" Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass. [...]

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. [...]

Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views. Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ. The irony is that perspective will not get kids into college, nor does it help them thrive there. Academia rewards depth. Expertise is bred by experts who work with their own kind."

"Time is that quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working." --Anonymous

"There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done."

"I think that anybody who cares about the future of technology -- anybody who cares about the future, period -- ought to be awfully concerned about this. But people who work in technology have been agnostic on the subject so far. They need to recognize that they're going to be faced with a fairly stark choice, which is a gradual concentration around certain trusted platforms that cannot be broken out of and are filled with black boxes that you can't code around and can't see the inside of.

You have to get politically active and stop it from happening, because Congress has been bought by the content industry. The choice is being made at a very complex and subterranean political level. It's being done in standard settings, with the FCC, in amendments to obscure bills in Congress, in the closed door sessions to set the Digital Broadcast Standard. It has very significant long-term effects [for] the technical architecture of cyberspace, because what we're talking about embedding into everything is a control and surveillance mechanism for the purpose of observing copyright piracy, but [it] can be used for anything."

"It's a difficult proposition because the content industry has done a marvelously good job of getting people to believe that there's no difference between a song and a horse, whereas for me, if somebody's singing my song, I think that's great. They haven't stolen anything from me. If somebody rides off on my horse, I don't have anything and that is theft. Otherwise intelligent people think that there's no difference between stealing my horse and stealing my song. [The content industry] has also managed to create the simplistic and basically fallacious notion that unless we strengthen dramatically the existing copyright [regime], that artists don't get paid anymore. First of all, artists aren't getting paid much now. Second, making the institutions that are robbing them blind even stronger is not going to assure [their] getting paid more. And it's going to make it very difficult for us to create economic [and] business models that would create a more interactive relationship with the audience, which would be good for us economically and good for us creatively."

The alternative is to return to the original purpose of copyright, something no national legislature has yet been willing to do. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas, leaving thousands of old movies, records and books languishing behind a legal barrier. Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death, now the norm in the developed world.

Digital technologies are not only making it easier to copy all sorts of works, but also sharply reducing the costs of creating or distributing them, and so also reducing the required incentives. The flood of free content on the internet has shown that most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations. To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights would be enough. The 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a good place to start.

A real-time ticker application that will be updated using RSS. (Not the current "refresh to update" silliness in aggregators of today)

Publishable schedule items (to the rest of the world or a specific subset at my option)

To subscribe to lists of events that are occurring around my area geographically, and virtually and have those events appear in a calendaring application.

To use a blog or blog-like publishing environment (I'm thinking Zope with CMF) for a personal desktop heads-up-display console from which I work at all times.

"A discussion on Sam's blog got me thinking about self-hosted identities. Ideally, I should be able to put together a file, discoverable through my weblog, and digitally signed with my private key that contains all of the personal information that I want to make public. When I go to any type of forum (like a weblog) or to a commercial site (like Amazon), if they want my information, they would do what Dave suggests and put a "You know me" button on their page. When I go to the site, I click on the button, the site asks me for the location of my identity file. They download the file and extract the necessary information."

"I no longer want to know where my files are stored. I no longer care. I have hordes of directories on my various computers called stuff, downloads and documents, and the effort that it would take to organise them into a proper heirarchy is just not worth it. The heirarchical filesystem is a really wonderful thing for programmers and websites, but it just doesn't cut it for personal use. I no longer care where my files are stored."

"I'll be burned at the next stake over from Charles when the time comes, for this filesystem heresy. Just the other night, a co-worker was asking me about how diligent I was in organizing my email. I told her, "Not at all. I leave it all in one pile and then run the Find command on it later." She was shocked that I, alpha geek and info freako, didn't have some intricate taxonomy of folders into which mail was sorted by carefully crafted filters.

Here's what I want to see: Storage without explicit organization, but with super-rich metadata for super-fast searches. Allow me to create views made from persistent searches - my "project folder" is simply a collection of resources tied together by a common tag, one of many. And, if I want to form a project hierarchy, make my persistent searches into file objects too. The main thing in all this, though, is that it be woven very deeply within the OS. I don't want a helper app. I want this to replace the standard metaphor completely."

