Thursday, September 29, 2005

What To Do?

The universal problem seems to be how hard people have to work just to figure out what to do. Task work has become streamlined, but knowledge work has become more cluttered and confusing. Making the right choices - fast, while everything's changing - is now the toughest part of getting our work done.
from Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster by Bill Jensen
Let's add "learning new things" and "making new connections" to that last sentence.

I like to think that "Web 2.0" is about trying allow a more graceful pivot - one with meaning rather than random pivots whenever we feel like it. Seems like mashups, Backpack, and Yahoo! 360 all help us take steps from data to information or relate tasks to a goal. I can't wait to see how things evolve to help find knowledge in that information.

Tim O'Reilly posted this Meme Map from Foo Camp, which sets some context for the activities, but doesn't say what all of these inputs lead to. For example, harnessing collective intelligence is great, but it necessitates a way to filter that new information in a way that allows you to gain knowledge from it.

Like Bruce Sterling said at SXSW, the reward for solving societies greatest problems is a better set of problems.

No comments: