The name of the game is organization, synthesis, and navigation.
Organization - The various modalities of the internet (blogs, social networks, static/dynamic web pages, flash movies, open source, etc.)
Synthesis - How is this information at these various addresses synthesized, that is to say can we begin to synthesize information from various sources, so as to begin to get rid of redundancies? Can search engines (or some other app-perhaps some sort of data mining technology) synthesize this information so that when you type in a search you are not presented with 564,000 webpages on subject X (I never look past page 3 anyway) but rather an intelligent synthesis of those results. So that perhaps instead of a chronology that lists webpage A, webpage B, webpage C, ad infinitum, (which contains perhaps a personal blog, a wikipedia page, a science journal, an excerpt from a NY times article, a forum discussion-all with varying biases, relevancies, lengths) we are presented with an intelligent synthesis of this information, perhaps via some sort of powerful data mining algorithm similar to that of Amazon...?
Navigation - Who owns the web? That is to say barring any top-down conspiracy theories and what have you, is it not reasonable to suggest that Google owns a large portion of it? Not sure how many searches Google has daily, I'd venture to say it's somewhere in the hundred millions if not more, but is not right to assume that whatever algorithm/classification method they're using to index all the information that currently exists virtually; it is they who currently "present" the faceted surface of the web to you. They control what is shown and what is deemed irrelevant. Google acts as my home page and I would say it acts as a veritable "gate" to that differentiated mass of electrons we so dutifully dub, The Web.
Thoughts about a "walking physical web..." More to come later? Web 3.0-Physical space and virtual space merging...
Monday, October 1, 2007
Blogger Play
Perhaps you have all seen this? Not sure...
I'm new to blogging so it's slightly exciting.
Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.
http://play.blogger.com/
I'm new to blogging so it's slightly exciting.
Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.
http://play.blogger.com/
We need to rethink a couple of things...
I'm not even going to begin to unpack everything contained in this brilliant little video. But what strikes me as interesting is that I'm adding to the web as I'm writing this. I determine in some small part the course of this "collaboregate" collaborative-aggregate, my word damn it... Don't steal it. But it's so easy isn't it? Just highlight and right click. Which I suppose is a great introduction to this little number. Enjoy.
You should watch this if you plan on living in the present:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
You should watch this if you plan on living in the present:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Brave New World Wide Web
So many things to think about so little time. Since I've been rambling all morning I may as well continue with the trend. Couple more things I wanted to bring up. And again, these are ideas which need to be unpacked and scrutinized, I'm simply supplying little kernels, a very cursory brainstorming session here...
Web 2.0 being shall we say dependent on dynamic interaction leads me to believe that there's still room for web 1.0 and that stasis a la "old web" is just one of the many modalities that the internet will differentiate into (see previous post on internet as organism). What struck me as interesting as well was the issue of frequency of interaction between human user and machine interface-web surface if you will and of course how dynamically that surface changes (old web, surface changes very little, new web surface is constantly changing/updating). I bring this up for a variety of reasons many of which I'm certain I'm not even aware of. What is clear to me however is that there is an ever decreasing time interval between my physical self and the collection of virtual selves or representation of selves (i.e. myspace accounts, blogs, emails, etc) that exist on the web. That is to say, I think of an "idea" as I have in the shower about 10 minutes ago, and then it takes X amount of time to update my "virtual selves and appendages" so that they may reflect the thoughts of my physical self... Simply put, our virtual reflection on the surface of the web, is becoming increasingly tied into our physical self. I think it a safe assumption to say that personal pages (virtual appendages of our physical selves, i.e. virtual identities...) of the old web updated less frequently than they do now. My question is, as I write this so that my virtual self can be in compliance with my physical self, is "How much are we going to become a slave to our virtual reflection, fettered by a constant desire to update and change information so that it remains "factual" simply for the sake of being correct?!" And I say this not to be reactionary, or dramatic but simply to say that it is an issue perhaps worthy of discussion from a philosophic, social and technological standpoint. Philosophically speaking it raises issues (again this is by no means a dissertation which of course brings up other issues of how blogs and forums create their own type of content-that is, "quick" content) on the self, or shall we say the multiple selves or even the delineation of a self apart from other delineated "selves". Which of course brings me to my next topic of how this self (collection of selves) then melts, merges, weaves, what have you into a collective-and not any sort of metaphysical, new age, hippie "collective"-identity! A truly dynamic, interacting, "mappable" collective self! I'm conceptually developing a kind of amazon meets ipod meets wiki model of identity for the jerusalem project, stay tuned... and on another note I think my thesis for the project will have something to do with expanding or at least re-contextualizing identity(ies) within these contested spaces... And of course this is where the technology comes in... While at the wired next fest, I happened upon Yahoo's booth, on display was their new app, FireEagle. Still in development testing, not ready for prime-time use...
http://fireeagle.research.yahoo.com/
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/fireeagle/
Effectively the app will take your position latitude, longitude and share this information with other web based apps, i.e. flickr, myspace, etc. So that your friends, enemies and potential enemies and friends can know your "exact" location at all times... Which bring me back to this idea of frequency of communication between physical self and projected virtual selves... Soon, there will be a virtual representation of your physical self if only locative (but surely not so) for anyone to peruse... Interesting? I think so.
