There’s the physical space of weSpace, the co-working hub we’re launching for entrepreneurs and digital creatives. There’s the social space where we connect innovators through technology, collaboration and creativity. And there’s the space between the ears where we consider our place in a shape-shifting world.

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Space matters. It can inspire people to do great things. To engage one-another. To think more deeply. To innovate and make a difference. Space inspires us.

But like great expectation, great space just doesn’t happen. It unfolds in time. “The future enters us slowly, as if to transform us, long before it happens,” the poet Ranier Marie Ilke counseled.

Space must be designed. Carefully, bit by bit. Steve Jobs put it this way: Design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works.

We Media emerged a decade ago with a prescient and somewhat ominous (at least for some) design: Networked technology would enable everyone to set the agenda for what we know, how we work and how we live. In the world we designed in 2002, control shifted from traditional institutions to everyday people. Media was democratized; power flowed to citizens.

Many people see this as the Internet revolution. It is, but not the way they think. While the “digital everything” was the first law of We Media back in 2002, it was also a foreshadowing of a social revolution to come. The age of access that we saw coming a decade ago is patently obvious today as people everywhere design or redesign their place in a connected society. The implications for just about everything are profound.

Design sits atop our agenda for the visible future. It is the way we interact with the world. It’s how and what we see, how we organize thought, how we translate concepts to others, how we create, how we express ourselves. Design brings us closer to communion with the ineffable in a period of enlightened anxiety.

Watch this space.

If you live in Washington, DC, and can offer a little bit of your time, sign up and check out the project details. You can go down into the subway to see how long it takes to escape, or assist with mapping data and other text, photo and video tasks.

Sign up and share this link to invite your friends:

http://newsit.net/assignments/454

I’m rooting for team NewsIT, and I’m biased. NewsIt won our 2010 PitchIt Challenge, and we’ve been advising the project since then.

A few elements of the DC Metro investigation are innovative and notable for those who care about the future of journalism. First, NewsIt is doing its work in public. That’s a departure from the traditional cloak of secrecy that shrouds investigative journalism until the work is done – followed by the traditional “big reveal.” NewsIt has told us exactly what they’re working on – and they’ve asked for help.

Second, they’ve asked for help in a manner that should be appealing and practical to a broad network of individuals who care about the investigation and its results – whether or not they care about or want to call themselves citizen journalists. This rips a page out of citizen science – built around volunteers who collect data to contribute to large-scale research projects; and from the world of micro-volunteering pioneered by services such as Sparked and SeeClickFix. (Both of those also launched as winners of our PitchIt challenge).

This version of collaborative, volunteer-powered investigative journalism curated and produced by a commercial, professional hub also offers an alternative vision for the future of local journalism – compared, for instance, to AOL’s Patch, which is building out a network of local sites built around volunteer bloggers. You don’t need to be a dedicated or good blogger to make a meaningful contribution to NewsIt.

Finally – this project is an important test for NewsIt, a startup from Washington founded by journalist Melinda Wittsock (@cncpundit). NewsIt needs to prove its model to prospective investors and industry partners.

Today I watched the movie Groundhog Day and downloaded The Daily on my iPad. Both reminded me how we live the same day over and over until we get it right.

Rupert Murdoch’s much-anticipated, save-the-newspaper app debuted after several delays. You’ve got to love the serendipity of the February 2 been-here-before release: the newspaper for TV, the newspaper for computers, the newspaper for the web, the newspaper for the mobile phone, now the newspaper for the iPad. Each time we get the old newspaper metaphor on a new device. I’ve got you babe ….

The question is whether people will pay to play. A straw man for newspapers in the digital age, The Daily is an argument for sustaining the failing business model of an industrial age remnant.

You’ve got to admire Mr. Murdoch. Unlike his brethren publishers he’s put his money next to his mouth, investing $30 million to keep the once-lucrative newspaper legacy alive. The very publishers and editors who once loathed his business practices, as well as his brand of journalism, are suddenly pulling for him. If The Daily succeeds, they will follow. That is what newspaper publishers do when faced with a challenge: follow. At the least, Mr. Murdoch leads with his wallet and a vision.

Relishing his role as groundbreaker, Mr. Murdoch has buddied up with the suddenly-absent Steve Jobs and embraced Apple’s predatory marketplace. His fellow publishers love the familiar subscription model. Apple loves the 30% distribution fee and a share of revenues from cheap ads. We are left to wonder where’s the sense in replicating a legacy, general format newspaper on an iPad then downloading it for a fee on iTunes.

