A post is just the start of a conversation; highlighting comments from still-simmering discussions.

I write in public because it helps me learn; the process of writing forces me to develop ideas a bit clearer, and publishing these thoughts in public helps me learn from variety of people and communities.

On that note, I wanted to highlight a couple of conversations still alive here:

• On The Passing of the Polymath, one of Matthew Ward’s comments:

  … business cycles don’t match generations anymore. If you only consider technology (and factor out globalization, restructuring, incentives hysteria, etc) you’ll see how it’s rewritten industries and occupations.

  Remember when the best/safest/highest earning jobs were to be a computer programmer/CPA/consultant and telecom/media/banking/consulting was enjoying healthy margins? No more; we’re on to a new cycle. As cycles get shorter so does the total value of a premium for specificity. Value comes from organization – a classic generalist skill. I think you could model it as NPV pretty easily – specificity requires a much steeper discount than generalization assuming the duration is really different. You’re right that opportunities arise during organizational shifts that command premiums (when the skill is scarce). But as these opportunities shorten and require more investment to master, I’m not sure they pay off.

  Both Fred and Matthew contributed some great thoughts on a couple different aspects of this post, leading to a couple different conversation streams.

• On How can we “shape serendipity”?, Ethan Bauley’s comment:
  

  …there’s two primary tech-mediated forms of serendipity I’ve been exposed to:

  1. clicking on links in blog posts/articles I’m reading (pre-Twitter era)
  2. surfing the “stream of stuff from people I’m subscribed to (Twitter era, also incl FB newsfeed of course)

  The primary function here is: trusting the sources enough, in aggregate, to allow them to waste a bit of your time as an investment. The return is finding something that you didn’t know you needed/wanted.

  So I think that this is getting at the same “attention economy”/info mgmt issues that have been discussed elsewhere, but from a different and useful perspective (“serendipity”).

  That is to say: I think it’s possible to have a stream of 100% serendipitously awesome stuff I wanna click on, with 0% “noise”. Or: serendipity doesn’t necessarily have to carry the cost of inefficiency. A combination of a reputation score (quality over time) and velocity (what content do most people like right now) would probably solve this.

  Sometimes the comments are better and clearer than the posts :)

• On Why I Love Communities, Erica Johansson’s comment:
  

  As I see it, cities around the world (and the online world) are made of communities. Without them, what would we have? They provide a sense of belongingness, build bridges between people of different backgrounds and let us exchange ideas and form valuable connections.

  The challenge, and the fun part, is to find the right communities (off- and online), where you’ll get the best value, can contribute the most, make a difference, find inspiration and, most of all, learn.

  On that note, definitely worth checking out: Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City and Creative Class websites and books.