, December 30, 2013, curated by Harold Jarche. Excerpt: "It's not about marketing, or SEO, or "going viral". It is not about internal "enterprise social" or external "social media" It is not even about the platforms or tools on which you choose to write. It is much simpler and much more powerful. It is about developing our awareness, our communication skills, and our collective intelligence. It is about thinking harder and writing better. Blogging is a means by which to rediscover your voice, to learn to share your thoughts with others, and by doing so to help us all get smarter faster. "

An interesting assessment of how stage fright was picked up and reported in thousands of tweets elevating a single appearance into an epic disastrous event, and how absence from Twitter by the presenter, compounded the error. If anyone thinks that social media can be ignored, they need to read this blog post. Love the quote below from Chris Taylor about how the communications game has changed: It's Twitter, the Internet's first responder, that is primarily responsible for changing the laws of media physics. There are just too many witty things to be said in the space of 140 characters, especially with a moment as shadenfreude-filled as this. Thousands got the Bay-bashing bug, and I certainly wasn't immune. (Hey, it's not every day that a parody of that Aerosmith tune from Armageddon pops up complete in your head.)

Thanks to Kemetia Foley, we have this great article from Huff Post College that appeared today. It's written by Nathan Holic who teachers at UCF Department of Writing and Rhetoric. It's pretty funny. "I'm 33, and feel like I'm living in a generational No Man's Land between digital dependency and digital illiteracy." Closing paragraph "Still, despite how amazing it sounds to live in the cloud, the digital uncluttering has become not liberating but exhausting. When the photos are scanned and the CDs are ripped, will I then spend full weekends "uncluttering my desktop," endlessly organizing folders on my devices, trying to make the digital information ever more accessible, editing "Easter '89" to perfection, searching for the most recent digital task-list that I commended myself for having typed on my phone...but which has long since disappeared into the haze of clutter obscuring the screens of my devices?

Love this post by Seth Godin on "too long; didn't read" mentalities as we all proceed in the "checklist mode" of grazing here and there but never stopping long enough to read, understand, and make sense of things. He mentions the importance of "trusted curators" and how it is up to us to decide how to invest our time. Implications for WLS: building dashboards, prioritizing, culling, controlling the incoming flow are all important skills to master for online work. We build on old concepts--dashboard for online focus, leading online--and become trusted curators too to provoke curious second and third thoughts leading to conversions on our site. Excerpt: One option is to read incisively, curate, edit, choose your sources carefully. Limit the inbound to what's important, not what's shiny or urgent or silly. The other option is to assume that you already know what you need to know, and refuse to read anything deeply. Hide behind clever acronyms, flit from viral topic to flame war, never actually diving in. It appears that this is far more common than ever before. Here's what I've found: When I read in checklist mode, I learn almost nothing. It's easy to cherry pick the amusing or the merely short, but it's a quick thrill with very little to show for it.

Great blog post on how to approach a weak topic and change the angle into a series of related posts, each with distinct value, Copyblogger Stefanie Flaxman, January 2014.

Just a sensational list of the top learning articles, essays, slidesets of 2013 identified by Jane Hart, truly a magnificent list of resources.

Incredible post by Beth Kanter on integrating learning into nonprofits' work, January 2, 2014. Very grounded piece that links to excellent resources. References Charles Jennings' framework of adding learning to work, embedding learning in work, and extracting learning from work. Ends with these questions: How does your nonprofit integrate learning into your work? How do you as a nonprofit professional incorporate professional learning into your work? - See more at: http://www.bethkanter.org/learning-at-work/#sthash.CxcnOOYv.dpuf