THE KONGQUEST

I thoroughly enjoyed this post by Diana Kimball about changing her life from loving the internet for the serendipity of vast information flow to high fi well thoughtout information in books, music and entertainment. Moving from noise to signal.

I have been thinking about doing this myself for a while but still do not know how I am going to execute it. The lure of RSS, Facebook, and Gmail are always pulling at me all the time while stacks of books and unfinished projects lay on the side. I believe in creating systems and have experimented in blocking out what I can access online and channeling my free time towards higher pursuits but long lasting habits have not formed yet. I guess I need continual reminder of what my goals are to solidify new habits at this stage. We’ll see how things go 60 days from now.

Check out the blog post yourself:

Diana Kimball: Trying

I just watched the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O and was completely blown away by future potential of this application. Google has rethought the way communication should be done and put it all into one neat little package.

The premise of a “wave” begins with a message that is the start of a dialog between one person and another or a group of people. From there it can transform into a number of things simultaneously. It can become a static back and forth conversation like email, a real time back and forth conversation like instant messaging, or a work in progress like a word document or presentation that can be presented as a whole thought in it’s final state.

The impact of having these options to transform mediums immediately and fluidly will decrease the chances of online miscommunication dramatically. Because you can have a conversation and pop in a comment in any position you want to call attention to or re-write any part of the message and be accountable for it in the conversation playback, accountability for correct informatin lies on all participants.

What I like most of this application as the “email and instant messager killer” is that the Wave can be taken as far as you want it to. Open a wave with a friend and just treat it like you do as email. That’s fine. Open a wave with someone who is currently online and talk in real time. That’s fine too. Take it to the next step in the conversation and brainstorm a trip idea and put some pictures into the email and you can transform that whole conversation into a travel itinerary or travel guide for a book, ready to be exported immediately with some of Googles tools in the Wave.

This is THE application that all the collaboration and web 3.0 and tech geeks have been talking about when they say the future of the internet is content streamed through different portals (RSS makes it so that we do not see the original websites built around blog content) and that information will be collaborated in real time instead of statically in silos all over the web. I am interested in seeing how the world takes on this new technology and runs with it. I hope it’ll reach mass appeal like the advent of email, instant messaging, blogging, and now tweeting and just replace all those older communication channels.

Wow. This is a great video inciting people to action on changing the way education is done in our country. We all have a duty as citizens to take action for our shared better future. I love the quote she cites in the speech:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. - Thomas Jefferson

Watch the video: