• How To Generate A Good Idea –
• The Surprising Benefits of Solitude – I'm looking forward to the book by Cain that Andrew refers to. It reflects my hypothesis that great ideas germinate in solitude and then are nurtured to fruition by input from a group of interested, engaged individuals.

• The ‘wisdom of crowds’ loses steam | The Open Road – CNET News – Matt Asay shares a collection of evidence that the "crowdsourcing" revolution may be settling into traditional models. From the article: "Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of "community" over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits: Command and control."
• The Science of Success – The Atlantic (December 2009) – A fascinating article on the "Orchid Child Hypothesis" that impacts evolution, nature v. nurture (or should we say nature + nurture), and parenting. From the article: "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."

• Gov 2.0 University – I'm very proud to announce the launch of this new joint venture with Hinchcliffe & Company and LMI. I was at EPA for the beginning of "Web 1.0" and helped launch one of the very first government Web sites. Ever since then, I continue to believe there is a fantastic opportunity for government agencies to use the Web to better serve their constituencies and revolutionize our democracy. The term "Gov 2.0" may smack of hyperbole, but that does not change the fact that there are great opportunities afoot for us to improve our great republic!
• The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" – There is No Crowd – Interesting article about Vassilis Kostakos research that shows that small, vocal groups can control the voice of the "crowd" and what some sites are doing to address it.

• Lessons from the Ant Colony: Overcoming the Biases of Web 2.0 – ReadWriteWeb – Scott Brave puts a entomological spin on the "database of intentions" idea that John Battelle raised years ago. The most powerful data your website collects may be the implicit behaviors of the visitors.
• Learning 2.0 and Workplace Communities – April – ASTD –

• Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y – the Facebook Generation – Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 – WSJ – Gary provides a great summary of how organizations and leaders will have to function differently once the "Facebook generation" is in power. I especially like #11: Intrinsic rewards matter most. Extrinsic rewards (read bonu$e$) are having a success backlash and may actually undermine performance and job satisfaction. Traditional organization structure and function is in for some radical changes.
• Government Agencies Make Friends With New Media | Epicenter from Wired.com – A very important legal hurdle has been crossed to free Federal agencies to start leveraging the power of social media. This will be a wonderful boon in fed's ability to share learning and information.
• Crowdsourcing Examples – Anjali Ramachandran, a strategist at London based digital agency Many by Many, has compiled a very useful list of 135 real-world examples of businesses leveraging crowd contributions online.

• Disruptive Knowledge Management: Social Media is Sneaking Through the Backdoor – Jeff Widman with a simple, but provocative statement on the future of KM: "… putting up walls in consumer apps rather than removing them in enterprise apps – may be the major source of KM innovation in the next few years."
• List of “White Label” Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms – Jeremiah Owyang has put together a great list of community platforms if you are shopping for a solution for your organization
• The emerging case for open business methods | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Dion Hinchcliffe posts a good summary of the challenges and opportunities of moving businesses from the traditional closed/internal model to a new open/crowdsourced model.

• The Future of Media >> TV Gets More Social – Perhaps we can move beyond the boob tube: "New technologies focusing on the convergence of TV and community continue to turn watching TV into a social activity."
• OLPC XO Laptop 2.0 Has Dual Touchscreens, Looks Amazing and Future-y – OK – Great. But how will this new design hold up in a developing nation environment? I wonder if OLPC has lost focus from its primary misson..
• Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool (AFP) by AFP: Yahoo! Tech – The cultural tides are changing to embrace Web 2.0: "Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors"
• Unplugging Conferences (Techlearning blog) – Steve Hargadon shares his twelve (OK – thirteen) "Ideas for enhancing or creating self-organized meetings". Unconfrences are (potentially) a great opportunity to recreate Web spontaneity and dynamic learning in a live setting.

These are my links for May 12th:

• Your Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce – ReadWriteWeb – A glimpse into the explosion of crowdsourcing sources. This will have a huge impact in the way organizations staff, work, and produce. People must learn to hone the social network skills and work with ad-hoc teams.
• Digital Age Assessment: Part 2 > April 22, 2008 – From Harry Grover Tuttle (I'm not making that name up): "A look at how technology use in formative assessments improves feedback and reporting opportunities."

These are my links for May 7th through May 8th:

• How Little Do Users Read? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – From Jakob Nielsen: Why it is important to keep your text short and simple. From the article: “On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”
• Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? – New York Times – From the article: “…brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.”
• Recruiting 3.0: Web Advances Change the Landscape – Interesting workforce recruiting article from WSJ: “Advances in technology make the way jobs are found and filled online distinctly different from just a few years ago.”
• Human Resources 2.0 – HR World – Arrrrrrgggghhhh!! Enough with the “2.0″ monikers! I suppose the title is inevitable and Jennifer McAdams does a fast pass at Web 2.0 without discussing the obvious HR issues of privacy, transparency, and possible worker productivity drops.
• List of Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing Examples – Best practices – Open innovation and crowdsourcing – Great list of crowdsourcing and open innovation projects and resources.
• Techdirt: Ideas Are Everywhere… So Why Do We Limit Them? – Mike Masnick’s thoughts on the Gladwell article (below). He hits the nail on the head by defining: “Innovation isn’t idea generation. Innovation is taking an idea and making it do something useful.”
• Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – Very interesting New Yorker article from Malcom Gladwell on how “the history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.” Has great implication for the theory of diversity being a primary driver of innovation.
• Wirearchy :: Retrospective on KM and the Impact of Web 2.0 – “…it’s always useful to look back every once in a while, if only to see how far and fast (or not) we’ve come since this Web thing started to penetrate more deeply and spread more widely into the workplace.”

These are my links for April 8th through April 9th:

• Diversiteria: the blog – Great minds think alike! This company is also approaching diversity and inclusion from the perspective of collective intelligence. Like the Diversity 2.Open program I'm developing, the focus is on better performance not just representation.
• Traders bet Obama will win Democratic nomination – The wisdom of crowds in action. Prediction markets are being used more and more inside organizations as well to aid decision making. This type of collective intelligence has great impact on learning and thinking…