mrmerlot.com

What motivates you? Dan Pink knows and this video will blow your mind!

mrmerlot — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:17:10 +0000

Dan Pink, author of such awesome books as A Whole New Mind and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, released his latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us in which he lays out research about how the modern knowledge worker is motivated. Countering traditional models that emphasize compensation and bonus structures, Pink argues that as long as someone is getting paid fairly, what truly “drives” them to produce more or better are three things:

Autonomy: To have control over my work.
Mastery: To get better at my work.
Purpose: To be part of something bigger.

While the book itself still rests comfortably on my bookshelf (along with scores of other to-read brethren), I found two videos in which Pink outlines the gist of his findings. The first is a TED conference talk in which he talks in his characteristically engaging and animated style. (Read more after the jump)

The second video, however, could be even more insightful. In it, you hear Pink’s soundtrack while watching a very talented artist/cartoonist depict the elements of Pink’s talk visually. It’s mesmerizing and I’ve gone back to watch it a few times. It was produced by a company called RSA which hosts it on their YouTube channel. I’ve bookmarked a few of their other videos to watch, too, and will likely post additional blogs featuring the ones I find most thought-provoking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The best systems are simple [TED video]

mrmerlot — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:00:51 +0000

Simplicity is something we desperately yearn for in areas from data visualization to technology. Yet these very areas often stray into more complex waters, becoming less usable the further they go. George Whitesides, who has a background in chemistry and various other sciences, seems uniquely qualified to help us find a definition of “simplicity” in this TED talk.

If you don’t have 18 minutes to spare, then skip to the 7:30 mark and watch until about 15:30. Whitesides explains how an ideas as simple as a wall switch was used to create the transistor. Many transistors put together created the integrated circuit. Many integrated circuits helped create the computer chip which ultimately evolved into what we know as the Internet and cell phones. Which means a concept as simple as a wall switch was built upon to allow people in the most remote areas of the world to have access to people and information around the globe at their fingertips.

Improve Firefox’s spell check feature

mrmerlot — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:00:52 +0000

One of my favorite features in Firefox is the built-in spell checker. Two recent tips I learned are worth noting to improve the power of this feature.

Change the way misspelled words appear.

The default red squiggly underline for misspelled words is often too subtle for me. So I really like this tip, courtesy of downloadsquad. To change the indicator to something more obvious like a solid double-underline or

Type about:config in the Firefox address bar. If it pops up an alert, tell it that you know what you’re doing and proceed.
Search for ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. If you find anything, skip to step 4. If your system is like mine, you found nothing. That means you have to add this configuration value. Right-click any where in the whitespace of the window and select New > Integer.
Enter ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle to create a setting by this name.
Set the value of this setting to one of several options: 0 for no highlighting, 1 for a dotted line, 2 for long dots, 3 for a single straight line, 4 for a double underline, and 5 for a squiggly line (the default).

This setting doesn’t require restarting Firefox. It’s effective immediately, so open another tab and test each style to see what looks best.

Remove mistakenly added words from the Firefox dictionary.

I frequently customize the Firefox dictionary by adding new words that I know are spelled correctly but aren’t in the default word list. This is as easy as right-clicking on a word flagged as misspelled and choosing “Add to Dictionary.” Unfortunately, sometimes I do this too quickly and add a word I shouldn’t have. Thankfully, Lifehacker published instructions on how to remove misspelled words from your Firefox dictionary:

Open your application data folder. On XP or Vista, go to your Start menu and hit Run (or just press Windows-R) and paste in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles; on your Mac, navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles.
Find your profile folder, which by default should look something like something.default.
Inside your profile folder, find the file called persdict.dat and open it up in a text editor.
Find the misspelling, delete it, and save the file.

Lost & found: silver screen gems rediscovered

mrmerlot — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:29:17 +0000

Two recent NPR stories caught my attention for how they speak to a pervasive problem plaguing organizations like mine: loss of organizational history.

One story is about “Bruce,” the name given to the three giant fake sharks used in the movie Jaws. After the filming concluded, all three models were lost and most likely destroyed. After all, you can’t keep every movie prop for sentimental reasons, right? Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and so, years later, the efforts of a determined journalist finally paid off. After coordinating tips from a dedicated Jaws fan community, a fourth shark made from the same mold as the movie models was found in a California auto yard. Used as a prop at the Universal Studios Theme Park in Hollywood, this 25-foot-long behemoth was sorely weathered. But Jaws fans can finally rejoice that a key piece of Americana has been found.

