Robert Barlow-Busch's dashboard

Robert Barlow-Busch posted an update in Primal Fusion on December 17, 2009 20:14:

What do you think of the new Thought Cloud prototype in Primal Labs?

I'm pleased to announce today our latest addition to Primal Labs: introducing the "thought cloud" prototype, a more fluid and concise way to express your thoughts. Here's an excerpt from our blog post that introduces the prototype in more depth:

In many of Primal Fusion’s products, you’re asked to “express your thoughts” about a subject, by building what we call a thought cloud. To date, these thought clouds have been fairly static creations. Today in Primal Labs, we’ve launched a prototype that turns thought clouds into more fluid, interactive objects. This makes it easier and more fun for you to express an idea.

Like tag clouds, a thought cloud is a collection of differently sized words or phrases. However, there’s a key difference: whereas tag clouds are used as output to represent the top subjects in a collection of information, thought clouds can function as input to help you express an idea — even a vague, abstract idea.

In our new prototype, you’re invited to build a thought cloud by adding items, then playing with their size and position. The experience should feel like “sketching” with thoughts. For example, here’s a thought cloud that describes how someone thinks about bagpipes:



Click to continue reading on our blog...

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on December 09, 2009 19:09 to the idea "features" in Primal Fusion:

Thanks for the thorough description, Ola. So to recap, you'd like:

• A better way to specify the relationships between items in your thought cloud, to help others understand your thinking process.


• A representation of those relationships in any websites you create.
• 
  

Is that about right? FYI that we're currently working on some new features that will begin to provide this type of ability, so your feedback is really helpful. Thanks again!

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on December 09, 2009 15:31 to the idea "features" in Primal Fusion:

Hey Ola, this comment caught my attention:

"...needing a tool to express their ideas graphically for the students."

Today, our alpha provides two ways to do this: creating a "thought cloud" (essentially a tag cloud) of words and short phrases, or publishing a website that uses your thoughts to organize content.

Do you feel these choices help you express ideas graphically? Are there other alternatives you'd like to see?

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on December 08, 2009 05:01 to the problem "issue collecting & remembering secondary thoughts" in Primal Fusion:

This problem has been fixed with our latest alpha release. When you select and remember thoughts that have been suggested by the Brainstorm assistant, they'll appear in your thought cloud.

Robert Barlow-Busch posted an update in Primal Fusion on December 04, 2009 16:02:

What do you think of the new Website Generator prototype in Primal Labs?

We've just launched Primal Labs, a place to share ideas we're exploring and provide an early glimpse of some work in progress. The first item in our Labs is a website generator prototype, and we'd love to hear what you think of it! Here's an excerpt from our blog post that introduces the prototype in more depth:

When you do research on the Web, it’s common to collect information from many different sources. You visit a variety of websites, glean what you can from them, and put together some sort of summary of your research.

Today, we’re pleased introduce a prototype that automates some of that otherwise manual activity. It searches the Web on your behalf, gathering and organizing information about a subject you’re researching. The end result is a dynamically-generated website — complete with text, images, and links to more information.

Using the website generator is simple: type a few words to describe a subject, then click Generate a website. The prototype builds a website about your subject using text and images from sources such as Wikipedia, Yahoo!, and Flickr. For example, here’s a website about 19th century civil wars:



Click to continue reading on our blog...

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on December 01, 2009 22:42 to the idea "Add news feeds widget to the generated site" in Primal Fusion:

Great suggestion, Sujit, to produce a news feed based on terms in a thought cloud. Would you expect a traditional RSS feed that you could pick up in any RSS reader? If you have something else in mind -- or other details to suggest -- please share them.

BTW, you hit the nail on the head with your observation that "When the user builds a thought cloud... his choices are telling you a lot more than a single search term." That's the idea behind interacting with all our assistants: the thought cloud you construct is like sketching a picture with words. As Primal Fusion matures, the assistants should become more adept at working with the pictures we sketch.

Robert Barlow-Busch set one of Mark Connolly's replies as an official response to "What browser works best with Primal Fusion?" in Primal Fusion

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on October 01, 2009 21:31 to the idea "Blogging" in Primal Fusion:

Thanks for the idea, Mark. I'd like to understand better what value you think this tool might deliver. Is there a specific problem bloggers experience that you imagine we could address? For instance, you hint that gaining "insight" is a time-consuming process currently. It'd be great to learn more about that process.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on September 10, 2009 22:04 to the update "We want your help: improvements to Primal Fusion" in Primal Fusion:

Good catch, Alain. That screenshot should probably have shown thoughts related to "innovation" on the right-hand side (RHS) because, in fact, that's what would initially happen. The screenshot we posted shows the result of having clicked on "technology" in the main thought cloud. That's not clear.

