Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."

Otlet's overall prescience makes me wonder if maybe both he and Berners-Lee are on to something. One ding against the idea of a semantic web has been that nobody is going to put the kind of time in that would be necessary to tag, classify, and intelligently link all the web's information. Huh. Maybe all the energy that we're sinking a la Clay Shirky into YouTube and Twitter and MySpace Facebook and so on suggests that in 2008 we're very willing to put that kind of time into creating a smarter web?

Wright has some great photos of the Mundaneum up on his personal site, one of which he kindly said was okay for me to use above. Also, there is a film about Otlet called "The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World," and Kevin Kelly has the details on that over in his extensive library on documentaries.

Over on the excellent WorldChanging I have a short piece up on Carrotmob, a concept recently launched out in San Francisco where a group of green-minded buyers coordinate their shopping to incentivize a certain business into making concrete earth-friendly changes. The mob shopping concept is about you and your friends playing along with capitalism to move the market in a direction of your liking.

What ran on WorldChanging was a shortened version of my take on the topic, so I'm taking the liberty of running some of the omitted sections -- on the "carrots" that might make businesses participate in such a scheme -- below. It probably makes sense to read the post over there first and then hop on back here if you're still interested.

The natural question becomes whether the success of the Carrotmob targeted-consumption approach at K&D can be replicated and grown. The answer might lay in the answer to a different question: what's in it for business? What carrots might really make them to go green(er)?

Looking at the Carrotmob experiment from the spring, the most obvious answer is cash. When Brent says with a smirk in a video on carrotmob.org that "corporations will do anything for money," he means that in a good way. With their interests on the table, what remains is aligning them with those of the green-minded buyer. What's so important about Carrotmob is the coordination, because it reduces an inefficiency in other, uncoordinated socially-conscious shopping: "mobbing" lets a business know exactly why the gods of good fortune have smiled upon it.

A second, less obvious carrot came up in the Carrotmob planning process -- reputation, and in particular the growing power we all have to use the social Internet to shape the reputations of businesses we like. One of the downsides to the "stick" approach to collectively addressing (like, say, me prodding my social circle into boycotting Shell over its poor environmental record in Nigeria) is that going negative (a) takes sustained effort and (b) isn't that much fun. But buying a six pack of Brooklyn Lager on a Carrotmob-appointed day, and then blogging about how much I looove my energy-efficient corner bodega on a social site like Outside.in? That's easy. And fun. It's casual, occasional, proactive activism.

Using online social cred as a carrot took something of a backseat to cold hard cash as Carrotmob rushed to launch. That's something of a shame, because those combined carrots can be powerful. K&D Market's participation in Carrotmob was rewarded with a sharp jump in business, at least for a day, but visit K&D's page on the hyperlocal review hub Yelp and you quickly see the opportunity for more. (The page is easy to find -- Google "K&D Market" and it's the first result.) Among the nicest reviews about K&D is one calling the market "the museum of expired cereal. (Many reviews complain about poor service.) For some businesses, a boost in their online rep that going green might provide might be even more valuable than a few hours of targeted sales.

(Photo thx meganpru)
capitalism, consumerism, green, networks, social organizing, social technologies

Ah, I should mention that we're running a poll over on TechPresident, on the subject of "Does a Connected World Need a Connected POTUS?" (POTUS being shorthand for President of the United States). As I discuss in my introductory remarks to the poll, in my mind the question goes far beyond whether or not Candidate X carries his or her own Blackberry. Where once nation states were the organizing unit that presidents had to worry about, I think that you can fairly convincingly argue that we're today as much (if not more) organized around networks.

Now, does a politician really need to understand online social networks or wifi networks to understand how to handle a terrorist network like Al Qaeda? Dunno. Thank god we're running a poll. But consider that the response to 9/11 by some politicians was to storm into Iraq while the response of others was to focus on cutting off the global financial spiderweb that powers Al Qaeda. One, I'd argue, is a response rooted in a nation-state mindset, and the other is one that is at least informed by an understanding of the importance and power of networks.

Anyhoo, take the poll and let's get a discussion going in the comments.