Yvette Arts

Today I was pointed to the site readinginsights.com. This is a “free service that helps you catalogue your reading insights and easily share them with others.” And besides the fun of being able to read what others have found “insightful” in a book you may have read, readinginsights.com is set up where any user can make money in the process of participating in the site.

There are two ways in which you can see some revenue from the model. The first is that if you are the first person to add five insights for a book, readinginsights.com will place your Google Adsense ads next to that book for a year. When anyone clicks on the ad during the year Google will pay you a commission.

The second way to make money is to invite someone to read your insights on readinginsights.comor if you blog about your insights. If someone buys a book you recommend, you will earn the Amazon commission. Of course, you need to sign up for the Google Adsense account for the first way to make money, and you need to set up an Amazon associate account so you can realize some commission under the second scenario.

I looked through some of the insights on the website. The user dmartin submitted some insights from Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. One quote from the book that was shared was “No matter how many times you are willing to click, half of the Internet is still invisible to us” (page 168).

The content acquisition team members at Provo Labs are constantly in the process of acquiring and generating content. I notice now more than ever that there is certainly a vast difference in the quality of the content that is available on the Internet. I’m glad that half or more of the Internet is still invisible to me. Some of the content is just not worth the click.

The question then becomes “How can the user find the information that he/she needs—find that content that is worth the click?”

Provo Labs is working on a distributed search engine that promises to make visible those portions of the web the user is seeking without pulling up a million responses to a search term. It also comes with G-rated and PG-rated filters for those users who desire such a feature. We want to make the content “worth the click.”

Third day of work, second day of Corporate Alliance training.

I did increase my rpi (relationship power index) from 23 points on the first day to 243 on day two. How was this done? Power drills, power drills, learn-serve-grow activities, and power drills. These activities were timed, so we had to think quickly and listen carefully during each exchange.

The Corporate Alliance (CA) team created the program to help people realize the value of nurturing relationships as a key to genuine influence, and personal and professional development. The CA team demonstrated how that when once value is deemed to reside in individuals instead of in the organizations (or an organizational structure), everything changes in the marketplace/community.

We also practice this concept at Provo Labs. We know that our relationships with other people, including customers, investors, business owners, and key employees at hundreds of other companies, is the most important factor in our success. We are highly focused on constant networking and learning and we freely share that learning among ourselves and with others in the community. We focus on building companies that combine content and community and technology in innovative ways to specifically meet the needs of our customers. (Thanks to the Provo Labs’ web team for these words.)

One of my passionate areas of interest revolves around a question posed by Mary Parker Follett in the early 1920s: “How do we make human interplay productive?” Tom Schwen, professor at Indiana University Bloomington also asks a couple of similar questions: “What are the fundamental dimensions that influence performance? How do we socialize into productivity?” I feel that the CA team have these questions implicitly in mind as they evolve and grow their leadership summit curriculum.

And Provo Labs is also dedicated to growing this type of “evolution” where there is a process of reciprocal leadership—where, as Follett states “Activity always does more than embody purpose, it evolves purpose” (Creative Experience, p. 83). Follett also describes this idea by stating that the “process must be emphasized rather than product, that the process is continuous, and that the making of wholes and the breaking of wholes are equally important” (ibid, p. 103). And to just throw in where my thoughts are taking me, I think this idea of “evolving purpose” is key to the foundation of Web 2.0. But before I head there, I want to include this long quote from Follett:

We see experience as an interplay of forces, as the activity of relating leading through fresh relatings to a new activity, not from purpose to deed and deed to purpose with a fatal gap between, as if life moved like the jerks of mechanical toys with only an external wire-puller to account for the jerks, or a too mysterious psychic energy. What we posses always creates the possibilities of fresh satisfactions [emphasis mine]. The automobile does not satisfy wants only, it creates wants; this is the meaning of our formula for sociology. The automobile was not invented to solve the farmers’ problems. The purpose in front will always mislead us (ibid, pp. 80-81).

What I think ties Corporate Alliance’s program, the mission of Provo Labs and Web 2.0 together, this idea that “What we posses always creates the possibilities of fresh satisfactions.”

And I will talk about this in the next post. My little son, Jake, has come to be with me and this always creates satisfaction for me.