I’m coming a little late to the game. Evidently, there’s been much ado about the Web2MemeMap posted to Flickr by Tim O’Reilly. Peter has a great initial analysis of the map and its shortcomings on his newish blog Designing for the Sandbox.

On the train the other day this image popped into my head as a way of explaining the emerging generation of Web-based services. (I hadn’t posted it because I really didn’t have the time to explain it. I still don’t, so hopefully it speaks for itself.)

It doesn’t accommodate some of the Web2.0 buzzwords — tagging, perpetual beta, etc. — but since we’re still trying to figure out what Web2.0 is, perhaps we need to strip a way the things that are consequences of the core principle, not the principle itself.

A handful of colleagues helped me review my presentation for the upcoming East Coast IA Retreat. Both the subject matter and the format of the presentation are unconventional and the peer review was an invigorating process to refine both.

Instead of a lecture format, I decided to employ the Socratic method, compiling a workbook that introduced basic concepts and asked leading questions to build upon them. Based on the conversation last night, I intend to make the following changes to the first draft of the workbook:

1. Provide some description on each page. In the first draft, every page is just a series of questions (mostly fill-in-the-blanks). It was clear that I need to provide a little more background to establish the purpose of the page in the workbook.
2. Have each participant focus on one content management concept. If you’ve been reading my blog regularly, you know that I assume there are three concepts in content management: workflow, roles, and content. Everything we do in content management uses these three concepts. Each page in the workbook asks participants the same question about all three concepts. Instead, I will change the workbook so that participants select one concept at the beginning and answer all the questions with respect to it.
3. Don’t change the flow. Although I was skeptical about the flow, it got a lot of positive feedback last night. The workbook goes against a basic principle of presenting, which is to offer your conclusions at the beginning of the discussion. The Socratic method, however, calls for building toward a conclusion. The discussion last night became quite heated when we got to the central notions, but everyone admitted that the build-up to the discussion was crucial. Still, I may try to streamline.

I think those are the high points. If in looking at the first draft of the workbook, you have any ideas, please leave a comment.

Don’t miss Movies 101, premiering this Friday, Sept 30 on American Movie Classics. In this half-hour interview show, renowned film professor Richard Brown talks to the industry’s biggest names — not about their personal lives or Hollywood gosip, but about the creative process and the business of entertainment.

The premiere promises to be especially electrifying: an interview with Martin Scorcese. My dad and Scorcese were in film school together and recount the early days of NYU’s program.

Set your TiVos.

It’s not that there aren’t things to write about, it’s just that I’ve been working on other things. September’s been a jam-packed month with two out-of-town guests in a row. (Pictures from Dana’s visit on Flickr.) In early October, I’ll be running a workshop at the IA East Coast Retreat. Instead of doing the usual slides-and-discussion routine, I put together a workbook to take a more Socratic approach to talking about my content management ideas. (Regular readers of greenonions.com should be able to run the workshop themselves.) Watch this space for a sneak preview of the workbook. I can’t promise it will make much sense without the benefit of facilitation, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting. I’m also in the midst of a long-term writing project that’s taking up much of my free time.

That said, I’ve started several different blog posts, and been thinking about some others, but until I have a bit of free time to elaborate, they’ll have to live in a draft state. Among the more interesting ones:

• Space cowboys don’t use phasers: thoughts on the use of technology in Joss Whedon’s short-lived FOX television show Firefly. I came up with this idea after reading “Finding Serenity” a book of essays about the show and finding it deficient in this area.
• One small step — defeating defeatism: diagnosing why the design community in DC is so “defeatist,” a word used by PeterMe to describe the state of what he saw during his visit.
• The economics of enterprise architecture: James and I had a great conversation on the way home from the Adaptive Path Redux held by DCIA a couple weeks ago. He’s been working on thinking about the relationship between Enterprise Architecture and Web 2.0 — really interesting stuff on how their core philosophies share some principles — which got me thinking about the viability of those principles in economic terms.
• IA Summit 2006: Of course, I have a few ideas for what to present at IA2006, which I intend to hammer out here on greenonions.com.

I won’t pretend there are legions of you waiting on the edge of your seat for Dan’s Next Post, but to those of you who do stumble in occasionally, my apologies for the silence. Perhaps October will be better…

Earlier this week, DCIA hosted a redux of Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week. Forty people turned up to the event. For more information, see James’ account. For pix, see Damon’s photostream.

Lisa (the one in blue) and the organization she works for are in the Christian Science Monitor! (slideshow)

My sister Lisa works as a monkey trainer in a small non-profit organization called Helping Hands, which provides trained capuchin monkeys to quadraplegics.