Opposable Mind

Too much good stuff!

I want to go back to a statement that Liz Lawley made around the "Beyond Folksonomies" panel at SXSW (podcast available). I say "around" rather than "in" because I just rescanned the podcast, and can't find her comment, and it might be that I missed it, or that I'm remembering a part of the conversation that happened off-stage.

The comment was that the problem with overload isn't that there isn't enough good stuff, but too much, and that folksonomies, and emergent tagging systems can't really help with the problem that we have.

I can deeply sympathize. Every day that I find some new slant that I want to explore on some subject that has been around forever, I can find 20 or 30 people who do a wonderful job discussing interesting nuances in useful ways.

This is the nightstand problem. There are always more books piled up than I will ever read. The vast majority of the books that I own, or that I've checked out of the library, have only been partially read. Not because they weren't good, but because something else come along to nudge it off my list. Sure, I always intend to get back to the book, and occasionally, I succeed, but far too often, I the book slips off my radar, and the points it was making remain only partially resolved.

Actually, a better name for this symptom might be Amazon Wishlist-itis. I've got more than 800 books on my wishlist (thank God that Amazon warns me of duplicates, or that number would be 30% higher). I've started using my cart as a priority queue.

To Liz's point, the existing systems could be much better at helping me accomplish what it is that "I" want to accomplish. The simplest way I can think of in Amazon's case, is to suggest clumpings, or subclouds, from my wishlist, and notice associations and similarities to the way others are doing the same things with the same books. Perhaps I'm being naive, but it seems that there is a huge untapped potential for community that should be fairly easy pickings.

The existing stubs for community, the review and rating pieces, the listmania sections, and the author blogs are all wholly unsatisfying in terms of community fulfillment. Granted, the problem isn't trivial, but I don't think it's all that difficult either. Perhaps somewhere between rocket science and brain surgery, but hey, they've got money, and it would be a worthwhile expense. And of course, if Amazon can help me prioritize my list down to something even remotely manageable, I'd be much more likely to actually purchase some of those items. Hmmm, maybe I'll give Jeff Bezos a call.

Daily, I talk to people who feel the crunch of too much information. And it's not just a signal from noise problem, increasingly, it's becoming a signal from signal problem.

Again, Liz and Mary Hodder are both right, we don't need more tools just for tech's sake, but goodness gracious, we definitely need something. Is the problem that the "what" isn't sufficiently well defined? Let's get on that.

If Semantic Web fell in a forest, would it make a noise?

I decided to wade in and try setting up my own FOAF entry:

My God, how hard can it be to generate a pointer to myself? Does anyone else feel like the evangelizing of Semantic Web is akin to demonstrating the power of radio to Homer Simpson by showing him a circuit schematic with a demo generating a sine-wave tone at 440 hz and asking him to imagine how much easier this is going to make his life?

Great, I can find tutorial pages in which I can simply fill in the fields to generate my own foaf, then I can copy that to my website and paste it in and name it correctly. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo. How do I reliably connect it up, find my friends, and wire this baby to rock? What I get is about as useful as that 440 hz A-note. What I really want is a full-blown, knock my socks off, surround sound symphony that connects me to all my friends, and the context to navigate the global information repository without having to sift through a googol haystacks for my particular needle.

I know that it takes time to develop this stuff, which takes time, and that the work is complex and underappreciated. I've just listened to the audio version of "Weaving the Web," Tim Berners-Lee's book, and I get it. This stuff is incredibly useful, and will eventually have a bunch of killer apps that will make us wonder how we ever lived without it. That's my point. I know I can't live without it, and I'm not rocket-scientist enough to build it myself.

How hard can it be to give us a simple, easy to understand, yet useful tool. Don't make it solve world peace. Just make it so that I can create a connection, actually see it do useful work, and then peer under the covers to get an idea of what's going on.

This is what helped the web take off when Marc Andreeson released the Mosaic browser. I *know* that all of the work prior was essential to getting to this point, but Gopher and the line-mode browser are examples of A-notes: uncompelling. Without a viscerally graphic representation that is so obvious that it makes drooling coach potatoes stand up and take notice, it might as well be a tree falling in an unoccupied forest: no sound. RDF, OWL, URI, yawn. Somebody wake me up when we get to the good part.

