Saturday, December 25, 2004

Connected Intelligence

The Wikipedia got me thinking. You've seen it before I figure, it's that miraculous document which is an encyclopedia written by ANYONE AND EVERYONE. In other words, it's a document which is "open" and we're all free to improve on it.

The Wikipedia is a document based on an understanding that nothing is more powerful or revolutionary than connected open intelligence. Not plain vanilla "connectivity", but connected, networked, open intelligence.

Like wikis and the wikipedia, blogs operate with a similar notion. Blogs aren't cool because we tell our deep dark secrets on them or write fun stuff on them. Blogs are cool because we show each other how our minds work there and they share this same provocative assumption with wikis, that we need to create places where connected open intelligence can happen. Great minds do NOT think alike, luckily, and nothing is more rich than a diversity of pugnacious thought taking swings at one another to improve everyone's skill at thinking radical new thoughts.

Sometimes we give this notion of being connected short shrift and say the cool thing about the Net is "connectivity" but that doesn't go nearly far enough to my mind, in describing what's really going on around here. The cool thing is that we connect and then amplify our intelligence by creating documents, blogs, wikis, ideas, manifestos TOGETHER and not just that, but even more importantly, is that we do it very very FAST.

What's dynamic and revolutionary about connected open intelligence is the wildfire speed at which ideas are put out there on the Net, picked up instantly, improved, challenged, reinforced, checked for accuracy, checked against cultural context, checked against worldwide perspective, amplified, distributed and ubiquitious in a matter of ... ready ... hours. The Net is the ultimate warp speed due diligence machine for ideas.

This is the kind of thing I like to think about on Christmas. This, to me, is a very big Christmas present, still half unwrapped. We haven't even begun to lift the lid and peek inside.