With total transparency comes total responsibility. With total transparency comes invisibility. I'm not sure how to end this...
So, now all I need is an app, perhaps it's out there perhaps we need to write it, that will publish all this information to the many virtual selves that I have out there, without me having to go and post this on my personal blog, my myspace blog, the mediascapes blog, and this email chain... Sooooooon.
Web 2.0 being shall we say dependent on dynamic interaction leads me to believe that there's still room for web 1.0 and that stasis a la "old web" is just one of the many modalities that the internet will differentiate into (see previous post on internet as organism). What struck me as interesting as well was the issue of frequency of interaction between human user and machine interface-web surface if you will and of course how dynamically that surface changes (old web, surface changes very little, new web surface is constantly changing/updating). I bring this up for a variety of reasons many of which I'm certain I'm not even aware of. What is clear to me however is that there is an ever decreasing time interval between my physical self and the collection of virtual selves or representation of selves (i.e. myspace accounts, blogs, emails, etc) that exist on the web. That is to say, I think of an "idea" as I have in the shower about 10 minutes ago, and then it takes X amount of time to update my "virtual selves and appendages" so that they may reflect the thoughts of my physical self... Simply put, our virtual reflection on the surface of the web, is becoming increasingly tied into our physical self. I think it a safe assumption to say that personal pages (virtual appendages of our physical selves, i.e. virtual identities...) of the old web updated less frequently than they do now. My question is, as I write this so that my virtual self can be in compliance with my physical self, is "How much are we going to become a slave to our virtual reflection, fettered by a constant desire to update and change information so that it remains "factual" simply for the sake of being correct?!" And I say this not to be reactionary, or dramatic but simply to say that it is an issue perhaps worthy of discussion from a philosophic, social and technological standpoint. Philosophically speaking it raises issues (again this is by no means a dissertation which of course brings up other issues of how blogs and forums create their own type of content-that is, "quick" content) on the self, or shall we say the multiple selves or even the delineation of a self apart from other delineated "selves". Which of course brings me to my next topic of how this self (collection of selves) then melts, merges, weaves, what have you into a collective-and not any sort of metaphysical, new age, hippie "collective"-identity! A truly dynamic, interacting, "mappable" collective self! I'm conceptually developing a kind of amazon meets ipod meets wiki model of identity for the jerusalem project, stay tuned... and on another note I think my thesis for the project will have something to do with expanding or at least re-contextualizing identity(ies) within these contested spaces... And of course this is where the technology comes in... While at the wired next fest, I happened upon Yahoo's booth, on display was their new app, FireEagle. Still in development testing, not ready for prime-time use...
http://fireeagle.research.yahoo.com/
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/fireeagle/
Effectively the app will take your position latitude, longitude and share this information with other web based apps, i.e. flickr, myspace, etc. So that your friends, enemies and potential enemies and friends can know your "exact" location at all times... Which bring me back to this idea of frequency of communication between physical self and projected virtual selves... Soon, there will be a virtual representation of your physical self if only locative (but surely not so) for anyone to peruse... Interesting? I think so.
With total transparency comes total responsibility. With total transparency comes invisibility. I'm not sure how to end this...
So, now all I need is an app, perhaps it's out there perhaps we need to write it, that will publish all this information to the many virtual selves that I have out there, without me having to go and post this on my personal blog, my myspace blog, the mediascapes blog, and this email chain... Sooooooon.
Xrumer
I've been finding some pretty interesting stuff as a result of my studio research so I thought I'd share a bit more...
