PUBLIC MARKS with search crowd

In what circumstances is it better to distance yourself from the crowd, to highlight your unique circumstances?

Criticism • Side effects often dominate over intended consequences of any project or endeavor. • Abstract views may make us callous or may badly reflect ground truth. • Ignorance is bliss. The world is filled with sob stories. Best to not dwell? • Such services may be used solely for the most banal aspirations and goals. • Struggle may be important - making things too easy may harm fitness and lower diversity of skills and abilities over long term. • What about poor people who are outside of any implied technological social network? • Why not just help people around you? • Any technology should go hand in hand with day to day personal practice that is unmediated? • Feedback loops may be created that accelerate and disrupt society. • Virtual and visual only for curators; not tactile; uses only one sense. A concern?

There are some Flash fans in the crowd, who ask quite rightly whether all this will be made simpler with great tools, like what Adobe provides for Flash. We do need better tools, but I ask him to wait till I talk about tools in The Cloud.

Concerts have to be licensed by the government, and monitors from the Information Ministry watch the crowd to make sure nobody stands up to dance.

The spark that set off the uprising occurred on February 27, 1947, when a police agent attempted to confiscate black market cigarettes from an elderly Taiwanese woman, Lin Jian-Mai. She resisted and, as accounts allege, was then pistol-whipped by the agents. An angry crowd soon gathered around the agents and the woman. After a warning shot fired by one of the agents went astray and killed an onlooker, the crowd pursued the agents to a nearby police station. The crowd surrounded the building, and demanded that the officer be given to them. The captain refused and the anger of the crowd heightened when it was discovered that the agents had been spirited out of the building via a rear entrance. Violence finally flared the following morning on February 28.

In Beijing, the authorities have worked hard to prevent Olympic crowds from being too one-sided in their support for the home team. Volunteer spectators have even been drafted in at some half-full Olympic venues to cheer for both sides.

And while the open web crowd may froth at the mouth at the very notion, it isn’t clear why it would be in Apple’s (or any other manufacturer’s) interest to encourage development of portable apps when they can lock developers into their ecosystem.

[...] and a sports bar called “Champions” Serving up Potato skins, Ribs, Buffalo Wings and other western crowd pleasers.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.