Whilst my body is long gone, I’m happy to still have the opportunity to talk to you like this, in a way my great great grandparents unfortunately didn’t have to speak to me. Little did they envision the opportunities we now possess to have a permanent record of our every online conversation built into a relatively accurate personality construct that can speak to you in the way that I’m speaking to you now.
You might be accustomed to this transgenerational conversation, but let me tell you, we aren’t. Our parents are just getting comfortable with the idea of email, and our generation is just getting accustomed to the idea of public conversation on platforms such as blogs, microblogs, and open social networks. You will know more about our tastes in music, our interests, our passions, our foibles, and our lessons learnt than we ever knew about our ancestors.
I’m sitting here listening to a radio station based on a friend’s excellent taste in music. This is a small step, so I can’t even begin to imagine what will be possible in eighty years time. Eighty years is a long time, and if you’re reading this, its clear the human race has somehow figured out how to convince the machines not to eliminate us from this beautiful planet. Congratulations on a fine achievement, god knows how you did it.
If you’ve chosen to download my construct into your family pet robot, then thats alright by me. The only condition I’d place on this is that I get to go camping with you. I won’t mess up your car/hover vehicle/magic carpet or whatever it is you move around in. If I’m speaking to you in a virtual space, ask me to take you to the Abbotsford convent for a beer and some live Cuban music on a warm Friday evening in December 2008. You’ll love it, really.
If you’re a construct talking to me having already eliminated all the humans,
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Maybe its just that I’m relatively new to it, but it appears that the Melbourne web development/startup scene seems to have a lot to offer, and from others are saying, might be picking up speed with regular events such as Thehive.org.au, Melbourne Jelly and Pitchclub, The events are great for connecting entrepreneurs and developers and bringing new people onto the scene to inspire each other’s ideas and efforts. This weekend saw Melbourne’s first Startup Camp. 3 startups in 48hrs from 3 teams. Not even a glint in the eye of the team members as they arrived on Friday evening, the ideas manifested into fully fledged working products by lunchtime Sunday with business plans and pitches ready to launch.
Our team managed to get a bitofpluck.com up and running by the deadline. Creating colorful, engaging connections between strangers with similar interests based on location data. The frenzy of rapid development over the weekend makes for some frenzied learning.
Story cards
The 1. I am (user)….2. I want to (action)….3. So that (outcome) story cards really helped us frame the fundamental value proposition of the site, from both the business and the development side. It helped us keep the feature set as simple as possible so that the developers had a realistic target to meet and had everyone moving in the same direction. We were talking pretty big at the start and this really helped us pull our heads in.
Ideas abound I can’t believe I ever thought there were not enough new ideas. The process of getting together with people in that environment just seems to bring the creativity out.
There are some great people in Melbourne
Genuine, intelligent people just seem to be congregating and this is just one example. Not just people who want to start a business, but people who seem to believe that a business has more to offer than just a revenue stream.
Its not the last we’re going to see of this kind of get together. Thanks to Maxim Shklyar from Kisla Interactive for letting us use his fantastic studio, and Bart Jellema of Tjoos.com for bringing his Startup Camp expertise from Sydney, and Michael Specht from inspecht.com.au for food sponsorship and organisation.
Took this video of a hardened socialist protesting outside of Lehman Brothers the day it went down. With the element of truth to what he is saying about Wall St, people probably couldn’t help but wonder about the legitimacy of his tirades on international conflict. It’s the context of the current credit meltdown that now protects him from ridicule. Ride that wave mate.
Its interesting to see market forces accomplishing a feat NGOs would be unable to (assuming they had wanted to). As of 2007 over 50% of the world’s population now use mobile phones. It took 20 years to reach 1 billion, another 3 years to reach 2 billion, and the 3rd billion took just 2 years. Mobile phones and their future capacity for information distribution are making their way into the hands of the world’s least resourced. Assuming there is bandwidth left over after everyone’s finished downloading Myley Cyrus ringtones, there will be an opportunity to connect people and distribute something useful.
Mobile phones will initially help enable banking and access to microcredit loans, and as the technology develops, we’ll see a gradual improvement in access to the world’s increasingly organised information.
Dan Ariely has pointed to the power of relativity when it comes choosing and experiencing those choices. Satisfaction with a meal, a job, a car, is often relative not only to what others around us are experiencing, but is also dependent on how the event is presented at the time when we choose. A small plate under a sandwich not only makes the sandwich seem bigger, but you will also “feel” more satisfied after eating it.
I remember recently hearing the story of an web entrepreneur who chose to drive around in a prius because it was the best hybrid in its class. He could have chosen the Porsche Boxster (The “poor man’s Porsche”) for a similar cost, but he claimed he’d feel like he was always on the bottom rung of the Porsche ladder. Fair enough.
“Thought networks provide a concrete semantic representation of our thoughts, ideas and interests. Encoded as data, our thoughts are accessible to the power of computing. Semantic synthesis provides the means to expand and connect these thoughts in entirely new ways. Equally important, as structured data, thought networks may be used as inputs to software “agents” to automate much of the drudgery of our online experience.”
“Ultimately, thought networking is intended to provide two main benefits. First, it will enhance our cognition. Our ability to store and recall information is extremely limited. Thought networks can help by expanding the number of thoughts at our disposal and organizing them effectively. This isn’t a comment on our cognitive abilities, any more than a calculator is a comment on our math skills. It’s merely illustrative of the way computing complements thinking.”
“Secondly, thought networks will save time and effort. Consider how much time you spend collecting and organizing your thoughts. Whether you’re writing a paper for school, planning a trip, or researching a medical condition, thoughts are the necessary precursor to action. If we can migrate some of that arduous process online, we can put computers to the task of simplifying your online experience.”
“Once we digitize our thoughts and put them online, our thoughts may interact with the world even when we’re not attending to them. They become both an independent embodiment of our thinking as well as a powerful knowledge asset. Thought networks won’t displace thinking any more than social networks displace our socializing. But they will augment our ability to think and get stuff done.”
Just came across this impressive ad (about a year old) at the end of a TED talk. I’m not a marketer, but the emotive brand association is clear genius.
It prompted this first post, as this is realy what I’m interested in exploring. How we can figure out how to use the internet to achieve global superordinate goals. Its not a new concept, but with the social web coming into its own over the last decade, it seems the tools are becoming available,
and the enabling mindset is emerging, to properly harness this enhanced interaction between people for this purpose.
Who knows what role we might play in its cognition. An intelligent sensory organ, an eye, an ear, a finger, or a cognitive guide/gatekeeper for red-flag thought processes? In the end we need to understand how our personal biases affect our ability to interpret our own experiences and inputs into this process. Maybe the subject for a different blog.
