Fourth Turning

Fourth Turning – Pre-9/11 (1997 in fact) study on cultural / political global cycles – no obvious mention of underlying technological / economic cycles, but worth looking for parallels I suspect. Doomsday / holocaust prediction of 9/11-esque triggered events – it was ever thus etc. Salutory. [via Dave Pollard] Dave throws his hands up in horror at the fatalistic conclusions of the paper – I suspect I’ll feel the same if we can’t learn something more pro-actively useful from this.

Personal Knowledge Emergence

Personal Knowledge Emergence – Great summary from Luigi / Sharewood Tidings (Robin Good) on effectiveness of knowledge emergence thorugh blogs and other de-centralised / peer-to-peer / interactive systems. Links to many other KM’ers in blogland. [Also via Seb]. You can spot the angle from the opening paragraph referring to Autonomy and Siebel as “useless shelfware systems”.

Oliver Wrede also picked-up this thread, and highlights this summary quote “In other words, content providers should not be trying to guess how I want to interact with their information. They should just be providing the information. I will customize my experience as I see fit.” Interesting in a day-job context where we are working on de-coupling “acquisition” from “characterisation”, and saying to source applications – give me your raw data – tell me what you know in your own words – ie don’t second guess how you think I want to see or use it.