Brad Neuberg has put together one of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time. The title: Creating a Personal Research Agenda doesn’t do the post justice. Within the post he makes a few incredible revelations.

First, the notion of a personal research agenda is something that every working individual should carry, and be held accountable for (in a professional manner, of course). In a few of my previous posts I’ve commented on the lack of self-learning abilities in new college grads. Brad’s post is right on target…but, I absolutely think it is an industrial fallacy to have to wait for a “sabbatical” to put the agenda together.

Second, and probably more noteworthy to me is Brad’s #5, where is raises the issue of collaboration overload. I’m not sure that we are quite to a level of “overload” just yet. Though I would definitely agree that there is a management “layer” that is missing. I’m also not a believer in the Google-must-solve-every-problem mantra that seems to be rampant. As a user of Gmail, I’m actually fairly happy with it - as an email tool.

I’d recently read a post somewhere where a guy has completely dumped email use in favor of Facebook’s messaging. The fact that you must be “friended” in the Facebook world before you can message eliminates much of the inherent junk in email world. Plus, Facebook (to their credit) have done a good job at protected the masses from SPAM. We’ll see if they can hold their API tight enough to continue to offer innovative services and protect the sanctity of users.

My point is that this isn’t collaboration overload. It is simply more “natural selection” of web functionality (regardless of its version 1.0:2.0).

No. 7 is really tied to No. 5. Linking users, as well as data is important. By linking correctly, we can help prevent potential collaboration overload. Intelligent context switching of systems’ backends based on user preferences and operational domains.

Anyway…Brad’s post is a logical front on many different paths - and very worthy relaying here.