September 11, 2001. I remember staying up past midnight, flipping through my hundred or so cable channels. Everything covered the attack. I went for a walk. TV light flickered from windows of every house. Everyone was up but nobody was out. Except one guy, on a payphone, highlighted by a street light glowing over him, speaking [...]
Tagged as:
change,
history,
osama bin laden,
perspective,
tv,
twitter,
war
So I saw this SEO copywriter joke a bunch of times yesterday. I love it: “So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor” (If you don’t know what SEO copywriting is, it means writing with specific keywords in certain orders to help sites rank [...]
Tagged as:
humour,
jokes,
memes,
networks,
seo,
social media,
social networks,
twitter
I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
Tagged as:
change,
evolution,
facebook,
future,
generativity,
meaning,
philosophy,
progress,
social media,
society,
technology,
twitter
We had an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day, about the lack of attention given by the media to lesser-known election candidates. Partially aside, it was the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see for a while — a lively backchannel discussion about how local politics news is covered — and I hope [...]
Tagged as:
blogging,
conversation,
elections,
ideas,
journalism,
leadership,
linking,
politics,
reporting,
social media,
twitter
I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]
Tagged as:
authority,
expertise,
information,
internet,
knowledge,
learning,
lifestreaming,
medium theory,
social media,
technology,
twitter
Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic. There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: If it persists much longer, this [...]
Tagged as:
development,
future,
generations,
generativity,
history,
innovation,
jonathan zittrain,
progress,
recession,
society,
twitter
The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership [...]
Tagged as:
bureaucracies,
collaboration,
copenhagen,
design thinking,
designers' ego,
generativity,
innovation,
open innovation,
organizations,
planning,
rapid prototyping,
think21st,
twitter,
twitter api
Last week when I read Titus Ferguson’s post about the fact “‘social’ is in ‘social media’ for a reason,” I was reminded of Dan Brown’s column at LFPress.com about how his blog has led to offline friendships. I can relate. Since I started actively engaging people on Twitter a year ago my little bubble has exploded. I [...]
Tagged as:
community,
gdldn,
groups,
social,
social media,
twitter,
web
Here’s Chris Brogan’s talk on serendipity at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, here’s my earlier one relating to generativity, and here’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of serendipity & generativity in action on Twitter: No, they’re not on the same list, nor are Jeff Jarvis and The Clever Sheep ever normally in the same [...]
Tagged as:
blogging,
edupunk,
generativity,
heuristics,
process,
publishing,
serendipity,
twitter,
web
Selection is a natural; so is categorizing; so is ranking; so is list-making. We owe a lot of great things to the human tendency to rank & classify. We wouldn’t have science (and therefore we wouldn’t have a whole bunch of other things)… Think of biology and chemistry. Unfortunately, it also means discriminating. A list isn’t so much about [...]
Tagged as:
classification,
discipline,
expertise,
mastery,
networks,
process,
selection,
signalling,
social media,
storytelling,
systems,
twitter,
twitter lists,
web
Generativity is one of the core concepts I keep coming back to. I think it’s at least as important as “sustainability” and we shouldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. Recently I noticed Tim O’Reilly mention it with new (to me) associations in a TechCrunch post about Gov 2.0: The government may build [...]
Tagged as:
cultural evolution,
development,
evolution,
generativity,
innovation,
institutions,
intellectual evolution,
jonathan zittrain,
open government,
open innovation,
open source,
tim o'reilly,
twitter,
web
