Defrag Blog

Phil sent over a quote, and the fun thing is to figure out who said it and when:

“What information consumes is rather obvious, the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Answer: Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon in 1971.
As Phil and I emailed back and forth, the interesting idea that emerged was the notion of an “insight to information ratio”; much like the signal to noise ratio, but dealing with attention and information. (Surely, *this* is not an original thought.)

Then, I received an email that spoke to how all of the seven key topics of Defrag were tightly intertwined and probably actually problem sets of a larger overall puzzle. This is great! Now people are discovering why we started the show — because we saw all of these technologies that don’t see themselves as necessarily related, working on problem sets that are actually part of some bigger thing.

The task of the first Defrag conference is to find a way to name and/or describe that thing; to give the group some common terms. I think we’ll get there (as a whole, certainly not by ourselves), and those not in attendance will find themselves sadly lacking in the necessary lexicon of innovation. [end attempt at humorous show plug]

Just off of a great call with Jerry Michalski — discussing the myriad things he sees floating in and around Defrag.

On the “tagline” problem: Jerry’s suggesting “social intelligence.”

He also brought up visualization as a major area of work to be done in the Defrag space (specifically the ability to represent threads of discussion through linkable, widgetized visualization thingies — that’s a technical term ;-).

Jerry’s breadth and depth of knowledge around these topics is immediately apparent. We’re lucky to have him on the advisory board.

Hang on tight folks - when this advisory board sets their mind to putting the right people on stage, I have a feeling we’re all gonna be amazed.

other notes from jerry:
1. let’s get some interns and a wiki and document the things we figure out a Defrag.
2. let’s put a projector on a side wall of the room, so that people can add context to what’s being spoken about.
3. let’s work through jerry’s acronym — “MADA” — memory, analytics, discourse and action.