Mathemagenic

One more weblog discovery: Piers Young, Monkeymagic - thought-provoking and fun writing on creativity and thinking (also revealing that the author seems to like tea :) Between other things - do "question memes" travel the same way as "answer memes"?

A comment to my note that "the microcontent nature of weblogs is an important component of the mix that makes them so powerful":

Which made me think that in many ways weblogs are like the blurb on the backs of books. They offer a quick, personalised insight into a bigger piece of content.

Which in turn made me wondering what are those "bigger pieces of content" touch while reading weblogs? Our bigger canvas? Ourselves?

Sometimes I feel that weblogs are "blurbs on the backs of books" without books themselves. I read a "blurb", get interested, but I hardly get an opportunity to read the "book": weblogs provide many "blurbs" about our bigger canvas and hidden agendas without making them explicit.

Weblogs are good as personal profiles, but the impression they give, although very much holistic, is still difficult to put in explicit words. It's like an abstract art - you can get the meaning from a few lines, but it's difficult to explain explicitly and you are never sure that this "clear picture" that you have inside is the one that the artist had in mind.

I guess I'm trying to explain something I can't explain yet :)

Found on a wall at a colleague's office: IFTF's Map of the Decade (you can also check other research resports by Institute for the Future). It worth A3 color printing and studying in detail :)

Trends (reformatted by me)

Emergence: from top-down to bottom-up sophistication. Emergence is about the unpredictable phenomena that occur when lots of individual actors following simple rules create complex behaviour.

The new agency: from trusted agents to self as agent. Agency is about who acts on behalf of the individual, the organisation, and the community - a who assumes the risks and burdens.

Shared value: from the value of proprietary ownership to the value of shared interests. Shared values is the increased value that information, products, and services acquire when they are held in common by players with diverse interests.

Focus & fusion: from virtual boundaries to embedded focal points. Focus is about the relationship pf the center to the periphery. In a distributed information world, the search for center - fused with real places -  comes foreground.

Smart presence: from episodic interactions to persistent experiences. Presence is defined by the experience of persistence - whether it's an always-on web cam or the digital tracks left behind by visitors to public spaces.

Health values: from traditional health care to a burgeoning health economy. Health values are like family values - they provide a touchstone for all kinds of decisions at home, in the workplace, and in the community.

Still thinking about personal effectiveness in knowledge intensive environment. May be talking about personal knowledge productivity is better (actually, it's only shorter, but I guess more confusing).

Or may be I should pick up Dave Pollard's idea of personal productivity improvement and then add my "knowledge intensive environment"...

I'm reworking my PhD plan and trying to come up with a good title :)