One on the Personal Request For Proposal (pRFP) Engagement Model and the other the Information Sharing Report.

The first is a look at a the negotiation stage in the Car Buying Engagement Model, which paints a detailed picture of one person’s experience through the entire Customer-Supplier Engagement Framework for a new car.  Think of this as “car buying VRM style.” In the pRFP Engagement Model, we do a deep dive on how Sally would use a pRFP broker to buy a new car.

The second is a report placing Information Sharing in the global context. Based on a comprehensive literature review by Mark Lizar, the ISWG takes a look at the historical conversations about privacy and data protection to illustrate how we see Information Sharing as part of an emerging solution to managing the increasing risks and challenges of individuals sharing personal information online.

If you have an interest, please take a look and give us some feedback. We’ll be incorporating input from the comment period starting next week, September 13, 2010.

I hope to hear from you.

Steve Blank, Entrepreneur and Author

Steve Blank, Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, will be presenting at the Fishbon Event Lab, Wednesday April 14 in Santa Barbara. The Event Lab starts at 7ish with a potluck barbecue, followed by the presentation at around 8:30.

Steve’s startup experiences include E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS Computers, Convergent Technologies, Ardent, SuperMac, ESL and Rocket Science Games. Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

After he retired, he wrote a book (actually his class text) about building early stage companies called Four Steps to the Epiphany. He now teaches entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. With “Customer Development” the core theme in these classes.

In 2009, he was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. The same year, the San Jose Mercury News listed me as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley. In 2010, I was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.

He has also given several well-received talks on “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“.

In 2007 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to serve on the California Coastal Commission, the public body which regulates land use and public access on the California coast. In 2010 he was appointed to the Expert Advisory Panel for the California Ocean Protection Council. He is on the board of Audubon California (and its past chair) and spent several years on the Audubon National Board. He is a board member of Peninsula Open Space Land Trust (POST). In 2009 he became a trustee of U.C. Santa Cruz and joined the board of the California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV).

The event will take place at the Pescadrome, 101 S Quarantina St, Santa Barbara, CA 93103.

Event: Steve Blank, entrepreneur & author
Date: April 14th
Time: Potluck BBQ ~7PM, talk at ~8:30PM
Location: The Pescadrome 101 S Quarantina St, Santa Barbara, CA 93103.

Fishbon is an artists’ collaborative based in Santa Barbara.

It should be a fun environment and good people. Please feel free to invite others. If you can RSVP to me at joe@switchbook.com, it would be appreciated.

Sure.

It’s about time.

I sated myself long ago on the digital high of social networking, whether you call it Twitter, Facebook, or something else. We, the Kool-Aid drinkers, will try just about any new technical gadget if it promises us a richer, more immediate advantage… in life, work, whatever.

But even digital fanbois cannot live on Kool-Aid alone.

We are weaving a new social tapestry. Home pages, blogs, tweets, profiles, these are all part of something bigger co-created in bits to replace and augment our traditional social ties in the world of atoms. As we discover new toys, they’ll grab our attention, until the glow of novelty fades. “Shiny” wins for the moment. Then, those with enduring value find a place in our daily lives.

Blogs, for example, dramatically transformed as Twitter took over for real-time tidbits and pointers. Blogs stopped being the most frequent vehicle for self-published contributions to the global conversation, and instead settled in as a long form context for engaging dialog. While Twitter satisfies the instant gratification of the exclamation, blogs allow a more durable appreciation and digestion of complex ideas. Blogs moved from the reactive, real-time driver of the echosphere to a more natural role, aligned with its form and function a medium for deliberative discussion and debate, tirades and manifestos.

So, for those of you still running high on your first rush with Twitter or Facebook… I agree with Matt & John.

Take some time off.

Reconnect with your work and your passions offline and in other media. It may well highlight what is magical in social networking and what is just flavored sugar-water. It may even allow you to reconfigure your online social network as a more durable, value-creating contribution to your life.

That would be an excellent way to start the second decade of the millennium.

I’m looking forward to writing a bit more this year, opening the conversation up about portable contexts and user driven services. My work with Project VRM and the Kantara Initiative’s Information Sharing and User-Managed Access Work Groups will continue to be a big part of that.

I’m also looking forward to some interesting new product and service releases, from SwitchBook, MyDex, The Mine!, and others in the VRM community, as well as updates and innovations from Scanaroo, Kynetx and Azigo and others. Also, Doc Searls‘ upcoming book on the Intention Economy promises to be an intriguing read. It should be a good year for VRM.

