Ad Hoc Relationship Campaigns
Any time we want to accomplish something, from here on called the campaign, we rally together our digital forces to achieve (or fail to achieve) that goal.
For each given campaign, we gather assets, if only cerebrally at first. Bookmarks, search results, trusted members of our social graph, all the tools that fit the given campaign. These will be different based upon our goal. Our social graph is not one size fits all.
Likewise we will use various tools to accomplish this. Email, Del.icio.us, Message Boards, Twitter, a blog post. Each has its own strengths.
Each of these campaigns lends itself to a different view of the world, and thus requires a different filter or lens by which we distill the digital mass into a meaningful result in an ad-hoc manner.
As of yet, there are no unified tools to manage these campaigns, to harness the Ray Ozzie or Howard Rheingold “swarms” of collective intelligence, which more than aid these campaigns, but are the essence of them.
This is one reason why the rumbling of discontent with Google search is in the air. It’s a static tool for a live web. And Mahalo works as a mass media method in a personalized world. The latest project management and collaboration tools are probably closest in nature to the solution, but fail to meet the felxibility and speed requirements that a personal tool would need.
This tool would need to harness all the social platforms and search methods from one unified vantage point. As we change our focus, the tool changes its focus, and our view of the ‘river’ is adjusted to trickle out only what we need for this campaign.
Steve Gillmor’s Newsgang.net is so close to achieving this, it’s as if he’s holding a magnet over an opposite pole, waiting for it to flip. Apply to much pressure and it will slide away.
We are only one or two features away from a watershed moment on the web. A groundbreaking tool which changes the way we position ourselves in the information river.
I’m confident that this tool will come with no great fanfare. It will be ‘neat’ but not heralded or understood for years to come, in the way that Google crept up on us.
P.S. The ‘river’ analogy is a great and often used one for services like Twitter and FeedReaders. I guess it goes back to Dave Winer’s River of News, but we need a new one to handle the fact that this is not mass media, and we can (or will) be able to control the flow. It’s not a faucet, not a firehose.