BMW drives into audio book podcasts
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Mediocrity by "areas of improvement"
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TechCrunch » A Taste of DEMO 2006
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Job hunting online complicated by the feds [via Virtual Handshake blog]
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Don't litter [via AdRants]
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Technorati Tags: audio blogging, podcasts

A good definition of Groupthink at Disinfopedia.

Groupthink is "a concept that was identified by Irving Janis ("a forefather in the study of group dynamics") [in 1972] that refers to faulty decision-making in a group. Groups experiencing groupthink do not consider all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the expense of quality decisions."[1] (http://www.abacon.com/commstudies/groups/groupthink.html)[2] (http://www.groupthinkfilm.com/)

[via Contentious]

"This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it. "Society's problems are scaling at unprecedented rates, so solutions need to scale also. Our very survival depends on our ability to work together more effectively, to get collectively smarter. Computers -- when used properly -- can help us do this." Our software tools -- particularly in the collaboration space -- are nowhere close to fulfilling their potential. I can walk into any meeting anywhere in the world with a piece of paper in hand, and I can be sure that people will be able to read it, mark it up, pass it around, and file it away. I can't say the same for electronic documents. I can't annotate a Web page or use the same filing system for both my email and my Word documents, at least not in a way that is guaranteed to be interoperable with applications on my own machine and on others. Why not? In order to make a real impact in the collaborative space, tools must not only be good, they must be interoperable. Improving collaborative tools, then, boils down to this: We must be people-centric when designing and building applications, and we must work with other developers to make our tools more interoperable."

Eugene Eric Kim - Blue Oxen Associates -- A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

[via Kolabora]

Boston.com: MIT professor sees far-flung future workplace

According to Ray Ozzie, Lotus Notes creator and founder and chief executive of Groove Networks Inc; "The real story is what technology-augmented decentralization is doing to business and society." also... "Fundamentally, the technology is being used to reduce the cost of coordination to get a problem solved."

I think that we're see much this happening already, but it's not being driven by employees who need by rather by management who requires it. Part of the great "jobless recovery" is utilizing the technologies we've put in place over the past few several years to augment some of the previously inefficient business process such as archaic communication and collaboration modes. Not unlike children who grow up today and don't know a world without the Internet, new companies are growing up in this economy that know little of the old ways and could not survive were it not for a highly coordinated and collaborative remote collection of centers.