Spirited Thought

Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.

It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.

Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.

Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.

Last month I finished authoring a chapter submission on how social artifacts mediate the deluge of content a social network consumes and how diversity of participation is an imperative to keep us from French inhaling our tweets. We are living in a time of content explosion – this was news back in 2003 when a UC Berkeley study summarizes the prior year’s information detonation:

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].

3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

How much information? 2003, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.

Aric Sigman authored an interesting article in the February issue of Biologist titled, “Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, where he presents various findings and side effects of our social affliction.

Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.

The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.

A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.

“Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, Aric Sigman, Biologist

All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life.   Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.

One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.

Teens’ nude photos get unexpected results, Irene Sege, Boston Globe

It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.

The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?

A few weeks ago, I tried the pre-paid mailer service purchased at B&H serviced by A&I. The roll was from my Mamiya, which I have always pronounced as mam-eye-ya but have since found out could very well be ma-mee-ya. The delay in mailing across the country, processing and back was painful. Especially when I walk by Duggal on the way to work which as far as I can tell does fantastic work! Opening the envelope returned a rush of excitement you get from hanging a freshly developed strips of negatives. You scan them with a flashlight as they dry, hunting for the images you remembered to be special. While the prints are not made to match the 6×7 ratio, the 4.5×6 prints make for friendly proofs.

Reviewing the negatives has me watching film scanner prices on ebay. Good ones are expensive and add one more thing to the equipment pile. It is hard for me to justify for anything beyond the love of my art. If I had a stable flow of income from photography, it would be a simpler decision. That said I am not sure I want to be a commercial photographer. Scott Kelby featured Syl Arena as a guest blogger a couple of weeks ago. Syl listed twelve things he did not learn in photo school. The last resonated with me most…

12. Resist the temptation to become a pro photographer.
The true meaning of “amateur” is “someone who works for the love of it rather than for money”. Choosing to remain an amateur photographer is no measurement of your skill or commitment to the craft. The photo world is filled with unskilled professionals. Thinking that you want to be a pro shooter because you really love photography is absolutely the worst reason to get into the business. I guarantee you, if a love for photography is your main motivation, the economic realities of the industry today will pound your passion into the ground. If, however, your inner voice continues to shout “this is what I want to do” after your passion has been beat out of you, then you are truly hearing the call to the trade. Let me be the first to say “welcome” and “I’m here to help”.

Consider that Prosumer is what marketers have coined to capture professional consumers that want more than “amateur” equipment but cannot afford or rationalize the purchase of professional equipment. Prosumer emphasizes the consumer, not how professional they are. While equipment is certainly part of the recipe, everyone knows they are but the paintbrush and the paint. Given my primary employment does not flow from my photography, I embrace the title of amateur.

In December, I treated myself to something old but new, a Mamiya RZ67 ProII outfit. It is a legendary film camera with a cult following. There are many reasons to fall in love with a camera like this and I am just beginning my journey.

As a child, I remember sitting around the dinner table and discussing how the racket did not make the player. Tennis was a big deal in our house and while I knew the sentiment was true, this was the dawn of composite rackets, a move away from traditional wood frames. For me it was a conflict worth waging, because the racket was significant. The racket indeed matters, but without a competent player, it is no better than a lesser tool. The racket does not make the player, but a good tool in the right hands is magical.

Right before I found my new tool on Craigslist, I read an inspired blog post by Chase Jarvis around being successful in photography. It is always interesting to hear the secrets of successful people. People love to try to boil things down to consumable words of wisdom when in fact how someone ends up where they stand is far more complex. Nevertheless, a fantastic quote of a quote from an interview with Steve Martin.

Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them and nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear — what they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — but I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

Not only is that true, it is brilliant. I tend to be understated out of fear of being labeled arrogant, but I also enjoy seeing how other people perceive my work and me. If I were more aggressive, I would taint the viewing. I am interested in getting feedback and the best way in my mind is to let people react and then watch and listen. Be undeniably good.

