I have begun development of a new site, TradeUps.net, where users will be able to barter with those in their geographic vicinity with the help of tags and Google Maps. It's still in its infancy, and the core components haven't even been written yet, let alone tested. I don't even care if it's already been done before -- it's more of a learning experience. I'll be journaling its development occasionally, starting today.
Read full entry »I find it interesting how advances in web technology come in waves. Weblogs have been around forever, but blogs really came into their own with the development of simple CMS apps that ordinary folks could use (instead of manually editing and uploading every time they had something new to say). And each new advance begets a new problem.
With blogs that incorporate comment systems has arisen a new need: the need to keep track of the comments one has written. I like to follow up on comments that I leave on other people's blogs, so after commenting, I drag the link to a folder in my bookmarks toolbar in firefox. Then I occasionally revisit the links in the folder, deleting where necessary. It's not efficient, and I'd like to see some automation. Some scattered sites and systems have their own systems that work by email, such as LiveJournal and Movable Type. But that's not enough. There needs to be a system independent of the CMS in use by a site. I know others must be feeling just as frustrated.
So I wasn't entirely surprised to see a system appear on the del.icio.us/popular list recently: coComments. I'm signing up for the service as I write this, and I intend to test it thoroughly.
What do you do manually on the web that can be automated? What will the next advance be?
What if web surfers could edit any page on a website? What if webmasters could get webcorrections from users? What if readers could fix typos in blog posts, without leaving nitpicky comments? I've got a plan...
Read full entry »Until recently, I thought my memory was going. Now I realize that it is simply being outsourced.
As Jason Kottke points out, we technophiles are becoming more reliant on data-management systems to track our information. (PDAs, address books, personal wikis, password managers, keyrings, bookmark tagging systems, search engines, et hoc genus omne.) As information access becomes ubiquitous, I will have less distance to reach to find the next relevent piece of information. Each time I rely on an external databank to prop up my memory, my ability to recall that information diminishes — a worrisome prospect. But is this outsourcing of the memory necessarily a bad thing? I'll explore the issue from several angles: philosophical, psychological, societal, technological, and spiritual (a little bit).
Philosophically, this is no different than any other type of augmentation that humans have practiced in the past. I recall saying to a coworker the other day, I'll be the first in line to get a USB port installed in my brain — so I can plug in my 512MB USB drive.
The prospect of becoming a "distributed cyborg" somehow has me reacting differently. From a practical perspective, I lose some control over my data by using decentralized recall. But from a philosophical standpoint, there is no essential difference when one ignores the implementation and details. Apparently, I already have the equivalent of a USB drive stuck in my head, which I had already decided would be a good idea.
Psychologically, we are transforming literal memory to procedural memory. Ever since I started a corporate wiki at my workplace, I've become forgetful of certain commands and parameters that I use frequently, even weekly. But when I need them, I know where to look and how the information is categorized. What used to be nodes filled with data have become references to search terms or hooks into well-known procedures. I have mapped my internal databanks into external data banks — this is a process we have evolved to do quite well.
Societally, we already have a similar system. In the EEA, we remembered who had this skill or that bit of knowledge, and the tribe members would assist each other in areas requiring expertise. Instead of division of labor, division of knowledge.
Technologically speaking, there is no problem. A common thread throughout the history of computing has been the storage, organization, and retrieval of information. Not just any information, but information that otherwise would have been stored, organized, and retrieved by humans. The recent mass adoption of folksonomies has provided a major breakthrough in the classification and structuring of information. Ubiquitous information access is moving towards a reality, with the adoption of peer-to-peer networking and wireless connectivity. No problems here.
Spiritual matters might be relevant as well, not in any earth-shattering way, but in some subtle changes to the structure of our relationships to humanity as a whole (I'm a humanist, so that's as far as I'm going to go with the spiritual side of this topic.) Look to the more distant future, when our minds become more distributed and interconnected, and wonder just how far this distributive intelligence might go. Could we one day be inseperable from the community we live in? What does that say about personhood? What about the distinction between individual and group? Those are questions I don't have the information to answer, but I keep them in the back of my mind.
But, ready or not, here it comes.