Archive for January, 2009
Global Intelligence
Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by jon.
I’ve been pumped to write about this for a while because I think it’s one of the most important trends that’s happening right now. Perhaps the most important trend. I don’t say that lightly either. We’re on the verge of something that’s incredibly powerful and the acceleration of this trend has become really apparent in the last couple of years.
What do I mean by Global Intelligence?
A bunch of people have written about this before and I think everyone has their own definition. I probably started thinking about it a lot right around the time I saw this video:
For me Global Intelligence means the following:
#1 – An interconnected world where when one person gets smarter, we all get smarter. I use “all” loosely here as at this stage of our development it doesn’t mean everyone. It more likely refers to a small portion of society that is digitally connected and actually seeking out information and knowledge. Perhaps that’s about 1% of the world’s population. Maybe slightly higher.
In a world of true Global Intelligence there is a tremendous multiplier effect. Think back 20 years ago. Let’s say that I was studying nutrition and decided to write a book on the subject. First of all, the likelihood that I would even get published was very, very small. If I did manage to get published the total number of people who would read what I wrote would also likely be much smaller than it would be today. So the multiplier effect of my learning would be somewhat tiny, especially in the aggregate.
Fast forward to today. First of all, if I’m studying nutrition I don’t need anyone’s permission to share my knowledge with the world. I simply create a blog or a YouTube channel or whatever and start getting my wisdom out. This has created an explosion in knowledge/content all along the “tail”. And if my work is really good? Well the audience that consumes it is going to be much larger than it would have been in the past.
#2 – The ability for people to get more knowledge out of their head and onto the Internet. Twitter has been fascinating to watch over the last couple of years for this reason. Think back to a decade ago. Getting the knowledge in your brain on to the Web was actually pretty tough. Then along came blogging tools and there was an exponential increase in the amount of knowledge available online. However, blogging was still something that required a fair amount of effort.
Along came YouTube and now people had the opportunity to share their knowledge via video in a much easier way. So you had an explosion in video knowledge transfer, tons of video tutorial sites and an exponential increase in video blogging. Very powerful stuff.
Then came Twitter. Twitter has two distinct components. The “Just has a cup of coffee and preparing for the workday” type of tweet is moderately useful in term of social connectedness, personal expression, etc. However the much more powerful part of Twitter is what’s commonly characterized as the micro-blogging component. It’s essentially a much easier way to get knowledge out of your head and on to the Web than we’ve ever had before.
I installed the most excellent application RescueTime this fall and I noticed something very interesting in my logs. I spend almost as much time searching Twitter as I do searching Google for information. That astounded me. The reason is that a lot of the information on Twitter is very different from what I would find on the Web. For example, if I’m looking for what people are saying about eduFire or another online education start-up I’m more likely to get timely and intimate feedback from someone’s tweet than from their blog post.
This is a huge trend. A while back I wrote a blog post here where I asked our readers how much of the world’s collective knowledge is available on the Web. The answers were interesting and most people tended to agree that a very small percentage of our individual knowledge is available collectively. What tools like Twitter have done is increase that percentage by some factor. Time will tell whether it’s by a small amount or a large one but my guess is that it will be larger than most people think.
#3 – Connection of knowledge seekers with knowledge providers. This is the third component of Global Intelligence. If I have a question (and we *all* ask ourselves hundreds or thousands of questions on a daily basis) there’s almost certainly someone in the world who has an answer. The difficulty is in connecting to that person or that knowledge. Search engines have helped dramatically with this. Social networks are also helping. However, we still have a long way to go.
As friction reduces in this area there is going to be an increasingly realization on the part of most people that they can turn to the Global Intelligence when they have a question rather than using many of the inefficient methods they have used in the past. As they do that you’ll see markets emerge for Global Intelligence and you’ll see much better tools for search and discovery than you see today.
So I’ll leave it at that for now. We’re hardly on an unimpeded path towards Global Intelligence as there are a good number of counter-balancing factors including spam, information overload, the digital divide and proprietary data stores. I’ll address those in a future blog post. But, as I mentioned in our year-end blog post, I am really encouraged about where we’re heading right now and how far things have come in just the last couple of years. It’s going to be fun for all us here at eduFire to play a role in pushing us further down this road.
