Adrien’s blog
Stuff I like, stuff I do, stuff I make

Tim O’Reilly, during his talk for TED:

He gives a metaphoric example of people wearing name tags in the real world and semantic description of these people on the semantic web, assuming that they are identified by an RFID tag.

we don’t wear name tags all the time [to get identified]
[…]
if we meet again, i will not recognize you because you’re wearing a name tag, i will recognize you because “oh yeah, i’ve seen you before!”
[…]
=> our machines are becoming like that

He uses this metaphor to show that the actual “Semantic Web” is filled progressively by learning from the “wisdom of crowds”:

Semantic web /RFID is things wearing name tags, and web 2.0 is learning to recognize them. So many things are continuously getting better at recognizing things by accumulating context, bit by bit.

Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of typical structured knowledge management and collaboration platforms (e.g. intranets):

For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.

The feeling of connectedness (and thus, the usefulness) of Social Networks and Ambient Awareness environnements is very hard to explain without actually experiencing it. David Allen did not find a way to actually explain this feeling, but he gives some inspirational clues:

There is inherently some sort of magic between the lines in much of it that seems to have struck a chord in so many of us. I attribute this to the transparency, connectedness, and immediacy that social media offer, which are key attributes of quality relationships—something humans crave at a basic level.

Time Management in the Age of Social Media