Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

What to do About Platform Sameness

Current subscribers will remember at some point I was looking into platforms (see tools) for the future of the letter. Things I'm considering are: fees per number of subscribers, ease of use and communication, community component. To that list I'm adding easy ways to pay. It still feels like many of the platforms I looked into are in flux. When/if you consider a move from one platform to the other, think about the back-end, too. Anne Libby made a few, and she can tell you to watch out for integrations. If you ever wondered about the role of integrators: painkiller.... Read more →

Innovation-Speak

Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell wrote a book that draws a distinction between “innovation-speak” and innovation and creativity (I added imagination because it's step one). Spoiler-alert, the book is really about the critical role of maintenance in enduring work. Can you guess why we don't we talk more about that? Because repairing and routines are not as exciting as innovating and inventing. Imagine two profiles. One says, reliable and steady. The other, trailblazing and surprising. Which one do you pick? Hence, an under investment in repairing corporations, communities, conversations, and even consciousness. It's an interesting phenomenon that happens in communication.... Read more →

Why How we Work Shifts What and Who has Power

In a recent conversation with Cal Newport, Jason Fried explains how email has ushered in a world where conversations happen out of context. The trouble this mechanism creates has a cumulative negative effects on how we work. And you're not going to solve it with hacks. There's no hacking human nature. Conversation is important because it's an emotional tool we use to negotiate meaning. Lack of conversation means decreased empathy, which is the root of the characteristically human qualities we need to succeed in the future. Email is a technology created to accelerate efficiency in the transmission of information. But... Read more →

A Reflection on Scale

The end and beginning of each year bear prediction gifts. But our beginnings never know our ends. Calendars are conventions. The work is in the middle. For that, reflection is more useful: pre-mortems, reviews, activity, and observation are tools for the job to be done. There's tremendous upside to building and creating. But the existing technologies and paradigms are solutions with problems non the side. Take for example micro- or niche communities. Sari Azout shared a note about scale#. I'd like to emphasize and sharpen it. She says: Scaling intimacy is the million-dollar question for digital micro-communities. I’m surprised by... Read more →

There's no ROI in Likes. The ROI is in Connection.

[Ponte Vecchio, Firenze, Italy. Photo by Valeria Maltoni.] [Note: I published this article on LinkedIn on March 5, 2019 with the promise I would post it to my site. Then my friend developer died and I got busy. 2020 was, well, 2020. So here it is in all its 3k+ words glory.] You don't get connection from status. You get it by enlivening each other other, making people stronger through engagement. Status may give you self-esteem, but alone it does not create change. It's social energy that drives civilization. But we need to figure out how it works and how... Read more →

The Age of Data Malpractice Could be Over: a Shift in How we Understand Relationships

“It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting—it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web. I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” It was 2007#. More than a decade later, Tim Berners-Lee announced Solid#, a path to preserve the decentralization of the web by putting you and your data at the center of it: Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over... Read more →

For Every Successful A-Side, There's a Suprising B-Side

[Coming up this week. Sign up here: http://bit.ly/reframe-connect] A B-side was the song on the flip side of a 12" or 7" vinyl single that backed the A-side originally. That's where you put the song that wasn't going to be promoted or receive radio play. They were meant to make it worth your while to buy the single. You'd know the songs because diehard fans raved about them initially, then they spread. Metaphorically-speaking, B-side stands for for the less-obvious part of a story, personality, or other. It gets less attention, but it has more power. Because a B-side contains more... Read more →

Inventing Things Without the Words

On October 29, 1969, the first node of a network called ARPANET was connected. There wasn't a word for what was happening yet. That came later. Internet and TCP / IP, its fundamental protocol for the transmission of information, became a word a few years later. But the vision was to create a “unique intergalactic network.” That's what one of the pioneers of that company said in early 1960s. No word, no word of mouth, apparently. It was hard to predict what that connection would mean, exactly. On the morning of 29 October 1969, at 3420 Boelter Hall of the... Read more →

Mistakes Happen. It's What we do With them that Makes a Difference.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest. When we say “done is better than perfect,” we're not saying forget testing. Steve Woods, CTO of Nudge.ai, put the philosophy to the test# recently. He got into a sales meeting, and when he came out the phones were ringing off the hook—hundreds of people had received repeated invite/cancellation/invites messages to a webinar. Nick Haughton, growth engineering at Nudge says, “I moved into this role 2 weeks ago, and we already had this webinar in... Read more →

4 Ways Technology Impacts our Ability to Make Decisions

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest. Marshall McLuhan observed the effects of media and technology. “The medium is the message,” “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” and “First we build the tools, then they build us,” are three ways of talking about the impact of technology. True to the Canadian educator and communication theorist observation that “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers,” we're still working on our understanding... Read more →