I thought the phrase was interesting: "the amateurization of technology". We've gone 'round and 'round about this before, only in different contexts -- such as Drool-n-Click vs. *nix boxes.
Also, check out the discussions of Folksonomies below. I'm curious what Woj and Carl and Chuck will think of this!
[lots of links in the original at Poynter. Also, see follow up post, linked below]
Where Geeks and Thinkers Meet
"How many people in this room have built a computer from scratch?" Half the people duly raise their hands, and then get a lesson into how to hack your car to add a multi-media system that does not dim the headlights. I am at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego this week, which brings together an excited bunch of computer nerds, thinkers, and entrepreneurs.
The audience is blogging and Flickring away and in the room you can see and feel this strange mix of multitasking attention. Daniel Hillis' video of a six-legged robot, or his amazing virtual map table, get full audience attention, and so does Jeff Bezos' confrontation with an unwilling PC, but any other minute you can hear 700 delegates tapping away, switching their attention between e-mails, the speaker on stage, and the reports online.
What are the big stories here? The event revolves around "remix" -- the effects that the mass amateurization of technology has, going from hacks, tweaks, re-combinations on the more technical side of the spectrum (open APIs are getting everyone very excited here), to the content version of this networked and connected form of production of services.
<...> more at: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=79799
'Folksonomies' to Organize the News
This morning, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference looked at "folksonomies," a term used to describe how large groups of people can organize information by adding freely chosen keywords. Picture site Flickr, for instance, lets users add "tags" to their own pictures. These tags' main purpose is to help people organize their own pictures, but they also serve as a way to organize the vast ocean of public pictures. (As an example, see pictures of the O'Reilly event itself under the "etech" tag.) Most people also allow others to add tags to their own pictures, so to a degree people also start to organize pictures that they visit.
Another example of folksonomies at work is del.icio.us, which lets users tag and share URLs. Tagging is an interesting way to organize information; the fact that there is no systematic taxonomy, no set categories, can be useful. As Yoshua Schachter of del.icio.us pointed out, "The interesting group behavior is the tagging that isn't categorization, e.g., 'To read' -- not a category, though it has a big group and a lot of social and user context."
etc. etc.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31
"Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft. You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day."
--Ptahhotep, Vizier to Isesi,
Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, 2300 BC