Intelligence Amplification

Ahh what a wonderful morning, woke up today feeling like I’d finally gotten some sleep, and had a great couple of posts to start off the morning with. Following the trackline is a comment I left on Ben’s Blog.

Post Trackline: Ben’s Blog > Wandering Stan / McInblog > Thought on Holiday Parties; Involver; and SNS.

I like Stan’s viewpoint on the issue. We’ve all experienced that phenomenon but everyone focuses on why/how it happens, not how something supercedes the reaction. I think it’s rooted alot in our evolution – the ability to focus on a singular objective has been extremely important in our history.

We all have to much information to absorb, and until the singularity is upon us and we turn in robots, we have to figure out ways to seperate relavent/interesting information from garbage.

How do we choose what’s important to listen to? How do we emulate that selection process given all the information of the web?

There are people making strides in this, and I agree that your social network is the best choice I see out there now. Take one of my favorite sns sites www.involver.com – they use tags to connect people with events they’d enjoy. Far more often though I look at the events my friends are attending and discover through that. The reason social-networking is so effective, is because it’s so intuitive. Being “good” at using a search engine to find what you want requires learning how to search… it’s not intuitive. social networking sites have done a good job of emulating a common practice. I can call/sms/email my friends and ask them what thier doing, or I can log on to involver and see the next event (or the event i’d probably like the most, or the event nearest me, etc) for all my friends.

Social Networking is a really easy way for non-techies to sort information, and I think because of that it’s an integral part of where the web is headed. The goal needs to be to figure out a way to attach serious meaning to social networks. Social networking for social networking sake – to get the most friends, as if life was a zero sum game, is soooo 3 years ago. So let’s use sns as a platform, not a solution – and make it work in a long-tail environment.