Those of you on the lookout for innovation tools and trends will want to pay a visit to the Innovation Weblog.

This blog, in a post titled “New tool for innovation team design: Innovation Styles Online“, links to a free Innovation Styles Profiler (available through 10/31/06) at Innovation Styles Online which allows you to discover your own personal innovation style.

I’m an explorer. What are you?

(Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy for the link.)

This post constitutes Part 3 of a series of essays on blogging for the conflict resolution community.

The series began earlier this summer with Part 1, “Getting to yes with alternative dispute resolution blogs: time for ADR practitioners to join the conversation” and continued with Part 2, “Getting in touch with the whole world through blogging“.

What can you do then to influence what the Internet has to say about you and to make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd?

Think blogs.

Take my own case. Unlike, say, “Bob Smith”, “Diane Levin” is not an especially common first name/last name combination. So I was surprised to learn that I am not the only Diane Levin out there. There are in fact quite a few of us on the web.

There is of course me, the Diane Levin who is an attorney and mediator. There is also Diane Levin, a well known professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College. There is also Diane Levin the Texas Holdem champion–who frankly sounds like a way more fun Diane Levin than I am–and a Diane Levin in the wholesale fashion business. There’s even a Diane Levin who is vice president of a Great Dane club in Minnesota (definitely not me, I have a yorkie).

Before I started blogging, and despite the fact that I had a pretty healthy web presence, with my own business web site, online articles, and listings in any number of web-based directories, anyone looking for me on the web would have had a very hard time figuring out which Diane Levin was in fact me.

When people searched online for my name, search engines often mixed us all up together or, worse, gave first-page ranking to another Diane Levin, even if the search combined “Diane Levin” with “mediation”. It was enough to give even a self-confident mediator an identity crisis.

What made things confusing, too, was the fact that the Wheelock College professor Diane Levin lives and works in Massachusetts like me. To make things even more confusing, much of her work concerns conflict resolution and violence prevention, not so different from the work I do as a mediator. People were always mixing us up.

Being confused with that Diane Levin, however, wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. She is a nationally respected authority on the effects of violence in the media on children who has testified before the U.S. Congress–who wouldn’t enjoy some of that celebrity?

But it was soon apparent that people were confusing me with other Diane Levins as well. I knew that I was in trouble the day a client asked about the secret to my success at poker tournaments.

People were definitely getting the wrong impression.

The fact is that we all google each other. It’s an easy way of doing a fast background check. Employers do it before making an offer to that prospective new hire. Clients and customers do it before hiring a consultant or a service provider. Savvy competitors google each other. So, too, do colleagues.

Blogging can give you control over what the Internet has to say about you. It allows you to shape the impression the world has of you and to create and market your own personal brand.

Today, largely thanks to this blog, when someone googles me, there is no mistaking me with anyone else. What’s cool, too, is that my blog posts enjoy favorable search engine rankings for search phrases relating to topics in my practice area. My work is much easier to find, and along with it, me.

For a series of articles on blogging’s benefits for ADR professionals, visit my friend Tammy Lenski’s blog, Mediator Tech.

At any rate, thanks to blogging, it’s nice to know that my little identity crisis is behind me.

(Although I sure wouldn’t mind just once winning a Texas Holdem jackpot.)

My eagerly awaited copy of the Summer 2006 edition of the Association for Conflict Resolution’s quarterly magazine, ACResolution, arrived just the other day.

It was eagerly awaited primarily because it contains ACResolution’s first-ever article on blogging, which, I am proud to say, I wrote.

This article, “Three Reasons ADR Professionals Should Be Blogging”, while unfortunately not available online, can be glimpsed in an earlier draft, “Five reasons why ADR professionals should be blogging“, published here on this blog last year.

The editor was kind enough to add a sidebar with a list of ADR blogs (Negotiating Tip of the Week, Florida Mediator, and Mediation Mensch among them) as well as resources for bloggers, together with a nice screenshot of the World Directory of ADR Blogs.

This could be a sign that the ADR world is finally starting to pay attention to blogging. Hey, a girl can hope.

Travel advisory: this post has nothing to do with mediation, negotiation, or the practice of law. It concerns itself solely with the peculiarities of the latest U.S. Transportation Security Administration regulations regarding carry-on items–which I got to see first hand during business travel earlier this week.

Mediators are keen observers of human behavior. We know from our observations that humans are rarely consistent. In fact, paradoxically, if there’s one factor that remains consistent from one conflict to the next, it’s that you can generally count on people to consistently behave in inconsistent ways.

Which may explain the current TSA regulations.

Now that Britain has foiled the latest terrorist plot, U.S. air travelers are adapting once again to brand-new security protocols, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration.

Frequent fliers will be heartened to learn that at least as of today, August 24, 2006, meat cleavers, sabers, and ice picks continue to be prohibited items in carry-on luggage, even for travelers wishing to wield them in self-defense against freedom-hating terrorists. The same is true for firearms, cattle prods, brass knuckles, and dynamite. No surprises there.

There are, however, some anomalies. Corkscrews and knitting needles, which could certainly put someone’s eye out, remain permitted. Permitted also are pointed metal scissors with blades shorter than 4 inches in length–still long enough, if you ask me, to do some damage in the hands of any determined psychopath–along with screwdrivers that are seven inches or shorter.

Meanwhile, even though smoking has been banned on domestic flights for many years now, cigar cutters are permitted (although matches and lighters are not).

In addition, all liquids, gels, pastes, and lotions are now prohibited items in carry-on luggage here in the U.S. That means no beverages, Jello, or yogurt. And no shampoo, toothpaste, or perfume. (Which makes it all the more peculiar that corkscrews remain a permitted item. If you can’t bring on board that cheeky Merlot, what on earth do you need that corkscrew for?)

Personal lubricants (up to 4 ounces), however, are permitted (perhaps as a courtesy to members of the Mile High Club?).

So, feeling safer yet?

(A P.S. to the security screeners at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport–while I am grateful for your care in screening my shoes for chemical explosive residue, we both missed the tube of toothpaste that I’d forgotten to take out of my briefcase. I discovered it at 30,000 feet on the plane back to Boston. Oops.)

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the deterioration of public discourse and the suppression of dissent that has become so commonplace here in the U.S. It’s hard not to, given how prevalent its symptoms are.

I was therefore intrigued (and amused) to discover via the Law & Society Blog a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries (make sure your pop-up blockers are fully activated unless you want to be inundated with Ann Coulter ads), chosen by a specially selected panel of conservative scholars and public policy leaders at Human Events, a right-wing publication.

In descending order of their degree of harmfulness, these books are:

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (The Kinsey Report), Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietschze
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

Books that didn’t make the short list but earned honorable mentions were:

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America, Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

Apart from the couple of titles authored by homicidal dictators, the selection of these books is baffling (Unsafe at Any Speed? Silent Spring? You’re kidding, right?).

What exactly makes these books so harmful? By whose standard? And so now what? Are we now to banish these books from college syllabi? Slap parental advisory stickers on them? Burn them?

(Given the scorn which some conservatives delight to heap upon conflict resolution, it is surprising that Getting to Yes failed to receive even an honorable mention.)

One can only hope that the fact that these books have been labeled as “Most Harmful” will produce a delightfully ironic and unintended effect: make these books an alluring forbidden fruit to entice a whole new generation of young minds to read works like On Liberty, The Origin of Species, and The Feminine Mystique.

And, of course, to weigh for themselves the intrinsic worth of the ideas contained within.

(Book collectors take note. Setting aside the notion of a free marketplace of ideas, these books have worth in a different kind of marketplace: first editions of these works are not only rare but highly valuable.)