In the first weekend, I shot the camera twenty times. I forgot what it was like to work with film and in this case peel-apart expired Polaroid. Everything takes time. With my Canon 30D, I can rip through hundreds of shots in an hour. My keep ratio is extremely high and I am brutal given the number of photos I am left to manage. The digital darkroom is now an extension of my mind and tweaking is effortless. We forget how much the camera and computer are doing.

My first few shots were first metered by my digital camera and then transferred to the RZ. Underexposed. Test. Underexposed. Test. Ah, the film. Then years of experience with film rushed over me. Film selection is a critical part of creating an image. Expired Polaroid peel-apart is a wild card. To further complicate things, I was metering with my Canon, which has fancy algorithms for referencing neutral gray. The lighting conditions were such that the best exposure would have been metered from an incident reading, where instead of looking at the reflected light off an object you read the light falling onto the object. Unfortunately, I was without meter and for my first weekend, compensating would have to do.

Chris Orwig, a faculty member at the Brooks Institute, was a guest writer on a wildly popular blog by Scott Kelby. Scott and team run a slick show keeping everyone in tune with Adobe products and photography. Most of their work is tool and gear focused, so inviting Chris to the show was an unexpected and genius move, because he is all about the art. Chris is a fan of quotes. It must be the educator in him.

The review [of one of Chris’ student’s portfolio] was fine, yet after it was over the student pleaded with Jay [Maisel], “Tell me, how can I take more interesting photos?” With missing a beat, Jay volleyed back, “Become a more interesting person.” Or said in another way, as Chris Rainier told me last week, “…at some point photography becomes autobiographical. In order to create better photos, sometimes we need to put down the photography books and magazines. Then we need to go out and to develop who we are.”

Who we are, shapes what we see.

Be undeniably good. Become a more interesting person.

My setup came with extension tubes, which enable lenses to focus at very close distances, excellent for macro (micro) photography, something I dove head first into last year. My still life rested atop a mantle. Extension tubes and my 110mm lens attached to an unqualified tripod. My Canon 580EX attached to the hot shoe. Test. Underexposed. Test. Underexposed. Test. Ah, the film. Compensate for the film, the extension tubes, and the power level of the strobe light. A color print of what is essentially a black and white subject. Slipping in a pack of Fuji black and white instant film, I nailed it. Unreal. Hours go by as you shoot, wait, look, adjust and expose. Over and over again, totally engrossed in the process, frame and science. The smell of the caustic Polaroid chemicals and the fascination with even poorly exposed shots. Now I remember why it was so amazing to get 10-20% of your shots as keepers. When you shoot film, you have no choice but to wait to see what was captured. The delay is part of the process.

I had been dragging my feet on a couple of purchases, a light meter and a good support system. This new outfit requires both. They have been among the best investments I have made.

My first photography class had everyone shoot slide film. Hardly anyone shoots slides anymore. The process of looking at images projected on a wall is no longer captivating to most. What is smart about slide film is that you basically get what you shot. While there is a development process, there is no magic going on in the darkroom in creating a print. The realized image is the developed slide. Instant films are much the same way. The image only exists in one place. There is no negative. You get what you shoot. Wickedly humbling and intoxicatingly addictive.

I am already a better photographer than before my Mamiya. Bringing me back to all the inconveniences of film informs how I construct my image. Those inconveniences are the pauses that leave you only to think, feel and reflect. Hopefully one step closer on my expedition to being undeniably good. More importantly giving me another window of exploration by which I become more interesting. After all, the process of capturing images is a method by which we interpret and reinterpret our world. That journey is its own therapy.

Vacations are for getting away from work and resting from the daily grind. Yet, almost everyone seems to need a week to unwind before getting to relax. My week of unwinding was productive.

