My Name is Kate

From Small Miracles to Big Dreams .. Day 2 at TED

It's tricky to do notes about a day at TED.  I don't blog live during the conference.  I'm not that coordinated :-) and I still like to sketch non-linear thoughts out in my moleskine.  So, until a tablet PC becomes mine ... I go the analog route.

There are actually a number of people blogging TED who take much more detailed and copious notes that I.  If you're interested in the gritty details, your best bet is likely the Technorati TED2006 tag.  Also, check out the TED blog; you can also view the TED schedule for specifics about speakers.

I have a number of thoughts scribbled down in my notebook, but I left TED today with this overwhelming sense of watching a disaster movie cum Star Trek TNG episode cum evangelical tent meeting from the inside.  And this isn't a bad thing.  But it is exhausting.

Disaster Movie ...
Climate Chaos (aka Global Warming) is real.  And it is imminent.  We have less than 10 years to change the path that we are on.  Or our planet is in serious peril.

Repeat.  Or our planet is in serious peril.  And as of today, there is no other planet.  So we'd better get this thing fixed.

Related Links: http://www.globalwarming.org/ and http://www.climatecrisis.org/

Star Trek TNG Episode ...
There has been a lot of talk of morality and moral authority today.  Climate crisis is a moral issue (Al Gore).  Design must be responsible, responsive - it has meaning.  It is connected to morality ... design is not just for the pure edification of humanity, but design must take into consideration the environment, the context, the materials. (Roger Mandle)

Also on the STTNG riff ... people at TED get shit done.  Neil Gershenfeld is a crazy synthesis of Scotty & Geordi with his Fab labs (http://fab.cba.mit.edu/).  And Alan Russell is like Dr. Crusher - showing us the way to regenerative medicine.

Evangelical Tent ...
We had some literal evangelists (Rick Warren, Michael Shermer & Dan Dennett).  And we had some topical evangelists (for bloggers, Mena Trott; for life on Mars, Penny Boston, for open source education, Rich Baraniuk)

Fav Quotes ...

"It is important for us to learn each other's dance moves." - Jehane Noujaim on ways to build global bridges of understanding

"I'm like the Ralph Nadar of bad ideas." - Michael Shermer on his role as editor of Skeptic Magazine

"You matter to God." - Rick Warren.  I include this one because I believe that it is an incredibly difficult thing to hear a person of such genuine and sincere faith to say "You matter to God" particularly when your own relationship to God is different than his.

"We need to reclaim our moral authority.  Our tolerance for what goes on on the planet is absurd.  We need to get over it." - Al Gore on affecting change.

Shout Out ...
To fellow blogger, Mena Trott.  Now, I know that Mena has been controversial in some of her recent industry appearances.  Regardless, she gave an incredible, passionate and authentic presentation today on the power of blogging and the individual, personal lives it has touched.  Well done, Mena!

Obligatory Name Dropping ...
I met Renee Blodgett today.  Cool.  She's blogging TED and putting up great summaries and posts.

Sum up ...
It was a phenomenal day.  And there's still 1.5 days to go.

Technorati Tags: TED2006, marketing

My electron-based faith

This was going to start out as a just "cool shit" post -- I found another Chicklet Maker, one from Luca Zappa (he calls it a Brilliant Button Maker - which it definitely is).  I love these little buttons.  They are kind of a standard ... at least from a size point of view.  But there is all sorts of room for creativity.  I think everyone should have one! Mainly because I would like to collect them.  And use them as links instead of plain text.  Like mini digital business cards.

So now I'm thinking about digital collections. Several years ago when Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon software company had launched its new website one of the activites you could do on was explore the site with characters from the CD-Rom games (Rockett was the most prominent character) and you could collect digital treasures that you could share with your friends.  And some of them were in limited quantities.  So if you got a rare blue butterfly and gave it to a friend, that was a sign that you were really good friends (note .. I am totally making up the blue butterfly part ... I don't remember the specifics of the treasures).

Some of the same principles and motivators applied in Ludicorp's Game Neverending (oh, GNE, how I miss you).  There were lots of things to collect and use, but also, you were rewarded for giving away digital objects. NeoPets .. all about collecting digital objects.  The basis for any MMORPG (and for the synthetic economies they create, also a good article about this in The Walrus) is also the collection of digital goods.

I marvel at this type of collection (a far cry from my philatelic days) because it isn't *real* (in the atomic sense).  It's just bits.  It's electrons!

