Some things are just plain obvious. In 1994 when I first started an interactive agency in Miami, I saw zero risk in becoming a web guy. Even if I failed, I would have failed at investing my time in the development of a most certain future. But despite the ostensibly obvious nature of so many things, recognizing them at the right time and developing the right perspective is often the difference between winning and losing, between success, survival and failure.

Having the right insights at the wrong time many times over the last 16 years of my web career, but managing to persevere in the face of each adversity, I have become good at recognizing when an idea is ready for prime time. The Synaptic Web is now poised to become that next ‘oh so obvious’ meme which places Echo CEO Khris Loux and many of the other participants of the Synaptic Web Summit in the perfect position to leverage their understanding, insights and vision for ‘how the web works’.

Synaptic Web Summit Details

At the Synaptic Web Summit sponsored by Intel on Saturday March 13, 2010 at 3:00PM live from the Social Media Clubhouse, you too will be able to benefit from this key insight that I believe will define the next generation of social apps even more then ‘web as a platform’ ever did. The Summit will be hosted in a round-table format, livestreamed by TechZulu and Justin.tv in front of a small group of invited press and guests. After the Summit, we will feature a live performance from Hilary York as part of the KUT Live from the Social Media Clubhouse series.

The Synaptic Web Summit will be moderated by Chris Heuer (that’s me) and features leading voices on the Future of the Web. In addition to Khris Loux (who will present a brief keynote), we will be joined by Kevin Marks from BT, Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Saad from Echo and several other special guests to be named in the coming days.

We welcome you to request an invite to participate, but please note that space is extremely limited and we unfortunately are not able to accommodate everyone.

So What is the Synaptic Web

In its most base form, I see it as the idea of looking at the web as an electronic brain that contains an increasingly larger portion of human knowledge. Like the human brain, the more that we have strong synaptic connections created between the different neurons (or content objects/nodes) the smarter the brain becomes.  It’s a close kin to the Semantic web, the idea first presented by Tim Berners Lee that adds some basic linguistic structure to the web along with a common set of design principles for enabling the servers/machines to become smarter in how they communicate with each other. In my view, what’s really important now is more then just the structure and our choice of language, it’s the contextual elements like Twitter’s driving question, “What are you doing?”. It’s the color commentary added to the reporting of simple observations. It’s the richness of understanding how its all interconnected, helping us not only access reviews, but also knowing which reviews to trust. Most importantly, it does much of its technological wizardry invisibly to users, in a true sense, making evident the magic of technology.

As I wrote in this post back in 2005, its when we move past the information economy and embrace the knowledge economy (information applied with purpose or from experience) that things get really interesting. It’s also the stepping-stone for society to move past the knowledge economy and beginning to experience more of the wisdom economy that is just now appearing in the form of social entrepreneurship and open government.

But that’s just my perspective on the really big picture and why I think its so important for us to explore with the smartest minds we know. To really understand the synaptic web, you need to listen to Khris Loux tell the story himself and read more about the bigger picture in the slide presentation that accompanies that talk.

According to Chris Saad, the origins are pretty simple:

The Synaptic Web: Real-time is just the beginning

The Synaptic Web is not an open standard, advocacy group or business. It is not something anyone invented. It is not even something anyone is advocating for or developing. It is simply something we observed and wrote down.

We wrote it down because we needed a conceptual framework from which to design, develop and refine our own product. We then shared it at SynapticWeb.org because others seemed interested in learning more about it. Since then we have continued to refine it and collect examples of other people taking our observations and expanding upon them. By understanding the patterns better, we hope to shed some lights on possible areas of innovation for the community.

Join The Conversation

So on Saturday March 13 at 3pm CST, we hope you can tune into our livestream from the Social Media Clubhouse in Austin, TX (unless you are attending SxSW, in which case you can download the podcast when you get home). Together, we will be exploring more deeply the question of what is the Synaptic Web, what are contemporary examples of it in action today, what the future holds and how you can understand to leverage it in your business.

In closing, I want to express my deep personal thanks to Intel for their sponsorship of the clubhouse and this event in particular. If not for their support and friendship over the years, this would simply not be possible.