A Meaningful Life

Some time ago I wrote about transition time costs and how they are a big cost to personal and business efficiency. Problogger Darren Rowse was right on the money today in his post about batch processing tasks together to get efficiency in his blogging business. I think he misses the “why” it works but the crux of the strategy is there. The approach can apply to managing businesses, finances, sales, marketing and even getting the chores done around the house. Just about any area in your life can benefit from the batching strategy.

The Powerhouse Museum has posted over 400 Photo Plates on Flickr. You really have to take you hat of to them. It’s wonderful to make this so available to Australians. Hat tip to Sean Carmody.

This shot is quite sentimental for me. I grew up about 100 metres around the bend on the left from when I was two until four years old. I then moved to Perth until I was twelve before returning to live at Beauty Point (the right side on the other side of the water) until I was eighteen. After that I moved to Manly for a few years (bottom photo about 200 metres out of shot to the left).

This really gives me mixed emotions. Seeing the time difference between then and now gets me present to my short time on this earth, my mortality.

I’m at BarCamp Sydney 2008, get there if you can, lots of great people and content - a perfect storm. Clearly no-one has it nailed on what Web 3.0 will look like, including me.

The discussion turned to; web privacy, OpenSocial, OpenID, which device, on vs. off-line and semantic web. So many views and they all felt right to some degree but none felt clearly and independently correct. The one point of clarity was that Web 3.0 isn’t any one thing.

The discussion and comments just added evidence to my view that the organism or entity that is evolving out of the primordial Web 2.0 soup is so much bigger than the sum of it’s parts. It can’t be observed, it has a life of it’s own, we can’t comprehend it. Just as the flea doesn’t know it lives on a dog. We are building all the components, the cells in it’s body. Being many specialist cells, we don’t have the ability to conceptualise the whole entity yet. I’m increasingly convinced Artificial Intelligence is going to be a major component. If the web enabled applications are the cell specialisation using frameworks then the nervous system is probably somewhere in the region of AI engines and the semantic web. The cell nuclei or the distributed brain if you like.

Picture credit: Mike Licht