During my last workweek, I was helping an employee configure Apache to simplify her life. While poking around on the development machine I noticed that the team was creating multiple WebSphere Application Server profiles. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is IBM’s J2EE platform and it supports the ability of running multiple instances of the runtime environment without installing the product several times. This can be a very powerful feature and in the case of my team, they were simply doing it for isolation. It allows each of them to manage an instance of WAS without worrying about affecting other peoples work. While this is a development machine, apparently one of the applications it ran is less “in the works” than the others. This presented a problem, when I wanted to front-end my employee’s application (the one I just configure Apache for) with the web server.

You see, in a typical WAS setup, there is a web server that receives requests from an end user’s web browser. Web servers are extremely good at serving static content, executing CGI scripts and connecting to FastCGI applications. To hook into this layer, WAS loads a plugin that reads an XML configuration document to understand what it should do. This document, among other things, maps which URL paths should be passed on to WAS. For each WAS profile, a new plugin-cfg.xml file is generated. This makes sense, because each of these profiles is a different environment. The challenge is that the WAS plugin Apache loads can only read one XML file. So, what do you do when you want to map multiple WAS profiles to a single web server?

A few months ago, I remember the manager of the systems team we work with describing how this was a manual process and when he had more time, he would automate it. This led me to search and find a link for Lotus Connections documentation, “Mapping multiple WAS profiles to a single IBM HTTP Server,” that described the manual procedure. Using this as my guide, I updated the plugin-cfg.xml file manually and my employee was all set. It worked as expected and that was that. My last workday was the following day and yet I was compelled to automate this during my wind down week.

PERL is my programming language of choice when it comes to working with text and it fits perfectly for this task – merging two plugin-cfg.xml files. There are four XML nodes to consider when merging these files: VirtualHostsGroup, ServerCluster, UriGroup and Route. The latter three are easy because they just need to be copied “as is” into the merged XML document. VirtualHostsGroup however needs to be merged. Moreover, while the example from the Lotus Connections documentation shows a VirtualHostsGroup stanza named “default_host” and because this is XML, to do this responsibly we need to presume there could also be a VirtualHostGroup named something else. So, not only do we need to combing the children of all VirtualHostGroup nodes, we need to persist these nodes even if the named node in one XML file is not in the other.

With the help of XML::LibXML and XML::Tidy this task is simple enough. The following script takes three arguments, the file name of first XML document, the second XML document and the new XML document. It merges the second document into the first, inserting changes after the existing XML nodes. This approach ensures the file appears in a more logical human readable fashion. The formatting options available in LibXML disagreed with my aesthetics, so I added a dependency on XML::Tidy, which while cleaning up the document, makes it too neat. Oh well. The script could be used multiple times to merge several plugin-cfg.xml documents. For full disclosure, the IBM documentation for Lotus Connections mentions:

Do not complete this procedure if you are planning to add the multiple profiles to a node in a network deployment. In that case, you can define a Web server for the node and map only the node to the IBM HTTP Server.

I have not looked into what happens or what would need to happen to support multiple profiles in a network deployment. My last disclaimer is that I have tested this many times with a few edge cases. As with any software, it may have bugs, so test it on your documents before using this in a production environment. I will not be held liable for damage you create using this script. For that matter, if you plan to use it commercially, you should email me to discuss a license. Let me know if you find a bug or have suggestions.

Download wpcMerge.zip.

When the Creative Commons forged a more progressive look copyright law, enabling content creators legal power to elect specific use of their works, a cultural movement ensued. Until that point, copyright law reflected a historical component of intellectual property protection vital to commercial endeavors, but presented obstacles to reuse. Any of the various combinations of the Creative Commons license permit specific opportunities to a consumer of the assets, turning copyright into a layman’s device, clarifying for both creator and consumer a license that is compressible and deliberate. Copyright doe not mean “don’t use,” it just presents additional barriers because it lacks the varietal nature of the Creative Commons. Copyright is very specific, that the author of the content holds all rights and in order to use it, one would need to contact the author for permission or license. This appears to be a great inhibitor and makes a great compliment to the more explicit Creative Commons licenses. As the Creative Commons site explains, “Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.”

