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Passion AND Purpose….perhaps? Here are some “memes” to consider:

• What will be on your epitaph?
• Connecting with others – how and why?
• Reality shocks – are we all in a state of shock right now?
• The supple bend in the strong wind – only the flexible will survive
• Multi-threading existence – now many threads…strands…personas could/should we persist?
• Make and mind the gaps – it’s the space between “the stuff of life” that builds reality not the stuff itself
  
• Only do what you do best and enjoy, but do it better and more often

People to read:

Po Bronson

Tony Robbins

Dr Wayne Dyer

In the wider world of religion

The purposes of a Hindu’s life are Dharma, Artha, Kharma, and Moksha.

• Dharma is the fulfillment of one’s purpose;
• Artha is prosperity.
• Kharma is desire and enjoyment and
• Moksha is of course, enlightenment.

Buddhism talks of The Noble Eightfold Path

In order to fully understand the noble truths and investigate whether they were in fact true, Buddha recommended that a certain lifestyle or path be followed which consists of:

1. Right Understanding

2. Right Thought

3. Right Speech

4. Right Action

5. Right Livelihood

6. Right Effort

7. Right Mindfulness

8. Right Concentration

Sometimes in the Pali Canon the Eightfold Path is spoken of as being a progressive series of stages which the practitioner moves through, the culmination of one leading to the beginning of another, but it is more usual to view the stages of the ‘Path’ as requiring simultaneous development.

The Eightfold Path essentially consists of meditation, following the precepts, and cultivating the positive converse of the precepts (e.g. benefiting living beings is the converse of the first precept of harmlessness). The Path may also be thought of as a the way of developing ala, meaning mental and moral discipline.

In tougher times, do we need to dig deeper into “meaning”?

10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 and/or the Wooooorld.

Get them all and try them out or read Macworld’s review of Twitter Apps for the iphone

Insert URLs in tweets from the iphone using Twitfire

To have other people do your tweetin’ work for you, just use twitthis:

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

USA newspaper informs us of Anniversaries and festivals to follow next year.

Big anniversaries and festivals offer yet another reason to travel in 2009. And, since many such celebrations include free events, it’s a great way to get more for your money. Just remember to book accommodations early, since the events are likely to draw crowds.

Major anniversaries in 2009 include:

• 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s ascension to the throne. Expect major festivities at Hampton Court Palace and beyond.

• 250th anniversary of Kew Gardens. Special exhibitions will commemorate the event.

• 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany. There will be special exhibitions, memorials, tours, and walks. The Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in 2009.

• Alaska’s 50th anniversary of Statehood. The Alaska Railroad is offering a free one-day pass anywhere the train travels to anyone who will turn 50 in 2009.

• Missouri Botanical Garden’s 150th anniversary. One of the top botanical gardens in the world, it’s also the oldest public garden in the U.S.

• 400th anniversary of Bermuda. The island will celebrate with special events.

• 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birth. Baltimore is celebrating with Nevermore 2009, a year-long citywide festival.

Major festivals in 2009 include:

• Manchester International Festival 2009: The second biannual festival features original and new works of performing, music, and visual art.

• Homecoming Scotland 2009: Scotland is celebrating the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth and Scotland’s contributions to the world, including golf, whiskey, and Scottish heritage. Events take place all year.

• July 2009 XXV Song Celebration in Tallinn, Estonia: Estonia has a proud heritage of massive singing festivals, the next of which takes place from July 2 to 5.

• Holland Art Cities: Boasting more art and culture per square mile than anywhere else on earth, the two-year Holland Art Cities is an event hosted by ten of the top museums in four of Holland’s largest cities. Two museums (including the Hermitage Amsterdam) will open as well.

• Around the world, demand is down and destinations are pushing hard for more visitors, so unusually good deals should be easy to find, at least through the first half of 2009. These and other emerging destinations provide added value since they tend to be even more affordable than more popular, established destinations. If you’re looking for an affordable vacation in the coming year, an up-and-comer could be just the ticket.