A similar story revealed that 75 silent films were recovered from the New Zealand Film Archive. One such film is a 1927 feature called Upstream by four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford. These early American movies were sent to remote areas of the globe late in their lifecycle. The physical films degraded quickly and, since they were shipped in heavy metal cans, distributors in the States thought it financially wise to abandon them rather than pay to ship them back. However, projectionists and collectors thankfully protected them until they found their way to the vaults of the New Zealand national archive.

Both of these stories are examples where the value of something – films and film props – wasn’t realized until years after they were lost. And, while I can understand how financial limitations prevented preserving a giant shark and dozens of classic films, the same doesn’t apply to expert knowledge and experience. These types of “artifacts” are easy to preserve, especially with the availability of social enterprise tools like blogs.

So I have two questions for you…

Can you think of a project or area of expertise you worked on years ago that has since been lost because the knowledge wasn’t captured properly?

What can you do – today – to prevent repeating this mistake?

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An introduction to the “21st Century Web”

mrmerlot — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:22:42 +0000

A while back, I asked for help identifying what web sites would be ideal for someone who had missed key advances on the Internet for the past several years. As a social software trainer, I teach a class designed to encapsulate the “latest and greatest” on the web in order to lay the groundwork for students to understand the nature of our social enterprise tools. It’s my goal to help them “get” how these tools can empower them and increase their productivity both professionally and personally.

I recently published a Google Doc as a guide to the websites we cover in the class and includes ideas for experimenting with each one. Since the class is only three hours long – and focused on those tools that have counterparts in our social enterprise suite – some of the sites (like the ones under “Media sharing”) are only mentioned.

Please view the list of “21st Century Websites” and let me know what you think. Alternatively, you can download the full PDF or 2-page condensed PDF versions.

What critical sites are we missing?

What other activities would you suggest we add to the “Try this” column?

Please feel free to reuse or redistribute this resource as you see fit!

Best web apps for Internet Neophytes? [your help needed!]

Being the “hands on the keyboard” for your mentor

mrmerlot — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:44:20 +0000

In an enlightening conversation I had yesterday, a senior leader where I work said that as we continue to face the likelihood of losing a large percentage of our workforce to retirement in the next few years, the organization has essentially three options to prevent hemorrhaging knowledge:

Capture their knowledge (in a usable format) before they leave.
Enable effective mentoring relationships that allow their knowledge to be transferred to the next generation.
Hire them back as consultants.

As the conversation continued, I found myself ruminating on these options. Obviously, the first option is my personal goal and the goal of my team: to teach the workforce how and why to use social enterprise knowledge sharing tools – like wikis and blogs – to pull tacit knowledge out of the minds of people and aggregate it in a searchable and linkable format.

But the second option, while worthwhile, seems a bit shortsighted. After all, passing knowledge and insights from one generation to the next is important, but only delays dealing with the core problem: working in isolation.

I think an effective solution is to integrate (enforce?) knowledge capture within a mentoring program. This would mean providing the technology, training, and time for the mentee to be the “hands on the keyboard” for his mentor. Following each mentoring session, the mentee would either add to a wiki page or publish a blog post with what they learned from her mentor.

Would you be willing to pitch this idea to your mentoring folks?

Which is the biggest obstacle to adopting such a strategy, knowing how to do it, being willing to do it, or having the time to do it?

Do you mentor using social media? [call for help]

A warning label for gadgets

mrmerlot — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:00:25 +0000

I read a post by Don Miller the other day that humorously petitioned for warning labels on gadgets. I have reposted the image he included on his blog because I found most of the “warning labels” funny and incredibly useful. What warnings would you want to see on your technology?

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Cool visualizations [data display done right]

mrmerlot — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:19:41 +0000

I wanted to share a couple of powerful infographics I came across a while back. These images are not only visually appealing, they convey a large amount of data that would otherwise would be fairly boring (and therefore ineffective). In fact, I won’t add complexity by including unnecessary commentary or explanation.

