I got a hunch to go back and reread Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind.” When I came to the part where he talks about the R-directed cultural creatives who insist on seeing the big picture, I paused to reflect. 20 Million of these folks in the US? That’s about a percent of the adults (rough guess, R-directed style, no calculator whipped out for that one). So, where are these guys? Sure, I’m finding a bunch of good blogs, and need to start my own blog-role, but I’m not seeing the kind of volume that I expect from this sizable a crowd.

Maybe they’re having just as much of a challenge as I am. I may have said it before, but blogging currently, is a pain in the arse. These major league bloggers must have some sort of system down to slog through their reading/writing/and rethinking.

I want to unleash my big-picture thinking, to turn my head inside out so that people can get at the goodies and put them to use. And I want to unleash the goodies from this 20 million strong uber group so I can put them to use. A year ago, I set out as a goal to become a lightening rod for the cultural creatives in Austin. I’m still relatively unknown, but I’d like to think that I’m just on the pre-vertical part of the asymptote.

My writing could improve, sure. But that’s only part of the problem. Okay, okay. I reread yesterdays entry, and I can see why it might be a bit murky. Sometimes big-picture view leaves the details too fuzzy, like the zoomed in picture of my house on Google Earth. So, here’s a better description of what I’m thinking about. And visual to boot. I think I’m wanting even more detail than this shows, but the gist should be clear now, right?

I’m motivated and technically ept (though I don’t have super-human tech prowess), and I find keeping up with my ideas an obnoxious chore. And I’m probably more tolerant than 95% of those 20 million. The SSE stuff could help, and I also want to actually get into the XFN. These have been around for a while, why aren’t they in more widespread use?

How about this. I’m reminded of the early days of computers. I was working on my CS degree back in the late 80’s, so I still got to hear the old-timers talk about optimizing their code to account for the rotation speed of drum memory (okay, so maybe not firsthand). I was always amazed that anything ever got done at all. I’m not the best coder in the world, so I sometimes found just the simple tasks to be a bit of a challenge, but throwing machine code and clunky hardware restrictions in the mix, and I’m amazed that anyone perservered at all.

It must feel like the same kind of thing is going on for those 95% right now. I’m kind of enjoying trying to get up to speed, and I’ve seen the twinkle in the eyes of the true geeks who are seriously getting off on all this stuff, but Web2.0 is basically equivalent to assembler in terms of innovation. We’ve got some high powers parts, but if you want to actually build an application, you’d better get out the soldering gun and prepare for a few marathon sessions of hacking and kludging. It’s happening on a faster scale now than it did in the early days. But we still need to get some pretty wrapping around some more of this functionality.

I’m being too hard on everyone. The effort is appreciated, and the progress is stellar. Again, I find myself incredibly grateful that other people love to do this stuff enough to basically do it for the love of craft. Still, my expectations and standards are high. Let’s actually make something that those 95% will wonder how they ever lived without. Something as simple, powerful and intuitive as Google, but with the mission of unleashing contribution.

If you’ve got ideas, contact me, david, at metastorming. comp (minus the p).

Let’s build this thing.

Roland Tanglao has an excellent presentation of RSS Remixing. Listen to the podcast, particularly to the questions at the end; there’s an application that wants to be born.

What we really want to do is improve the signal to noise ratio. As communication becomes cheaper and more efficient, the volume of data has exploded, and will continue to rise exponentially. In addition fragmentation has also skyrocketed as it becomes easier to express an opinion through blogs, tags and spam. In short, the meme-space is severly fragmented and in dire need of defragging. How are we going to do this?

Read Umair Haque’s Edge Competencies on bubblegeneration.com for a background insight on how this next piece works.

Each user is effectively sorting signal from noise on a daily basis. Most are duplicating effort without any coordination to reduce the size of the haystack. The people who are helping effectively reduce the size of the web haystack is the team-up of Google and the bloggers. The emergent semantics of folksonomies has promise, but so far has been largely untapped. When I mention collaborative effort, I’m not thinking of mechanical turk. I don’t want to farm out the task of separating signal from noise to someone collecting micropayments for that task. Why? Because I’ll likely end up with garbage. Who better to filter my content than me, right? So how do I leverage others if not explicitly?

