Normal is boring a.k.a the Age of the Weird

Dr. Seuss writes, "We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."

Seth Godin's new book is a celebration of weirdness!

"During the age of mass (mass marketing, mass manufacturing, mass schooling, mass movements) the key was normal. Normal was important because you needed (were required) to fit into your slot. ...But what happens when mass disappears? When we can connect everyone, customize and optimize--then what happens to normal?"

Discovery (of music, books etc.,) has already pushed us from the bell curve, to clusters (of similarity). In this age of the weirdness, the true test of discovery technology is not just the ability to cluster related items, but in establishing the relationship between these clusters, as we don't stay put in our current weirdness forever.

The Language of Relevance.....

First-generation relevance attempts to transform the internet treasure chest/junkyard into a personalized DJ experience.

Pandora is emblematic of applying this personalized DJ model, to the long-tail of music streams.

Can this successful model be applied to other realms as well, like video, particularly Television? The answer is no. Not without evolving the interaction between the human and machine, into the next generation.

In the case of Relevance 1.0, the interaction between the human and the machine is pretty simplistic, you press buttons skip,like/unlike,share and the system could provide you hours of enjoyable music, which you can enjoy in solitude or as a background, while you are working.

TV is more about a myriad of other factors, than the precise content that you enjoy. The past and future plays a key role in your Television experience.

You have a certain looking-forward-to-ness of appointment television, which Tivos cannot fulfill. Your experience becomes complete, when you share excitedly about the show that you watched the previous night, during your water cooler conversations. Roku and Boxee, fulfills that need,only partially.

Evolving Relevance is not about adding buttons in the keyboard, i.e., from like to search. It is about emerging the user interaction, into a language....and I mean language in a generic sense and not from a programmable sense.

The Fourth R

Kevin Kelly writes thus: "Environments are invisible." That's Marshall McLuhan' overarching big idea. We are fundamentally, almost inherently, unable to see the largest thing in our lives -- our environment. This ocean of ideas, assumptions, expectations, constraints, drivers, beliefs, blinders, and influences that shape our lives and minds is hidden from us precisely because we are in it and of it. It takes a peculiar stance and foolishness to step outside it long enough to perceive it."

Apart from Reading,wRiting and aRithmetic, there is a fourth R that needs to be taught,to cope up with this abundance, it is Relevance. Just like how we are taught to Read and Write using a language, we need a language of Relevance. Otherwise, we would be dealing with the abundance by using filters, without fully benefiting from the profound richness.

Filters are a start, the sustained solution is to invent a language of Relevance.

Unlike the other 3 Rs, machines would partake with us, in such a language.