Steve Brewer weblog: a neuroplastic mirror

Unique New Presentation Medium: Prezi

stevebrewer — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:58:57 +0000

I put together this presentation on collaborative technologies in less than an hour.

Great Social Media Presentation on Slideshare

stevebrewer — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:39:41 +0000

Enterprise 2.0 Candy Store – It’s good for you

stevebrewer — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:43:34 +0000

Great blog post by Laurie Buczek on the dangers of post-Enterprise 2.0 launch “let’s try this, let’s try that” craziness. Laurie has some great recommendations on tactics to deploy to diffuse the “kid in a candy store” mentality.

Most integrated E2.0 offerings have so many different kinds of candy (micromessaging, blogs, wikis, widgets, tags, tables, collaborative spreadsheets, etc.) to try within their own walls, that it would take months just to try them out in different business use cases. And other candy stores (vendors) have more or less the same kinds of candy. My company just adopted Socialtext, which has a very robust set of integrated functionality. Our challenge is to get executives to try the candy for an extended period of time to really get the sugar in their system.

And finally, the biggest challenge is to convince everyone that the candy is actually good for them.

Google Wave

stevebrewer — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:08:04 +0000

We’ve (FONA) been using the socialtext platform for a few months, and i can see a lot of similar types of communication patterns with Google Wave there: wiki page editing, inserting of comments, collaborative editing, micromessaging, private IM client, etc…

Google Wave, with just a few people working on a wave together, is going to seem frenetic. Its a good thing we’ve been exercising our multitasking mental muscles, because these waves will really stretch us.

Google wave is a giant mash up, wrapped in hair ball, dynamically updating one key stroke at a time. It is going to be fun!

Situational Software

stevebrewer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:19:30 +0000

We’ve recently launched Socialtext where I work (a fast growing, dynamic flavor creation company in the Midwest). It has been interesting to see how this advanced social-wiki, micro-messaging, blogging, content management platform is being adopted by different teams in different ways. Because the platform is very easy to use and very adaptable, I see non-programmers using the platform tools to build their own social applications (project coordination, team communication, performance dashboards, locating someone with expertise, organizing bodies of knowledge, sharing training videos, building reputation capital, etc.). Each team is getting a feel for how to customize their own content. This feels very fresh and built-for-particular-needs compared to using impersonal, generic applications designed for no one in particular.

Thank you, Socialtext, for all your hard work developing and hosting (for us) the platform, which frees us up to do the ever-and-always-changing work of organizing information in a social-technically-enhanced way to help us move faster and make better decisions together.

This post was inspired by a 2004 Clay Shirky blog post titled Situated Software and a wikipedia entry on Situational Applications.

Email is a channel technology

stevebrewer — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:06:24 +0000

I got this from Andrew Mcafee: Email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don’t know that the email was sent, and can’t consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members.

John Maynard Keynes This is a Nightmare quote from 1930

stevebrewer — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:14:48 +0000

John Maynard Keynes quote from 1930 that felt like it could have been written today:“This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and man’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they ever were. The rate of our progress toward solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … We were not previously deceived. But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.”

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Every Christmas can change the world

stevebrewer — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:13:20 +0000

Great video on the true meaning of Christmas, put together by adventconspiracy.org . Thanks to my friend Jay Nichols, wallacejnichols.org

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Socialism, Democracy, and the role of faith

stevebrewer — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:05:53 +0000

Thoughts on the recent economic melt-down:

If a people is not guided by an inner compass of morals magnetized to truths set forth in sacred literature like the Bible, then true liberty will be abused by the strong to obtain as much as they can, the rest of the world be damned. If we cannot depend on the generosity of the resourced to empower and lift up the under-resourced, then “fairness or equality” will be redistributed by a socialist regime – which has never been successful in creating a vibrant, growing society or economy.

A great quote from the year 1835:
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty can not. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colours than in the monarchy which they attack, and it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed and what can be done with a people which is its own master if it be not submissive to the Divinity.” From Democracy in America, By Alexis de Tocqueville

“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”, also by de Tocqueville.

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, ‘equality’. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

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I think we’ve almost arrived at the day

stevebrewer — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:37:21 +0000

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money”, by Alexis de Tocqueville

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