No wonder the moniker "web2.0" is greeted with such scorn.

Almost all of the Web2.0 apps out there are variations of producing the 440 hz A-note. Okay, so you're playing a three-note chord with mashups. It is getting better, and I'm just grousing because I'm particularly impatient.

 

It's just that it seems that in the quest to get computers to understand humans, we've taken a wrong turn and instead are trying to get humans to speak machine-code.

Okay, while I'm railing on. Del.icio.us. WTF? I know, I get it, it's got incredible potential. I'm excited. Really, I am! I'm just sick and frickin' tired of waiting for it to get "finished" so that it is finally really, truly useful.

It's still too dang intrusive to save my bookmarks, much less retrieve them. The usefulness isn't immediate and obvious, but indirect and delayed. Using the built-in bookmark tool for IE is easier to use and is more functional. Be honest. How many of you actually use del.icio.us as a way to retrieve the frequently used bookmarks that you've saved? How many of you actually bookmark everything that you would like to find again? How many of you use... dammit this is making me tired.

Just... please... stop with the hype already and give us tools that do what we want instead of making us drool over what may someday be possible. Please?

You know what? It might even be sufficient to just screencast a killer demo of how an ace-user is accomplishing this stuff.

Creation Networks

Okay, drop whatever you are doing and grok the working paper on Creation Networks by John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

I don't know how I've missed these guys up to now. They are talking precisely about the space that I'm most interested in. Kinda makes me embarrassed to realize just how sloppy I've been with my prose, but you know what? I think I still have some value to contribute here. Will post more about this tomorrow. In the meantime, pull up a chair and grok this stuff!

Deeper connection between intention an attention

But this might make you work harder.

I've been thinking about Attention Economy vs. Intention Economy, and I believe there is more conversation to be had.

Look over those 40 or so links above (under blog posts), or these 417 links and see which ones you find most relevant.

While browsing, think about the links in the following chain:

Conceptualization gives rise to Perception
Perception gives rise to Attention
Attention gives rise to Intention

Any of these can feed back to one another, giving richer context to the tapestry.

Conceptualization is the ability to mentally draw a boundary around an object (such as "tree")
Perception is the ability to notice that something falls within a boundary
Attention is the ability to watch for occurances of perception
Intention is the ability to act on hits of that attention.

This is oversimplified, agreed, but is a rough sketch of a process. One of the actions we may take during the Intention phase is purchase, contribute or create. Another possibility is to invent a new conception, which gives rise to a new perception, etc.

This resonant feedback loop, I assert, happens all the time on both the individual and collective levels.

I'd normally want to edit this quite a bit more, but at this point, it's more important to get it out there than right. Feedback welcome, questions encouraged.

How to concoct your own Red Pill

So, is it an Attention Economy, or an Intention Economy that we're growing here? Just before SXSW, Doc Searls raised the notion of an Intention Economy to new awareness. I've been waiting for the ripples from that initial splash, but have yet to observe them on the horizon outside my window. Unexpectedly, this morning a tidal wave hit me in my neuronal activity as I was uprooted from my slumbering pod in the Matrix. The red pill has got me for sure.

I felt like nothing so much as a cross between Cypher and Agent Smith, simultaneously longing for pleasant artificial dreams of the Matrix and the revolted by the pervasive stench of human clinginess to meaning through (commercial) activity.

Definitely a bad trip, only without drugs. Or, rather withing ingesting anything through the bloodstream. I must admit I had been partaking of a dangerous brew.

Are you curious? If so, you may be one sick puppy.

Okay, here's the recipe:

One: Cluetrain Manifesto
Two: Doses of Bucky Fuller's works
Three: Humberto Maturana's: The Tree of Knowledge
Four: A bit of entrainment with NeuroProgrammer 2
Five: sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!
Six: Any marketing literature that promises newfound ease with the acquisition of power or riches (exercise left to the reader).

Then, binge consume for 24 hours, sleep fitfully and then try to architect a new open source project. YMMV.