Producing a kinda cooler, sorta newspaper for tablet screens is not much of a game-changer, but that’s not really the point. A lot of folks who aren’t used to paying for news will have to subscribe at the introductory rate of $39 a year for The Daily to turn a profit, pay for journalism and recoup the development costs.

Content will ultimately determine whether The Daily succeeds. Like any new publication, it will take time for it to find its legs. Audiences are developed or lost over time in the news game’s constant ebb-and-flow of content and curation.

At its start, The Daily feels like newspaper by committee. The design is influenced by magazine apps currently on the iPad, but content is as predictable as a newspaper website. While updates, animated graphics and promotional video raise the bar, The Daily remains a walled garden in a universe of searchable, linked content most of which is available for free.

It may be cutting-edge by newspaper standards, but The Daily debut fails to deliver the breakthrough experience that leads to the next business model. It may, however, answer the question everyone is asking: Will I pay for mediocre content on a newspaper app when I can get it for free on the open Internet?

It’s Groundhog Day all over again.

Jemima Kiss’ video tour for the Guardian.

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The 2011 news challenge seeks applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

Learn more and apply at newschallenge.org.

As you can well imagine, the future of documents is more than a curiosity for a company famous for its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox Parc) and world-changing computing innovations such as the graphical user interface and computer mouse – but still synonymous with copying machines. Today Xerox is a major provider of consulting and outsourced printing for big companies that churn out boatloads of paper.

Among other things, Francois and I discussed how social media and the changing nature of the document enable a new kind of workplace powered by real-time knowledge sharing and perpetual creativity. We’re already seeing the rise of the networked work experience. Legions of loosely organized, cloud-powered solo entrepreneurs, contractors and free agents work at home, in coffee shops and in co-working collaboration hubs like our own WeSpace in Reston, Virginia.

What does all that have to do with documents?

Here’s a starting point: Our culture is built around documents. Whether it’s contracts, invoices, magazines, Microsoft Word or Google docs, legal records, blog posts, cave paintings, paychecks or even cash, it’s hard to imagine organized society without something that looks or acts or at least represents a collection of words, numbers, pictures and ideas fashioned into a human-readable format that we call a document.

I can imagine paperless news and a paperless workplace. I can’t imagine a society without documents.

What’s worse, the more I think about it, the less sure I am of exactly what I mean by the term “document.”

As the information required to organize our lives becomes more distributed, atomized, personalized and streamed, like magic, from unseen computers in the invisible digital cloud, the distinctions between disorganized data, loosely organized content, curated documents and full-fledged media experiences – or products – becomes fuzzier. Is a Tweetdeck dashboard, which displays a realtime stream of Twitter updates, a document? How about a screenshot of it? What about a Google Docs spreadsheet shared and updated continuously by a distributed work group, or a personalized newsletter delivered to your email inbox and posted to your Facebook wall – where friends “like” it and add comments?

What, exactly, is a “document” in a world of apps, screens and perpetually changing representations of information? Storify, a new web service, helps people create documents of documents – it’s a drag-and-drop tool to collect content from whatever online sources they like (Or, so it appears from what I’ve seen of it – I’m still awaiting access to the private beta so I can give it a try).

We know intuitively what we mean by a physical document, but what about information, knowledge and ideas that are not fixed in space and time? They’re revised, redacted, retracted, redesigned and refreshed continuously – like the advertisements and futuristic edition of USAToday from the 2002 movie Minority Report.

Of course, a digital newspaper, even on fabulous e-ink that’s vastly more capable than what you get now with a Kindle, is a modest mental leap forward from a world already hooked on the web, mobile apps, iPads and the like. But packaged news is just one kind of document, it’s already digital, ephemeral and hardly the most important document in our lives. How about your medical records, photo collections or online banking records?

What happens when realtime touches everything?

Have a listen, then please add your thoughts.

The podcast is broken into four parts, or click here to listen to the entire conversation.

Part One
What is a document in the age of social media? Is it time to update your definition?
Listen

Part Two
How will “social documents” impact organizations and knowledge workers?
Listen

Part Three
What are the social implications of virtual work?
Is there a clear vision for a cloud-based, app-driven workplace?
Listen

Part Four
What will become of security and privacy in an information overloaded world?
Listen
–
Photo Credit: By Ludovic Bertron

One signal comes from Brave News Worlds, a new report from the International Press Institute and the Poynter Institute. A collection of essays from digital innovators and advocates, Brave News Worlds provides “effective solutions and lessons learned” in the transition to digital media. What resonates, though, is its point of view. Loss lingers and continues, but the publishers offer an agenda of hope. “Is the future really so bleak?” asks IPI’s Lauren Dolezal.

