Oscar Wilde

A couple years ago, when I was invited to speak at Nokia OpenLab, I met a guy named Jari Pasanen. He was a VP at Nokia and he delivered the opening keynote.

Less than a minute into his keynote, he expressed his gratitude to Nokia for letting him be himself and still climb the ladder. Jari looked more like a Viking Biker (a Viker) than a shot-caller at some multinational. He stood at least 6’2″, had a shaved head, and wore earrings and black motorcycle boots.

I’ve been similarly blessed. But it hasn’t been because of any one company. Rather, it’s been the whole f*cking internet.

Over the last decade, I’ve become an expert of sorts at how some things work on the web. And that means that I’ve been able to help other people make sense of something very big, powerful and complex.

The result is that I’ve been able to make a good living being myself. I make decent money wearing jeans and sneakers, and helping older, richer, more powerful guys figure out how their businesses should use the web.

I’ve gotten to travel to a lot of cool places and meet a lot of cool people and even made a bit of a name for myself. Sometimes, when I roll into a conference, the bitches be all like “OMG, CT Moore! Ooh, I want to have your baby, CT!”

Okay, well, not exactly. But from time to time, I do get some recognition from complete strangers, and that feels kinda nice.

Pai Mei

The point is that what it means to be an expert is changing because we live in a world where technology moves so fast that most of it becomes obsolete before anyone can really master it.

Experts use to be people that mastered using certain tools toward a certain end. Now, experts are people that have a lot of experience trying new tools and finding new ways to achieve the same old goals.

Yesterday was fire, today was electricity, and tomorrow will be cold-fusion. There’s not enough time to spend mastering any of them, but that doesn’t really matter as long as we can light and warm our homes.

Just look at the world around you! Look at the things you do and how much they’ve changed in recent years.

Did you ever think that so many tools would seem so primitive (pagers, flip phones, cash)? Did you ever imagine that you’d be doing things this way? Can you imagine how you might be doing them tomorrow?

So Mike Maddaloni tells me that it’s been six whole months since Nokia brough a rag-tag bunch of geeks (including me) in Helsinki by Nokia for Nokia Open Lab 2008. Toward the end, I remember someone saying that if only we had had another couple days, we could’ve mapped-out Nokia’s entire strategy for the next year. Well, I think that if we had had any idea of what to expect, we wouldn’t have needed another few days to do that.

For one, I wish I’d known what to expect so that I could’ve scheduled a few video interviews in advance. It’s not every day that you get access to a pool of both Nokia execs and some really forward thinking bloggers from around the world. Then again, with everything that went down, I imagine that scheduling more than a couple interviews would’ve been hell.

All in all, the experienced really changed the way I think about social media and the web. For starters, it taught me that the web and desktops/laptops are not inextricably linked. More importantly, though, it made me realized that, insofar as social media is about people connecting and sharing with other people, the mobile web is going to be a hell of a lot more important than I think most of us realize. In a word, the mobile web will merge the internet and physical world, making for a much more tribal web:

The social web [...] made it possible for people to transcend a physical divide and come together to form a community. What it didn’t do, was afford them the physical experience of community participation.

The mobile web is going to close much of that gap. It will enable to transcend the physical divide when forming and joining communities, but still have some physical experience by including our physical environment in our community interactions.

Other things I learned included (1) don’t trust baggage handlers at Charles de Gaul with your luggage, (2) no matter how Irish you think you are, never try to out-drink a Finn, and (3) keep a close eye on your drink when Estonian hookers are lurking in the club (Nick Bouton can back me on this one).

In any case, here’s the official video diary of the event produced by Nokia. And if you have troube getting it to load, you can always check it out here.