Implicitly. I already sort my own content daily, just save the results to a tag file. What if I had a tool that helped my with this solo task? Here’s the gist. Currently I bookmark or tag only a tiny fraction of the links that I find interesting. Tagging is currently too distracting from my task at hand, reviewing content. I don’t want to leave my page, or be limited to three tags, or go to a shadows page. I want the basic implicit context of my current page to become an automatically generated tag for all sub-links on the page, and I want an easy way to add tags such as toBlog, toRead, toSave,
, for, etc. The option to add these tags is in a hover-menu when I pause over a link (the implicit tags are auto-logged and tagged when I view the page; example auto-tags include timestamp, parent-page, email author/group, Google search terms, etc.). Now I’ve got implicit and explicit annotated history of all links that I come across.

How to use this history? Remember the toBlog tag, when I go into blog mode, if I search my taglog for toBlog, all those links come up, and I can sort by date, project, or other tag. While composing my entry, if I highlight a phrase, and hover over the phrase, I can create a link to one of these taglog links.

Here’s the cool thing. This tag-log is mine. I can export it to del.icio.us or shadows.com if I like, or keep it private. Hmmm. Private is last millenium. I want to share my content. Remember, I’m not just in it for me. I want other people to be able to leverage my meaning-making, so I want them to be able to read my log. If I’m shy about something, perhaps I can make specific entries wholly or partially private. Maybe I can make my taglog available anonymously.

In my own little taglogged folksonomy, links become somewhat relevent as soon as I’ve been exposed to them. They gain relevency when I tag them, visit them, or blog them. Other people can see the links that occupy my attention at various levels. Now, imagine a tool that was harvesting these annotated attention streams in the same way that google is currently doing page-rank.

What we’re doing here is turning every web citizen into a Maxwellian Demon, separating signal from noise for his own benefit and then sharing that benefit with whoever would like to use it. This is creation of value in the form of meaningful context. Collectively, this value will be astronomical. There is a little problem though. Right now, the web isn’t nearly stratified enough. Think of wikipedia. There is one entry for Bill Gates. We need to microchunk this. Currently, each little demon is fighting with every other little demon to push the content around. This is because we are used to thinking in the metaphor of physical proximity, and a thing can only be in one place at a time. Tagging has broken that metaphor, but we still fall back on it by habit. Contextual proximity has no geographical bounds, and therefore can be multiple places all at once. I “Bill Gate’s” microchunk of information might be simultaneously “funny” “serious” “factual” “disputed” “interesting” and “worthless.” Much of the value of folksonomy tags is their subjectivity, not their objectivity. If I can find other users whose subjective experience of a micro-chunk matches my own, then those matches could possibly be harvested across other micro-chunks.

In this way, I might want to subscribe to an RSS feed of “funny” Bill Gates micro-chunks. Or maybe subscribe to a particular user’s “funny” tag for other micro-chunks. Or maybe to some heuristically determined subset of users who’ve tagged this micro-chunk as “funny.”

There are almost unlimited ways that I can control my feeds now, and if I make it so that my incoming stream is easily adjusted by turning the volume up on signal and down on noise, we’ve got our app for harvesting collective intelligence.

I’ve probably moved ahead too fast. Bring it down several notches and just think of your known peers (not FOAF). What if you could just share your taglogs with this peer group? I could see what you find interesting before you blog about it. We could see who in the group hasn’t seen bubblegeneration.com. The work that we do quickly moves from having individual value to having collective value.

Effectively, what we’re doing is laying down multi-variable pheremone trails (see Emergence, by Steven Johnson), while we’re searching for content crumbs. I can easily change my state so that certain pheremone trails become invisible and others become highlighted based on my current intent and internal state.

There are other issues that I’ll address in a future entry. These include trust+identity commons, and compensation+reputation. These concepts are seen as difficult primarily because of paradigmatic habits of viewing resources as scarce. If we can break down this habit, we can see that attention is one of the best forms of compensation. So much so, that it can be monetized, not by Amazon or Google, but by you and me. In the coming omniarchy of an abundance economy based on attention, the citizen becomes king, and the corporation becomes servant. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the data. The prevailing worldview is flipping on its axis as we type…

- David

At the Accelerating Change conference in September, I met Linda Groff and we had a wonderful conversation about the relationship between the coming singularity and spiritual intelligence. It was just a short conversation between talks, but clearly we had some common ground. One of the topics in that brief conversation was my participation in the Spirituality Track of the 2005 American Creativity Associations international conference in Austin.

About a month ago, Linda called to ask if I would like to participate on a panel at the upcoming World Future Society in Toronto.

