A wonderful post by Doc Searls disscussing the limitations of IQ scores leads onto a rather profound observation -
Third, the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of freely available services that make possible what we're doing here, are flat-out utopian — Not in their aspirations, but in their achievments. Hell, look at Wikipedia. Pretty freaking amazing, if you ask me. Go back fifteen years and imagine the Internet we have today: something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Can you name the big, hierarchical company that made all that happen? Can you name the big, hierarchical companies behind HTML, HTTP, SMTP, POP, BIND, XML, or RSS? How about new ones sprouting like weeds... attention.xml, for example? Some helped, sure. But we live in a world now where a guy like Steve Gillmor — a journalist, fergoshsake — can call for a standard, enlist smart technical help (qualified by their good work, not by IQ scores nobody knows or cares about), and push it out into the marketplace.
This is inspiring stuff for the entrepreneurial spirit. Remember not all entrepreneurial endeavours must have a business model. OpenEir certainly doesn't. So it strikes me that I probably feel similarly to Steve Gillmor, in that we're both pushing ideas out there into areas where we have little technical exerptise. But it doesn't matter because in the idea amplifier of the blogosphere experts can be drawn to an idea like moths to a flame. If the idea has value.
Look at what has happened since Adam Curry pushed out the idea for podcasting less than a year ago. This is a world where journalists and DJs can now throw a spark onto the tinderbox of the blogosphere and be engulfed in flames of fascination within moments.
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