It is not that I really like ideas better than people, it just that I like people with ideas better than people with no ideas. It seems easier collecting the ideas and then finding the people than the other way around. The Web has an abundance of people with ideas. The favorites of this weblog and many others are provided in the left hand column. There are many more to be found through Google Reader and other web 2.o tools. Organizations such as TED and MIT are filled with people with ideas.
What is especially cool is that sometimes people with ideas will coming looking for you. One of the components of this ongoing blogging experiment is learning social tagging systems. Right now three are being used, del.icio.us , diigo and StumbleUpon. I have been fortunate enough to get connected through social tagging with smart people who are very good at having ideas. Now as a matter of mostly my personality, the connections are more through the tags rather than the social. What we are talking about is folksonomy or what seems to me to be crowd-semantics. Once somebody networks with this weblog, all their tags and the links and ideas represented by those tags are available for exploration.
The result has been literally global in nature. The weblog networks with people in Scotland, Finland, Russia, Italy, Nigeria, Denmark as well as the United States (not to mention the European Union). My horizons are being expanded in other ways as well.
One particularly notable connection and the most recent is with George Clark of Portsoy, Banff, United Kingdom.
George responded to an e-mail I sent him with a kindly worded response.
Thanks for getting in touch. I was impressed (overwhelmed even) with the amount of good stuff you have pulled together on your blog. I reckon I will learn much more from you than you will from me.
The truth is that George is way beyond me. I just gather links like picking fruit off of the ground. George has worked on creating some impressive social activist sites and networked them with a good number of organizations working for social causes. I have stumbled one of them so far Caledonia Centre for Social Development. He has also been instrumental in the creation of the Seafield Research and Development Services site and Let it begin with me. He also blogs at existential soft rock at which his current post is particularly noteworthy.
George strikes me as a one-man EUFORIC. Now I am not sure how he will like the comparison and it is pretty safe that he will take issue with the one-man designation, but through George's links and the others connected to through this weblog, I have been learning that the world is far more faceted than we usually appreciate in the United States.
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