Full Circle Associates

I love invention. Ken Yarmosh is mashing/meshing up a way to codify an informal form that has emerged across blogs for sometime: a shared focus over a certain period of time. Blogoposisum #1 is about Communicating the Ideas behind ‘Web 2.0′.

Now I have been trying to wrap my head around this Web 2.0 stuff -- from a non-first-adopter perspective. In other words, how to talk about it to my clients, colleagues, friends and maybe even my family (at least my semi-geeky son. We don't have a lot of geeky genes in our family.)

In the moment we move to a language where more people can understand what we are talking about, we influence change. Gladwell talked about the tipping point. For me language is a key point of that phenomenon. So I want to dig into the 2.0 stuff. My antennae sniff something interesting about change in it.

But first, this post is about new forms. In this case, a blogoposium. I had to look back to the definition of one of the root words, symposium, to start my thinking.A Google search gave me a few goodies:

A public presentation in which several people present prepared speeches on different aspects of the same topic.
highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/007256296x/student_view0/glossary.html

Drinking-parties in Ancient Greece where the guests reclined on couches, and were crowned with garlands of flowers. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/symposiu.htm
www.libraryreference.org/index.php

A drinking party that usually included entertainment and conversation; for an example, see Boston 01.8022 (image); also the title of a text by Plato in which various characters - including Socrates, Aristophanes and Alcibiades - discuss love.
ablemedia.com/ctcweb/glossary/glossarys.html

Meeting of a number of experts in a particular field at which papers are presented by specialists on particular subjects and discussed with a view to making recommendations concerning the problems under discussion.
www.pacto-convex.com/glossary.htm

a meeting or conference for the public discussion of some topic especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The Symposium is a Socratic dialogue by Plato. The Symposium is one of the most controversial of Plato's dialogues.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_(Plato)

# Originally, the term symposium referred to a drinking party; the Greek verb sympotein means "to drink together". The term has since come to refer to any academic conference, irrespective of drinking. We have literary depictions of symposia in the sympotic elegies of Theognis of Megara, as well as in two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium

Key words here. Public. Presentation. Drinking. Party. Experts. Specialists. The only one that really talks about interchange or dialoge is the reference to Socrates. And that was about love.

Of course blog is the medium. So I think I shall focus on that last word, love.

What happens when we get together and talk about things we care about deeply. Things we love. What changes? With that be part of a Blogoposium on Web 2.0? Is that a measure of what we can bring when we blog collaboratively across our little domains and piles of words?


unconference, blogoposium1