"In 1999, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the journal widely followed in national security circles, wondered whether it was on the right track with an article about computer security and cyberterrorism. The editors went straight to some experts — the denizens of Slashdot, a tech-oriented Web site — and published a draft. In hundreds of postings on the site’s message system, the technically adept members of that community promptly tore apart the draft and gave, often in colorful language, a variety of perspectives and suggestions. Jane’s went back to the drawing board, and rewrote the article from scratch. The community had helped create something, and Jane’s gratefully noted the contribution in the article it ultimately published."

"If the problems are large in defining human organisations in a behaviouristic way then we have to go to language and culture in order to make sense of them. 'Information space', or the realm of legitimate knowledge inside the language and the culture is 'multidimensional' - which means it can be cut up in many different ways. The problem of attribution is a social one and at the microlevel comes down to value judgments. It can be looked at the macrolevel in terms of the collective sympathy or resistance which determines whether or not an idea is taken up. Knowledge management is therefore not really about 'managing' the knowledge or skills which people have within an organisation but in 'making sense' of why something happened and trying to influence the future by such intelligence."

1. That knowledge can be managed [Too tacit, dynamic and complex]
2. That organisations can be 'designed' [Real organizations are too complex and organic]
3. The myth of the rational agent [People are not just motivated by data]
4. Utilitarianism [People don't always do what they do because they expect a return]
5. A belief in Utopia [The real world isn't made of glib generalizations]
6. A belief in 'best practice' [Circumstances change]
7. The organisation is merely a collection of individuals [Optimized individuals might not make an optimized organization]

"IBM now have a search engine called 'tacit' that can trawl the 'team rooms' on the intranet and pick up any key words that might give a clue to information on any current problem that they have. An e-mail is then sent requesting help and a task force can be quickly assembled. But privacy is respected in that only key words and not text are picked up. Also whether a person responds is up to them. If for example you are looking for an expert on 'story' you may not pick up David Snowden's but he gets informed that you are looking. If he knows that you are a person that's likely to steal his ideas he doesn't respond. If you're someone that he knows and trusts then he might phone. In a bureaucratic organisation the thief would prosper but in this kind of 'shadow' system he or she gets starved of the access to knowledge on which the exploitation depends."

• Most knowledge lives in people's brains.
• Most evidence of what each person knows lives in their email archives.
• Knowledge flowing is more important that knowledge filed away.
• Email archives provide opportunities for social network analysis (SNA) and social filtering.
• People hate filling in complex forms.
• People want control over sharing personal metadata (who I am and what I know).

"Wealth is the performance per pound utilization of the world's resources. It is the number of forward days that the number of people on earth can live at an increasingly higher standard of living without the negative effects of environmental pollution."

"Intellect and energy; measured by the amount of forward days for how many humans with which we are technically organized to cope. Because energy can neither be destroyed nor created, and 'know-how' of intellect can only increase with each experiment, or experience, wealth consisting of both the physical and metaphysical can only increase with each and every re-employment."

"Today, mind and brain scientists have made enormous progress in understanding how the human brain works. There has been many surprises in these recent advances. But the biggest shocker is that the brain doesn't decide what to do. Decision making is not controlled centrally in the brain. The mind-brain appears to act as a coordination and consensus system for all the cells, tissues, and organs in the body. The brain doesn't decide to eat. The cells of the body decide to eat, the brain coordinates their activity and carries out the consensus will. Our human brain stores the gathered information from the body's sensing of its environment, the brain presents opportunities for action reflective of both the sensing of environment and the needs and goals of the 40,000,000,000,000 cells it serves. The brain is not the leader of the body, it is the follower of the body. It is a system that matches needs in the body with its sensing of opportunities to meet these needs by action within the environment. The brain is a 'government' that truly serves its constituents– the cells, tissues, and organs that make up the human body. The apparent " I " is not real. It is really a " We ". ... If the human body can using unanimous rule democracy and synergic consensus can organize and coordinate the actions of 40 trillion cells so totally that we identify the whole organism as a single individual, then we humans should be able to use these same mechanisms to organize our species and solve our human problems..."