The goal of this UI is to help you construct a thought cloud that illustrates what you're thinking about (in this example, "innovation"). The list on the RHS is meant to act like a brainstorming partner, helping you find terms to include in your thought cloud. When you click something in your thought cloud, Primal Fusion returns thoughts related to what you clicked.

Given this, the main purpose of the "Add a thought" button on the left is to let you add thoughts directly to your thought cloud. For example, when I first think about innovation, I may want to immediately add "research" and "technology" because they're top-of-mind. Once I've added the obvious items to my cloud, however, I would turn to Primal Fusion for some brainstorming help.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on September 10, 2009 17:31 to the problem "Unintuitive interface - What am I supposed to do? What is this button/link supposed to do? Why does nothing visibly happen when I click here?" in Primal Fusion:

We're currently working on some improvements to the user interface. We recently posted an illustration of some changes we're considering and would love to get everyone's feedback. So please click through, check out the changes, and let us know what you think!

Robert Barlow-Busch marked one of Juti Noppornpitak's replies in Primal Fusion as useful. Juti Noppornpitak replied to the question "Where are the references?".

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on September 10, 2009 17:21 to the idea "View List of Previous Thoughts" in Primal Fusion:

A lot to chew on in that reply, Pandora. I especially like how you've described the "train of thought" not merely as a convenience to aid navigation in the UI, but as a resource that can lend credibility to the final thoughts that a person has shared. If we know how someone arrived at their thinking, we may be more inclined to feel that thinking is valid. Good stuff.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on September 10, 2009 17:06 to the update "We want your help: improvements to Primal Fusion" in Primal Fusion:

Thanks for all your feedback on this topic, Pandora. You've shared a lot of great ideas! We'll definitely post more details about these proposed updates, especially after mulling over the feedback we're receiving, so stay tuned.

Robert Barlow-Busch marked one of Peter Sweeney's replies in Primal Fusion as useful. Peter Sweeney replied to the question "Is Primal Fusion only as good as the current semantics of the web?".

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on July 02, 2009 03:42 to the praise "Primal Fusion - Guessing Games 2.0" in Primal Fusion:

Thanks for the message, Sunil. I especially like your title of "Guessing Games 2.0": it's evocative of some ideas around thought networking. If you spend any more time exploring Primal Fusion, we'd love to hear more from you.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on July 02, 2009 03:36 to the idea "Initiating a search from my firefox search toolbar: open search." in Primal Fusion:

Thanks for the suggestion, Sarah, and for pointing to Open Search as a possible implementation. We appreciate hearing from you!

If you get a moment to respond sometime, we'd love to hear more about what motivated the idea. For instance, is there a specific benefit this capability would provide? Did you have a particular experience that brought the idea to mind? I encourage others who like Sarah's idea to chime in with their thoughts, too.

Thanks again!

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on April 03, 2009 18:21 to the problem "Deleting a website I've created" in Primal Fusion:

You've listed a lot of fantastic ideas, John! Today, the websites created by Primal Fusion are bare-bones. There are a lot of directions we could take this, however, so feedback such as yours is quite helpful as we prioritize future development.

Thanks again!

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on April 03, 2009 01:52 to the question "How can you make step #2 larger?" in Primal Fusion:

This is a good question, as step #2 quickly gets squeezed for space. We're aware of the issue. Check this related topic for some ideas on how to respond to the current limitation.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on April 03, 2009 01:42 to the problem "No invitation codes in my email" in Primal Fusion:

They're invisible codes!

No, seriously, we messed up. Some people received emails without codes. If this happened to you, we're sorry! We quickly realized the error and sent a new, sheepish email with an apology -- and with the promised codes.

If anyone didn't receive the new email with codes, please let us know and we'll take care of it right away.

Robert Barlow-Busch replied on April 01, 2009 13:55 to the idea "Semantic Think vs Google Think" in Primal Fusion:

There's a notion that our minds can operate in different modes of thinking. Certainly, we believe that semantic technology has the potential to support more "natural" modes, as you put it. We've been digging into research in this area, and it's a rich source of inspiration.

Thanks for sharing this idea -- it provides lots to... er, think about. :-)