When I saw some of the photos from the Learning Technologies Conference in London earlier this year (below),  I couldn’t identify with the guy in the photo.

The Jay in my head is racing to shake things up, make his dent in the universe, and help businesses outperform their greatest expectations, but the guy in the photos resembled a nutty professor.

I cut off my whiskers the day I got back to Berkeley in February.

This is my final bearded performance for the rest of time. Enough gravitas.

Please say hello if we bump into one another at a conference. It’s still Jay in here. Or here.

Last week, Edelman's Steve Rubel made an aggressive jump - away from traditional blogging, turning over his site to a lifestream, which captures all of his activity from around the Web. His move, he reported, was due to a feeling that blogging "feels old" and that the new reality is about the flow of information. This followed on to a conversation he, Steve Gillmor and I had a month or so ago, which led to my post saying that RSS felt slow. But while I see some of the same issues Steve has, I haven't made a full move away from the blog, don't ever plan to do so, and for any company I give advice to, I tell them to do so would be a mistake.

The blog is the foundation and center for who you are - either as an individual, or a brand. While I believe the best bloggers in the world are participating outside of their blog, on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and everywhere else, to only participate in those areas leaves a gaping hole. The world of lifestreaming and real-time is fun, but it can be as deep as a soap opera in a world that still demands insightful documentaries and news reporting.

We're still groping with the tools of new media, trying to figure out when to use what.

It was noted that Intel had originally shunned the concept of the Virtual Organisation, yet had subsequently developed into one “by walking backwards into it”. For example, only 20% of its “employees” are now traditional permanent staff. Far more contribute “virtually” or as suppliers. Yet all need access to company data and systems, so have to be trusted. A fifth have never met their boss face-to-face, and half of those never expect to: Such an organisation is logically already facing the challenges that the Protean Corporation seeks to answer.

Great synopsis of Michael Malone's description of the next phase of corporate organization for those in perpetual motion.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
-Edgar Degas

Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
-W. Edwards Deming

Damn but this is good.

The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts

Gladwell goes on to blow holes in Chris Anderson's notion that everything wants to be--and will become--free.

Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge?

by Robert Scoble on June 28, 2009

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. What would you like me to find? Chinese Earthquake? Google has it.

Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It’s impossible. I’m an advanced searcher and I can’t find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine.

On April 19th, 2009 I asked about Mountain Bikes once on Twitter. Hundreds of people answered on both Twitter and FriendFeed. On Twitter? Try to bundle up all the answers and post them here in my comments. You can’t. They are effectively gone forever. All that knowledge is inaccessible. Yes, the FriendFeed thread remains, but it only contains answers that were done on FriendFeed and in that thread. There were others, but those other answers are now gone and can’t be found.

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

This doesn't have to be either/or. Some items and ideas are interesting flashes or finds, not essays. They go into Posterous, FriendFeed, or Twitter streams. More fully formed thoughts warrant blog posts. All of these have their place.