but i have such a soft spot for e-mint (disclaimer: i’m one of the founders).

the group is global but has a heavy london presence as we used to hold f2f meetings every month. there hasn’t been a f2f in a while but last week about 40 people came out to meet other e-minties and hear nancy white give a talk. both robin and david blogged about it. thanks to lizzie & robin who seem to be the main instigators in organizing this!

btw, robin has a few pix on flickr which gave me a kick to put my e-mint pix up there…. coming soon…

bolt media, a ‘networking site for people developing creative projects’, announced the winner of the first online collaborative song writing contest (at least they claim it’s the first time).

Bolt’s music experts and members of the band “Three Days Grace” chose five musicians, including a Christian rocker and youth pastor and a classical musician trained at the Berklee School of Music, to form Orangeblood.

The band created the song, called “Gunshy,” over the Internet using feedback, constructive criticism and remixed tracks from a new community of musicians.

that’s very cool! i wonder what sort of collaborative tools they offered the 5 musicians and what format the feedback/criticism was fed into the process. it doesn’t seem to be promoted heavily on the bolt website. i did find this blog post but there’s not many details. anyone try this website before?

btw, i knew bolt sounded familiar. their ‘about us’ page says they’ve been around 10 years in the youth sector & sure enough … they used to be a community website. looks like they’ve survived & morphed into social networking.

Forum One has been around for years in the community space and now they have come out with project spaces, a web based collaboration software.

you can get a 30 day trial to check it out but the feature list includes what you’d expect – calendar, document sharing, task list, email discussion lists, message boards. maybe the feature list isn’t complete but i think there’s a fair amount missing for a collaborative software – particularly one from a company that knows about getting people together online.

interesting article on the rise of IM popularity over email usage. it touches on the generation gap of older folks not used to spreading them across several conversations of IM, how IM is the ultimate in having communication but not really having to ‘deal’ with the person you’re IMing and the immediacy of the medium. there’s 2 really great quotes i want to highlight –

“Like parents, they try to control their children,” she says. “But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate.”

this from anne kirah (senior design anthropologist at microsoft). she’s talking about companies and how younger generations work differently. this is going to be a huge topic of research as time goes on and, i think, a real shake up for business. i recently had a conversation with a friend who said all their graduate folks are very different to what they were several years ago. how these kids think they can take over everything (which i think can be said about every graduating class) and they have a real sense of not needing to work for anything, everything being handed to them – a real sense of entitlement. i think that added on to the technology culture is going to shake things up a lot.

“In this world of instant gratification, e-mail has become the new snail mail,” says 25-year-old Rachel Quizon from Norwalk, California. She became addicted to instant messaging in college, where many students are logged on 24/7.

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee.

i love the idea of comparing junk mail/post boxes with email. it’s such a great mental picture of how email sucks for collaboration or working with multiple people.

Negotiations and Conflict Management Research (NCMR) is the official
journal of the International Association for Conflict Management. NCMR
publishes fundamental research that focuses on theory and research on
conflict and conflict management across levels, including organizational
conflict, interpersonal conflict and inter-group conflict, and across a
range of domains including environmental conflict, crisis negotiations,
political conflict and cross-cultural conflict, as well as formal and
informal third party intervention, including mediation and arbitration.
The journal welcomes both full-length theory and empirical manuscripts, as
well as shorter “research notes” appropriate for single study empirical
papers. Diverse methods and approaches are also welcome. More
specifically, we seek to publish papers that:
(1) initiate, extend, validate or redirect a line of inquiry;
(2) provide a theoretically driven review and integration of an important
research area;
(3) draw upon and integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines;
(4) provide new empirical findings;
(5) make theoretical contributions;
(6) employ diverse methods;
In addition, NCMR seeks to provide high quality and timely feedback to
scholars, and provide scholars with individualized mentoring through our
mentoring program, where early career scholars can be mentored and receive
feedback on their manuscripts prior to submitting their work for review.
In addition, we seek to reward scholarship with our annual “Best Paper”
award.
For additional information, please see the journal webpage at http://www.iacm-conflict.org/ncmr/