1.	Switching gears.
2.	I've reconnected in a very pleasing way with a longtime friend, Bernie De Koven.
3.	Bernie is a game designer, he recently left Mattel, where he was part of the team that did the Barbie Fashion Designer software.
4.	We've been friends since the early 80s when he was a user of the bulletin-board that I operated out of my Menlo Park living room, running on an Apple II with a ten megabyte Corvus hard drive.
5.	Between then and now, Bernie has had lots of game-designing jobs and has explored a new idea called "technography" in the late 80s and early-mid 90s.
6.	Technography is revolutionary. It's a new application for computers that's on the verge of being discovered by thousands, maybe millions of users. It's newly relevant in the age of meetings and net-connected executives and engineers.
7.	How does technography work? Add a laptop and a smart person to a meeting. Project the laptop so other people can see the screen. Soon the screen becomes the "surface" of the meeting. People start pointing at text and say "Move this there!" or "This belongs here," and the technographer, with a few waves of the mouse, does what he or she is told.
8.	People can log into the meeting thru a web browser. Decisions are made, resources allocated, committments given and taken. Technography increases the value of the organization in substantial, even huge ways.
9.	The meeting can start on the web, days or weeks before the meeting, and extend days or weeks into the future. The meeting becomes a project, a process. Any conference or meeting, of any size, can benefit from technography.
10.	A technography-managed meeting works differently from the meetings you go to today. No notepads. The purpose of the meeting is to create a document. One document, not twenty or two hundred. People who are shy are given ways to contribute safely. Technography is about tools for communication. And of course technology is central to technography.
11.	I'm re-learning this from my friend Bernie. I've believed in the power of group idea processing since I started doing it with my team at Living Videotext in the mid-80s. Now fifteen years later, computers are widespread, the skills and knowledge are out there. The users are starting to do it, so it's time for me to tap my lovely friend Bernie on the shoulder and say, Bernie, let's have some fun!
12.	And of course, my walking buddy Bernie says yes!
13.	So here we go...
14.	http://technography.userland.com/
15.	I'll be writing more about technography, and sharing Bernie's writing. We'll do how-tos and Technography for Dummies. I look forward to the O'Reilly book, Technography in a Nutshell. It's like XML, but instead of being geek-level, this is totally user-level stuff, and of course it's connected to XML, but let me and my technical friends worry about that.