The question captures the irony of the report’s title, a tortured reference to Aldous Huxley’s disturbing, distopian vision of the future in his 1931 novel Brave New World. The metaphor transported me to a 2007 seminar at Poynter where a faculty member warned that technology and empowered citizens would undermine the capabilities of newspapers to organize communities, and thus hurtle society toward distopia. The scenario spooked participants so thoroughly that they were asked to exorcise their demons by revealing what worried them most. Their answers produced a flip chart of fears, mostly about job insecurity and the inevitable demise of newspapers. They were right to worry.

Bill Mitchell, the report’s editor, makes no such mistake. Mr. Mitchell is quick to get past the woe-is-us feeling so prevalent among journalists these days. He acknowledges an epiphany, then does his best to deliver one. He reassures journalists instead of scaring them — smart for someone who heads Poynter’s entrepreneurial and international programs. Practitioners such as Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, validate journalistic enhancements in the digital age. Pop-prophets of media change — the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirkey and Dan Gillmor — spin now-familiar commentary about the expansion of journalism to most everyone. What emerges is validation for journalists to move on.

But moving on presents another irony. In what could have been a powerful demonstration of the capabilities of digital media — interactivity, linking, social networking, multi-media storytelling and design — the report is instead delivered on the platform for journalism that is being replaced: print, 152-pages of it. You can download a bulky PDF from the IPI and Poynter sites, but the print-bomb undermines the publishers’ credibility for espousing the opportunities of digital delivery. It does, however, validate their contention that journalism’s transition won’t be smooth.

I admire IPI and Poynter for the reckoning. The moment is not about the collapse of journalism, but of its reframing. Call it entrepreneurship, innovation or creativity, you must first accept the possibility of a media renaissance. The hard part is letting go.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
— Rudyard Kipling, the Gods of the Copybook Headings

At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just an elegant aggregator: a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations into a new ditch. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content gets love, that it is curated, redesigned or re-edited with care.

Incumbents are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies a beautiful, interactive metaphor to news access, an alternative to the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war they’re winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page.

Fred McClimans knows as well as anyone how people get/share information and what role technology can, and should, play in that effort. He is an Information, Technology and Business Analyst with over 20 years of experience in developing information/analytical methodologies and content distribution systems for global markets.  In his WeThink essay, Fred explains how he “expected the iPad to be a phenomenal tool for getting news/analysis online.” But after visiting about 40+ different “media” sites, he isn’t convinced.

Here is an excerpt:

I’ve been waiting for Apple’s iPad for about 10 years, ever since the first real “tablet” PC prototypes began to hit the market, and I’ve been logging some serious time on it since it came out – enough to say that if AT&T retains its newly announced tiered data plan structure, I’ll be in the top 2% that will take advantage of the unlimited plan. Yes, I’m impressed with the iPad. Great book readers. Perfect for email and social media sites, not to mention web surfing and tons of cool apps (even though many of them are still suffering from Rev 1.0 Crashing Syndrome). And I’m sure I’ll be equally impressed with many of the coming Droid-based dPad’s and the Microsoft-based mPads that I’ll also buy, analyze and try to break.

What I really like about the iPad is the devices “concept” – it’s not a “touch-screen PC” or laptop replacement and is clearly not a “content creation” device, as evidenced by the fact that writing this piece on my 64Gig 3G unit – without an external keypad – is like watching my 2 yr old try to unlock my cell phone (slightly amusing at first, but ultimately annoying when he figures it out and starts deleting emails). Rather it’s a new breed of device with a form, fit and function radically different from its bigger brother (the Mac) and its smaller siblings (the iPhone/iTouch/iPod, etc.). While the iPad is not bad for email, taking notes, social media sites, etc., this device is clearly a “content delivery and consumption” device.

With this in mind, I expected the iPad to be a phenomenal tool for getting news/analysis online. But after visiting about 40+ different “media” sites, I realized that:

• Most “news/analysis” sites have not yet figured out the iPad’s real function or how to present information in this new X by Y format, not to mention the internal inconsistencies that abound (such as sites that routinely mix Flash and non-Flash video on a page by page basis, or those that offer different page layouts based either by author or subject matter – a major turn-off),
• The iPad highlighted differences between “blogs”, “analytic” and “journalistic” sites (Mashable, btw, still comes across as a blog, CNN as more of a newsy site, the WSJ as a clear journalistic site and the NYTimes as a hybrid split personality “not quite sure” site), and
• Nobody has yet figured out how to appropriately use different media formats to best convey their news/information on the iPad (a great example being a five-page, text-only news story that I read – I don’t remember what the story was about but I do remember it made me feel like I was sitting on a runway tarmac for five hours without bottle of water).

