If you haven't been following along with Danny Ayers' new weblog for his employer, Nodalities, you'll at least want to check out This Week's Semantic Web where Danny hunts down all the semantic goodness fit to print. I particularly liked the post Henry Story wrote on JSON.
I'm more ambivalent about Clay Shirky's speech at Supernova. The video can also be found at YouTube, since the Supernova site seems to be having problems.
Clay Shirky is a good speaker, and he makes some interesting points. I think, though, that conflating 'love', as he did, with our sometimes passionate interest in technology confuses that which we use and that which we value. Does the plumber love her wrench, the artist his brush? Perhaps, but if deprived of such tools, they would continue because it is really the act of creativity they love–the ability to use their skills to create something from nothing.
When Shirky talks about today's social networking tools, and how they act as 'aggregators' of such love, turning love into a …renewable building material my first thought was, well yes, perhaps, but they can also turn love into a wrecking ball.
When I wax poetic about a technology, there is no implication of extraordinary communal tie based on such an expression. If there were, I wouldn't be able to see when the technology is no longer useful for my purposes, or my interests lie elsewhere. I would lose my objectivity, and hence, my overall usefulness.
I do understand, though, about the need to give back to the community. If we find a technology to be useful, it behooves us to support it, in some way. Our support, though, is as much for selfish reasons as selfless–we give help, we get help back.
When Shirky uses 'love', he really is talking about in a higher sense; at a minimum, the love we give to our closest friends, which means we feel a strong comradery with others who share the same passionate belief in the technology. Such 'brotherly love' can lead to a wonderful sense of belonging, true. But it can also lead to fanaticism. There isn't a one of us who hasn't been caught up in a fanatical battle between technology believers. None of us has ever benefited from such, no, not even those who like a good fight.
C++ vs. Perl
RSS vs. Atom
IE vs. Netscape
XML vs. JSON
Windows vs. Mac
vi vs. emacs
Microformats vs. RDF
David Weinberger vs. Andrew Keen
And it goes on and on.
In the meantime, such 'aggregated love' can drive wealth into the hands of the canny few who know exactly what Shirky is talking about, and in fact, are banking on it.
