The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

In a recent blog post, online marketing guru Seth Godin proposed a new standard for meetings and conferences. He based his proposal on factors like oil reaching $130 a barrel, increased security measures at airports adding two to three more hours to business trips and online conversation and video conferencing tools getting better and better all the time. Godin asserted that, given today’s business realities,

• a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.
• a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.
• if you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip.

User Experience researcher Dan Rockwell picked up and expanded on Godin’s original post on his own blog, where he cited the rise of collaborative web apps as another factor that will affect and change meetings, and mentioned Octopz as an example.

The latest collaborative app we’ve used at work is called Octopz, and ya know it was pretty decent.  Wyatt at work seems to give me these kinds of mini fire drills, we need to find a cool app fast that does x, y, z, p, d, q and so forth.  We landed on Octopz after trying PalBee, Brio and a few other flex like apps that basically help bring people, web cams and content to talk.  You’d think just use WebEx right?  I feel like thats pretty bland and I dunno, I’m always on the hunt for the newer stuff.

Update: ZDNet.com’s Oliver Marks also blogged about the high cost of oil, more expensive and longer business trips and the potential impact on business and collaborative technologies.

Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton is a Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research, an early Octopz advisor and the author of the book Sketching User Experiences. In a recent BusinessWeek article, Buxton shares one of the techniques from his book, called the Order of Magnitude or OOM rule, for overcoming a creative or conceptual impass. The OOM rule states that:

If something changes by an order of magnitude among any meaningful dimension, it is no longer the same thing.

To illustrate the effect of OOM, Buxton takes us back to the early 1800’s schoolhouse and uses the student slate (an existing technology) and the emergence of the classroom blackboard (an implementation of the existing technology on a larger scale) as an example. Buxton points out the despite the lack of technical innovation, the change in scale from slate to blackboard, fundamentally changed the classroom and the impact on education was greater than paper, the PC or the Internet.

Bill Buxton’s example of Order of Magnitude (OOM) using display technology

Buxton then draws on his own experiences and interests to provide a contemporary example of the OOM rule at work, by citing the accelerating shift from today’s digital electronics and personal computer displays to large interactive wall displays that can be put up anywhere there is a whiteboard or cork board.

Microsoft’s Ian Sands demonstrates TouchWall and Plex (video by TechCrunch.com)

The importance of this development was underscored yesterday by Buxton’s boss Bill Gates (click for video) at the Microsoft CEO summit, where he demonstrated TouchWall and Plex, prototype technologies for creating inexpensive wall-based multi-touch computer interfaces.

Buxton concludes his BusinessWeek article by putting his OOM rule in context with respect to creativity and problem-solving:

Not everyone can learn to be a world-class designer, no more than everyone could become a major league pitcher or a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taught to improve your ability to throw a ball, or understand something about the interior working of the atom. So it is with creativity. There’s no magic formula for any of this, and the OOM rule is just one technique that one can add to one’s quiver. It’s not the full story. But it is a good start.

BusinessWeek also has a review of Sketching User Experiences as well as more articles by Buxton on risk and entepreneurship and innovation.

Update: this is the slideshow version of my riff.

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Here is a 5 minute riff I put together to answer the question “what is the future of communications” for the MicroMedia Meetup taking place online and at in the Crowne Plaza hotel lobby in Palo Alto, California at 10:30 GMT. The meetup was initiated by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang and uberblogger Robert Scoble.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, futureofwork, geoperdis, Octopz, technology