Best of luck to you and for your own plans for 2010. May it be a stand-out year for all of us.

JoeAndrieu: @zemanta just crashed my browser. WP server side install, with FCK editor. Crashed latest Firefox while drag & dropping image.

JoeAndrieu: actually, I must say I was impressed with @zemanta, and the crash may not be their fault.

andraz @JoeAndrieu there is no way for us to crush firefox, except if there is a bug in firefox itself (we only use standard javascript)

JoeAndrieu:  @andraz just confirmed that it is repeatable: 1. Insert image. 2. Move image into a bulleted list. This did not crash with other images.

JoeAndrieu:  @andraz should I submit a formal bug report or do you have it under control?

friedcell: @JoeAndrieuwe’ll look into the drag and drop issue tomorrow morning CET. did you publish the post that crashed firefox?

JoeAndrieu: @friedcell still working on it. It crashed during editing, as I was adding images.

friedcell: @JoeAndrieutweet the url @ me when you’re done and if possible indicate the drop point so we can reproduce it, file a bug and fix it asapabout 3 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to JoeAndrieu

JoeAndrieu: @friedcell if you like, I’ll send you the draft. Just promise not to publish or redistribute.

andraz: @JoeAndrieu This is a bug report to be filled against Firefox… however we’d be interested to have a skype chat – support@zemanta.com

JoeAndrieu: @friedcell as requested here’s the blog post http://is.gd/llXg

friedcell: @JoeAndrieu great, thanks. as @andraz already pointed out firefox should catch such event loops, but i hope we can do that for it

JoeAndrieu: @friedcell it surprised me that it only happened with Zemanta images. Those from my own gallery worked fine.

Great responsiveness by Zemanta. I’m truly impressed. Especially as all this happened on a lazy Sunday morning. I’ll report how the bug resolves itself.

Btw… anyone know any tools that make creating this kind of thread easier? I’d love to have the timestamps for those tweets and the cut & paste and editing was tediously unnecessary.

“The Social Graph” is a popular misnomer that has plagued the social networking portability conversation ever since Brad Fitzpatrick catalyzed the blogosphere with a vision about the Global Social Graph.

But in fact, “The Social Graph” has little real value outside of computer science elegance. Nobody but Big Brother, the TSA, the CIA, and [insert surveillance agency of your jurisdiction here], actually want that single, monolithic view of all the relationships in the world. That’s The Social Graph.

In contrast, my social graph is hugely valuable to me. Your social graph matters to you. And it might be interesting to discover where our graph (plural) overlap. But neither of us actually care about The Social Graph.

At the VRM Workshop 2008, here at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, it came out that “social graph” is actually plural.

Like fish.

The Social Graph is a misleading distraction, a handy buzzword we can all slip into our cocktail conversations. But the real value is in the personal, independent social graph we all have. Plural.

If you think about it, that’s the only way you can really make sense of it in our user-centric, user-driven world.

For a quick taste, check out the interview with Drue Kataoka on View from the Bay. It is amazing how a few simple words can have such a profound visceral impact.

Drue’s suggestions resonate with my user-centric world-view:

1. SIMPLIFY
   Focus on what’s important. Eliminate what’s not.
2. IMMEDIACY
   React to the moment — not to your fears and concerns.
3. BREAK YOUR RHYTHM
   Surprise yourself and those around you.
4. BE CALM
   Find Tranquility in Action.
5. GREEN FROM THE INSIDE OUT
   Begin with your own personal ecosystem.

Take time for yourself, reconnect and put things in perspective, and engage the world on your own terms, in the moment, sustainably.

When redefining technology in personal terms, Drue’s take on Zen packs a powerful punch.

Forward to 2008 and enter PocketMod. Mash up your design, print, fold, cut, fold some more. Instant paper PDA. Nicely done and just enough fun to try out.

Tip of the hat to Peter Duke.

Actually, I doubt that it was my comment that made the difference, but kudos to everyone who took the time to give their input, even those that disagreed with me. (Note that link only includes those who commented through the online system rather than by email or other means). Internet governance doesn’t always work well–and maybe this is an odd example of it working–but at least this time, public input seemed to prevent a change I definitely thought would be for the worse.

Tip of the hat to Doc Searls for the initial call to arms.

Future

from xkcd.com

That about sums it up sometimes, doesn’t it?