• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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Michael Hiltzik wrote a piece for the LA Times about Jaron Lanier. Lanier, 49, was one of the early visionaries for what the internet could do, and is the author of You Are Not a Gadget. He “has been pondering the effect that the World Wide Web — its ideology as well as its design — has had on creativity, society and commerce for years.”

America’s Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven’t seen before,” he says. “The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves — Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn’t have been able to forget their former selves.”

Is it just me, or does it seem like there is an increase in the number of people who are writing about the perils of technology, media and always-on connectivity?

Or maybe I’m just drawn to these prophets because they provide catharsis in the midst of my unanswered questions about technology’s role in my future.

Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel wrote an excellent article for BusinessWeek, “Innovation’s Accidental Enemies.” They suggest an alternate path to the two defaults we typically choose when it comes to filtering new ideas.

When faced with a new idea, the boardroom impulse is to ask for proof in one of two flavors: deductive and inductive. With deduction, we apply a widely held rule. With induction, we develop a new rule from a wide range of data. In both cases, we use existing information to understand the issue in play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty.

Instead of using deductive and inductive logic to reason with a new idea, the authors suggest a third form: abductive logic.

Instead, when facing an anomalous situation, we can turn to a third form of logic: abductive logic, the logic of what could be. To use abduction, we need to creatively assemble the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference—a logical leap—to the best possible conclusion.

In other words, abductive logic suggests we focus less on what we know and more on what we don’t. “Asking what could be true—and jumping into the unknown—is critical to innovation. Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part.”

As content becomes more and more populous, the gap between what exists and what exists that I’m interested in will continue to grow larger. Google search has been a convenient distraction because it has taught us to believe that a robust search engine is all we need to deliver all we need. Unfortunately, search is only good for me if I take the initiative to search. It doesn’t come looking for me. At least not yet.

Content creators are everywhere. From writers, photographers, designers and musicians to YouTube maestros and Twitter provocateurs, content is being generated everywhere and it seems by everyone (I’m adding to the noise by writing this blog post). The beauty of more content is that it encourages more creators to take part in the joy of creation. It’s a natural part of the way we were… created.

The future, I believe, will be seized by those who figure out the best way to curate content, not just create content. I call them Content Curators (apparently Rohit does too). Content Curators are the people who sort and sift through the glut of content and organize it in a way that is relevant to a desired filter.

Amazon gets this. Every time I purchase something from Amazon, my habits are recorded and compared to give recommendations that I might also appreciate, based on others who enjoy similar combinations and/or content that is related. A similar logic exists behind iTunes’ Genius Mixes. Magazines are good at this too. They provide a specific frame (sports, marketing, sales, cooking, design, news, etc.) that all of their content filters through.

Content Curators will also become “branded” because people will be hungry to have someone else do their sorting and sifting.

Our dependency on content creators will become less and less as our dependancy on curators becomes more and more.

Maybe it’s time to brush up on those mixtape skills and start curating!