Author Archives: Gideon Rosenblatt

Gideon Rosenblatt writes about the impact of technology on people, organizations and society at Alchemy of Change. He is a technologist with a background in business and social change. For nine years, Gideon ran Groundwire, a mission-driven technology consulting group, dedicated to building a more sustainable world. Prior to that, he spent ten years at Microsoft in various marketing, product development and management positions, where he developed CarPoint, one of the world's first large-scale e-commerce websites. Gideon was raised in Utah, lived and worked in Japan and China for several years, and now lives in Seattle with his wife and two boys. More details on Gideon here.

Alchemy of Change Weekly Links (weekly)

Science in a Complex World: In touch with our inner hero – The Santa Fe New Mexican In addition, we modeled mathematically what happens to groups over many generations. Our results lined up remarkably well with the data we gathered. Groups exhibiting two co-existing traits seemed to prevail and persist throughout history: cooperation within groups and a willingness to collaborate ...

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Why Our Software Needs Social Context

There will soon be a day when the majority of our online social interactions will occur through mobile devices, and we will face a much more intensely social world than we can even imagine today. When that day comes, our software will need to be much smarter at recognizing people's social context.

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Alchemy of Change Weekly Links (weekly)

Digital Social Grooming (Ed Batista) And while I agree with Boyd’s basic premise–i.e. social grooming is an innate behavior so of course it’s going to find expression within social networks–I also agree with Haque’s critique that those networks are devalued when too much content takes the form of ritual displays of grooming behavior.  Some amount of digital social grooming is ...

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Four Ways to Improve Our Online Emotional Intelligence

It's one of the great tragedies of modern life that our amazing capacity for emotional intelligence gets short-circuited online. We need software that helps us not only retain, but augment our online emotional intelligence. Here are four areas to focus on and a plea for injecting anthropology into our software development process.

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Weekly Links (weekly)

Heal thyself: Trust people – health – 30 August 2011 – New Scientist “It’s probably the single most powerful behavioural finding in the world,” agrees Charles Raison of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who studies mind-body interactions. “People who have rich social lives and warm, open relationships don’t get sick and they live longer.” tags: TED AOC health relationships community ...

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Weekly Links (weekly)

Stowe Boyd · The Architecture Of Cooperation The new architecture of work is now emerging, after decades of transition. White collar work became knowledge work which has now become creative work. The transition from process to networks is not just a recasting, not just a different style of communication. The work is styled as information sharing through social relationships, and ...

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TicketMaster “Friend Discovery” Helps You Find Facebook Friends at Concerts

TicketMaster gets more friendly

TicketMaster just announced a new interactive seat map feature that allows you to more easily book seats next to your friends at concerts. This new "social seat map" feature is a prime example of "Friend Discovery" - connecting an organization’s CRM database with the social networks of its customers.

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Software Will Replace You

Going, going, gone.

Software-based businesses like Amazon and Netflix are rapidly displacing traditional businesses, but it goes much deeper than that. Software will soon replace much of what you do at work - and at lower cost and with better service. The question is - how far will we take this? Will software someday run our companies?

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Weekly Links

Strategy Leadership & the Soul – YouTube Inspiring video to help us rethink what is possible with our organizations. tags: strategy leadership soul Tips, tricks and resources to make your own gorgeous infographics Infographics (or Information Graphics) are graphic visual representations of data or information, presented in a way to make it easier to consume information. Infographics gained popularity in ...

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What If You Could Customize Klout to Match Your Definition of “Influence”?

Our new hamster wheel...

How come I can't decide for myself what influence on the web means to me? Who died and left Klout king? How about an influence tuner to let me decide what kind of influence matters most?

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