I totally agree. I love the constraint of flying. You can't go anywhere, and no one can bother you. Well, I guess your annoying seatmate can, as well as the baby crying in the back. But I have found flying time to be incredibly productive. I often pass on in-flight WiFi just to maintain this sacred space. I especially love to read books on planes, which I find harder and harder to do "in real life." All that said, I'm sure the Business Week article is right, and I'd love to find ways to replicate these conditions in my space on the ground. I'm sure your book will have some good things to say on this point. I'll plan to fly somewhere this summer so I can read it. ;-)

Congratulations, Mike, and best of luck moving forward!

Ouch! I'm totally Jimmy Page when I turn up the volume to Kashmir, but I do the air guitar thing when I do it, so that's probably not a good example. When people put bumper stickers on their laptops, would you argue that that's a form of "republishing" rather than expression?

I don't think the why is so hard. The transaction cost for having your say and getting some attention for it is nil. Unless you're seeking community, there's no incentive to develop or conform to group norms. The harder question is what to do about it. I think designing systems to encourage intelligent conversations is still a huge, untapped market, and we can learn a lot from what we understand about facilitating positive face-to-face interaction. I also think that we're starting to see some infrastructural shifts that may have a positive effect. "Portable" digital identity, such as Facebook Connect, is a good example of this. The transaction cost for acting like a buffoon is much higher if that reputation will follow me wherever I go.

Congrats, Alex! Looking forward to this!

Congrats, Ross! Echoing Thomas: Slideshare is a great fit, and they're lucky to have you. Thanks for all you've done for the wiki world, and looking forward to seeing you push the cutting edge for how we work in this world!

Not to be a Wikipedia apologist (which I probably am), but framing Wikipedia-vs-Britannica as a debate over a billion articles about everything vs a smaller article about things that matter is misleading. The Wikimedia community is very thoughtful about the issues of content quality and scope. It is certainly valid to ask whether or not an article about, say, Chewbacca qualifies as Things That Actually Matter, but I don't think the answer is obvious. This, of course, is secondary to your main point, which I think is quite important. I'm very curious to see how this will play out in the years to come. By the way, the Wikipedia article on Chewbacca is very good. ;-)

Sounds really exciting! Congratulations! Looking forward to reading about the cool stuff you do there.

Heh heh heh. :-)

Totally hear you. I'm the same way. I also like to stick my papers up on my whiteboard and move them around. It's a good indication of how far digital technology needs to go to surpass the affordances of more traditional mediums. With large, high-resolution screens and touch interfaces, we're starting to see the physical capabilities catch up, and there's even a possibility of surpassing traditional tools. I think we're still far behind as far as software goes.

No laptop?! What year was this photo taken?! ;-)

I agree with the gist of the post, but I can't help pointing out that the problem is specifically with choosing word frequency, not about Wordle itself. Choose a better measure, and Wordle can be incredibly powerful. For example, I use Wordle often to show titles of wiki pages sorted by backlinks, which is a beautiful and quick way of surfacing the shared language of a community.

Congratulations on all your great accomplishments at Salesforce, Steve! Looking forward to hearing about your new adventures.

Edward Tenner wrote a great book about the unintended consequences of technology back in the mid-1990s. It's called, Why Things Bite Back. Its frame isn't quite what you've described here, but I think you'd find it interesting.