The New Yorker Magazine Conference Example

I recently had an opportunity to attend the New Yorker conference. Basically the idea was to throw designers, chefs, architects, politicians, entrepreneurs & other creative types into a blender and see what they all thought the world would look like in 2012.

The reason I attended was that it seemed like an amazingly condensed MyHippocampus-style knowledge event. What could be better than an event designed to make huge cross-genre connections between Will Wright & his video games & Zaha Hadid's architecture or between Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts on geniuses & Cory Booker's inspirational work in Newark.

Now that I've had a chance to write up some of my thoughts, I think it has definitely been a success. MyHippocampus now includes islands of Forgetting, Happiness, Journalists & Doctors and you should see the size of the Morality island. It's growing almost uncontrollably. I just don't seem to be able to help the fact that Jonathan Haidt's talk about the 5 pillars of morality and moral relativism in general seems to color almost everything I'm thinking about. Just fantastic.

My Cory Booker topic prompted me to go out and rent Street Fight, which was definitely worth seeing, even if did get distracted from the point because I couldn't get over the fascinating flown-in-for-the-event press secretary for Sharpe James. Who was that guy?! I'd watch another documentary just on him. I wonder who he's selling his services to for this election.

My other background influence these days is "By Night in Chile," although, more than anything else this may be a good example for why I don't think that MyHippocampus should be a transparent & 'full speed ahead social I-can-see-all-your-thoughts' kind of website. I've been enjoying the book & I've been writing down my thoughts about it, but if you think I'm confident enough to share my 'analysis of the text' with the rest of the world you're crazy.

Overall a one day conference is a tough thing to evaluate. With a roster of stars such as it had, it was tough not to hope for something hugely magical. Instead we're left (as we always are) with some interesting thoughts to ponder, a few neat experiences, and a desire for more hors d'oeuvres in our daily lifes. I think that MyHippocampus will be a good way to encourage the insights gained not to fade away too quickly.

Day 1 - The Launch Honeymoon

You should all launch a website sometime, if for no other reason than the fact that it's just darn cool to see where web traffic comes from. At right are the last 1000 hits. It reminds me a bit of a game I used to play when I was younger where we'd mark out twelve rows on graph paper, then start rolling dice, marking X's and racing to see who made it across the page first. 7 was darn tough to beat, but every once in a while a number like 10 would make an amazing showing. C'mon Morocco! This is starting to prove my theory that the Internet is disproportionately Dutch as well. Has anyone else noticed this?

Happily, besides just watching the hit counter turn over, I've also recorded a new screencast that's a bit shorter & sweeter. Just because the screencasts are fun to watch doesn't mean you shouldn't check out the manifesto & the tour though. There's a lot more to this MyHippocampus idea than just a pretty face and I think it's tough to convey everything I'd like to in the screencasts.

A few people have asked me about how to share the topics within your hippocampus. This is a good question, although you might be surprised that this isn't one of the features we've included to start off with. The reason this isn't high on our priority list is that we really feel MyHippocampus is first & foremost a personal tool. It seems to us that this whole instant sharing of cat-falling-off-the-tv videos is a bit, you might say, empty? "But wait!" you say, "I wanted to share my thoughts about a book!" Well, yes, hopefully those are a good deal more interesting than the cat videos. The problem that we've found however is that when you write something for public consumption, you're immediately hemmed in by a number of constraints. You can't just dash out some thoughts and your entries start looking like reviews. While that's fine in some contexts, we want MyHippocampus to be a place where you can jot down half-thoughts, inklings, and other fragments of ideas that wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

Certainly as time goes on and MyHippocampus evolves, the ability to publish your fully formed thoughts to the world will be a wonderful and important utility. For now though, revel in the fact that this is one place on the Internet that's all yours.

Hippo-lease version 1.0!

Kicking and screaming, MyHippocampus.com has been pushed out the door. I can't quite express how exciting it is to sit back and watch the hit counter go up, but I promise I'll come to my senses soon and get back to work making things even better.

A MyHippocampus screencast tour is probably the place to start if you're interested in finding out more about the site. We're running on an invite system right now, but if you put your email address in the box on the front page, I should be able to get an invite out to you before too long.

Thanks to everyone who's helped me with this process and thanks for all of the helpful comments I've received. Please keep 'em coming.

-Jeff