Interesting Thoughts
And, I really should write more, but it is one of those days...
Edging ahead 
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The two-way Web is being printed on HTML pages, distributed over the RSS network, and woven together with links. The WYSIWYG writing capability that I saw in the Netscape and Microsoft mail/news clients five years ago, and that Ingo and Greg are drawing attention to again, still isn't woven into the fabric of the two-way Web the way it needs to be. But we'll get there, eventually. That's not what worries me. |
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My concern, rather, is that we'll get hung up once again on applications and protocols, and miss the big picture. Ultimately, it's not about RSS any more than it was about NNTP. It's about the evolution of our species toward shared consciousness. |
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"Shared consciousness is fuzzy stuff, but what we know truly matters. Blogging is a huge part of the new social fabric that is knitting itself all around the world of ends that comprises the Web. |
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I wrote about that in my Release Early Release Often post back in June 2001. There's a matrix there, borrowed from John Seely Brown, that sorts explicit and tacit knowledge into personal and social quadrants. What makes blogs so powerful, I think, is that they feed socially held tacit knowledge (what we know) with an abundance of explicit (what I know) stuff. |
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Here's what JSB said, long before weblogs showed up: |
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In essence the Web augments the knowledge dynamics of a region, increasing its diversity (serendipity) and expanding its learning resources by leveraging local expertise — in a lightweight way — for mentoring. More generally, it enhances the fluid boundaries between knowledge production and knowledge consumption and between the local and the virtual. The Web helps to build a rich fabric that combines the small efforts of the many with the large efforts of the few. It enables the culture and sensibilities of the region to evolve, not only by enriching the diversity of available information and expertise, but it tightens the feedback loops of bootstrapping. It increases the intellectual density of cross linkages. And it enables learning to happen everywhere‹a learning ecology. And the lurking (or informal benchmarking) that happens in local hangouts can now get augmented by the Web, one feeding the other. In other words, a self-catalytic system starts to emerge reinforcing and extending the core competencies of the region. |
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He goes on to predict weblogs: |
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Let me end with a brief reflection on a very profound shift that I believe is happening — a shift between using technology to support the individual and using technology to support relationships. This shift will be very important because with it we will discover new ways, new tools and new social protocols for helping us help each other, which is really the very essence of social learning. It is also the essence of lifelong learning, a form of learning that learning ecologies could dramatically facilitate. And being able to create learning ecologies in a region is a first step to constructing a culture of learning , more generally. |
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This is also, I believe, the idea behind smart mobs, moblogging and the transformation of companies from the forts they were to the social organizations they will become. Source: Doc Searls Weblog; 1/13/2003; 3:10:05 PM |
3:56:18 PM 
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