The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

It all began innocently enough in 2003, when Matt Harding (aka Dancing Matt) left his job as a video game developer to travel the world. Almost as an afterthought, he began videotaping himself (with the help of others) doing his own particular dance jig in front of different landmarks.

Harding then shared the clips on his website with family and friends who wanted to keep up with his worldly adventures. On his return, he created a compilation video, Where the Hell WAS Matt?, of 15 dance scenes, set to catchy background world music.

Word of the strange, hypnotic dance video spread virally by email and eventually landed a sponsorship for Harding. This allowed him to take a second trip around the world, and in turn make another travel/dancing video, Where the Hell is Matt?, in 2006. By this time, video sharing sites like YouTube were online and on the rise, garnering Harding an even bigger audience and a steady stream of emails and tribute videos from around the world.

In 2007 Harding announced that he would do another world dancing trip. He used the internet and his website to coordinate dance meetups with fans and fellow dancers around the world; fourteen months and 42 countries later, he released the video above, Where the Hell is Matt? (2008).

So one guy shared a simple and slightly crazy idea with family and friends and then went on to dance with thousands and entertain millions. Don’t you just love it when the virtual and the real world come together like this?

Previously on The Pond: Just for fun, All together now . . .

VizThink, a favorite source of insight and understanding about visual communication here at The Pond, is officially one year old today. Congratulations VizThink!

VizThink (short for Visual Thinking) is a global virtual organization that promotes the use of visualization tools and techniques for thinking, communication, collaboration and learning. The initial concept for VizThink came from Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE. Find out how VizThink went from idea to reality in The Story of VizThink, published today on the organization’s blog.

The VizThink website and blog have information on upcoming workshop and conferences, as well as a section of informative podcasts on a variety of visual thinking topics, including:

What qualifies as visual language anyway?

Creating Powerful Presentations with Nancy Duarte

Collaborative Knowledge Visualization with Martin Eppler

Related post: Octopz and meaning

Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently remarked that developing online means of fostering collective creativity is the next major challenge for the web. Berners-Lee, echoing some of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering ideas on online collaboration, made his remarks during his keynote presentation at the Tetherless World conference on the future of the Web.

According to Berners-Lee, the Web should evolve into a system that allows people to connect and share partly-formed ideas online that with the help of others can be turned into solutions to huge and pressing problems.

How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There’s no proof yet that for creative thinking we’ve done that. The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity.”

A video recording (with slides) of Tim Berner-Lee’s keynote is here. The part on collective creativity begins around the 60 minute mark. Computerworld reported on the keynote here.

Related Pond post: Douglas Engelbart, online collaboration pioneer