Poetic.

The poetry and artistry of that Massive Change thingy was this:

Bruce Mau (the instigator the Massive Change project) managed to pull a John Todd (who was a conversationalist on the day), by plucking some random species from human nature (the audience), and plopping them into the ecosystem he has created (the event).

Now, as John mentioned in his session, this act has nothing to do with specific selection, it's just that some of the punters will be able to clean up/process/run with the stuff that was presented to us.

My ideas are still a little confused about it all, because frankly, my brain was saturated with goodness that day, and i'm just running with the concept here...

The thing is, with regards to that mundane thing i've been blogging about lately, you could look at raw data (much of the crap that's coming out of, say, blogging) as sewage. And you could apply Todd's methodology of biomimicry to this so-called sewage... by finding some handy organisms (let's say many subsets of interested parties, or the audience) to clean up the crap, and present some actual information... or clean water.

So, with Flickr in mind, contacts (and sometimes people you don't know) are little periwinkle snails... moving through all your sewage, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, until your dataset is more useful than just a big old dump (of photos). That's cool shit, and a nice way to visualise what's going on with collaborative metadata creation, if you can get past the pun.

Get it?