Or rather it has simply atrophied but ironically due to over- rather than under-use. So sad to see folks still trying to make email do what they need it to do within so many corporations when facebook, twitter, blogs and a host of other media do a much better job of getting the message out and getting decisions made. The kids know and some smarter adults like Don Tapscott of ngenera know too. Unfortunately human face-to-face communication and the art of true meaningful conversation might be on its deathbed too.

THINK. What is the purpose of the emails you send? The underlying purpose?

1. To communicate widely and poorly usually,
2. to send attachments
3. to create a record to refer back to,
4. to let folks know what is going on or
5. to ask what’s going on

What else?

We have the newer, better, more timely, more direct, more useful technologies now that let us do all of the above in a much more human way…not stilted by structure…freedom to publish whatever and whenever you want and let the world filter it via profiles, filters, rss, tags and all the other meta-information out there,

THE FUTURE: Sending out ripples of what you specifically need and having that coming back to you in waves. Some would say that’s here (I hear y’all, geeks! 😉 but not in the true informational sense.

THE FUTURE + Not sending out anything but having a system match you with what you need based on what you do and deliver that to you.

THE FUTURE ++ Sending simple commands that live in an online OS that generate the systems that you will need in the future based on what EVERYBODY is doing…a twitter command line 😉

I think I can rightly say Cooper has done it again with a finely balanced agile+ux presentation from Agile2008 on how developers and logical interaction designers (IAs + visual designers + design technologists) are really all after the same thing…ACCEPTANCE by the client and the users they are subsequently delivering to. A list apart also does a sterling summarizing job; the presentation list of which is below:

Presentations:

• Leisa Reichelt, Waterfall bad, Washing machine good [mp3] — presented at dConstruct 07.
• Jeff White & Jim Ungar, User Interface Design in an Agile Environment: Enter the Design Studio — presented at Interaction08.
• Alan Cooper’s The wisdom of experience — keynote at Agile 2008.
• Maria Guidice, Can’t we all just get along? Human-Centred Design meets Agile.

Finally, the IxDA and Agile Usability lists frequently discuss the issue of Agile design.

Great strides forward in this nascent debate and practice.

• Government (policies, plans, systems)
• Universal Health care (or at least 21st century respectability)
• Education (building the country anew, bottom-up)
• Sciences (Green)
• Security (generally hanging onto what you have)

Thanks to my “e-friend” Tom Atlee and in relation to the looming financial crisis (?) which I have begun to think about in earnest these last few days, I received the following brilliant article by Charles Eisenstein, author of the Ascent of humanity.

Essentially it asks: “Given what’s coming, what is the most beautiful thing I can do?“

Here’s a key paragraph:

“…every time there is an economic recession…
People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to
rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to
facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are
created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail
to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic
crisis is to make and keep more money — to accelerate the conversion of
anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is
generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the
commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in
Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though,
for the reverse process to begin in earnest — to remove things from the
realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts,
reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is
going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose
their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other
and real communities will reemerge.”

This cast my memory back to the way helped each other at home in Ireland when I was growing up – exchanging cabbage for a haircut and helping cut peat turf for a couple of dozen eggs. Those transactions fill my heart to this day (there were levels to the exchange that transcended the common-place) and were, even then, way beyond Web 4.0. (NOTE: My maturation sequence of the control nexus of the web: 1=system, 2=relationship, 3=meaning, 4=soul).

This all in turn reminded me of the actual secondary currency of countries such as Bali where there is an actual fiscal currency but also a bartered exchange system for services regardless of actual value. In fact, my friend, Rich Vazquez, has a highly innovative time exchange system already up and running in Austin, Texas.

“Time Banking” as it is commonly called, is a program that has been growing for over 25 years. It is inspired by concepts developed by Edgar Cahn, an attorney, economist, and pioneer of social change, who had a vision of how communities could empower themselves by looking within to meet one another’s needs.

Who knows what the future holds!? I hope though we will still experience something beautiful.