Enjoy! Click the images to view full size. You may need to click on the image again to magnify to 100%.

Mariana Trench

Courtesy of i-am-bored.com

Rising Sea Levels

Courtesy of The Guardian

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Cell phone commercials…from 20 years ago!

mrmerlot — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:39:29 +0000

I just came across these two classic commercials from the early days of the cell phone via Read/Write Web. I look over at my Android phone and marvel at the computing power contained within a device that size. Then I wonder what “mobile technology” will look like in another 20 years (my prediction is that “mobile” won’t be a relevant word at that point).

Click here to view the embedded video.

A brilliant marketing scheme by Heineken

A stirring talk from a 12-year-old [TED video]

mrmerlot — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:04:08 +0000

If you’re anything like me, this 8-minute talk by 12-year-old Adora Svitak will have you smiling for a while. Her talk is insightful and strikingly articulate as well as humorous and down-to-earth. I hesitate to use other adjectives like “precocious” for fear I’ll belittle this child prodigy’s poise and intelligence, but Adora’s effervescent personality and enthusiasm continually reminded me of how the sheer freedom of a young mind empowers her to dream big.

After you watch the video, I suggest reading her blog, paying special attention to her Twitter feed. One recent post had her gently correcting her mom on proper texting etiquette (and her distaste of grammatical shortcuts). And it should come as no surprise that Adora is homeschooled. I just can’t imagine a school that could challenge and contain such a mind!

Going offline…or not [Chuck & Beans comic]

mrmerlot — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:00:12 +0000

I gotta admit…this is what would happen if I ever even contemplated going off-line…

Life before Google… [hilarious comic]

mrmerlot — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:00:49 +0000

A colleague of mine posted this Chuck & Beans comic in the office this morning and I literally laughed out loud. As a constant and (insatiable) learner (just ask my wife), this nicely sums up my life prior to 1996 when I first discovered the web.

A brilliant marketing scheme by Heineken

mrmerlot — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Mashable reported this week about a marketing campaign executed by Heineken that involved a soccer (“football”) match and thousands of duped victims. Watch the video below and tell me if you don’t agree that this was an imaginative and perfectly executed practical joke.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Reality of Social Networking [make sure your kids see this video]

mrmerlot — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:00:35 +0000

I’m one of the last people to raise the paranoia flag, but as a social networking enthusiast and social software trainer, I have a certain obligation to investigate the privacy issues around such web sites. Recently, I’ve been talking with folks, reading, and thinking a lot about privacy.According to a colleague (and a character in the latest episode of House), privacy as we define it today is “a recent invention that started with urbanization.” In other words, when we all lived in small communities, personal and family privacy was impossible; everyone knew everything about everybody else.

Now, we can go from our house to the garage to our car to the garage at work to our cubicle…and reverse that in the evening. Hence, the “expectation of privacy” most people have come to demand. With the advent of social networking web sites, blogs, Twitter, and the rest of the read-write web, we have seen this model challenged, however. Technology has enabled us to broadcast aspects of our lives in myriad ways.

I think social networking sites offer the potential for everyone to maintain and develop relationships they would not have been able to before. But I also have four kids who will only know an internetworked world and “Internet of Things” (hey, I encourage all of the kids to play with my iPod Touch and get on the Web…under supervision, of course).

But allowing children – or, in many cases, parents and grandparents – free reign on these sites without helping them understand the implications of their action is irresponsible.

Leave me a comment after you watch the video about how you protect yourself and your friends and family online. And you may want to revisit your Facebook privacy settings just in case…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get Yourself Schooled in Economic Theory [hilarious yet educational video]

mrmerlot — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:07:51 +0000

A colleague of mine recently admitted she enjoyed (geeked out on) this YouTube video. Somewhat skeptical, I allowed myself to click through and… wow, these geniuses actually schooled me a bit in the “Dismal Science.” If you’re like me, the principles of macro economics (e.g., how our country continues to run in the “knowledge age”) has always been a bit mysterious. I recently read Freakonomics and Economics in One Lesson which both break down complex economics principles to an understandable level (to let me get caught up on what I should have learned in high school or college). But I like productions like this one to reinforce or fill in the gaps to help me understand the rise and fall of our economy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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