Pointing to Florida’s change in tone, coupled with the fact that Florida had a rather lucrative lecture circuit where he explained his Creative Class theory as an economic development strategy for $35,000 a pop, MacGillis paints the Professor to be some sort of urban planning snake-oil salesman. And not without reason; MacGillis points out both Florida’s partnership with Catalytix, a consulting group that charges $250K for reports that “differ little city to city”, and his side-firm, the Creative Class Leadership Program, “that guides cities through year-long planning initiatives for which Florida himself does not necessarily appear in person.” Neither make him seem to be the disinterested academic he really ought to be.

The problem with ideas isn’t having them. Shit–I have plenty of ideas. The challenge is to be able to determine which ones are worth acting upon

…that’s what’s got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they’d like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don’t make it too complicated. Don’t spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site… [Andre Torrez, Even You Can Do It]

Donors of all ages will be looking for meaningful points of engagement with your organization. They'll want to set the programmatic agenda, select the beneficiaries and target areas, communicate the organization's message, and, in real-time, evaluate feedback as it comes in.

Notice something strange about those tasks? None of them involve passive check-writing on behalf of your organization. In 2012, individuals will come to your organization with the expectation of being full partners in your work, not just dollar wells to be tapped when cash is needed. Donations will be a consequence of meaningful engagement, not a measurement of it.

My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. Many of you know it because you’re our honored shelvers. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth. You can’t judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that’s true for the present as well.

But even through the mind-fog, one thing pierced my brain the next morning: orchiette with broccoli rabe and croutons.

Now, I grew up in New York, and I lived most of my adult life in New Haven, and this dish came as a surprise to me, because orchiette and broccoli rabe are almost always cooked, in restaurants at least, with sausage. It’s a fabulous combination, and it never occurred to me to mess with it.

remember to collect the check for $25k in exchange for not telling anyone else about this (presumably bad) idea

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

The Future Of Ideas
Lawrence Lessig
text format

Google will make mistakes. Despite its concern for quality and quality control, it will miss books, skip pages, blur images, and fail in many ways to reproduce texts perfectly. Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts.

on computational thinking, or thinking like a computer scientist; teaching people how to reason in ways that can be amplified by computation

"How to think" rule from Ed Boyden

I believe e-mail is diverting our best waking hours from thinking, conceptualizing and dreaming big ideas.

It's like Spain - for pants!

An idea is a multiple sequence of creative acts. This is important because it means that creativity isn’t just the domain of brilliant people, it’s also the domain of average people who travel to other groups.

"I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices,", says Kuniavsky.

Whatever the answer, New Orleans was not defined by its spirit of innovation in the decades preceding Hurricane Katrina. But the flood that changed everything two years ago has changed that too: Today, by accident and by necessity, this city is awash in i

This reminded me of a great phrase I first heard when I was working for Sun Microsystems: That Which Is Measured, Improves. This principle worked for me back then, and it still helps me a lot with many daily activities. Read on to find out how.

Ten things Google has found to be true.

Rather than a "home" location serving as the trigger for moving material among libraries, patron requests become the trigger. Only materials patrons actually want to use pass through delivery.

suggest this as a routine for people who must spend their days in front of a computer and want to accomplish more: Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slow

social shopping. be my frend and buy stuffs pleez.

some kind of online role playing game, details tbd

free short transcriptions speech-to-text

chocolate gifts in Royal Oak, MI

sketches >> prototypes for creating ideas

coworking = cohousing for work.

scenario planning

Bruce Sterling's mashup of two days of talks at Idea. Did we really sound like this? Yup.

now speaking at MLS event

on the us mishmosh of the laws around ideas, and a suggested way forwards

The Brenda Ueland quote via Global Ideas Bank

have a group write down the nicest thing you can say about each other

first, a site full of great weird ideas; then, a particularly wonderful one about talking to your kids