What a wonderful time to be on the Web. No, really. This morning’s Web bread crumbs trail browsing session went like this:
- Raw Peanut Butter Cups: Yesterday’s hunt for delicious snacks I can make to munch on when I work from home netted me this treasure. This lead me to….
- Finding Vegan: a visual recipe browsing site; I’m sure there are many great sites like it (Food Gawker also looks like another great one), but this one is a real find. I started investigating what they used to build Food Gawker, which lead me to…
- Scaffold, a nice Tumblr theme Food Gawker is using for visual browsing without having to go into a huge photo gallery set up for the images. This then lead me to…
- Pinry, a ‘make your own Pinterest’ which could address how enterprises who want the benefits of social networking tools but don’t want to widely share the content can make this whole scenario work.
The Collaborative Prosumer is here. Yes, I hate to combine buzzwords and trends, but as much as I love Collaborative Consumption, adding the Do It Yourself, contribute your thoughts to the hive mind aspect is where I truly get excited. It’s one thing to have a recipe book, another to have a visual guide to recipes where a chef – or foodie – shares their recipes, and another thing completely to have commentary from other foodies, and then another idea completely to have people start their own recipe communities altogether via the technology to build it. Yes, Epicurious and other food sites have been around, and a huge help, but this is another slight shift to something even more immediate. Why go to an established site when you can create your own site and create and consume over there? Why wait for someone to create an approved solution, when you can create the solution and add the content yourself?
Now I do worry about silos, and marginalization of communities and all the dangers that happen in how we store and use our knowledge, but when Open Source Technology meets Current Information Consumption and Production Habits and they hang out with great tools like Shareabouts (backgrounder on this from Shareable) I envision a future where we continue to share what we know, what we consume, and the Hive Mind of interconnected knowledge will grow with the added benefit of location and ubiquitous, smart computing. Maybe we will not only have maps showing bikes, but maps showing the contents of locations themselves – where resources like CPR/AED tools are available, as are a quick sense of who is around at a location to use them. The metaphor of Mesh Networks is an intuitive one to grasp – a spider web is strong even if its made of individual, fragile threads because of the distributed mesh composition of the network, like the Internet itself which depends on multiple notes and connections. The thing is, while a spider weaves that one web, we have a chance to make a Web that’s even stronger than one found in nature by linking all of our webs and networks together. Whereas usually nature has a biological version that tends to inherently ‘work’ without our help, we can build upon the biological model through applying our wisdom to make our Webs resilient, responsive, and adaptive. The promise is that the Internet of Things will be not just a connection of objects, but of all that we need from online and offline worlds – the objects, the knowledge and the people. In that way, perhaps we can create a network to rival the best of what biology has done, because it will be a reciprocal, growing, self healing ecosystem. What a fantastic time to be alive, indeed.
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On a more personal note, the themes of interconnectedness, communication (writing especially) and tools have translated for me personally not only in finding good recipes and tools to make my life personally and professionally easier, but on an immensely gratifying, non technical, more human topic too: mentoring. I’ve now had the chance to mentor three people through my current workplace, and it’s long been a dream of mine to be able to put my personal passion and joy in connecting the dots, sharing knowledge and putting a more human face onto technology into practice – and using mentoring as one of the ways I can spread that joy. I’ve been blessed to have mentors in my life who’ve inspired me – my dear friend Jack Choules being one. I’ve thought of him often lately now that interning season has arrived. I met my intern for the summer yesterday after sending her a quick email, and hoped to meet her later the next day. Now I didn’t think to send her a text message at the crowded event we were both at, so the day where I have a Smart Assistant like Siri that notifies me ‘x person is here – I think you wanted to meet her…?’ will be fantastic, but we did finally meet up, and I had a wonderful reward upon meeting – a hug. I understand that in business we have issues with ‘touch’ – that in certain contexts, a hug can be inappropriate. But being a Canadian at heart, I tend to love the warmth of community by default – perhaps a cold climate country will do that to a person – and hugs are a great ‘community’ way of thanking someone for their sharing. The great part of the experience was sharing my knowledge beforehand – about some corporate logistic and administrata issue, as well as as someone more experienced helping someone new. The result – a happy face and a hug – is a true reward. One doesn’t go into something necessarily for a reward, but when it happens, it reminds us of the power of connection, one of the reasons why social networking and collaborative tools are so successful. Never underestimate the craving of the human animal to be social – technology’s just the latest log on the campfire of connection. I look forward to the day when Cynthia, too, will be able to be the smiling face showing a new person around, and I know she’ll be great at it as well, because generalized reciprocity (‘paying it forward’) is the joy that comes out of connections in a network. There’s an Indian Proverb that says ‘ a smile you sent, will always return’ – and be it a digital 🙂 or a real person hug, the network can help us send out those smiles and experience that joy that comes as a result. For me that’s truly what it is all about – any of the work I do to connect people, processes or tools is to have results that increase the joy. There are many other metrics that drive our work, but for me joy is the ultimate metric, and provides me with true happiness, both professionally, and personally.
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