Udell to event promoters on leveraging folksonomy: 'Pick a tag' I'm now trying to figure out why InfoWorld's Jon Udell is a journalist and not a millionaire technologist (or maybe he is). Udell keeps coming up with one brilliant idea after another. The first of these -- which I thought was just plain obvious -- was Udell's idea for vendors ...
I prefer to describe
Jon Udell as a Technologist Type 3 (according to
Tom Bradford's
Technology Types nomenclature) who is also a journalist. His insights, thought stimulation/leadership, and power of articulation defy monetization.
I do know Jon (albeit primarily via emails and phone interviews), he even put me forward for an
innovators award in 2003 re.
Virtuoso etc.
Full disclosure aside, you only need to trace back in time to see that he has been a Type 3 Technologist for a very long time. When I read one of Jon's articles I always sense that they are the end product of the following steps:
1. Hypothesis Development
2. Hands on Experimentation
3. Experiment Obersvation
3. Conclusion Attainment
4. Report / Article generation
5. Share findings with interested parties
On the subject of "sharing his findings", the blogosphere has become a very effective dispatch outlet. He starts conversations about
Google Maps,
Querying Web Data via XQuery/XPath for instance, that stimulate further discussion (in the form of related blog posts of varying relationship density which might discern from these posts by
Tom and
myself for instance ).
Blog conversation replaces the need for a "Jon here is our take on this..." or "Jon here is our implementation of what you demonstrated" phone call or email (you know he sees the discussion threads coalescing around his origninal post exprimentation conversation; most of the time setting up the next batch of experiments).