I’m a big literature fan – I graduated college with a degree in English – and one of my all-time favorite authors is James Joyce.

Yes, James Joyce – he of the incomprehensible. He got denser and denser with each book, but, to me, he’s still the finest English writer since Shakespeare.

He’s not the most quotable author, simply because of the density of his work. For example, one of his best quotations is the last page or or so of Ulysses, an inner monologue of Penelope giving in to the temptations of the flesh. Closer to music than prose.

That said, Joyce does have some sound bites (to use today’s vernacular) that are accessible and memorable. One of my favorites is the following:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

— (virtually) the last lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was thinking about this quotation last week (why? I dunno), and it made me think of the internet, the web, and Wikipedia (in particular).

These virtual areas are, to a great extent, the “uncreated conscience of my race”: The online world is capturing, organizing (thanks, Google) and explaining the sum of everything for the whole human race.

It used to be groups of people (communities, traveling tribes), then cities and religions, then universities that took on such high-arching tasks.

Now the online world is the teacher, memory bank and zeitgeist – past, present and future – of all that we know we know. And then some. For better or worse.

Now, I’m not the first to see this relationship, of virtual to reality in the fourth dimension (time), but it really struck me after recalling the Joyce quotation.

Mash-ups (and associated open APIs [esp. HTML] ) really make this all possible, along with the power of the masses. I had to look up “snooker” today at Wikipedia, and there was so much knowledge about this game/sport that it was overwhelming.

Sure, some of the data is probably wrong/biased, but that’s what the community will correct.

So we’re collecting data that will be – to some degree – the sum total of what we are, what we know, what we believe and so on.

That’s impressive. And, to some degree, accurate.

Yet I read a news headline yesterday that made me think that, while we are collecting and centralizing information, we are also doing the opposite of aggregation: We are rapidly moving toward a strong decentralized form of “uncreated conscience.”

The headline?

Nokia to buy Navteq for $8.1 billion.

Nokia is a HUGE phone maker, and very forward thinking. Navteq is one of the largest GPS/mapping companies – and there are really only a handful of such companies.

When an 800-lb gorilla shells out serious money (in whatever form: stock/cash etc) for a scarce and valuable resource, it makes one take notice.

I did.

One of the touchstones of internet visionaries is that innovation happens at the edges: In other words, it’s not going to be Sun or Microsoft doing the “next big thing” on the web, it’ll be some small start-up founded in a dorm at Stanford University.

Yeah, like Google.

While Sun, MS and Google will continue to contribute to the growth of the web, it’s the people who just have an idea, a passion, that’ll change the web. Or move us off the web to something different, as Usenet/Gopher/Veronica etc gave way to this World Wide Web.

(Sir) Tim Berners-Lee just wanted a way to share documents at CERN. Whoops, it became the web.

eBay I didn’t get it. A garage sale online? And you’re buying from people you don’t know a continent (ocean…) away? Sure, I’ll be doing that…(not!). And the business model? eBay takes a small percentage of each sale (garage sale, remember, so they weren’t – at launch – selling BMWs). OK, take your cut of my sale of a dented copper cannister set for $5…

Seemed ridiculous.

Seems brilliant today.

OK, that’s my (over)view of innovation starts at the edges.

Today – as the Nokia purchase confirms to me – the innovation that is happening at the edges also includes the innovation at the edges that will remain at the edges, or pushed to the edges.

What the hell does that mean?

Well, it’s great that’s there this big honkin’ thing called Wikipedia, and there are search engines that can give me this or that, but my car just broke down outside of Hutchinson, KS: Who can I call for a tow, and – most importantly – who should I call so I, a city slicker whose knowledge of cars extends to opening the hood and confidently proclaiming, “Yep, that’s an engine” – don’t get fleeced?

Powerful stuff.

And before you say anything, yes, such an edge capability would be useful in most areas. Yes and no. Big city/suburb, you go to the Name (with a capital N) shop, or the one that looks best. Might not be the best bang for your buck, but you’re trying to not get totally screwed. In a town with two stations, and they both look like they were built in the 1930s and both run by some dude called, for whatever reason, “Dude,” it’s more compelling. One Dude will fix your car for $20 and that carton of cigarettes you have. The other Dude will sell your spare tire for a hit of smack.

It comes down to the “all news is local” concept. Apps that may – or may not – take data from centralized locations and delivering them where they are needed.

That’s powerful stuff.

Consider an area such as a college campus. Where are the emergency phones? (Fire, crimes, someone is following me!…). This doesn’t necessarily need to be in an uber-centralized place like Google or Wikipedia. But if I’m a student at Farber U., I should be able to pull that data up – via a centralized app that recognizes my location or something I subscribe to (RSS feed, for example).

I’m not articulating this well – gee, that’s a first.

But I guess I’m trying to say the following:

• Innovation happens at the edges: I know this will continue.
• Edge innovations of value become centralized: I know this will continue, as well.
• Fruits of centralization are being pushed to the edges: But, more and more, in a very targeted, localized manner. This is the internet’s – and telco’s – next frontier.
• Some edge innovations of value will remain there: Centralized weather pushed to location makes sense; the Avocado Ripeness Meter (making this up), however brilliant, is only useful in Castro, CA. At the edge.

Well, I began with a quotation; let’s end with another. This one explains, better than all I have written before, the value of The Edge:

“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”

“Barely–barely.”

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”

Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano