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by Jon Udell, http://udell.roninhouse.com/
An excellent article of what is *wrong* with emaiI - see the great example of idealised threading in the Zope group. Idealised. Yet that is what it could be like and IS like in newsgroups read in Agent - but who does that? I even switch on html occasionally these days. I buy food in plastic bags. I don't always bike everywhere.
"When I turned in the first draft of my book, my editor, Tim O'Reilly, said: "This is great, but you ask too much from people." And he was right. I was advocating not just a communication tool, but a way of using it to optimize collaboration. That meant asking people to narrate their work, but also to think carefully about the attention demands they placed on their coworkers, and to label, structure, and layer their communications accordingly. Most people didn't want to do these things, and most people still don't.
"What does all this portend for instant outlining? There's reason to hope. It's been clear to me for a long while that the only thing that might displace email would be some kind of persistent IM. That's exactly what instant outlining is. If it catches on, and it's buzz-worthy enough to do that, we'll have a framework within which to innovate in ways that email never allowed."
Interesting article - but I think that it still won't catch on... persistent internet messageing, nice idea but email remains king IMO. ANY method of collab requires either dumbing the tools right down and working ad hoc OR education in a series of rules and protocols OR human facilitation and email groups + the GroupSense approach to their design and facilitation is a real world solution combining what people know already and do now with gentle nudges to a saner world. Well managed email groups have benefits over the Outlined approach in Radio. Threaded email IS outlined. It is persistent (locally and/or on the web). It is instant when needed, asynch when needed, groups can be defined and structured as needed and you can filter out certain users if you need to!
Why can't these guys use email + mailinglists?
I am cross posting here - originally sent to Dan's Online Group Weblog.
"... All this happened last month in Scottsdale, Ariz., and will be happening again and again as more conference venues get "wired" with wireless."
"... What's going on here?
"As always, the phenomenon is happening first in a reflexive way -- as you may expect, at conferences where the subject is computers. But such phenomena have a way of spreading."
Esther Dyson is reporting on the PC forum - I think it is the first time i have read a report on the mooted shift happening - a room full of people f2f and online at the same time. The future is not being old & bloated & fed intraveinously while we are yourthful online. We will be fully physically alive, solitary or social and mixing the virtual into our actual with ease.
And yes - it happens reflexively at techno events but will soon be ubiquitous.
03/29/2002
"It feels a bit like a homecoming. After years wandering in the cranky wilderness of mix-and-match PCs I'm working again on a computer that feels like it has a soul. The reason I feel like this? The other week I switched from an Intel-based laptop to an iBook."
I have a Dell laptop running Mandrake - and while there is sometheing extra soulful about Debian on the iBook - I have a machine that has plenty of soul! 15" 1600x1200 playing K.D. Lang DVD while I work must be up there... or down pretty deep into soulful. The thing is that hardware aside, to be out of MS is bliss. I feels like being in a good restaurant after hanging out at Mc Donald's for years.
Josh's project - you will need Flash 5.
'Eyebeam, the not-for-profit organization dedicated to art and technology, will host an interdisciplinary panel discussion entitled Social Network Soirée: Discussion, Champagne, Experiment. The event will take place on May 14, 2002 at 6:30pm in Eyebeam's space in Chelsea located at 540 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th Aves. The discussion will address the social dynamics that drive fashion trends, enable salacious gossip, fuel Internet crazes and sustain corporate power structures. Each panelist will use social network analysis to explain a transformation in art, technology, or culture. A cocktail party will follow the discussion, where guests wear wireless badges called meme tags that track and analyze social interaction in real time. To participate in the experiment, guests will mingle, listen to freshly spun electronica, and sip complimentary mini-Moet champagne."
I mention this cause it is interesting and also being the Josh On parent.
Took this years ago - it was the first digital picture i ever took - and i stumbled across it while tidying up. I like it.
"Anita Konkka is a Finnish novel writer. She has published since 1970 eleven novels, essays, radio-plays, and a dream-book. She is a tireless scholar of love and love relationships, problematic ones, too. However, she doesn't portray her characters as enervated by love or otherwise with furrowed brow. In these Finnish latitudes she is able to write about love and its troublesome and unhappy aspects humorously and as though smiling, not derisively or with pity but friendly and understandingly."
Nice to hear from you again Anita!
"Anyway, I wanted to come back to the idea of Linux. It is a careful phrase, 'the idea of Linux'. It occurred to me this morning, as I was reading the technology news and reflecting on the tasks of the day, (I'm not exactly sure how, but that is an interesting side question) that Linux and the whole Open Source movement isn't about the software. It is about community. The Community of Linux."
This is from Aldon Hynes a regular on Psyber-L. I am looking forward to discussion on this whole topic. The idea of Linux to me is central to the psyche in cyberspace. Community is one reason for that, to be sure.
"Davis says that the gee-whiz hello-world days of the Web are over. It's true it was fun (for a few minutes) to watch a fish tank on a webcam. But that was not the promise or purpose of the Web. Maybe he thought that's what it was. If so, he missed the point. It's about publishing without middlemen."
Dave Winer also wrote something about Glen Davies... see my post below.
Publishing without middlemen - reading without middlemen - can this happen? It is happening now - but new media wil not replace old, only transform it.
A really nice page of links - backs up the notion "show me your links and i know who you are" - i have a sense i know John Morgan from links and nothjing else.
