CAB - Communication Agents Blog

Art That Makes People Think!

An excellent animated music video tells the true story behind one of the most controversial chapters of American history.

The medium, style and approach utilized in this piece are an outstanding example how artists should best employ their creative energies while contributing to inform, expose and suggest alternative views of how things really are.

The story of Katherine Harris and the 200o Bush Election.

Find more excellent content like this at BushFlash.

To be seen!

[via Zoe Lenska]

Limbo State Makes Communication Agents Think About Beauty

The new group of accepted Communication Agents is swiftly moving forward and is now refining and adjusting their new sites while learning the basics of publishing their first articles.

This morning I have had a great live collaboration session with Andrea rieniets to discover how to create hyperlinks to books and other sites with maximum ease and speed. She got it straight in less than five minutes. It was great to collaborate live over a 56 K dial-up connection while using a Voxwire MeetingRoom for voice, textchat and co-browsing needs while utilizing a Glance session to showcase her live how to exactly go about selecting and creating a link inside Movable Type.

In these first few days the little fears, doubts and frustrations arising from the learning and familiarization with new tools marks an important learning phase for all new Communication Agents.

Learning and adopting new technologies is not an easy task, especially when you are not in your twenties and you have had only a moderate use of the Internet so far.

Getting over the fears and prejudices of what it takes to publish something online takes indeed a few days and some dedicate, humble, open-minded approach also on the part of the learners. Being non-technical users they rightly demand maximum ease of use and simple and intuitive procedures.

Though with these technologies we have come light years ahead of the webmaster age, there is still a minimum of friction with technical issues. Therefore good patience and relaxed attitude can help even the most obtuse learner pick up what is needed in a non stressful fashion.

All of them are eager to learn and master all of their functionalities right now, while the path is still very long and steep. There is lots to learn and the best way to do so is to relax and to move one step at a time. I and Mihai are very happy and available to help. So are the three pioneers and each one of us can truly count on the others for getting this thing moving as it should.

Finally, it is nice to recount the stresses of the cosmetic side. This is also the time that CAs are worrying much about the look and appearance of their new site, forgetting altogether that they should not make of this site a mirror of their personal taste and style, but rather an innovative communication vehicle that gets them in places where they have not been before. Therefore trying to make the site "nice" and good looking is really not the best approach in this first phase. The good look and the visual message should rather convey without ambiguity something about the theme and mission of the site, leaving elegance and beauty to be created in the eye of the reader out of cleanliness, order and consistency of what is presented.

This is more difficult as for some of us the aestehtic aspect is something perceived very emotionally.
Interestingly enough, at the beginning of June, the three pioneering CAs did not spend one minute in adjusting the look of their site, outside of providing me with their initial photos, when they had them. The rest came naturally without them ever having to worry or actively deciding anything design-related. Results so far seem to indicate we striked a good chord not wasting time in a "creative" design process, but adopted ad literam some basic rules and best practices learned on Robin Good's own Web publishing and Information Design professional work.

What the new Communication Agents are learning in this respect is the importance of Information Design versus the traditional approach of Graphic Design. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend to a few articles on mine on the topic that will help you see things in a different light. The issue not to assume that anyone of us holds a particular taste or key to "beauty", as cultural differences, experience and personal taste will make what is paradise for one hell for another one. It is therefore in search of other qualities as cleanliness, order, organization and consistency that one should owe most of hir (his+her) interest when addressing design issues.

Beauty shall surface out of qualities of ease of access, order and simplicity with the complement of a unique, memorable "look and feel".

"It is a wonderful journey we have started and I am thankful for the road and the good weather ahead."

Robin

New Traffic Record For Chris Gupta: Top Ten Medical Myths Make The News

Extreme-DM traffic counter

Communication Agents rejoyce as Chris Gupta makes some nice waves in cyberspace.

I am happily celebrating Chris Gupta who broke yesterday all of our existing CA traffic records to his Web site with over 1550 unique visitorsin one day!

For the Communication Agents Initiative this is a sign of success and an early proof of our effectiveness at doing what we are pursuing.

Chris Gupta' Share The Wealth Web site has been systematically publishing highly relevant and controversial content since the beginning of June 2003.

In less than three months of life Chris has published over 117 articles and received 69 comments from his readers. Overall he has received over 10,000 unique visitors in this short period of time and has received visitors from over 50 different countries.

So much interest Chris has been able to raise around the topics of health, alternative medicine, energy and vested interests at work that a few requests have reached me asking for a Spanish version of his daily posts. While we would love to extend Chris reach through another language we lack yet the financial resources to do so, unless we can find a Spanish-speaking supporter who would be willing to trail along Chris tracks. We would be happy to provide the whole infrastructure and support required for this at no cost. (If you know somebody who would love to help Chris, please post a comment at the end of this message.)

The reason for Chris sudden explosion of traffic was due to his beautiful post entitled "The Top 10 Medical Myths" dated July 29th. In it, Chris says pretty unambiguosly how what we are being told about vaccinations, x-rays, tumors and blood cholesterol is pretty much worth complete re-evaluation.

If you care about your health and the one of your loved ones, and if you believe that there is something not right with the way health, energy and valuable information are treated today, you will find certainly a great read and some really powerful questions to entertain yourself with by checking out Chris Gupta great work.

As for any other Communication Agent site you can freely susbcribe to his posts by submitting your name and email in any of his site pages (top right). If you use a newsreader you can tap into Chris RSS feed which you can copy and paste from here too.

Communication Agents At Work

All of the accepted Communication Agents are working hard at refining their personal focus and direction inside the CA Learning Hub.

While I have moved myself for a short holyday to the island of Terceira in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, all of the accepted Communication Agents have been posting their content to go through their first learning step inside the private Web site reserved for their work. I have provided comments and advice to each one without saving on ideas and suggestions.

All of the posts and exchanges are open and each one can read everyone else work and posts. All CAs have equal access rights to the Forum and they can freely access and edit any content made available, leaving them with total independence and control on the contents being posted.

In the coming two days I expect one or two of them to have reached enough refinement of their "Focus" to be able to launch their CA Web site and to start posting in "Limbo" state their initial articles, commentaries or reviews. The "Limbo" state, is a period of time in which the Communication Agent start posting to hir site without actually being completely public. During this time I am not allowing Google to index the site and the CA is given the time needed to populate each one of hir selected categories with at least one article. In this way, each CA familiarizes hirself with the publishing procedures and gains personal self-confidence in the different parts of the publishing workflow. During this time final refinements and corrections are made to the CA site so that it becomes better and improved for the official launch a few days later.

Sebastian Fiedler is the ones who been moving faster than some of his peers so far and maybe the first one to see his site up.

On the other hand Klaus Rudolph has gently released his seat for another Communication Agent to jump in. I am reviewing at this time Diane Kramer application who was first in queue after this group for possible integration in this first group. Diane is set to win the Nobel Peace Prize for 2013 with a new set of ideas and technologies being embedded in her new PeakSkills learning system. (If you are a CA read more about Diane inside the Forum where I have posted my most recent feedback and comments to her).

Overall, a great deal of learning is going on and our little group is moving its first steps in finding out where they are truly directed and how they intend to tackle the core issues affecting our Areas for Change.

Stay tuned for more news.