Ramanujan Redux

It’s a trivial thing, but it’s one of the many problems the Internet solves–finding information that wasn’t easily accessible in old media days, then having the means (iTunes) to build it up.

YouTube ad commericals are something I frequent when I like the music. Of course, finding the music attached to the piece is a chore, especially if it’s instrumental. But ask the commenters and they can help you find message boards that answer your questions.

I find this particularly effective. Thanks to commenters I found out that Massive Attack was in charge of the song for this chilling West Wing clip. That Dockers SF commercial is only catchy because it evokes funk from Marlena Shaw’s California Soul. Michael Jordan knows how important advertising is, so he mixes powerful music like Zero 7’s Red Dust into his commercials.

Internet communities have the power to relay information much faster to each other than ever before, to help move us and empower us in our regular lives. The next logical step in that progression? Relaying ideas to one another. That’s what blogs, discussion boards and social networks are slowly evolving into.

And what comes after that?

What’s the next step for the Internet? We’ve reached stagnancy. Information is organized pretty well, we can track people with RSS.

Managing that chaos might be the next step. What if there was an application that tracked all your conversations (blog comments, message board responses, Facebook wall replies, )? CoComment tried it but the format was too cumbersome. Email can track some, but not all of these things. Could there be a Google Conversations in the future that manages our outreach and our communities so we don’t lose track of the open conversations we have on the Internet?

The benefits of such a program are tangible: It avoids the cumbersome nature of clicking back page after page after page. It centralizes the flow of conversation while decentralizing the conversations itself.

Friendfeed is the primitive form of such conversations, but it only deals with some programs and not all. Twitter deals with this on a micro level, but it’s me-centric. Me me me me me. What needs to be emphasized is US so that people don’t feel like they’re floating on an iceberg.

A message board is the perfect example of loose collaboration. People have ideas, other people respond to them. However, there are so many things we’re interested in that it becomes difficult to find every board every day. Message boards are still very insular in that sense–a conversation application that emphasizes each other rather than ourselves.

A big problem with the Internet today is communication. People are still ensconced within their own bubbles that it’s hard to cut through the noise and keep in touch with people.

Just a thought.

Seth Godin seems to be right on more often than not, and I think he’s starting to take on an edge. More and more the Internet is being cluttered with many, many things. However, I don’t think that’s the fault of the Internet. I think that’s just us tech geeks taking the Internet to the extreme.

My RSS feeds are huge, and I certainly only read about ten or twenty. But let’s face it–how many of you actually read your RSS? How many of you actually have RSS?

As much as I enjoy finding new information, new pictures, new sources of data, unless they add something to my life, their appeal is brief and illusory. The only time RSS is probably useful is if it’s current events (politics, sports, entertainment), or if the site is really really good (Umair Haque and Godin are two examples). I think connecting with people will require something separate (RSS 2.0?).

I don’t have it in my head quite yet, but information is one part of the Internet experience, and that’s the only thing RSS does a good job taking care of. It needs to be minimized to what you care about (basketball and football for me, celebrities and their crappy lives or politicans and election results for others) so you can make room for what really matters.

Time to prune that RSS feed now.