Information – aggregation, utilization and organization
A few interesting links on aspects of Web 2.0 (not a phrase I like at all, but there you go):
We don’t need more information or aggregation, we need inspiration, Alexander van Elsas:
Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.
And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers.
From Wikinomics to Government 2.0, L. Gordon Crovitz in Wall Street Journal:
Online tools under the rubric Web 2.0 are changing how information flows, with social networks letting people communicate directly with one another. This is reversing the top-down, one-way approach to communications that began with Gutenberg, challenging everything from how bosses try to manage to how consumers make or break products with instant mass feedback.
The institution that has most resisted new ways of doing things is the biggest one of all: government. This is about to change, with public-sector bureaucracies the new target for Web innovators…
That article via Amicable Collisions, who further addresses the need for new rulesets for a new century:
So we need to stop thinking about classical liberalism within the conservative framework and start imagining and inventing a conceptual framework and ultimately a social-political-cultural movement to champion a 21st century individualist-classical liberal ruleset. If we don’t do this then the collectivists will and our children and grandchildren will find themselves living under their ruleset, again.
Marisa at Making Sense of Jihad joins the dots between knowledge management and CT/COIN, via this article by Dave Snowden:
Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking…
The big problem for the knowledge and information management functions in an organization is that their governance structures were developed in an earlier, more ordered time when we focused on transaction systems for accounting and process. The essence of such systems is to remove ambiguity; the evolutionary pressure of natural human knowledge exchange is to embrace ambiguity. Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.
Marisa also points the way to a video of an International Data Corporation panel on Generation Y and the Emerging Power of User-Generated Content (UGC – another term I loathe btw). Four Asia-Pacific bloggers talk about social networks, monetisation, micro-blogging, etc.