So, while it is possible to permit some level of sharing and remixing in the end the license still reserves rights to the work. Copyright on the other hand reserves all rights. In cases where you want to know and be in control of your work, copyright is what you want.

While people tend to understand that they usually own the copyright of their creations, they do not realize the limitations of restitution if the work is not registered. Specifically in the United States, failing to register your work limits the amount of damages one can seek or be awarded in court. While my living is not made based on my photography, I have chosen to explicitly copyright my work, which includes registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Several sites discuss how to do register work with the U.S. Copyright Office. (e.g. ASMP and Peter Krogh) More recently, there is a great series that Photoshop User Magazine is running, “The Copyright Zone” and some great posts over at Scott Kelby’s blog.

The online copyright registration tool is your typical solution that was constructed to the letter of the requirements, which is to say that most people will find it rigid and cryptic. There is a lot of documentation to help bolster your confidence, but at some point, you simply need to take the plunge. Here are three tips that made my life much simpler.

First, if you decide to upload your work, you are sure to notice the warnings of 30 minutes per upload. This might cause some panic depending on your connection to the Internet, but you need not be concerned. Interestingly enough, no one mentions that you can upload many times. In practice, this means any specific upload is limited to 30 minutes, but you can continue to upload as many times as is required to transfer your collection. Each upload is logged and displayed as part of your submission. It takes a few minutes for the system to show each transaction (my guess is they scan for malicious code), but if you do not see your uploaded work, then they never received it. You can call or email for verification or upload again to make sure. For those of us registering an entire years worth of unpublished work, this is important!

Second, you will read about the format of submission. Some people advocate for individual images and yet others talk about contact sheets. Having called the U.S. Copyright Office for guidance, apparently, a digital contact sheet is acceptable. This really simplifies the registration of unpublished works. I used Adobe Lightroom v2 to generate digital contact sheets (4 columns, 5 rows) with the filename and date taken under each image. All the guidance says that the image needs to be clearly visible on small displays. I chose to export at 300 dpi and in JPG format. At 300 dpi the contact sheet will effectively show 20 images to a page while allowing the individual image to render beautifully at over 580 pixels in the longest dimension. Digital contact sheets allow for fewer uploads, while presenting the work in high quality legible form. If you are a Lightroom user, you are welcome to the template I used.

Third, the online copyright registration site recommends using ZIP compression as a means of uploading many files. While using zip on JPEGs yields less space savings than on other files, I used it to simplify my uploading. I numbered them 1 of X to ensure my logic was clear. Additionally, this will allow a copyright examiner to reconcile uploads just in case I submitted an archive twice. Finally, WinZip is offering aggressive compression mechanisms, specifically for images. I used legacy compression to ensure compatibility. Compression programs have come a long way, but in this case, interoperability was the priority.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. My comments here are a documentation of how I approached registering photographic works and may not apply for your use. Please consult an IP lawyer or the U.S. Copyright office if you want to verify you are following acceptable procedures.

Prototyping is something software builders leave to user experience professionals and that is completely insane. Prototyping should inhabit everyone’s being. It is an opportunity at any step of any process or creation. There are too many first drafts called final drafts, especially in software.

Regardless of your software development methodology, agile or waterfall, there is always a notation that says, “Take time to prototype.” Practitioners speed by this phase as if it were distracting from the final form. Project leaders receive pressures to deliver more, in less time and at or under budget. Where in that formula is prototyping placed at the top?

Some companies handle this by creating smaller development teams, housed in research and development or branded agile extensions of the larger delivery organization. This is where people think the prototypes come from. Does location, context or reporting structure have any bearing on how real software is?

pro⋅to⋅type [proh-tuh-tahyp]
noun, verb -typed, -typ⋅ing. –noun

1. the original or model on which something is based or formed.
2. someone or something that serves to illustrate the typical qualities of a class; model; exemplar: She is the prototype of a student activist.

