Automated tagging (semantic assignment), categorization engines, and self-learning bots are working quite well in separate places right now. What if we could bring them together? Some of this stuff has been tried in KM systems in the past few years, with varying degrees of difficulty. Alas, the biggest problem is that to make it work still requires more work and commitment that any organization is willing to put in considering the potential outcome.

I don’t think we are talking AI as much as we are talking well designed rules and metadata/tagging to help them move along.

(sorry it took so long to get back to you, needed to find the time – love you work)

That is probably one of the nicest compliments, or best comebacks someone ever gave me.

Social tagging is one of the applications, but I foresee a place where tagging is automatically done and then enhanced by social channels. As in correcting the work of computers. It is indeed an interesting place… the future.

Esteban

You are right – the time when we all have access to all the information is quite scarry and difficult to conceive – and it does allow us to bring the past into real time. The one problem is that for this (whatever this turns out to be) to work, we have to be able to capture and hold all the ‘real time’ information – so that it also becomes available to future real time. The danger is that we see it as real time as a current phenomena, something of the moment and therefore something that is disposable. Thus, as I have highlighted before, we are in danger of losing history (lets call history ‘future real time’). The #iranelection twitter tag, for example, for all its importance and significance as a historical event no longer exists in the from at which it existed when the key events were taking place. The tweets may exist – but it was the space that the tag represented that was critical in giving these tweets context. #iranelection as a space is very different today from what it was a few months ago – yet we only have access to the current space. We need to stop seeing this sorts of things as real-time and realise that they are only real-time on account of the speed and scale at which they can occur. http://richardstacy.com/2009/06/18/twitter-is-making-and-then-destroying-history/

Anyway – lets encourage the conversation about these sorts of things. I believe there are not enough people focused on them at the moment – too many technologists not enough historians involved in social media at the moment!

what we need to find cannot be avoided.

the medium is completely immaterial.

First, let me say that I’ve been enjoying reading the work you’re doing on developing a roadmap to Social CRM over on your blog. (http://www.estebankolsky.com/)

I agree with what you’ve said here, and I think the response I just gave to Richard above applies here too. All information is becoming collectively available within the cloud of the ubiquitous web.

I do agree that metadata and tagging is going to allow ‘good’ info to bubble to the top, but don’t you think we’ll still need people to decide how seemingly disparate information fits together? People to help make sense of the info and bring it together to gain new insights?

Machines may be able to do this for us someday, but I think those would have to be intelligent machines. AI. We’re not quite there yet…..

Thank you. These are good points. Here’s my takeaway:

#1. An expert used to be the one that had the information. Now that we all have access to the information, the experts are the ones who:

a.) know which information is worth knowing
b.) know how that information fits into the big picture

You will still have your experts in specific fields/industries, of course. It’s not just seeing how everything fits, but knowing what to do with it, so I’ll add one more bullet point:

c.) know how to apply the information

#2. Information just IS.

I think this is what you were saying, that when distribution goes away, information just IS. It’s not coming from a certain person/place, it’s just circulating and existing. We pull the pieces out of the ether that we want to examine, and add new things to the mix.

I think this idea is really going to impact the traditional educational system. The knowledge isn’t ‘owned’ by the schools, where we need to go there to get it. What we need is someone to show how to find the info and how to make sense of it. A teacher’s role is going to shift more towards being a facilitator, towards teaching students how to LEARN, not how to memorize just to pass a test. There’s going to be a lot more of peer learning going on, and informal learning happening outside of the classroom.

But that’s an aside. I do agree with what you said that ‘information will be the bearer of its own influence’, but I still think there will be people who are seen as sources of trust/understanding/guidance.

This whole thing feels very organic and holistic to me, which I love. I think a lot of the structures we’ve imposed on our minds and our society as to what’s what are being broken down and reframed. We’re having to completely rethink the meaning of concepts like “knowledge” and “intelligence.”

I am also seeing a convergence in these ideas with much of the early early philosophies for understanding the world and our place in it. For instance, if you look at early Buddhism and other eastern philosophies, there is a huge focus on “mindfulness”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness)

I think there is so much baggage with ‘religion’, and unfortunately, the western spin on eastern philosophy is classified as ‘new age’, which makes it feel like a bunch of spiritual crap that someone is selling me.

Forget all that. The idea of mindfulness is the idea of consciousness, of awareness, of real ‘presence.’ It means not focusing on the past or the future, as most of us do all the time, but really being ‘in the moment.’ 5,000 years later, Csíkszentmihályi “coined” this term as Flow, lol.

To me, the new ‘immediacy’ of information is changing the way we interpret information. As you said, it’s not distribution dependent. Now that all information is available all the time, in a sense it starts to break down the way we view history. Instead of it being ‘back then,’ it’s kind of ‘always now.’ We’re able to draw on the lessons/mistakes from the past in new ways, comparing them to today, making them alive again by drawing parallels and seeing the relevance.

Do you see the connection?

I feel like technology is pulling is into a cultural awakening. We are becoming more present as our information becomes more present. We’re beginning to really experience things NOW, and drawing on everything we’ve known and everything we’re aspiring towards and figuring out how to apply it now. We’re becoming aware that we manifest reality.

This is a big idea, but I find it extremely empowering. I mean, what happens when we all have the internet in some form, whether it’s via a computer or a mobile device? What happens when we’re all able to access information, exchange it, and learn from each other? It’s called a revolution. We are in the middle of a revolution. It’s not a ‘social media fad’, it’s a fundamental shift in human culture.