Just finished reading Jeff Jarvis book What Would Google Do. It’s an interesting study of applying google thinking to a wide range of other businesses. In the book he mentioned the Is google making us stupid article, which mulls over what happens if we can just search for everything, do we even need to remember anything anymore? And what happens if we shift our reading from books, to blog posts, to 160 letter twitter posts. Does that make us more stupid? Of course not! The only thing that twitter, blogs and facebook is making us better at, is choosing the right medium to convey our message. That is to say, in a more effecient way. Some ideas are best presented in a book, some in a blog post and some in twitter. Too often books could be cut in half (anyone else noticed that the sweet spot for books seems about 200 pages?) and sometimes a blog post might as well have been a twitter status update. It’s all of matter of choosing the right medium.
Luckily ideas can start out as a simple twitter post or idle chat in the hallway and then turn into something bigger. We often play around with ideas at the IOLA office. Sometimes they end at the drawing board, either discarded or put into the ever growing stack of fun ideas to try out when we got time, and sometimes they turn into sometimes bigger, like Nemo or YayArt. The interesting part of course is always what happens when you show your ideas to the world. That is often the litmus test, will people take the idea and run with it, or was it dead before it even started.