Defrag Blog

A recent banner ad that we ran touted Defrag as “the intersection of the Implicit Web and Enterprise 2.0″ — one of those phrases that you hope captures something, even if you’re not quite sure what that something is. Actually, wrapping our heads around the ideas that formed Defrag has been something we struggled with from early on (or at least, naming it all). The convention that I’ve used to describe it is the “aha moment” - that flash of insight that occurs in a collaborative session like a brainstorm. Defrag, then, was about building tools that would help to “accelerate the aha” — and it has always seemed that those tools were made up of “implicit things” (things working behind the scenes) and collaborative, enterprise 2.0-y things. Thus, the “intersection.”

As part of digging into Defrag’s narrative, I wanted to play amateur etymologist, so I began with “implicit.” The past participle of “implicate” (from implicare), implicit speaks to an entangling, an intertwining, interlacing, a twisting together. Its opposite, explicit, is that which is unequivocal, expressed and demonstrated. So, by extension, that which is implicit carries natural overtones of ambiguity — which makes sense as the intertwined, interlaced, intertangled nature of the word doesn’t lend itself to the hard edges of an easy definition.

All of that becomes very interesting as we look at the “implicit web” (which is almost redundant) in the light of “attention.” The general idea has been that we leave “traces” of our attention, and that sewing together (interlacing?) these traces can allow some tools to begin to perform operations behind the scene *for* us. In this sense, implicit is being turned to reflect a web that serves us, caters to us, bends the entanglement to our help.

The implication (pun intended), of course, is that the implicit web is one big pile of miscellaneous stuff. That we begin entangled, and through the use of certain tools, are able to derive insight — not from untangling (for the value lies in the entanglement), but rather from the dynamic connectedness of the entanglement (and how that allows for an individual to arrange on the fly according to his or her desires, wants, needs, etc). If everything is miscellaneous and unconnected, we’re screwed. But connected, we walk into the simulator of the Matrix, where we need “guns” — and rows appear according to our liking.

The “Implicit Web” are those qualities that enable us to race toward insight at a faster pace — to discover and assemble the miscellany in such a way as to bring something to collaboration that may not have been as readily available in the past; a hermetic quality of speed and mercurial insight.

You can see where I’m going with this, right?

David Weinberger is our lead-off speaker at Defrag because his thoughts on “everything being miscellaneous” will basically throw a bunch of useful toys, tools and teachings into our mental playroom.

We begin by looking at the moment of insight — and that leads us into the interlaced world of the miscellaneous.

[note: some would say this is where we run into business intelligence.