i think about this incredible fucking thing to which we are connected up. to which everything can be linked in a context with everything else. of describing things in such a way that the connections between them merge and simplify and ramify, and the vast possible intensity of this description.
i look at blogspace and the blog web - with its RSS(1.0) feeds and interlocking commentary like the trackback system, it looks like it could be a kind of bootstrap; as the collective recommendation and annotation of things on the web, for the denser semantic web over which serious inference is possible. annotation both of web things and to a possible extent, ideas in themselves, the kind of sense they make, the kind of paths they form.
i wonder about the usefulness of services like daypop - as reversible filter, tending towards the known or the unknown. catering towards a link race, also encouraging a dismissal of the overhyped which can work both positively and negatively.
with a trackback-like system the directionality of comment posting changes, from leaving comments on a site to making comments in your own space, and choosing connections. with a foaf-like system this should become easier to filter and perhaps more interesting to follow from the outside. the reading of a journal of a literary circle, like idea streams that the viewer can slip into.
i try to think this story is about the split of blogspace into two different applications, a link or idea discussion system like a trackbacked quicktopics, like a minutely distributed usenet; and a system of personal journals, of feeds on different topics, or describing the story of a project or the minutiae of someone's life. then i consider that this is an unfair dichotomy, that the second kind of items though being the subjects of the first are also part of the system of the first.
the present distribution or perhaps just the tools for blogspace/rss at the moment feel - feel like something missing. perhaps it is the constraints and statements of the web browser which feel shaky. that relatively centralised model seems to tend to centrifuges of personality. the speed with which ideas are raised and dismissed in blogspace - without time to reflect or space to return to a thread, keep it alive - speaks of something missing in the model.
lectern is a good rss reader for perl/gtk.
the rest of this was a small-circulation personal email which it was suggested i stick on line
i spent too long in blogspace, then. an hour tops - maybe less. i left it confused and angry and sad. spinning around friends and friends' friends; the interconnected story, chunked; the adventure shared.
sad that quinn was being stalked, harassed through all her comms channels by some arse-faced fruitcake can do this because her husband is halfway famous but not always tactful, and because the information openness she practises (as part of a more general spiritual thing, i guess) is open to abusers. that she felt compelled to lock-in to a heisenblog situation, that knowingness in the attack/defense cycle of both parties.
sad that the distilled and frequently wonderful vitriol of rageboy has vanished from my inbox, dilutes itself into blogwash now. life lists, interconnected loves, antipsychotic drugs. comfort in clique of the self-erected. but quieter there - no need for feedback, no sense of message. no immediacy, a false gravitas.
sad, not a little angry at the cyclical blogfest closer to home. chris heathcote's FOAP idea, elision into matt jones' cunting lazyweb. i had a nice mail from chris, having been pointed at my spacenamespace by jibbering jim. 'it seems we've been having similar, if slightly different, ideas' he began. something jarred a little for me, then. rambling questions of what seemed to me an ontological nature, requests for thoughts. replied at length, running through my ventures with DAML, on building the structures in triplespace.
mail slow and ponderous there, but having a nice field, the list a compromise immediacy between web randomcast and individual, crafted or stuttered person-to-person cries. i get a feeling now for why giles retreated from blogspace, why he couldn't make it work for him, headshakingly applaud. sidetrack.
i wouldnt claim immediacy or originality for my spacenamespace experiments. they're born out of long f2f conversations with paul@state51, with dmiles on irc, brief chats with danbri and with matt webb, #bots fantasies on irc with sayke, 'with wearables, we can annotate space, wiki-style'/ i could draw a tracer trail of credits behind that.
can i deny to myself the taste of sour grapes mixed with that kind of anger? coverage. the lazyweb - spit it out. that the adulated, self-aggrandizing, self-quoting banter of matt jones on social software and psychogeography gets better coverage is inevitable; that if those were ideas we'd had and not acted on, i'd have no reason to feel confused.
that a week's hacking work, some reasonably deep thought, multiple interfaces and a bit of presentation seems to have less valency than a half hour's worth of someone's blogging time. that many people-years of my friends' time and energy needs the loose word of a shyster to make it over the hump into web consciousness. having built implementations, proposed solutions, opened work up for feedback - feeling like a shabby corner store in the shadow of someone else's lazymall.
witness these circular discussions, closed-group commentaries, software dreams dissected, argued, analysed. the arching assumption that to talk about it enough, means it will happen, starts to behave like an assumption that it's already happened - the design already drawn, codewritten, interface socialised; in blogworld, having talked the theme out, they get on with fostering the next mayfly meme.
as a person of decent intelligence and lousy self-confidence i am put off designing implementations by this rush. to be dismissive - a hundred indiffferent instances thrown up by late starters and slow thinkers - a plethora of underwhelming choice - a bubble over, and a looking for something else. then, the wonderful semantic web dream, the shortcutting of trad evolutionary paths, the resonance of a hundred 'similar, if slightly different' things becoming something bigger and better than any of us could have imagined.
blogworld feels like a cloud over that vision.