The Idea Dude

CONNECTING THE DOTS ONE AT A TIME

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Cuisine or buffet

Can't help but notice how impatient we all get if a web page takes a couple of seconds longer to load. As an internet society we have come to expect our information instantaneously. Everything is on tap and available. Is that always a good thing?

I remember as a child the anticipation of running to the bookstore to see if my favorite monthly comic had arrived. I wrote letters to friends and looked in our letterboxes every day for a reply. Somehow, the anticipation added to the experience when something eventually arrived.

I wonder if the analogy is the same as my eating habits. I enjoy visiting a good restaurant, being served personally, choosing my meal and then waiting for it to be prepared specially for me. And when it arrives, I take a few seconds to admire the presentation before digging in. Compare that to having buffet meal, where I go and pick what I want and usually I'll try a lot of things because I can. I generally over-eat because of it and walk away too full and feel like I got my money's worth but really not sure there was any resemblance of a dining experience.

The internet has become a wild west with no signs of maturing. If anything it is getting worse. Search for any term on Google today and the majority of the links even on the first page are either spam pages, pages with no relevant content, content that is copied from other sites or sites that require a membership to view the content. Regardless of the number of Ph.Ds Google may have, they will always lose the battle of crowd-sourcing, millions of intelligent minds that find ways to game the system.

The problem is because so much of the internet is free, both in the creation and consumption of content. The internet has made us information gluttons and quantity has overwhelmed quality, a good sign for search engines but a bad sign for us who spend too much time looking for diamonds in the sand.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

The problem of being ordinary

There's a quote from America Beauty that's been running around in my head for last day or so... "I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary."

Most of us, if not all of us, have that fear. Watching the hundreds of thousands audition for American Idol each year points to that fact. To leave this life without leaving a legacy would be waste of a life.

The challenge is to find ways to be extraordinary doing the smallest of things. If I can figure that out, I'm sure it's a great start to being extraordinary at a grander scale...