Three Big Ideas for building your Edgility

Building and maintaining your online reputation is absolutely vital to increasing your Edgility. I recently found this post on the Wired Advisor blog and I condensed its ideas into three key takeaways. Here are those takeaways and several quotes from that article...

TED talk - Chris Anderson.

Chris Anderson is the curator of TED.  In his TED talk he sheds some light on the significance of distributed video.  It is worth watching. 



Here is the Prezi that he uses in his talk. 

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation on Prezi

Amazing world view - Facebook friends visualized.

This image was so intriguing to me, that I had to stop, write this post, and make the image my desktop background. We have all heard the Facebook statistics - 500 millions users worldwide and growing.  Large numbers are sometimes hard to comprehend.  This image of 10 million pairs of friends from facebook tells the story of facebook's power to connect the world in a single image. Paul Butler graphed the friend pairs by locality and this is what he saw.  You can read more about his methods here.

Book review: Conquer Cyberoverload

I recently read the book Conquer cyberoverload: Get more done, boost your creativity, and reduce stress, by Joanne Cantor. Joanne Cantor (Ph.D) is an internationally recognized expert on the psychology of media and communications. Dr. Cantor is the Director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Joanne Cantor's compelling book describes how the "marvelous technological advances have interfered with our creativity and productivity to an alarming extent." She illustrates how information-based multitasking has negatively impacted learning, productivity, and creativity. Chapter 4 titled, "How information overload blocks creativity" is full of interesting information on how the brain works (surrounding the creative / innovative process).  Innovative / creative breakthroughs come when the brain is relaxed, something that she argues, the brain has less-and-less time to do as we plug ourselves into "our powerful, portable electronic gadgets," and continuously connect ourselves to more information through things like RSS and twitter feeds.

What I like about her books is that she provides "practical steps" on conquering cyberoverload.  Step three provides some brain-enhancing ways to promote creativity - read the book to see the entire list.  One item that resonated with me is to "choose a break of the low-information variety (avoid TV, the Internet, messaging); don't add more information to an already overwhelmed memory capacity." Dr. Cantor concludes that it is during these low-information variety breaks that we will realize our most innovative and creative ideas.