round and around

I'd really like to do one of those posts with all sorts of brilliant links that make readers go "wow" and "wtf". Everybody would be in awe, if not of my utter polymathedness, but maybe my ultra-keen ability to navigate to all sorts of bizarre corners of the wild world web and make sense of stuff.

That would be ever so good because people would be, like, "dude!".

To do this would probably (more rcently spelt "prolly", I have noticed) take me several hours and, given that many other peoples also do this sort of stuff - notably this dude - so much better, not have the intended effect.

So, in lieu, I give you the cheap and nasty VVB alternative. If you go to Anil's site you get to see stuff like this - Google vs Meetup. What's Meetup? I didn't know, so I had to Google it. Way to be ironic!

But this is really interesting. TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design. There are quite a few clips of speakers available and the list is pretty damned impressive, E O Wilson and Richard Dawkins amongst them. Although I was a little disappointed to see Bono - stone the crows he's everywhere.

I was in a workshop last week where the clip by Stewart Brand, an architect turned solver of global accommodation challenges, was shown. It was meant to be inspirational and it was. People can do anything if they put their minds to it.

There's a link between Brand's talk and what Meetup apparently is - people. That's why I think IT-based "knowledge management systems" - never seem to meet their intended objectives. What we need are gizmos - electric shocks would probably work quite well - that make people pick up the phone or get up and go to talk to someone. You read it here first. "Electric shocks for a better world." Because stories are powerful.

Now I've lost the track again. I still have a cold. Here's a picture of a naughty wolf - well, it could be a wolf - that's in a series of many similar tableaux in a park (as I recall) in Singapore. Somewhere.