I just received a copy of Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody. I love his subtitle “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”. I can’t really comment on the book itself as I’ve barely read the first chapter.

To be honest I don’t have high hopes as I don’t typically enjoy these types of books. I did, however, really enjoy his post Situated Software so if that’s an indicator then maybe this will be a good read? I’ll get back to you….

Chris fired me this post by Mike Arrington a week or so ago.

“I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).”

Mark Hurst referenced this post in a recent email as well and makes some great points about the psychology of email overload.

“One benefit of declaring email bankruptcy, I think, is the ‘proof’ that you’re plugged in and important. Surely if you have so much email that you can’t manage it, lots of people are asking for your time and attention! Work must be a constant adrenaline rush! Wow!”

We certainly need to be aware that some people actually derive feelings of importance from being utterly overloaded by email. Hopefully they are on the fringe and most of us are ready to get a hell of a lot more productive when it comes to inboxes. Mark makes a key point about how Arrington is dealing with this issue:

“But consider the outcome of this strategy. Arrington effectively has no email, since he’s liable to delete anything he receives without reading it first; and he has no voice mail, since he leaves his voice mail box in the full state. Here is a leader of Silicon Valley who is no longer able to use technology. Strange.”

Mark thens makes the point that throwing more technology may not be the solution:

“I agree that *some* new technology is needed, but it’s probably not a snazzy thing that Silicon Valley geeks would drool over. Whatever it is, Arrington really wants it”

While I agree for the most part, Mark does refer people to his technology by pointing them to gootodo which strikes me as contradictory. With our focus at brainpark, we view all this as symptoms that we hope bp will tackle and at least help with. As always, the solution may not be had by focusing entirely on the symptoms. We talk a lot about the promises that technology has failed miserably at. This includes effective communication, less duplication of work, etc all aimed at allowing you move up the heirarchy and do something fun or hang out with your family.

This is good, link from Mark Hurst.

In honour of the day, we’re having stew and guiness of course.

Cripes I have to celebrate today. Not doing so would be like Mark not taking Canada Day off.

The date is set for the next DemoCamp in Guelph. If you can attend then put your name on the list here. If you’d like to demo then contact me asap.

If you work in anyway with software and live within driving distance then you have no excuse. People demo’ing at these events are finding great people to hire, getting funding, improving their designs, all while drinking free beer. Ok maybe there’s more of the latter than anything else but who cares.

How do you balance the intelligence and stupidity of the mobs? Sure, smart things come from everyone but so do dumb things. Kevin Kelly has an interesting article on this thread titled The Bottom is Not Enough.

“It’s taken a while but I think we’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.

Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all?

Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough.

More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even stupider.”

“The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.”

If you haven’t seen Improv Everywhere’s stuff yet, check this one out. Make sure you watch it to the end to see how the crowd reacts, very cool.

Speaking of starbucks and wifi, peep this video.

If this means they’re ditching those push button chicken soup dispensers and getting back to making coffee then I’m all for it.

‘Starbucks, he said, has lost its focus on coffee, noting that the company switched from making espresso by hand to robotic machines that pump out drinks with the push of a button.

“For them, the move to fully automated machines was inevitable, but they lost something,” Mr. Cates said. “If you are a barista, you have to roast your own coffee. It’s a necessity. You cannot compete by selling music or WiFi.”’

As Mark always says, it’s about the experience! In the meantime I’ll stick with Planet Bean.

I’m planning to attend DemoCampToronto17 this coming Monday and StartupCamp in Waterloo Tuesday night. You should too.

As Edwin Hutchins writes, cognitive anthropology “turned away from society by looking inward to the knowledge an individual had to have to function as a member of the culture. The question became ‘What does a person have to know?’ The locus of knowledge was assumed to be inside the individual….But knowledge expressed or expressible in language tends to be declarative knowledge. It is what people can say about what they know.”

So what am I rambling about? As far as I can tell, cognitive theory itself only recently, early 90’s, turned away from focusing solely on the individual and what a person knows. They’ve since developed the notion of socially distributed cognition. The concept I love is that the cognitive properties of a group is NOT simply the sum of the cognitive properties of the individuals.

Software is facing parallel false assumptions now. Is there any software being built that focuses on socially distributed cognition? I’m not talking about web 2.0, groups, friends, tags, etc because that ain’t it. Ya sure, it’s a leading question and I’m talking out loud about what we’re working towards with brainpark but isn’t that what this medium’s about? Software that supports cognition in the context of an individual is good, but it would pale in comparison to software that tackles socially distributed cognition….maybe…..I think…..but I’m just one person….