At the Digital Landscapes conference in Dublin last week, John Herlihy gave the audience a round-up of the corporate culture and attitudes at the company where he works, Google. In amidst the description of personnel and management reviews and how to handle dud projects, he pointed out that in a world with a population of 6.4 billion, good enough isn't really any good at all. In the video of his remarks, he says in connection with the standards of performance required by individuals in the new economy at 3:07: "It's not the best by your standards, it's the best in the world standards. Don't play League of Ireland football, play Champions League."

He says it in a matter-of-fact way, but if that isn’t fighting talk then I am not quite sure what is. When it comes to brain power and knowledge capability, Ireland is a gold mine. A gold mine people seem, almost willfully, to ignore. Ireland has many great things going for it and an educated population has to be one of the greatest attributes on what would be a very long list. It has well over 800,000 people who have completed third-level education of some kind. (We'll leave out the half a million that are coming through the system for the while.)

The one great opportunity of the Digital Age is to be able to take an idea, test it out against reality and get valuable feedback quickly and cheaply. To be able to fail fast and move on is the greatest potential force for liberation that we have available to us right now.

We can destroy false assumptions with a free or almost free web page; we can crush bad ideas that seemed oh-so-brilliant by getting real feedback in real time. We can blow away any notion of what we think we should be doing and focus on what we really need to be doing by simply putting those ideas into a shared digital form.

A very simple example: I put up a whitewall on tumblr last week to provide a scrapbook for ideas for this site. My assumption was that the more I read about Social Media the more new ideas I would have for articles. Within two days I realised that this was not the way to go. All I had available to me were comments and clips that everyone else was passing around. There was nothing new. I have now repurposed that site so I can store clips and links to things outside the Social Media world that I think might affect or be relevant in some way.

It was as lovely morning as one could find on the west coast of Ireland where I found myself sitting in my car on the streets of the lovely city of Galway. But my specific location is irrelevant. What I’m about to say probably applies to any place with more than two streets. End of caveat, moving on:

My enjoyment of the new day’s splendour was marred only by the fact that like so many other things in my car recently my music system was kaput. I was out on an errand at an unusual time for me and I found myself in a pretty nasty traffic jam. “Bugger,” was something like the word I used to describe my predicament. As I sat there quietly going nowhere fast, novel and interesting ideas started to bubble up in my mind as there wont to do when said mind is not required for its normal assignments.

In fact I had a number of good ideas, for me anyway, in quick succession and in the silence of my car I suddenly felt the need to talk about them with someone. But, alas, I only had myself for company. Wondering if anyone else was in a similar predicament, I looked around and noticed that there was all these other people sitting in their cars all by themselves too. Were they having any brilliant ideas they wanted to share? I thought to myself. No, I replied to myself, their radios are probably working.

Clearly a lot of work went into this NBC Olympic Pulse site but not a great deal of thinking. As a piece of engineering it's fine. But aggregating Twitter streams is no longer bleeding-edge technology. Not that it ever really was. The clunky design of both page and visual representation is definitely not to my taste but I have seen a couple of tweets that have appreciated the style of the page. So as ugly to my eye as it is I shan't be spending anytime criticizing the look of the page.

However, as a demonstration of Social Media in action it is a complete fail.

It is a fail because the mentality that informed the conception of the site is not a mentality that is conducive to operating in the Social Media world that we now all find ourselves in whether we recognize it or not. It is a mentality that operates on a linear process which says: we decide what information, news events, sporting events, entertainment and so on that we think interests you, we get it for you, we package it for you, we give it you. A one-way process that noticeably lacks the idea of dialogue.

Dr. Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona, president of Engineers Ireland, and member of the Irish Innovation Taskforce, gave a keynote at the Dublin Web Summit a few weeks ago.

He began by giving us some history. 30 years ago, he was a PhD student in TCD's computer science department. In 1981, he had his first visit to Silicon Valley because at that time TCD computer science had some links with Stanford computer science. When he went to the computer science department he met two young guys working on graphics hardware, Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy, who later went on to co-found Sun Microsystems. Chris thought "we're as good as these guys, why can't we set up a company like this from Dublin, Ireland". He talked to other people at home doing interest things with software and hardware ("geeks like me") and they decided that they were going to start a company.

John Collins interviewed me recently for an article he was writing for the Irish Times on life in 2030. Here are the full answers to his questions which may be of interest.

Human-computer interaction: the PC of 20 years ago had a keyboard, mouse and screen (although in terms of spec it was less powerful than most mobile phones). Microsoft is releasing Project Natal this year removing the need for a controller when playing Xbox games. How might we interact with computers in 20 years time?

Gareth Morgan interviewed me recently for an article about geotagging and social media in New Scientist magazine. Here is a longer version of my answers that may be of interest.

Do you see location-based social media apps appealing to users? If so, any thoughts on why?

I attended an invited talk at NUI Galway last year by Gerry McKiernan (blog, homepage) from Iowa State University. Gerry is an Associate Professor at the University and has been working in the area of science / technology libraries since 1987. His slides are available here.

Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter, gave a talk about some of the elements of the Social Web that he thinks are particularly important, including networks of niche communities and real-time topic-centric content.

He started off by telling us to close our eyes, and imagine we were in a big room: in one corner is your mom, in another is your boss, in another is your football team, your ex-wife, your girlfriend, and so on, and everyone in the room now knows everyone else in the room. We should be horrified by such a scenario, but this is Facebook.

These are some notes I made from the talk by Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, at the Dublin Web Summit. The event MD Mark Little said to begin with that he had read somewhere that Matt's long term aim was to create a movement, and he certainly has.