Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The Strategist's Soulmate


While sifting through "My Watchlist" on Diigo, the tagging and bookmarking epicenter of Web 2.0, I came across FruFru FourOne while searching for tags related to military strategy and political decision making. FruFru is an avid, frequent social bookmarker, with more than 10,000 tags, hundreds of bookmarked sites, and an flourish of group followers, FruFru is the amagamation of the intellectual, the Web 2.0 junky, and my perfect social bookmarking soulmate (plus FruFru is a she). Initially, I had to wade through the knee-deep topics of FruFru's interests: including 215 tags on Politics, 237 tags on strategy, 167 tags on technology, and over 4,000 tags on blogging and reading. What is remarkable about FruFru, is the frequency to which she posts comments, and suprisingly, how thorough the comments are. For an example I turned to a strategy bookmark concerning how to publically speak and "mingle." FruFru offered an extremely detailed comment, with a 4-step directions process in how to properly achieve the goal of "mingling," beginning with:
Casually approach the group and discreetly introduce yourself to the person closest to you without drawing too much attention. Use a lower voice than the rest of the group. Do this without pulling the person out of the main group. If there's a gap in the group, place yourself there otherwise stand in a location where the other person doesn't have his/her back to the main group.
While exploring bookmarks in FruFru's "military" section I came across a very interesting article entilted "Why the U.S. Loses 'Small Wars'" In this discussion Larry Kahaner discusses how the historical background of assymetric warfare, where "the relationship between the combatants is decidedly unbalanced," often leads to guriella tactics, prompting
contemporary small forces that use simple, durable and easy-to-use and obtain weapons, mainly the venerable AK-47 rifle backed up by Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
The most interesting aspect of FruFru's tagging is that while it is quite copious, every bookmark I came across, even when it was not related to my field, was surprising and engaging. I felt like I established a connection with another individual that shared my passion for knowledge, not simply military history, the historical method, politics, and the like, but everything from Design with Intent, a handbook for sustainable architecture, to Visual Literacy: An E-Learning Tutorial on Visualization in Communication.

FruFru has a whole host of a list of great resources, including news listings, how-to-guides, online learning tools, fascinating obscure topics, posts on my particular interests, and a variety of well-informed, well-discussed comments. FruFru is my social bookmarking soulmate because she offers intellectual discussion in a variety of disciplines, including my own, and offers insight into each of these disciplines. When reading through her recent comments I came across an article on Mendel's Law of Dominance. FruFru astounded me with engaging, intellectual commentary:

Offspring that are hybrid for a trait will have only the dominant trait in the phenotype. While Mendel was crossing (reproducing) his pea plants (over and over and over again), he noticed something interesting.When he crossed pure tall plants with pure short plants, all the new pea plants (referred to as the F1 generation) were tall.

It is remarkable how FruFru seems to have command of a variety of different disciplines, which is evident in her well-discussed commentary. Through FruFru's level of frequency in her bookmarking posts, her impressive level of commentary, her intellectual inquiries, and her captivating list of useful sites, I found my social bookmarking soulmate in not just another purveyor of strategy, politics, and history, but a passionate intellectual exploring the realms of other disciplines.

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