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.