1595–1605; < NL prōtotypon < Gk prōtótypon, n. use of neut. of prōtótypos original.

When I joined a skunk works team at IBM directly from college, everyone said they created prototypes. These prototypes were designed and delivered to scale to the entire enterprise. People called them prototypes to set expectations and help the traditional brass understand why a one-year project might be delivered in three months. Rarely was there anything approximating a prototype – well maybe the very first version.

There have been notable individuals that would have the courage to rewrite what they had coded to achieve greater aesthetic or optimal execution. It is a humbling, empowering and inspiring experience to throw out your current work in attempt to write it again better than before. This is the closest I have seen to developers creating prototypes and this is a rare occasion because we so easily rationalize how there is so little time, so little money and so much more to do.

First drafts make lame software, hence we iterate in hopes to accelerate the separation of curds and whey. In the end, this is not prototyping. Prototypes offer the opportunity to understand what is uniquely delivered by the solution, what is important to end-users and how the way the solution is built helps or hurts those two points. This is why the process often ends up being a user experience deliverable. The challenge and thus opportunity, is that maybe what is deemed important is unfounded. Maybe the feedback users provide is based on a poor articulation or misguided offering.

Prototyping in software development educates the architects, the developers and, in turn, the user experience professionals. By building relatively low investment prototypes through rapid development tooling, the notion of throwing the resulting build away seems palatable. It offers the opportunity to learn without entering the software delivery cycle – skipping the prototype is the quickest way not to have freedom to try things. Once there is focus on solution delivery, everyone creates a context that prevents the exploration of what is right. Everyone is left to struggle with making what gets delivers as good as it can be, given the circumstances.

This is all likely generalizable to many professions. Creative types work through revisions as part of their craft. Prototypes educate you, your team and others to the importance of the end direction. It forces everyone to approach the real work with purpose and limits the exposure to making poor decisions under pressure or pretense. Spending the time up front pays everyone back during and after delivery and yet it is not prioritized as such. Instead, we hope that professionals executing a good enough approach will deliver something remarkable.

The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.

The following presentation photographs in a working series titled “Nodes.” They represent select captures of a performance mixing water, oil, vinegar and soap. The evolution of the act sets out a beginning middle and end. Some echo the qualities of computer graphics or fine illustration, other of planetary bodies and petri dish activity. These photographs were taken with a Canon EOS 30D, Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo and Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX.

It is encouraging that people find analyzing data so compelling. Visualizations like the ones you can find at Digg labs can whet the appetite of almost anyone. Environments such as Many Eyes allow users to engage more directly in the dialogue of information exploration. Wordle, a tool that enables you to generate your own word clouds makes visual statements on views that go unnoticed.

Creating a Wordle visualization of your resume seems to be something people enjoy. It reflects back the author’s personal language for articulating their experience and qualifications. I wonder how many altered their documents to direct the impressions they were creating.

People seem to enjoy sharing word cloud views of the news and politics. Wordle generates beautiful pictures using word frequency; the more often a word occurs the larger it renders. This means that what you put in directly affects what Wordle can turn out. While it includes the flexibility of lower casing words, removing noise words and interactive editing if you spend any time with Wordle, you will find yourself tweaking your content.

In an attempt to practice my PHP skills, I created a simple utility to help automate some text processing prior to working with Wordle. Think of it as the presoak cycle of the word cloud creation process. While it is humble in its scope and function, it can heighten the impact of your visualization. Check out Wordle Presoak if this is the kind of thing you are in to.

This composition below presents variations using Wordle Presoak on the same text pulled this morning from Reuters, Palin says Obama friendly with terrorists. Notice how you can optionally maintain quotes and have them play with the words, perfect for telling a story.

What are your words saying?