Comments on: The World is Sorting

By: Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:33:11 +0000

Pleasure to meet you Grant and thanks for a thoughtful post about the new social landscape. I wrote somewhere that meeting fellow bloggers for the first time feels a bit like having beamed down from the Starship Enterprise. I guess that means blogs are the social equivalent of the Transporter.

By: lauren

lauren — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:44:58 +0000

hi from another one at the table. it was great to meet you, have a chat and hang out on the day. pity i was lousy at saying goodbye after the conference! i hope your stay was a blast and if you're in london or melbourne, do get in touch.

By: mark Earls

mark Earls — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:21:28 +0000

Great speech yesterday (tried to introduce myself but you were deep in conversation) and another great post. Completely agree with you on the point of "pointless" social interaction and the real lure of social media btw

By: Marcus Brown

Marcus Brown — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 11:19:59 +0000

Hi Grant, it was great to meet you. Hope it happens again sometime soon.
The guy in Munich,

Marcus Brown.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 08:02:46 +0000

Grant --

The technology exists already to automate connection-making over social network sites. In part this involves automated reasoning and in part, the so-called semantic web. The latter is the idea of adding annotation to web-content in order to allow this content to be "read" and analysed automatically by machines. Folksonomy tagging is an example of content-annotation which could be used to automate connection-making.

On automated reasoning, every version of Windows since Windows95 (released a dozen years ago!) has included some AI components.

-- Peter

By: collyn ahart

collyn ahart — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:23:05 +0000

Really wonderful to meet you this evening, and such a treat to hear you speak. The course I did at Saint Martins is called 'Creative Practice for Narrative Environments' or, what I would describe as 'designing stories and experiences for spaces'....

Most of the work we were doing was about using sensory devices to articulate stories. The course was multidisciplinary - very - and perhaps about (as you say) really 'traversing this expanding world' in actuality. I think, as I'm sure you gleaned from our rather brief chat this evening, that there is massive potential to apply this 'doing' into business and general business strategy. Taking from other disciplines is really just about looking at fundamental emotional and sensual responses to the way people exist... if something happens in a museum/whatever, who is to say it cannot happen in a tour bus? Or a library? Or a car show room?

I would love to stay in touch. Do let me know next time you're in London and perhaps I can buy you a drink/coffee?

By: dilys

dilys — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:55:52 +0000

"Sorting" may be one of your most functional ideas. And as to networking, meta-sorting happens from my reliance on *your sorted sidebar* bloglist (many others are not so reliable IMO) when I want to broaden the stimulus with similar quality and subject.

My own lapsed blog seemed to serve as an interactive, extended calling card: *Ms. D. is "at home" in certain conceptual categories.* Blogging lends weight, importance, and scope to the elementary socializing education to *learn-to-spell learn-to-type learn-to-think be-polite be-interesting*. Scope because eligibility for "sorting" is now not only social-class based. Anything that affects "being sorted" can be fatal, socially and professionally, or malform the forward trajectory.

Surely this will lead to a market in ghost-bloggers, for even a pale placeholder blog (with occasional focused high points for specific purposes) will be better than none, preferable to "no mailing address."

BTW "leaping from one story to the next, in breathtaking acts of barely managed continuity" = best phrasemaking ever! Signification *parkour*! (metaphor NewYorker 4/16/07)