Lets look for the mouse in Washington. We’ve been locked out of there for decades.

But it begs the more crucial question: How will behaviors change?

After all, sitting in front of a screen is sitting in front of a screen, whether you’re telling Dora what to do, or whether some screenwriter told her ahead of time. A mouse click is not that different from a channel change. Gilligan’s Island molded Clay and he seems not to have suffered because of it. Maybe the urge to ‘leave the island’ has carried him to his current status. Perhaps because he had wise parents, good teachers, inspiring mentors, a helpful local librarian — good human guides of one stripe or another — he escaped the basement and DID SOMETHING to change the world.

I want to know what people are going to DO with the surplus. (How has behavior changed because of the crime wiki? Has the Brazilian professor made people safer or more fearful? That’s the question Clay did not address, one with answers that are more important than the quantitative assessment of efficiency of crimelogging via Google Maps vs. the crimesheet provided by local cops.)

The new cartography is cool and all, but it is a skeleton. Flesh and blood and free will and calls to action will be required for the adventure to occur. A map does not make decisions or choose directions. People do.

Thanks for the post, Dave!

Dave’s own remarks this evening during a Web 2.0 Strategy panel discussion were thought provoking and inspiring.

Thanks.

I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about crowdsourcing – using web tools to engage the public (or other large groups) to solve problems. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research provides an example of how crowdsourcing helped improve a conference s…

It’s good to see you back, hopefully you can make some more posts in the future. I’m trying to do everyday and it’s tough, even when you do have things going on in your life.

Oh, by the way, congratulations on your continuous successes!

I was myself a little put off by the messiness of early Web 2.0 and initially very sceptical as to whether to jump in. Now I’m involved I still feel very much at the exploration stage because there are so many options. Twitter for me, and many others I guess, is a new catalyst for forming connections of both different and like-minded people, and was what brought me here. I’m looking forward to when we start to hear some really big testimonials from that activity. The way the Chinese earthquake news broke seemed to foreshadow that something profound is happening.

Dave, thanks for highlighting the talk. It will be of interest to my blog readers too, I’m sure.

Tim