Here is the draft of the description of the panel so far:

World Future Society Conference Proposal-July 2006–Toronto
Panel Theme: Cutting-Edge Issues in Evolution: Creativity and Innovation

There are many issues that will effect the future evolution of humanity. One important issue is the development of human, social, cultural, scientific, technological, and artistic potential via creativity and innovation in all these areas–the focus of this panel. The world is currently in a period characterized by terrorism and natural disasters, which all engender fear and lead some to seek oversimplified black and white absolute worldviews that choke off dialogue between different worldviews in the deeper search for truth and understanding, which is necessary for creative breakthroughs to occur in any field. This panel will look at a number of different perspectives on creativity and innovation–including key approaches to this in different cultures and time periods, and including the debate on evolution vs. “intelligent design” today–and why this topic is so crucial to future human evolution, noting that humanity has always progressed when great creative breakthroughs have occurred and stagnated when people lived in fear and dogmatism.

Who should attend: Futurists in any area of life–academy, business, government, and community-who are concerned about fostering greater creativity and innovation, rather than fear of change, so that humanity can continue to evolve.

What you’ll learn: Why is creativity and innovation so important to the evolution of humanity and society, what are the challenges to creativity and innovation today, and how might greater creativity and innovation be fostered.

How this knowledge can be applied: Panel will look at how to encourage creativity and innovation-including in a climate where fear of change exists. The many benefits of creativity and innovation to civilization will be noted.

Chair and Panelist:
Linda Groff, Professor, California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Director, Global Options Consulting, USA

Other Panelists:
* David L. Swedlow, Synergy for Practical Conceptual Innovation, Austin, Texas
* Jan Amkreutz, Digital Crossroads Consulting, Montana; Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Agent Technology and Knowledge Management, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Other Possible Panelists:
* Johnson, Charles, Psychiatrist, author of books on creativity and a CD on the Evolution of Music.
* Lindstrom, Hal, Editor of Technological Forecasting Journal, on Technological Innovation.
* Cordeiro, Jose. Venezuelan Representative for WFS, Millenium Project, and Club of Rome; and Convenor, recent TransVision Conference, Caracas, 2005. Attending recent Brazilian Innovation Conference.

Reading up on the librarians take on this issue gave me pause to think further on the consequences of the shift toward enabling the general population to find any information that is available. After reading this particular entry I added my own perspective, which is as follows:

I would argue that there is a quantum mindshift that is occuring right now, and the biggest bottleneck is the paradigm inside of which we are operating. Paradigms have a very nasty habit of being invisible when viewed from the inside (kind of like dreams; in both cases, it takes a significant amount of mental labor to become aware of the boundaries). I would like to make a couple of observations that may bring the boundary of the current predominant paradigm into focus a bit.

People are outgrowing the need for librarians. Ironically, the job description is morphing into something like: obsolete yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then to reinvent what you do at a higher level. The growing demand for information will no longer make it tolerable to stand in line for information, or to explain my issue to a human being before getting an answer. Roy’s maxim above, that people like to find more than they like to search doens’t even quite go far enough. People like much more than to find. In the same way that searching is just the prerequisite to finding, finding is just the prerequisite to contributing. People ache to contribute, and they are doing so with folksonomies, and wikis, and applications for building applications that will soon do everything from indexing the worlds knowledge to solving unheard of problems (see ning.com).

Our linear solutions for solving large scale problems are no longer agile enough to accomplish the task before us. We are shedding the skin of the current paradigm. The best we can do is to let go of it, and embrace the omniarchy of multi-paradigmatic navigation.

The population is becoming empowered and situated to start making most conventional jobs obsolete. We are used to thinking of people as needing the help of an expert to do make real headway on any significant task. Most hierarchies are set up to concretize the expertise of individuals. These silos are to restrictive for the kind of collaboration that is striving to be born. Rather than looking at division of labor, we should start looking at multiplication of labor. Rather than thinking of ways in which you can more efficiently give people access to your expertise, learn how to hand them your expertise so that you aren’t part of the bottleneck between them and their contribution.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the bumber sticker that reads “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.” Perhaps it needs to be updated and brought back. It should now read: “Follow those who lead by getting the hell out of the way.”

[Metacomment: I realize that I’m a bit behind the curve here. I just caught up with Brewster Kahle’s talk at ITConversations. In it, he mentioned the Googlezon presentation, which I watched. I wanted to know who else was looking at this, so boogied over to del.icio.us to check out the tag, and came upon the LITA Blog. We need to keep an eye out for the librarians, because they are on our side.]