Last week Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace and I had a great chat with JP (Confused of Calcutta) Rangaswami on the latest episode of our podcast - The Extraordinary Everyday Lives Show #028. Those of you who read Confused of Calcutta will know that JP is a deep thinker and eloquent writer who totally gets ClueTrain. What you might not know is that he also reads LifeKludger and understands the rambling path Dave and I are pushing forward as we think out loud together.
I really enjoyed the conversation with JP, several things stuck in my mind.
The first is JP’s questioning of why our industrialised education system groups kids into same-age classrooms. It certainly isn’t about optimum learning conditions!
The second is what I have dubbed the ‘JP Triangle’ in which a pattern emerges from Dave’s ramble about creativity and life near the ‘edge’. I scribbled the following visual representation of what formed in my mind during the Skype call:
I’m hoping that JP and Dave can continue this conversation by elaborating on the sides of the triangle and the meanings of the labels I have affixed. The triangle rests on its tip to represent an inverted hierarchy (inspired by Merv’s talk at the Living Laboratories workshop the day before).
So, lets have at it:
ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet - where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.
HETEROGENEOUS: at the edge things get a little crazy and that’s where the magic happens. Unlike the shallow end of the gene pool, there is lots of diversity which makes for good re-combination - fuelled by the laws of weak attraction.
CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff - sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!
As it happens, I am re-reading Dave’s copy of the ClueTrain Manifesto and my thoughts are falling into three columns of a table:
Mass Production | Mass Marketing | Mass Media
more on that later…
p.s. Shout out to Pete Cogle for his help with the space telephone!!
technorati tags:cluetrain, innovation
3 responses so far ↓
1
Tom Cotton's 8109
// Jun 27, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Whiplashed by The Long Tail effect…
Mike’s messing with my mind again. Here I was, innocently prep’ing the POC SnT and he waltzes in and drops another concept like a smart bomb for the collection management proof of concept.
While we’re trying to find authoritative soc…
2
lifekludger » People don’t scale, People Networks do.
// Mar 4, 2008 at 11:59 am
[...] the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people - the ecosystem of [...]
3
Blob » People don’t scale, People Networks do.
// Mar 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people - the ecosystem of [...]
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