Actually, there is another ingredient, but it was 48 hours ago. I attended the World Congress on Information Technology adjunct Open Source Workshop on Tuesday. This was shortly after I read the IBM GIO report. I started wondering, is enterprise getting it? Afterward, I concluded, no, they've just donned some beads, and started waving the peace sign around.

The effect was extremely surreal. The setting was a mock court in the Law School at the University of Texas. The "audience" was boxed in, watching an institutional display of lawyers, businessfolk, and a few others grapple with the complexities of trying to rebuild a bigger fence after the horses had left the barn.

The unspoken take-away: this open source stuff can be a bit dangerous, best leave the heavy lifting to the professionals.

Certainly that's not what the intent of the day was supposed to be. The subtitle of the day, after all, was: Connect and Develop.

Yes, we were permitted and encouraged to ask questions (I made plenty of observations). Still, it was anything but a communal event. I've always thought that Open Space Technology would be an excellent tool to use for Open Source discussions. This was about as far from that was one could imagine.

The panel that seemed to make the least sense to me was the one focusing on Creative Commons. It seemed that every person on that panel was taking the devil's advocate position of trying to find the reasons that (cc) was too complex and confusing, even though they all admitted to liking it, and not would abolish the effort if given the chance.

After the day's events, I spoke to a couple of others and we shared our thoughts. There's no good reason why Austin can't make a significant mark in a substantial way in the world of Open Source, but Tuesday made me seriously consider being a street-person in Palo Alto. The trade-off is just about worth it. If it wasn't for SXSW (interactive), I'd be outta here. Now, how the hell do we make SXSW or barcamp a monthly gig with perpetual activity?

Step one: give up control.

Attention geeks, fasten your seatbelts

J Wynia has done it again. The man sees it plain and simple and shares the goodies with all. How tired are the Attention hounds of explaining Attention to their friends who just don't get it. Without a lot of fanfare, J simple answers the perpetual question clearly, AND provided the framework to allow you, the user, to take the next step in leveraging your attention data.

GigaThanks J!

Important extention to Bradley Horowitz's community pyramid

Bradley's pyramid has started a fire-storm of conversation that has fanned out and started side-conversations all over the net.

I've seen several people derive a similar conclusion to that pyramid that I think is a bit misleading. The gist of the confusion is that the 90% of the population who are Consumers are inherently consumers in all domains. We can test this assumption very quickly. If you are a creator in one domain (or community), does that mean that you are in the Creator category in all communities that you belong to? Do you belong to a community in which you are a Synthesizer (or Contributer)? And what about the Consumer role? Do you lurk in any of your communities that you derive benefit from?

The percentages indicate that if you are a member of 10 communities, the chances are good that you find yourself in the Synthesizer role in one of those communities. And if you find yourself deriving value from 100 communities, you are probably a Synthesizer in 10 of those, and a Creator in one of them.

There are two more categories of people that Bradley's pyramid doesn't cover. The first is the Decliners. This are the people who have been given the opportunity to participate in the community, but have declined to because of one reason or another. I'm going to assert that this group is also an order of magnitude larger than the immediately preceeding group (Consumers).

The next category are the Uninformed. These are the people who have not even heard of the community, so have neither rejected it, nor accepted it. Again, this group is likely an order of magnitude bigger than the Decliners (at least -- possibly, this group is much larger).

The exciting part of all of this is that everyone is potentially a Consumer, a Synthesizer and a Creator. Even more interesting is the fact that if you belong to two communities, and you are a Consumer in both of those, but you use del.icio.us, or some other tool to bookmark your sites so that other people can see your bookmarks, the simple act of tagging two communities (or a piece of content in both communities) with a single tag is that a link between those communities has been created. In essence, you have become a Synthesizer!

Look at the way the dynamic spreads. Your second community has someone who is also a Consumer, but who doesn't know about your first community. They follow your link, and voila, they move from Uninformed in relation to Group 1, to one of the other categories of user: Decliner, Consumer, Synthesizer or possibly even Creator!

And the more that people get involved meaningfully in more communities, the greater the crossover effect.

At this point, you should just about freak out if you are like most readers. "I already have too much content to keep track of! How many communities do you think I can belong to?!?"

