Speaking of which: WordPress CMS is the new Online Layout

Josepha is a communications expert — that is a very broad statement, and Josepha has a very broad scope.

She communicates very well, and does so on a wide variety of channels. She speaks. She gesticulates. She uses facial expressions. Intonation. She listens, empathizes, considers viewpoints, takes on perspectives. She writes, she reads, she leads and directs. She publishes — naturally, this is to be expected. Why? Naturally, because she is Executive Director of the WordPress project.

Why do I mention all of this here and now?

In just under two months we will both be participating at the WordCamp Europe (WCEU) conference in Porto (Portugal) … together with many other leading participants not only from all across Europe but from all across the globe.

Personally, I aim to be leading discussions and conversations primarily related to natural language search technology and also about the impacts such technologies have on the global media landscape (cf. “Literacy = ! { an on-off switch }” [ https://socio.business.blog/2022/04/09/literacy-an-on-off-switch ] ) … and also about how WordPress — since WordPress has become the open source machine that powers so much of the online world [1] — how this particular and popular standard CMS is now on the verge of establishing open source as the lingua franca of a wide array of technologies (and for me the most significant among these technologies remains natural language search technology).

For more about such Great Expectations, please see leading.business.blog

For more about Josepha and her expertise, please see josepha.blog [ https://josepha.blog ]

For a quick review of my remarks related to natural language search @ WCEU in Paris (2017), please see http://fun.freezine.org/2018/02/22/woohoo-wordpress-advanced-search

[1] The WordPress open source CMS is very widespread and is also the template for many courses and classes worldwide — so this “online” technology is quite analagous to the way that standardized keyboard layouts became the standard machines a century or two ago, and also much in the same way that the scientific method made open publication the sine qua non of science three or four centuries ago.

Featured image via https://josepha.blog/about/speaking

Porto image via https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/centuries-of-porto-at-your-disposal

To Disrupt or Not to Disrupt — that is one of Charlene’s Questions

Charlene Li has many questions. I came into contact with some of her ideas when she was working closely together with Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester, finally publishing the book “Groundswell” together with Josh Bernoff well over a decade ago.

Recently, I discovered an interview with Charlene done by Bob Buday … and I have already written about a number of aspects of the many topics covered (see, for example, “We saw with the pandemic that some organizations that struggled with change, and others that changed quickly” [ https://networks.business.blog/2022/01/06/we-saw-with-the-pandemic-that-some-organizations-that-struggled-with-change-and-others-that-changed-quickly ] ).

Here, I would like to share yet another one of Charlene’s insightful remarks shared in that interview .. in which she touches on the delicate dance she does with her notion of disruption:

If it’s about you, if it’s about your thoughts and your ideas, it will never resonate. If it’s about how you are helping people, if you’re really clear about who you are helping, and understand that they have pain points and needs, and that you’re writing very specifically to those pain points, you will always resonate.
Charlene Li [see link above for interview, ca. 17:00 – 17:30 ]

Charlene continues to explain that she thinks of the way her target audience (or more precisely her typical reader) “wants to know how she can move things forward without upsetting the apple cart.” Later in the interview she notes that she (Charlene) feels like “in every interaction — even this conversation here — I’m learning so much from it.”

So there are a lot of ideas peppered in short soundbites throughout the discussion. It is only once we (as readers) become aware of the intricate connections between these individual ideas that the complexity of the big picture among those individual puzzle pieces becomes clear. In this particular instance, it is the question about whether you wish to disrupt others or whether you wish them to disrupt you — whether to be disrupting or to be disrupted. If your job is to sell apples from your apple cart on the deck aboard an open sea-faring ship, then this is indeed quite a difficult dance to engage in.

Charlene’s expertise is in the field of business, so she is well-versed in speaking the language business leaders can easily understand. I feel she is herself a leading expert in such hand-holding while embarking on a wide variety of journeys a wide array of businesses envision in their own immediate futures.

Whereas I myself am more prone to extrapolate much further out towards the end results (such as how the revolutionary changes brought about through business networks based on natural language search will ultimately lead to the eradication of brand names as significant and/or trustworthy phenomena — see e.g. the wiki about “Social Business” @ http://socio.biz 😉 ), Charlene is probably much more adept at explaining each individual step business leaders should take in the near term in order to optimally sell their apples on their apple cart aboard their IRL brand name ocean liner.

Remember, Remember: November may be the best time to move over or come over

Now that we have overcome what seems to have been the worst of the pandemic, it may now also be a good time to begin making plans about how to start over.

I suggest coming over rather than moving over (remember, remember: Janis Joplin broke on through to the other side — so if you want to keep moving and going with the flow over here, then there’s little use in listening to whatever she might have said long ago now).

Dark side, light side, this side, that side, all said — getting inside the true meanings in life is a good plan for dealing with a bewitched world out there. Meaning is not some incantation or gobbledygook story, it’s a matter of finding alignment with natural forces.

Nature cannot be off limits. Neither is it a domain for some sort of hocus pocus mixed up confusion. Nature is what science is all about, natural laws are what we must aim for on every front.

We do not seek to affront natural order, but rather to embrace nature as the primary design principle. We must not work against it, for to be so foolish to think that we stand above it would be a laughable exercise of working towards our own peril. Either we evolve towards alignment, or we will be steamrolled and asphyxiated through fixation on believing industrialism, innovation and human ingenuity might be a viable alternative to much-larger-than-us evolutionary designs.

My timeline is limited, and in my own time horizon there are only but a few human languages within my scope of expectations. Future generations will either learn more new tricks, or they will almost certainly be forced into extinction. Extinction Rebellion is definitely an admirable concept, construct, goal, ideal or whatever.

Yet for the immediate tasks which must be solved urgently, we need a much more fundamental focus on how far humanity has gone astray from the underlying ideals of humanism towards a fetishist bondage and subordination to near-sighted capitalist short-term results driven profit-taking (“money to the bank”) mentality. What got us here is not only not going to get us there, it actually got us into this rotten mess of a situation in the first place. More of the same is not only not an answer, it is a sure-fire destination for doom, total destruction, and global terminal death.

We need to reverse out of this errant path. We must return to rational thought. We must behave in alignment with nature, we must not continue to follow any hare-brained attempts to rise above it.

My own part in this realignment is rather small — yet I do not doubt its effectivity. I strongly feel that natural language is a technology that has evolved in alignment with natural law, and that it will continue to evolve in this manner (see also “In What We Trust“). I am strongly aligned, simply because of my very strong conviction (which is also based on several decades of research).

To say “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” is of little consequence. Yet I implore you to think hard about what you yourself intend to do. And I hope you will help me to discover more about nature — please accept my invitation to start here.

Just Another Declaration of the Independence (of Cyberspace)

We don’t need no special treatment (from the likes of so-called “social media” companies).

We can connect with others directly.

A few more examples of people willing to build connections:

Cara

I have already linked to these three people who are publishing content on their own blogs on some of my other blogs — see “I largely prefer being made to feel different for being black instead of for being disabled – but neither are pleasant“, “I want your articles, blogs, newsletter, eBooks, books, and social media posts to attract more attention than ever before” and “When you expand your definition of “wealth” and start to become aware of the things that really make you feel good, you develop the awareness of what changes you need to make in order to ensure you are getting those things“.

Cara describes quite well the kinds of connections she wants to make (build, change, … “get those things”). Both Sarah and Simone actually connected with me (and both are also excellent communicators [IMHO] ).

All 3 are more than welcome to join, connect, build, etc. with the Zita project!

How do you like that? 1 blog post, 3 open invitations! 😀