Renaissance: an overview? Maybe a preview (Just Bru)

Renaissance: an overview? Maybe a preview0

Posted by Bru April 29, 2006 10:42 PM

Why renaissance?
Well, to tell the truth this will be the theme at reboot, the übercool (un)conference that's going to happen in a few week's time in Copenaghen. This theme has been haunting me for a while now since I was (and still am) trying to organize my ideas in a sort of demo/workshop/
roundtable to submit to reboot itself.
Eventually I thought there could be no better moment to end this seemingly endless transition from the "old" All Things Bru to this not-new-anymore-and-probable-will-die-still-embryonic-instead-if-I-dont-move-quickly "environment".

the story so far
having to deal with a theme, I started by looking at a complete definition of it.

According to the usual descriptions, the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century, spreading through the rest of Europe, represented a reconnection of the west with classical antiquity, the absorption of knowledge—particularly mathematics—from Arabic, the return of experimentalism, the focus on the importance of living well in the present (e.g. Renaissance humanism), an explosion of the dissemination of knowledge brought on by printing and the creation of new techniques in art, poetry and architecture which led to a radical change in the style, and substance of the arts and letters. This period, in this view, represents Europe emerging from a long period as a backwater, and the rise of commerce and exploration. The Italian Renaissance is often labeled as the beginning of the "modern" epoch.

Well, in short, there's something here about making things in a new way, or finding new things to do, isn't it?

So I had a look back at my blog and, oh my! I suddenly realized that I couldn't recognize it anymore as my "personal knowledge management" system, or my "digital lifestyle aggregator" or whatever!!! And started feeling uneasy.
Meanwhile, I came across this trend about alpha or "first generation" bloggers quitting the scene...and started to understand the feeling of who decide to just "give-up" (there can be many reasons behind, my has always been "it's no more exciting as it used to / I want a new toy / what am I missing out there? ).

But I don't want to give up, essentially because in my case it wouldn't make sense at all: this was born as my cooperative pKM tool, and I definitely need to manage my thoughts and cooperate now more than ever!

So, it is the time for some huge change, and the (fairly obvious, but rather invisible unless you stop and think about) reason is that many things already ch-ch-ch-changed in my life (which is the main topic of the blog) in the last few years.

I divided these in three big categories:
1) context (where do I live, what/how/why do I do, who do I meet)
2) content (what/how/why do I blog)
3) tools (this and my other blogs, plus other services I started / stopped using)

Among these, context is definitely the pivotal element: it changes day by day due to my ongoing journey through life, experiences I make and so on, and I must admit that I'm pretty happy with it today as I was with the one I had three years ago, only in a different manner.
This is also the reason why I always put so much of a stress on the context elements of blogging (try searching "context"...), that often seems to go pretty much unnoticed.
At the end of the day, I like to think of content and tools as the "mobile" components of this knowledge machine, hence those that neede to be adjusted in order to match my own personal context.

I finish this post, as I often do, with a personal challenge: I'll spend the next two days (luckily enough monday will be a bank holyday :D ) thinking, designing and planning my next generation pKM environment. Tomorrow will be dedicated to content, while monday I'll review the tools.

What can I say if not... stay tuned ;)