This is a 5 minute? video of the program Xrumer, which effectively acts as a spam bot in some ways but is "legal"... Again my knowledge of the field is a bit limited but from what I gather it works by posting whatever message you might want to post on thousands of forums (these forums apparently get updated into the program's database at regular intervals). What this effectively does however is create thousands of "new" links across the surface (interior) of the web. By posting the same message on thousands of forums you are effectively linking a thousand addressses to one particular url. Now imagine 10,000 people doing this and you can see how this may be a bit of clusterfuck. It's obvious that the internet is expanding exponentially daily but I'm curious to know how much of it is """"actual""" usable data-sure I may need to define this but for the sake of the argument I think you get my point. That is to say as the pool of information grows (and I think this is a safe assumption) and becomes transparent (accessible to anyone and everyone) I would argue that it in fact becomes more and more "invisible" as a result of these "faulty linkages" (as the video shows). So as the internet universe keeps expanding (and no doubt it will, I wonder if there will come a cooling-off point akin to our own cosmological universe) I think organization and navigation become extremely sensitive issues. How do you locate what you're looking for? (search engines, yes fine but for how much longer? And surely there are ways to redirect and confuse them) How do you know, when everything becomes a 1 and a 0 what it is that you may be looking for? That is to say, in a world where information is linked and multiplied (redundant if you will), what becomes relevant? How do you know when to stop "researching"? I can easily see someone looking up information on X and not being able to get out of the system for an hour or two, we all know how easy it is to link between pages... I'm not sure where this is all going, there certainly is no central thesis per se other than the glaring fact that information multiplies exponentially and of course it doesn't do it itself as it requires our participation.
BUT. And this may be a big but, what happens when the internet becomes self-automated, self-adjusting, self-sustaining by way of machine to machine communication. Again I'm not sure what this all means but in light of Greg's email regarding the cell animation it becomes pellucid in my mind to imagine the internet as a living, breathing organism, a cancer, a body, choose your metaphor... As the system (internet) grows it differentiates (bottom-up I would gather) into various hierarchical structures all dependent in some way upon one another for sustenance and health-this of course becomes our "job" if you will. It seems to large of an effort to control from a top-down perspective. Perhaps this is of interest?
NOT MY TEXT:
This movie is a demo of the Internet traffic generator. It will be a shocking revelation to those of you who don't realize that human-to-human competition of the past is changing to human-machine-machine-human competition! XRumer, shown in this movie, is a software application that automatically posts your messages to forums, guestbooks, bulletin boards and catalogs of the links (as well as into livejournals and wiki). In a word it is an autosubmitter.
http://www.botmaster.net/movies/XFull.swf
This is where I found the link...
http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com/jspwiki/greatsoftwareengineeringspeechesandpresentations
This is a 5 minute? video of the program Xrumer, which effectively acts as a spam bot in some ways but is "legal"... Again my knowledge of the field is a bit limited but from what I gather it works by posting whatever message you might want to post on thousands of forums (these forums apparently get updated into the program's database at regular intervals). What this effectively does however is create thousands of "new" links across the surface (interior) of the web. By posting the same message on thousands of forums you are effectively linking a thousand addressses to one particular url. Now imagine 10,000 people doing this and you can see how this may be a bit of clusterfuck. It's obvious that the internet is expanding exponentially daily but I'm curious to know how much of it is """"actual""" usable data-sure I may need to define this but for the sake of the argument I think you get my point. That is to say as the pool of information grows (and I think this is a safe assumption) and becomes transparent (accessible to anyone and everyone) I would argue that it in fact becomes more and more "invisible" as a result of these "faulty linkages" (as the video shows). So as the internet universe keeps expanding (and no doubt it will, I wonder if there will come a cooling-off point akin to our own cosmological universe) I think organization and navigation become extremely sensitive issues. How do you locate what you're looking for? (search engines, yes fine but for how much longer? And surely there are ways to redirect and confuse them) How do you know, when everything becomes a 1 and a 0 what it is that you may be looking for? That is to say, in a world where information is linked and multiplied (redundant if you will), what becomes relevant? How do you know when to stop "researching"? I can easily see someone looking up information on X and not being able to get out of the system for an hour or two, we all know how easy it is to link between pages... I'm not sure where this is all going, there certainly is no central thesis per se other than the glaring fact that information multiplies exponentially and of course it doesn't do it itself as it requires our participation.
BUT. And this may be a big but, what happens when the internet becomes self-automated, self-adjusting, self-sustaining by way of machine to machine communication. Again I'm not sure what this all means but in light of Greg's email regarding the cell animation it becomes pellucid in my mind to imagine the internet as a living, breathing organism, a cancer, a body, choose your metaphor... As the system (internet) grows it differentiates (bottom-up I would gather) into various hierarchical structures all dependent in some way upon one another for sustenance and health-this of course becomes our "job" if you will. It seems to large of an effort to control from a top-down perspective. Perhaps this is of interest?NOT MY TEXT:
This movie is a demo of the Internet traffic generator. It will be a shocking revelation to those of you who don't realize that human-to-human competition of the past is changing to human-machine-machine-human competition! XRumer, shown in this movie, is a software application that automatically posts your messages to forums, guestbooks, bulletin boards and catalogs of the links (as well as into livejournals and wiki). In a word it is an autosubmitter.
http://www.botmaster.net/movies/XFull.swf
This is where I found the link...
http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com/jspwiki/greatsoftwareengineeringspeechesandpresentations
Thursday, September 27, 2007
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