My partner Ryan put up another post on the Foundry Group blog about our Implicit Web theme. This is a theme that is particularly interesting and useful to me since I spend so much time in front of my computer trying to deal with and synthesize a never ending stream of data and information.
I want my computer to do more of the work for me. I want the web to figure stuff out for me. I want my computer to learn. I want my friends’ behavior and interests to inform mine. I want people I don’t know but am connected to through other people I trust to help me find things. I want a pony.
A couple of years ago my path crossed with Eric Norlin. Out of our interactions emerged a conference called Defrag. The first version of Defrag happened last fall – as is typical of my schemes, I always have an evil plan. In this case is was to get in the middle of a bunch of really smart people and hear what they think about the wide range of problems we addressed at Defrag (which was a proxy for the concept of the Implicit Web.) Eric talked about this in his post today titled On Community-driven tech conferences.
My evil plan worked great and I learned a ton. We’re doing Defrag 2008 in – surprise – 2008 (11/3 and 11/4 to be exact.) I’m continuing to spend a lot of time looking at, thinking about, and investing in the Implicit Web between now and then. And reading as much Alex Iskold as he will write.