Clearly there are issues with the iPad – and everyone seems quick to highlight them. But these issues are technical in nature and they will be solved (for example, fixed-size images work great on a laptop, but “tappable” thumbnails that expand are ideal for an iPad device).

But the most significant theme that kept coming to mind as I cruised from site to site involved the shortcomings of the individuals who were actually producing the online content – the editors and writers themselves! It wasn’t that their content was bad, but that more often than their “content creation” approach just didn’t match up to the UI (user interface), screen size and “application-oriented” potential of the iPad.

[More later]

Fred’s full essay will be available later this week, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, Fred will be at the Tabula Rasa DC event to share some his thoughts about the iPad, and help brainstorm a more effective use of tablet technology by folks in the content business (details about attending the event available here: http://trdc.eventbrite.com).

Ask questions, raise issues, arrange meet-ups, provide feedback, or note key findings for innovation from the conference. Just bring your iPad and download the Disruptathon app. Or use an iTouch that Disruptathon founder Pete Erickson will provide you at the conference.

TRDC is all about creativity, connections and the latest technology. It’s about participation, too. The Disruptathon platform is just one way we’ll capture ideas and examples from everyone, including TR’s group of Digital da Vincis.

Panels and Powerpoints are for the Digital Dinosaurs. Join us for creative conversation, striking show-and-tell and cool connections on Monday, June 14 at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check out the latest on the program and watch the video.

Register today.

Oh!magination, a new app from our friends at KvJ & Company, let’s people capture, share, discover and delight in ideas. You can get a free download by attending TRDC at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm on Monday, June 14.

Oh!magination joins us as the official app for ideation at TRDC. A playful, interactive application for ideas, you’ll get a chance to use it as you’re inspired. Rich Brandisi, the COO of KvJ & Company will be on hand to talk about opportunities for innovation in mobile-social computing, as well as show off Oh! during the app throwdown at TRDC.

Check out the program, watch the video, and by all means register today.

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Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

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Tabula Rasa

What’s your app?

We’ll help you answer that question. Check out the program. Read our agenda.

We’ve been waiting for this moment since we bought our first Mac II back in the Dark Ages.

A scant four weeks after iApple introduced the iPad, we played in NYC’s Digital Sandbox by staging the first throwdown on tablet computing. First-movers showed a stunning array of mobile applications for connected citizens and consumers. A talented group of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and visionaries helped us flash-forward to a new marketplace for mobile engagement.

Beyond exuberance, one million iPads have been sold in a month. This is just the beginning, not just for the iPad but for personal computing on a stunning array of high-concept, high-touch devices heading our way.

Advantage goes to those who move first. As with other moments missed, slackers and laggards are left to compete for scraps, then complain.

Suddenly, everyone has an iPad or e-reader conference to show struggling vintners how to pour old wine into new bottles. Which may be fine for winemakers whose vineyards have gone fallow. Learn how to squeeze more juice out of fermented grapes, then charge more for the stuff. Even if it leaves a bad aftertaste.

We’re vintners of another kind. Plant anew. Cultivate. The terroir is rich, bold and complex. Join connoisseurs of creativity for a tasting from 1-4:30 pm on June 14. The vintage may be inexpensive, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. Drink up.

Online registration here.

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

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Dominic Campbell, a digital government and social innovation entrepreneur with a background in policy, communications and engagement, writes in the opening of his article:

For too long in government, organizations have rewarded risk aversion over risk management, process over outcomes and structures over common sense. Nowhere is this more clearly manifest than in government’s procurement processes.

As you might imagine, the procurement process is clunky, arcane, and seemingly anything but innovative.  But Campbell is optimistic.  He thinks/knows innovation is possible within even the most mundane of government operations.  He writes:

But that’s not to say there aren’t people on the inside willing to take risks, it’s just that they are strongly discouraged and certainly never rewarded for it. Instead government procurement culture squeezes the life out of the precious few enterprising public servants who try to innovate and push the boundaries of service delivery using procurement in creative ways to seek best market solutions.

Read the whole article.  You’ll learn something for sure.  Then tell us what you think.

WeThink – IBM – Final