No, not the 1966 Antonioni movie (which I was young enough to enjoy illicitly in 1970) but its Brooklyn remake by Vinnie.

It didn’t matter that it was late at night in Chennai, that I had a very early morning flight, and that the broadband connection I has was less than perfect, that it took many attempts to finish watching the show. And what a show.
I just loved everything about Vinnie’s efforts. And it encapsulated a number of lessons for me, an all-too-brief definition of what is possible.

How individuals working in teams can do things never done before. Learn about the possibilities. Take risks yet be careful. Tell people about what they want to do with passion and voice and then have the joy of actually doing what they want. Sample bits of this and that without caring about rights or wrongs, not intending to make money out of the sampling per se. Doing no evil. But doing something different. Disruptive in a gapingvoid way. Engaging. Micro capital raising. Co-creating. Sharing.

Having fun. [Thanks to Gordon and Frank for the link.]

A coda. Could you imagine doing this with anything but a Mac? The idea, the fund-raise, making the video, the lot. It’s all Mac.

Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.

And you read your Emily Dickinson

And I my Robert Frost

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we’ve lost… Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation

The more I think about it, the more I realise what incredible changes there are in value creation when we co-create and trade and exchange across open marketplaces.

Now I can see exactly where people I like and trust “note [their] place with bookmarkers”.

Now the bookmarkers don’t have to measure what is lost. [Except, of course, the evils sprung up by bad law and bad IPR and bad DRM].

They measure, at least in some part, what is gained. If tags are bookmarkers and things like Technorati are measures. But that’s for another day.

Today I decided to spend some time with Joi Ito’s blog. Not just read it, spend time on it. And it was an exhilarating ride.
First, I experienced the Chicken Little approach to transparency, a story Joi repeats from a meeting he was at. Priceless.

Second, via Joi’s post about Wikia, I decided to take a wander around the Wikia sites that were forming. Here’s a list of some popular Wikia sites:

1. Alternative History, for creating fictional alternative histories.
2. Creatures, about Creatures, the artificial life computer game series
3. d20 NPC, generic NPC and monster stat blocks for the d20 System.
4. Dofus, information on the Dofus MMORPG.
5. Doom, for fans of the Doom series of computer games
6. Memory Alpha, a Star Trek encyclopedia
7. Muppet, based on the Muppet franchise, including Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock
8. Star Wars, about the Star Wars movies and spin-offs
9. Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia
10. WikiFur, information on furry community and culture

Tells you something about the way cyberspace is interacting with the real world, doesn’t it? Fictional alternative histories. Muppets and Star Wars and Star Trek. And various forms of MMOG. And, just to “legitimise” the list a la Christopher Locke’s organic gardening*, we have “information on furry community and culture”. [*More on this another day]

Third, while on the subject of real versus virtual, but staying with Joi Ito, I then saw a Philip Torrone story about credit cards and virtual environments and the Lindex exchange.

Wow.

I have already seen stories about “well-to-do” “youth” “outsourcing” the playing of the first few “vanilla” levels of games to “India“, only to take up the reins when a more interesting phase of the game is entered and the requisite number of lives and collateral and artifacts have been earned/collected. Co-creation of a different sort. For well-to-do and youth and outsourcing and vanilla and India please go ahead and substitute with whatever works for you…..the principle’s the same and it’s here to stay.
We should not underestimate the sheer joy and power and learning and creativity that comes from collaborative work using social software in a world of sharply declining computing, communications and storage costs.

Thanks Joi for a wonderful random walk. By the way, it’s what I do with people I link to. It is worth actually taking a walk and visiting the site every now and then, rather than just getting syndicated and alerted content.

……….Yes we speak of things that matter. With words that must be said……………..

While working on the implications of better tagging and better learning (as part of syndication and search) I recently visited Rashmi Sinha’s site (as recommended by Chris Messina whom I found via Tara Hunt who was RageBoyed my way). Very interesting post on collaborative filtering and tags, something that everyone interested in that space should read. IMO anyway.

I particularly like the point being made about user-generated content being the key, the trigger. I quote from Rashmi:

But I think I do finally understand why collaborative filtering is being dragged out of closets, dusted and prettied up in this new world of tags, Web 2.0 and Long Tail. One of the roadblocks to collaborative filtering is user input, some expression of interest by a user that you can hook into. Tags provide such a hook. On the other hand, tags desperately need good ways of supporting findability. As I argued before, you can go only so far with lists. Which is why we are seeing interests in clusters, facets and collaborative filtering. Additionally, both tags and collaborative filtering provide inroads into the Long Tail.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about what she’s written, it takes some digesting. But I cannot help but feel this is important in the context of Four Pillars. Where collaborative filtering meets tags is where I can see the Bond Driver and the Learn Driver begin to do different things. [For those who have not read my earlier posts, this is a reference to the Nohria and Lawrence Four Driver model]