Comments on: Tim O’Reilly, now shall I compare thee to a city state

By: REK

REK — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 13:36:30 +0000

Grant – Your opening lines capture powerfully current economic realities. rk

By: srp

srp — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:28:30 +0000

TED usually brings news of speakers' long-term projects to the attention of its audience. Those projects are often nurtured in universities and traditional research institutes. They are not half-formed, brainstormy sorts of things, but pretty polished (and often astonishing) advances that do affect your thinking about what is possible.

So for at least some of these conferences, there is an ecology at work, with idea development occuring in the traditional places and idea dissemination occuring at the fluid mega-salons. I don't know about the more marketing-oriented get-togethers, though.

By: communicatrix

communicatrix — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:53:06 +0000

I think you've hit it precisely (or as precisely as one can hit such a thing) with the idea of the nimble being more valuable than the staid. I realize that life has probably been accelerating since anyone thought to call it that, but my beloved gramps, who stayed alert and nimble-minded to the end at 92, remarked more and more toward the end of his days (in the mid-90s) that I couldn't possibly understand how things had accelerated in his lifetime. And now, at a much younger age (46), I get it.

Seth Godin (and, I'm sure, plenty of others) speaks often of the divide between the digerati and everyone else, and how quickly it's growing. For as long as the infrastructure remains in place, that'll probably continue, I imagine. There's just so little lag time in communication nowadays.

Lovely piece, this.

By: gugoda

gugoda — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:47:14 +0000

I came away from your article with two impressions.

1. Man, I never knew Grant was a Foo Fighter (couldn't resist)

2. The accompanying picture brings to mind the wonderfully surreal image from The Time Bandits by Terry Gilliam.

What is the role of behemoth, slower-moving institutions in today's faster-moving world? It is a question that out of Darwinian necessity many institutions should be asking themselves of course.

"Here's to the crazy ones". The apple commercial of yore paid tribute to entrepreneurial, innovative creators. The Foo club and similar organizations seem to attract sharp minds of a similar ilk. But what is missing is scale. In your wonderfully vivid analogy, the monks may indeed stream out to the parishes to commence their proselytizing. But the reach and speed is slow. If nothing else, it is the sheer magnitude of attendance which institutions enjoy that is a source of their strength. Dissemination and examination of issues of the day can be far quicker. This is an age of fragmentation. Change is inevitable. Not all bold ideas are good ones however. There should be some solace in the fact that the institutions which are slower moving take longer to digest the consequences of ideas can be a healthy part of a naturally occurring 'checks and balance' system.