Lunch with a friend last week reinforced some of my own behavior. She's pursuing her Master's Degree, and because of that she's slowly pulling herself out of other activities - something that I've done more than once over the years to the seeming dismay of varied social networks. One day I'm really interested in something and immerse myself in it. Weeks later, it no longer interests me and I seem to disappear from that region, perhaps still existing on the fringes - sort of like what I have done with Second Life recently. Why? Much the same reason.

Time is finite. Time management is imperative for one's sanity. And thus, triage of interests happens at times. A long trail of interests and people I know because of them follows my lifetime, but no one branch defines my life. Instead, my life defines the branches - and long ago I learned that Life is something that takes you along it's own path despite your interests elsewhere.

I remember a time when I was not connected to a collective consciousness known as the Internet. Even when I got connected, reading Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books) had me stretching for more. For over a decade, I have drank of the collective consciousness and have added to it a bit, here and there.

So why was it an advertisement for a writing tablet, the Neo, caught my fancy? Was it that it's an electronic device that is portable and would allow me to write anywhere? No, that wasn't it. I'll quote what caught my eye: { Read more }

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology. { Read more }

Despite all my pictures on Flickr, there is a large gap of my life that is without images. From the age of 10 to 35, almost no images of me exist - and those 25 years have a lot of memories. A lot of friends in different parts of the world. A lot of people would have called me a misfit during those years - even a freak at times. The long hair years, the short hair years, the 'go fast' years, the sleeping on the couch and floor years.

They were good years. I made so many good friends in those years, especially from 17 to 30. Some of them were swallowed whole by the digital divide - at times, a name will come to me and I'll search for them on the web, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. They're gone. Its almost as though they never existed. So when I read this article, it really hit home. Nowadays, most of my friends are a part of the digital circle to some degree. My mother, on fixed income, is in some of these circles and thrives in some of them like Flickr. But ol' Marc, my roommate and Arby's junkie? Gone like so many others.

They don't exist except in my memory. I don't expect them to be dead, mind you, but for all intents and purposes these people do not exist on the Internet. For all I know, they're working the same dead end jobs we were all fighting to avoid. They might be married now with little ones running around, and I daresay that I think a few of them may be behind bars. None of them were bad people, mind you, but some of us made bad choices (including me). Some bad choices just lead to other bad choices. Life goes on. { Read more }