Oh, And One More Thing . . . A true tale of a NoteShare-assisted Smart Mob

When I was going up the stairs,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
--Hughes Mearns

Hey, man, thanks for coming. No, no--I'm over here. Don't even think about turning around. Just act natural and pretend you're waiting for someone. I'm deep in this doorway and I don't want to be seen for obvious reasons--the next blog entry was going to celebrate my Official, Triumphant Return to this cyber backwater. But, natch, plans once more haven't panned out: I've got more NoteShare-related news I want to share sooner than later. So once again I'm in stealth mode. I'll try to make this a brief as I can, and with luck, just maybe I can get out of here without calling attention to myself . . .

Last time I was here, I spilled the beans about NoteShare, AquaMinds' new, forthcoming application, remember? Well, afterwards, I began to wonder if I gave the impression that using NoteShare demanded a rigorous, well-planned workflow. Because though it can certainly deal with more meticulous approaches, its real power is its flexibility.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, NoteShare, NoteTaker, Web20

Granted, in the example from the previous entry, we accidently bumped into Fred, but downstream of this fleeting moment of fate, a pretty standard review-and-respond groove was established--albeit supercharged by the use of NoteTaker. Which is just fine, thank you, but--well--not as improvisational as it might have been. The longer I work with the NS alpha, the more convinced I am that NoteShare isn't simply the right tool for a certain situation--it's the situation itself; the environment in which highly interesting and productive things can occur.

And just as I was pondering this, wham, manna from heaven: NoteShare and I were thrust into a real-world, real-time, real cool set of ad-hoc circumstances. See this tale as the flip side of the previous post; an Anti-Fred Situation, where the workflow was cobbled together as and when we needed it . . .

The team of alpha tester put together by AquaMinds has developed the dynamics of chat room participants. We are geographically distributed, diversely specialized and highly opinionated about all things NoteTaker/NoteShare. And, speaking for myself, I only know these folks through their input to various shared notebooks--in splendid isolation on the East Coast, I've never actually met any of them. This, however, hasn't stopped a sense of camaraderie from begin established.

Anyway, a couple of Tuesdays ago Steve Jobs gave his MacWorld keynote speech and Apple chose not to stream it in real time. And thus, I decided to have lunch in front of my laptop and sign onto any number of live blogs from the convention floor. Almost as an afterthought, I emailed one of the alpha team members that one Mac news site had a particularly cool streaming blog that used Ajax to impressive advantage. That was my only reason for emailing--Hey, cool stream here; check it out.

Moments later, I got an email back addressed to the entire alpha team. My friend had created a shared notebook and placed the live stream in an embedded Web browser on
a full page. The email included an NS pagemark that automatically led to the shared notebook. Bemused, I clicked my way to the notebook and was surprised to see fully half of the alpha team signed-on.

What happened next was remarkable: This impromptu meeting began to self-organize. Different team members had their own favored live feeds of the MacWorld keynote and, in turns, they began to add pages to the shared notebook; each featuring embedded browsers with additional coverage. Additionally, a comments page was spontaneously established that served a giant live chat window for the group, where we could share our views of the keynote. And further, a summary page was also created, where clippings from the various streaming text reports could be pasted, along with the best of our group commentary.

On my end, my lunchtime sandwich now completely forgotten, I began to float what I deemed the most informative MacWorld coverage around the main group chat page of the shared notebook. (In both Notetaker and NoteShare, embedded browser windows can be floated independently of the notebook.) This allowed me to keep an eye on streaming coverage from four different on-the-floor bloggers at the same time I was reading and responding to what group members were saying about the event. It reminded me of the geek equivalent of one of those betting pavilions in Vegas, where suspended telescreens keep players apprised of four or five simultaneous sporting events.

At the end of the keynote, the alpha team dispersed as quickly as it had formed, leaving behind a persistent , shared record of the flash-meeting which was somewhat tidied up over the next few hours.

The take-away here is the previous observation that NoteShare is an environment that features tools, and not a tool in search of proper circumstances. Could this smart mob have broken out as easily without NoteShare? I seriously doubt it.

One of us would have had to have the idea to meet hours before the event and than gone to the trouble (and expense) of setting up a virtual conference room at a collaboration site. And while this might have substituted for the "chat" page of the shared notebook, there would still be the matter of monitoring the various live feeds--which would mean creating new browser windows and screwing around with their sizes and placement. In short, a kinda/sorta emulation of NS functionality might have been had, but in a thoroughly kludgey way compared to the one-stop elegance of the NoteShare approach.

And, of course, there would be the whole other problem of after-meeting persistence and archiving the event.

NoteShare's flexibility allows it to be used in rigorous workflows and also in a much more casual, improvisational fashion. In the wake of its use there is captured input and discussion that can be later used as informational Lego blocks to construct larger, more formal projects.

It occurs to me that what I'm obliquely suggesting is that NoteShare is equally at home with both "workflow" (refined paths that have been codified and paved) and "flow" itself (synonymous with play, inspiration and, of course, a jazzman's conception). In short, this sucker readily scales and seamlessly morphs, given the circumstances.

Hey! Remember, don't look in the doorway; keep staring down the street. That's pretty much what I wanted to double back and tell you. For every Fred Scenario with NoteShare, there is also an instantly blooming geek SuperBowl party--a pretty accurate description of how Apple freaks interact while "watching" Jobs' keynote. I know. I was there.

And I've learned my lesson--no more promises that my Official, Triumphant Return entry will be the next posting you'll see. Deeply interesting occurrences have a way of capsizing plans. Now I'm out of here. If they come looking for me, just tell them you haven't seen me--officially, at least. . . .

Fittingly, however, there really is one more thing: Had Apple chosen to offer real-time streaming video of the keynote, we would have embedded that in a shared notebook page and then floated it, like a portable television to be virtually huddled around. Pass the pixelated Nachos, would you?

The composition of this entry was made possible in part by Gravel Drive from the album "Black Acetate" by John Cale

Wednesday, January 25, 2006 03:45:22 PM