This was reminded to me today when I read a poignant observance in the Bob Lefsetz Letter, which really, really made me think about how I contribute, and collect, and gain satisfaction (or not) from what I contribute (daily work).  Most of what I’ll discuss below, however, has to do with Yosemite.  I expect Bob will have no problem with my reprinting his post below.

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… Yosemite is an amusement park of the mind.  Rather than going on rides, being turned upside down by mechanical contraptions, you look at the landscape and your mind does somersaults.  How did this happen?  It’s hard to imagine a glacier that creates Half Dome, and how can El Capitan be almost perfectly vertical?

At the visitor center near Yosemite Falls there’s a bit of cell service.  But you get no e-mail on your BlackBerry, you’re disconnected from everything deemed important.  You’re placed in natural perspective.  We’re here for such a very short time.  What do we want to do, what do we want to accomplish?

Money won’t help you if you’re hiking in Tuolomne Meadows and it starts to rain.  Rich people get no better view from Glacier Point than poor.  In Yosemite, we’re all in it together.

On a nature walk behind the Ahwahnee Hotel, the ranger told us the John Muir story.  It’s stuck with me.  It’s shown me that those Americans not on the cover of “Us”, not featured in the “Forbes” 500 are not losers, but in many cases winners.  Money is not the only priority.  You need it to live, but how much?

Would you rap if there was no Biggie, no Jay-Z?

Would you play the guitar if there was no Eddie Van Halen?

Would you be in the music business if David Geffen hadn’t made all that money?

If not, give up.  Please.  You’re hurting yourself.  And you’ll leave no lasting mark.

But if you need to play, don’t lament that you’re not a millionaire.  The music should be enough.  If you’ve got a roof over your head, if you can pay the bills, you’re on the map.  Affecting a coterie deeply is more important than being a momentary comet, burning brightly and then flaming out.

So don’t do what you should do, do what you want to do.  Even if your chosen field is not perceived to be a road to riches.  Who knew all those chefs would become stars on the Food Network?  Who knew you could make a career in extreme sports?  Who knew gaming would outstrip both music and movies in revenue?

I’m not saying to forgo an education.  Fundamentals are important.  Only by establishing a foundation do you have a place to build.

It’s time to establish your own independence.  To make your own decisions.  So when you’re on your deathbed, surrounded by loved ones who will soon reach their demise also, you’ve got no regrets.

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Anyone who hasn’t been to Yosemite, who has reasonable means to go there, should go   Bob is right.  The magnitude, the amplitude and majesty of nature’s might must be witnessed, serves to humble any size of ego that approaches, tames it, and suggests much greater things extant and capable in this life we all share.

This is what I find striking.  At the age of 16, filled with libido and pop culture, I filed Yosemite in the “must take kids to” category, for the impression it made upon me.  I imagined coming back with my own kids, doing some mountain biking, camping with some tents, spending more time there exploring, much more time than my brief visit with my parents had allowed, and sharing this experience with my future family.  Twenty years later I have a family of my own and I plan to bring them to Yosemite at the first opportunity… very likely this September!

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, “organized the world’s information” through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user’s expressed location (I am here), a user’s intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

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Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World…. what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed…

(this is a repost from my October 3rd 2008 post on the AOL Design Blog “ControlShift”)

It is also fun to strategize and plan ways to move the long tail into the high-value web experiences, and begin to see it work.

What’s most exciting (and tense) I think is watching competition.  Love.com is wading in a slew of aggregator broth, or more accurately, sharing a hot-tub of semantic soup with these folks.  My current list is as follows:  .

• Meehive (based on Kosmix)
• Loud3r
• Kosmix
• WNN
• JPZenger
• Evri
• NewsSift
• Alltop
• IceRocket
• Apture

If anyone has any other adds on companies doing this stuff, please send them.  I can be reached at grantcerny ) a t ( gmail.com.  Thanks!!!!