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Uncategorized

Social Media Fatigue?

Do I suffer from Social Media Fatigue? Returning back from holiday I looked at a number of new followers on Twitter and they are all companies. They are following me to sell me stuff but I cannot imagine  they will ever make a sale. How is it possible to be interested in the lives of more that 500 followers, where does one find the time to read all these tweets? It is common knowledge that people on Facebook want to depict themselves as uber-happy and successful. Sharing a location on foursquare has not brought me any value but only costed me time. Not to mention the nice integration between social media platforms causing the same small post to appear in a number of timelines at once. In the end there are some tweets, wall posts or others that add value but ask yourself:

Is the percentage of consumed social media information that add value higher than 1%?

Why not direct your energy away from social media and towards a rewarding goal?

I like to believe that if we would have directed all the the human energy used at Social Media worldwide, we might have realized at least one of the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.

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Uncategorized

Why relevancy has been and always will be important

Today I read a nice post by Sander Duivestein on Frankwatching titled “The Future of Information: realtime becomes right time”. Providing information at the right time has always been more important than realtime information. Relevancy is the third barrier to information productivity and organizations are coming closer to this barrier. These organizations have made information available (barrier #1) and accessible (barrier #2).

Sander argues that time and attention are scarce goods and that today technology is aware of our context. Well the first argument has been the case since the beginning of time itself. No matter how hard we try there will only be 24 hours in a day of which we can be engaged for maybe 10 to 12 hours maximum. The same can be said for attention. Our brain can focus on one activity or a number of activities. When we are focussed on one activity we ignore everything else. When we focus on a number of activities the quality of all activities will decline. The more activities we try to do the less quality we will produce. The Monkey Business Illusion offers great insight in attention.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY]

The second argument is that technology is finally aware of our context. Of course the world is not black and white and technology was already partly aware of our context, personalization has been part of technology for a number of years. What has changed is that technology is moving tot a 1 on 1 personalization and is combining all available input. This enables algorithms to assess what a person is doing each time of the day. The most promising initiatives at the moment, Siri and Google Now & Glass, are all aimed at the consumer market. Is there a need for an initiative in the consumer market or will consumerization of IT take these consumer initiatives to the office?

For a feel of the power of Google Now and Glass, take a look!

Google Glass

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4]

Google Now

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPqliPzHYyc]

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Neuroscience

Looking inside your brain

David Rock shared a post from science daily about a video showing the traffic inside a single neuron. Scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) used a new imaging technique to show the movement of proteins inside the cell. Proteins are used in the communication between neurons and therefore play an important role in our brain. I guess this is a nice example of the way the study of the brain is progressing and enabling us to know more and more about the most complex organ in our body.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baI9q2–q7s]

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Neuroscience Publications

Pre-order our new EIM book now!

eimAmazon started the pre-order process of our new EIM book, with the nice subtitle ‘When information becomes inspiration’. The launchdate is set on friday 3o november 2012. In this book, edited by my colleague Paul Baan and written by a number of my smart colleagues, I made a number of small contributions including a chapter on Neuroscience.