This very issue is a topic that Scott Karp and I have bantered back and forth briefly. (Okay, so I'm name dropping. He has referenced my blog, but we've only had a couple of volleys). This issue of navigating through the barrage of new content every day is precisely the reason that I started thinking about CxMS's as opposed to CMS's (CxMS is my abbreviation for Context Management System). I wrote about this back in December before I moved my blog over to TypePad.

How nice that this whole conversation is heating up just as we approach SXSW. My panel, Beyond Folksonomies, is precisely geared to address some of these issues. Should be a juicy session, and a wonderful conference. If you haven't registered for SXSW yet, and you can swing it. I'd rush on over there. Be forwarned, I don't think there are any more hotels in downtown Austin.

If you can't make the conference, my co-panelist J Wynia has created a blog specifically dedicated to the discussion of the panel before, during and after the conference

Scott Karp's inequalities of the niche audiences

Scott Karp posits that web2.0 tools are feeding the audience's sweet-tooth instead of providing balanced nutrition. Visiting the memetrackers, I can definitely see his point. But reading many of the comments to the above post (and more so, the comments to his just previous post), it appears that many readers think they agree with Scott, but actually are thinking of another issue. The interesting meme floating around is that practical wisdom extraction from the masses is still a ways off.

Wisdom of Crowds

I disagree. I think wisdom extraction is just around the corner. We don't need to rely on the tool developers, nor on the site designers, to define the audience or give the crowd a voice. I strongly believe the audience is rapidly gaining the capacity to define itself. Folksonomies are the rudimentary vocabulary and grammar of collective thought, a kind of ga-ga goo-goo of pre-lingual hyper-smart savants. Believing that the "adults" must lead the crowd around and cajole them with condescending chin-tickles is pretty laughable.

I'm reminded of the (not completely inaccurate) stereo-type of the english-only speaking person who thinks non-english speakers must be less intelligent, and so raises his/her voice in order to compensate.

Another apt metaphor: early 20th century industrialists believing they know what's best for workers, until the workers realized their collective voice new better than the bosses. I believe we are just around the corner from consumer unions, and they won't be clumsy automatons like their labor ancestors. This wave of evolved collectives will be much more robust, resilient, and nimble.

Better prepare to be obsoleted by intelligence 2.0.

Actually, what I'd really like is a tool that allowed the crowd to engage in this conversation without having to chase down all the links to it. How about a non-threaded, non-siloed discussion non-forum. It could be a tag-driven conversation as well. Boundaries to be collaboratively decided by optimizing for each reader. Sounds messy? I bet that it would converge nicely.

Relevent links for Podcast with Tom Parish

During the podcast with Tom Parish, I misspelled a name (Umair Haque of Bubble Generation), and forgot a name (Dick Hardt of SXIP).

Do check out Dick's Identity 2.0 presentation, it is short, sweet, and will blow your socks off. I also recommend bubblegeneration.com, but it is not short and sweet. It is very deep and can be dizzying. His breadth of coverage requires a bit more work, but the payoff is well worth it. Don't worry if it's not your bag of tea. I'll continue to post ideas that I think are particularly worth noting. Umair has a couple of podcasts under his belt now, and you can find those on his blog.

I'm in a rush to get some stuff done, I'll be posting more of the items related to the podcast soon. Sunday or Monday.

Sprouts in my context garden: podcast on Beyond Folksonomies

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting with Tom Parish in his south Austin studio to record a podcast on Beyond Folksonomies, Attention, Identity, and other related topics. I have to make a couple of apologies up front. I misspelled the last name of Umair Haque, I couldn't remember it at the time and spelled it as "Haik." Sorry about that Umair (and hoping I at least got the pronounciation right).

Also, in talking about identity, I mention SXIP, the presentation that Dick Hardt does (which is fantastic, don't miss it if you haven't seen it!) but I couldn't remember Dick's name. Sorry about that, Dick.

Okay, I think that's it for apologies. Let me know if I missed one ;)

On with the show. You can just listen (or download) to the podcast directly, read the intro that Tom gives on TalkingPortraits, or check out what I said on the BeyondFolksonomies blog.

If after listening, you find yourself wanting to know more about any of the topics, let me know, and keep an eye on this space. I'll be expounding on some thinner slices of that talk in several posts.