This Sunday we had things to do in Venice. Winter version of the city that is already drifting into the carnival spirit made me feel like entering Hades. Pale white temples above the dark waters, rotting foundations that are slowly descending into the dead sea, streets devoid of inhabitants save for grotesque masked figures who are herding and exploiting the frivolous, ignorant and decadent mass of tourists, truly seemed like the city of dead.
So Alex Willcock from Imagini had this beautiful session at the DLD where he asked the audience to give him a leap of faith, close our eyes and start imagining the most beautiful moment in our lives. I scrambled through my mind and settled with that special image. Little did I expect the demand he uttered shortly after: “Now turn to your neighbor and spend 30 seconds relaying your experience to him and then take turns.”
Hosted by Mark Samwer. Matt Cohler (FB), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Lars Hinrichs (Xing), Joanna Shields, Andrej Nabergoj. Live notes.
“When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy. When God changes your mind, that’s faith. When facts change your mind, that’s science.” The Edge Annual Question 2008 is out. From a pile of great reading, the following are some highlights that I liked.
Herkul. 1993-2007.
Professor McAffee, the ultimate enterprise 2.0 apostle, pointed out the emergent social software platforms in the enterprise and structured them in a neat model based on the strengths of social ties between the participants.
David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, gave a highly philosophical overview of his upcoming book The Rise of Implicit. Using a metaphorical example of a Rilke’s poem, he argued that we need a balance between the explicit and implicit now that the age of computers inforationalized our thinking.
A few weeks ago I attended Defrag, a new conference in Denver, »focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the aha moment.«
My takeaways were:
I often meet technology enthusiasts who are strangely conservative. Those intellectual snobs often lament the good old days, call blogging a passing fad and social networking a time waster. But the interesting question of such conversations is how those things affecting are the general quality of media and creativity in general.