Maybe all those opportunities you’re not taking, weren’t actually opportunities in the first place.

This simple insight got me thinking. I love getting excited about the latest thing, that just came to my mind. But rarely do I manage to sit down and execute it.

Most of the time, that doesn't really bother me. The next idea is just around the corner and by jumping ship and taking on the next awesome idea, the excitement never stops.

This creates something like a sea of potential chances. And it feels great, to swim through it, knowing that I could implement any of them, if I wanted to.

But what if those opportunities weren’t really opportunities, as long as they are not realized? To me, that would change the picture dramatically. Instead of floating through all those endless opportunities, I would suddenly stray through them, unable to find at least one that I can commit to.

I can't deny that there is some truth in it. So I decided to finally grab one of those ideas and squeeze it until I can see whether or not it has potential to be a long term companion for me.

To my surprise, it's not a very hard thing to do. All I need is some focus, to not work on any of my other projects, for as long as it takes to build a first presentable draft of it and then I see, where I can take it from there.

This means that for the next 4 weeks I'm going to work solely on "my idea". And I plan to have the first version ready by beginning of next month (which is May). I'm curious to see how good all those loose ideas really are, when it comes to make them a reality...

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring. ― David Bowie

During my stay in Bologna this summer, I had the chance to see the amazing "David Bowie is..." exhibition at MAMbo and I must say, it impressed me. Deeply!

Coming from a completely different background and time, Bowie was never really on my radar. So it may not be surprising that it literally blew my mind to get a glimpse of the holistic vision this man had as an artist. There may be parts of his oeuvre that are still not my cup of tea, but two particular aspects of Bowie's life and art definitely resonated with me:

• his ability to treat everything in life as a potential influence for his his art and
• the personal strength to break with traditional role cliches and therefore pave the way for others to claim their right to make their own decisions.

Wow!

No question, the web and search in particular have learned a lot of new tricks over years. It can do more things faster. – And it even comes with me (as long as it is not the U-Bahn in Berlin).

Unfortunately its nature has changed as well, which is most visible when looking at search these days.

A search result today is focused on offering services.

Ads on top of the page, a few high ranking mega optimized professional services as organic results and at the bottom of the page: more ads.

Roughly 2/3 of the sceen space is occupied by someone who paid for jumping in to my eye. – Not because my search engine of ‘choice’ thinks this might be relevant to my query.

But even if you put the commercialization of the search result page aside for a moment, the organic results are just as narrow focussed as the commercial ones.

An Example

Looking at a topic I’m definitely interested in: sailing.

Ads (9!) and commercial offerings. That’s it mainly.

Where have all the private pages gone? The blogs?

Blogs? Well, that should be easy: Blog + query and there you go. Well, here they come: SEO optimized blogs whose main purpose is boosting the visibility of the commercial offerings you were finding in the first place. 😵

Interesting views? An independent website? Even editorial articles are rarely to be found. And non commercial pages are often outdated or have been abandoned altogether.

It seems that content discovery has completely moved to social and has dried out search.

On the one hand I should say that’s fair enough. Truth is, it reflects my own behavior pretty good as well.

But two aspects leave me doubting if this is really working well for us, or if we are maybe accepting to live in a web that is getting smaller and smaller every day:

• One is the rigorous and narrow view on morality most social networks have, which narrows down content I can discover on their platforms.
• And the other aspect is the circle of likeminded people that surrounds me in social networks. They only share stuff I would like anyway (the well known filter bubble effect). This means, I deliberately have to start looking for specific people in order to get access to new content of a specific topic. It just seems that it is no longer possible to actively search for something completely random or new.

And even more, stumbling upon something I wouldn’t even know that I was looking for, can rarely happen these days – and search is definitely not a good starting point for this anymore.

Solutions?

My world has definitely gotten smaller. The range of undiscovered stuff I am able find on the internet has narrowed dramatically. And so the question is: what can we do about this? Or if no one else cares, what could I do?

Search somehow differently? Use link directories like curlie.org?

Browsing Wikipedia and following the sources usually works pretty good. That way I’ve found the NYT article about echo chambers above. I should maybe start refering to Wikipedia as a search engine with additional context.