There was a piece in Wired several years ago (actually, almost a decade now) by Fil Yeskel, an engineer from IBM.  He recounts a conversation he had with a young student about the whereabouts of a picture once the computer was turned off ...

"Where did the picture go?" she asked.

"It's in memory," I answered.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the picture is now stored in a different way and in a different place."

"OK, where is it?"

I sensed that misty path that lives in the marrow of every technophile.

"Not where - what. It's not a picture anymore: it changed when I closed the window, transformed like a butterfly going back to a caterpillar. It's an arrangement of bits now. The computer broke it into pinhead-sized pieces. It recorded the position, brightness, and color of each piece in a binary code."

"Can I see the bits?"

Drop down into the next world.

[ ... ]

"You said the bits are just below the surface (of a CMOS chip). If we scrape the surface, can we see them?"

Invisible world coming up.

"Sorry. The transistor structures that hold the bits can be seen with a microscope, but not the bits themselves."

The teacher came up with a photograph, taken through a microscope, of the top layer of an integrated circuit. At high magnification, these circuits look like cityscapes seen from high in the air.

"Each room in the city holds one bit. A transistor acts as a door that can open to admit millions of electrons to each room."

"Why millions?"

"Because we can't detect one electron, only whole thunderclouds of them."

"Can I see them?"

"Sorry again. First, the room is never empty. New electrons simply add to a spongelike latticework of atoms and electrons that's already there. Second, electrons can't be seen. There's an apparent paradox at the heart of the world of very small things: Any attempt to see them changes, in a random way, what you're trying to see. It's like trying to grab smoke."

"How do you know they're really there?"

Yeskel wrote this piece in 1995, describing (essentially) the magic of technology and the world we all take on faith (those who say spirituality is on the decline are misinformed).  It's still magic to me, and this world is still calling me to be faith-ful, but now these electrons are doing more than we ever thought possible.

GodCasting, coming to an iPod near you

The New York Times ran an article today called Missed Church? Download It to Your IPod [reg required] describing the adoption of podcasting by a number of religious organizations.

[...] the Rev. Mark Batterson, started podcasting, or "godcasting" as he prefers to call it, last month to spread the word about his congregation. The hourlong recordings of his weekly service, available on theaterchurch.com, have already brought new parishioners to his church, he said.

"I can't possibly have a conversation with everyone each Sunday. But this builds toward a digital discipleship," he said. "We're orthodox in belief but unorthodox in practice."

I have been regularly impressed by the religious groups who have exploited new technologies to get their messages out and heard, across the widest array of channels possible.  I struggle on a daily basis to get "old school" marketers to understand that this is no longer a broadcast, one-to-many world; that conversations with customers are key.  I LOVE that this guy gets it (and he is CUTE, to boot!).

New technology like podcasting updates the mission, although on a much smaller scale for now. But Pastor Batterson says he believes that podcasting will have an impact on the church as profound as that of the printing press when the first Bibles were printed in the 15th century.

"If you really believe in the message you're preaching, you want as many people as possible to listen," he said. He likes the idea of "spiritual multitasking" to keep people connected to their faith throughout the week. Before his podcasts, he also used his blog to connect with the 800 members of National Community Church, who gather for worship each Sunday in two movie theaters, one in Washington and the other in Alexandria, Va.

Good for him for reaching people where they choose to be and when they are ready to hear his message.  When my grandmother isn't able to attend church service, someone from the church faithfully delivers a cassette tape of the service.  It's a great service, but extraordinarily resource and labour intensive compared to the distribution reach.  Now I don't know if my grandmother would subscribe to a podcast at this point, but the distribution potential vs effort required is incredible.

Most religious podcasts can be subscribed to using R.S.S. [...] For godcasters who record prayers or psalms, the function is especially appealing, because it offers their listeners easy access to daily devotional readings. Pastor Batterson, for instance, is aiming to attract 10,000 subscribers in the next two years who are looking for doses of spirituality on demand.

The mp3 player is a particularly intimate device; it is with us everywhere we go and provides a soundtrack to our lives.  The co-opting of this technology and related behaviour is perfect for religious organizations.

Melissa Rogers, a visiting professor of religion and public policy at the Wake Forest University Divinity School, finds podcasting a good illustration of the entrepreneurial drive behind Christian evangelicals. Nevertheless, Ms. Rogers does not expect podcasts to replace going to church.

"Podcasts provide a way for people who are very busy these days to get their religion on the fly, but for most people this will be a supplement, not a substitute," she said.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  To me, one of the main draws of organized religion is the community.  Can more intimate communication provided at our seducible moments substitute for that community?