Present - Wednesday Evening - 12/20/2006

The Bot Problem: More musing on David Weinberger's book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" (which I finished today). The story about the two web sites killed for doing the wrong thing -- one was the site that pinged eBay to grab data from them so that users of their site could examine auctions across multiple vendors (they were found to be guilty of trespassing on eBay). The other was the ThirdVoice site that let their members overlay "sticky notes" on web sites as a way of communicating comments to one another. Here's my take on these. The former is actually a violation of David Weinberger's essence of the web. The interaction between this company and eBay was not a connection between two people. The "ping" was a faceless electronic being that was slipping in to do business that is not interlinking humans with one another. That is why this site broke with "web morality". I thought of this in connection with the issues that "World of WarCraft" is contending with. It seems that when people enter this world, they expect to interact with other people, the otherness of the environment notwithstanding. The participants are cheated of this human interaction when they are secretly sharing their space with bots that are, again, there to do business not connected with interlinking humans to one another. What makes me unhappy about the ThirdVoice outcome is that it seems to me that sticky notes are exactly one person communicating with all the others in their self-identified group of ThirdVoice members. Among the things that they ought to be able to communicate about is other web sites. So their efforts do not seem to be "web immoral" to me.

Flowery Language: Since I am so new at this blogging thing, I feel self-conscious. One of the things that I have learned from being in therapy is that I resort to stuffy, difficult to access language when I want to keep people at a distance. I am not entirely happy about this little diagnosis because I happen to really like words, and some of the ways I like them put together is not particularly accessible. However, some stuffiness is really boring too. I don't think that I have a "web voice". It't too soon to tell if that will be OK. But I can tell that I am attempting something kind of in-between that doesn't strike me as being direct and conversational, nor particularly polished either. It's so funny that I feel vulnerable to criticism and a little scared of it, but at the same time so ridiculously ebullient about doing this. I have this urge to try everything I am thinking of all at once. I am amazing myself sitting here writing after hours of xmas shopping and wrapping. I should be too tired. I am tired. But this feels important and fascinating.

Wiki 2107: I want to write a novel set in 2107. I have been diddling around with lots of small bits of the story. And I know the kinds of things that I think would be important about that world. However, I have found the notion of building the entire world in which this story would be set kind of daunting. As I was out doing my five mile hike today, it hit me that this would be a great use for a wiki. What if I found out how to start a wiki and created some kind of framework for describing what the world would be like one hundred years from now? Would people all over the world help me build this world by adding "facts"? It then occurred to me that I would be sort of stealing the ideas of all these folks if I used this world in my novel. But the fact is, if I were setting it in 2007 or 1907, I would be going out on the web and reading stuff about what the world is like and using facts that I find as background for my novel. Why would this be any different?

My Very Own Stuff dot com: People in a lot of ways are identified with their stuff. What they choose to own and what they feel they need. I know that there are lots of people in the world who have some major catching up to do to get stuff and I hope they do. But there are also a good many countries such as this one where we have blown right past any optimal point in the acquisition of stuff and now the accumulation of stuff is both embarrassing and ridiculous. Why would I need to buy a stuffed bear to go with my books? Why even think of that? So where I am going with this is that I think even the people here who have been trained by TV from birth to collect stuff and never stop are starting to find it all a little tedious. So there are several things that occur to me. Maybe if we shared our stuff on line at a web site, the stuff would not only have more meaning, but we would consider the stuff we have and buy in terms of that meaning. I am picturing a kind of cross between eBay and real estate sales listings. There is some mechanism for "space" which could be rooms and yard or cars and collectible beanie babies or whatever. Folks post pix and comments about their stuff and collect comments. Find other people who have /like /hate the same stuff. Anyway that's one idea. Another is that the pretend stuff from World of WarCraft (for instance) could become another way to have stuff that moves out of games and into social networking. Why can't personal web sites be furnished and bedecked? Finally, and more simply, won't it be the case that the zillions of things already on the web that people go get that are essentially nothing more than bits -- won't those things start to become more interesting and desirable than things that you go out to the mall to buy? And it will take just as much "manufacturing" labor, if not more, to create these kinds of things of comparable cost. So the world of work is going to shift to some pretty strange things.