"Until a critical mass of users is reached, a change in technology only affects the technology. But once critical mass is attained, social, political, and economic systems change.

"To achieve a dramatic effect on commerce, though, one more piece of the puzzle is required. Firms must see a transaction cost advantage that causes them to change their strategic thinking from the models of the past." (Reference)

Consider that in light of the first postal service: for a small fraction of the cost and risk of travelling yourself, you could conduct business, influence political and scientific thought, order goods not usually available etc. Same went for the early rail and air networks, telephone, radio and TV.

In practice, it requires a 10x change in an industrial process - usually a cost reduction of 10x - to start the sorts of revolutions that the world has witnessed in successive waves in the last 3 or 4 centuries. So, where are the 10x process advantages that are just waiting for critical mass? Broadband? Wireless?

I actually think you can make the case that Weblogs are such a phenomena: it took first, a wide-reaching Internet, and then wide adoption of very inexpensive tools to put global publishing within the reach of a large number of people (Bernie thinks it's 1 million bloggers, other numbers point to as many as 3 million).

The so-far unanswered question is what will be the impact on society, economies and political systems? I don't think that Galileo, Hobbes and Descartes were aware that the act of handing their letters to 17th-century postal carriers was going to pave the way for the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and all that's followed since... and I, for one, am not consciously trying to disrupt the world... but I think it's happening, nevertheless...
Comments 3:01:24 PM    

I've used Userland Frontier for years, and now use Radio - powerful outliner, great blogging tool, and is almost certainly the tool I'll use to render the HTML version of the book. But Radio is really a coder's tool, with an interface that is more like BBEdit or an IDE - not really a convenient place to drag and drop text and pictures for later retrieval and organization. I've always used files and folders to organize research, but it's a pain to constantly open various apps to view the text, URLs, pix etc.

So I've looked at Notetaker and Notebook, 2 OS X versions of an older NeXT product also called Notebook. Two people involved with the NeXT product have each made a derivative OS X product that uses a spiral notebook metaphor. The two products appear to be very similar - I've worked mostly with Notetaker at this point.

There's also a freeware product MyMind that just does outlines - which it exports to visual maps. Anyway, I'm researching outliners today... please send along tips, hints, advice...
Comments 10:22:41 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures