Accidental Magic?

networks in expanding cultural spaces by Grant McCracken at This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) shows how Ideascape could work to connect seemingly random events.

"This is the story of how an unlikely solution, two mathematical brothers from Russia, found an improbable problem, digital images of a Unicorn tapestry. What connects them is a Rube Goldberg mechanism that includes The New Yorker magazine, a real estate magnet, a hedge fund manager, an MET curator and his wife. As we will see, the chances of this particular solution finding this particular problem were astronomically small. Or were they?"

I wonder what the possibilities would have been if say, Dave Weinberger (JOHO the Blog), or Gawker, or Steve Rubel, or Rageboy picked up the story initially and blogged about it? Would del.icio.us have an impact? So, what are the probablities of an exotic solution finding an exotic problem in the blogsosphere? BTW Here is a story posted today in The Toronto Star about tagging on del.icio.us via Dave Weinberger.

Speaking of del.icio.us, this next idea sheds light on the ways we need to organize and scale to tackle complex problems.

Large-Scale Collective IQ, This presentation is one of a series from the Accelerating Change 2004 held at Stanford University, November 5-7, 2004. It features Dr. Douglas Engelbart, who invented or influenced the mouse, hypertext, multiple windows, bit-mapped screens, shared screen teleconferencing, and outline processing. But his ideas transcend technology and computer science and reach into the humanitarian. In this presentation, he tells how can we construct a collective vision as to where we are headed and where we would best be headed.

What's facinating (to me) about this is the subject of dimensionless numbers and scale. Dr. Engelbart talks about the the idea that both complexity and urgency are increasing exponentially and that the combination of both complexity and urgency will soon challenge our public and private organizations.

For those of you who are still with me here, I came across a post by Clay Shirky on Corante, Many-2-Many titled Ontology Is Overrated: Social advantages in tagging that adds perspective on organizing and finding information.

Because I like you, I'll pass along a couple of fun and interesting books. The first is "Fooled By Randomness", by Nassim N. Talib, it was a big fav on Wall Strret traders. The second is "Innumeracy" by John A. Paulos, Mt Fuji type problems.