"Possible theme of a paper could be the -- Necessity and Metaphor. Contrary to popular belief 'we can not think what we like', words and metaphors have a power of their own"
I wrote that a long time ago... it was an abstract for something I am still writing.
" I am called Thymie. I am the oldest, and the boss of the herd, yet the gentlest of everyone. I was born in 1984.I have had a successful, though short, trotting racing career as well. My racing name was Lotsa Time, and I am so gentle, and therapeutic that Kate spelled the Time part after a lovely herb to capture my healing essence."
~
Here is one of the pages from the site - which i have enjoyed making. The business is going well! We are loving the newness of our life - which is very different from how it was. The transitions have been hard.
"An online group for experiential learning about online depth interaction for people doing psychological work on the Internet. The group has been active (and inactive!) since 1993 and now has a life based on our history and sense of affiliation as well as the shared purposes.
"The Psyber-L mailing list grew out of the need to learn more about and experience first hand the potential of the net, especially how online group interaction effects the psyche.
"If you have an interest in the psyche online - please join!"
~~~
I have been completing the transition of this group from L-Soft to Yahoo. Bit sad about that as L-soft had a good feel to it and a better product, no ads etc. However Yahooo is easier and cheaper! I will be able to start writng there soon... life is getting back to normal after the huge upheval of stating the Mt. Lyford Horse Treks (see link coming up).
How is it then that i have time for being here - but not there in the cty? Solitude, strange but true. But then why here at all? Here being in this blog?
I am having a great time reviewing psybernet... tidying... shifting, it is helping me find myself. That sounds too grand. Helping a tiny bit in the big process.
The list of links is really a nice mirror for me and goes well beyond this weblog: Old Links
I searched Google on: "meaningful hidden sources" and picked the items of most interest to me. I can get engrossed in all of this and find it (synchronistically!) magical.
Magic has been quite word lately as I read "True Names". But that is another story. Knowing the right word is to do magic. And that is what I'd say to Mr. Davies - what are you typing in your search engine?
"Like his contemporary, Roger Bacon (1214-94), Albert was an indefatigable student of nature, and applied himself energetically to the experimental sciences with such remarkable success that he has been accused of neglecting the sacred sciences (Henry of Ghent, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, II, x). Indeed, many legends have been circulated which attribute to him the power of a magician or sorcerer. Dr. Sighart (Albertus Magnus) examined these legends, and endeavoured to sift the truth from false or exaggerated stories. Other biographers content themselves with noting the fact that Albert's proficiency in the physical sciences was the foundation on which the fables were constructed. The truth lies between the two extremes. Albert was assiduous in cultivating the natural sciences; he was an authority on physics, geography, astronomy, mineralogy, chemistry (alchimia), zoölogy, physiology, and even phrenology. On all these subjects his erudition was vast, and many of his observations are of permanent value. Humboldt pays a high tribute to his knowledge of physical geography (Cosmos, II, vi). Meyer writes (Gesch. der Botanik): "No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared with him, unless it be Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him none has painted nature in such living colours, or studied it so profoundly, until the time of Conrad, Gesner, and Cesalpini."
The medieval "magician" Albertus Magnus wrote:
"A certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love of hate or the like. When therefore the [human soul] falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that the [excess] binds things together [magically] and alters them in the way it wants. Whoever would learn the secret of doing and undoing these things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if [s/he] falls into a great excess."
"Most probably it was Sigmund Freud's influential essay on Leonardo's homosexuality and Freud's consequential analysis of the Mona Lisa which was the direct or proximate impetus for Duchamp's image. But, whereas Duchamp seems to imply that the picture fuses artist and sitter, male and female, Freud suggests that the Mona Lisa (specifically her smile) is a manifestation of Leonardo's submerged memory of the birth mother from whom he was estranged at age four and who Freud theorizes expressed an unnatural affection toward her young son. In fact, Freud refutes the notion that there is a physiognomic similarity between the artist and the sitter, but goes on to suggest that the device of the smile was obviously so meaningful to the artist, using it frequently in his works of the time, it must have repressed significance. The person behind the Mona Lisa, Freud suggests, may have had such a smile, a smile that evoked long ago suppressed memories of his mother. Indeed, as Freud is quick to point out, this seems to have been a persistent theme: Vasari even noted that at the earliest age Leonardo was known for having created images of smiling women:
Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Mona Lisa unsolved, and let us note the unequivocal fact that her smile fascinated the artist no less than all spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had thereafter returned in all of his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo's Mona Lisa was a portrait, we cannot assume that he has added to her face a trait of his own, so difficult to express, which she herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help but believe, that he found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it that from now on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy.
"(Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A study in psychosexuality. tr. A.A. Brill. New York, Vintage Books, [1955] Originally published by Freud in 1910, p. 79.)"
"He started Cool Site in 1994, after discovering the thrill of happening upon an especially interesting Web site and telling his friends what he had found. Within a year, more than 20,000 people a day were visiting the site, and Mr. Davis became a Web celebrity, giving interviews to online magazines and fending off gifts from Webmasters who were desperately seeking his recommendation of their sites. "
"Today, Mr. Davis has not only kicked his Web habit but also almost completely given up the medium. The Cool Site of the Day still exists, but it is no longer run by Mr. Davis, who has also lost his enthusiasm for trolling for new pages."
"A comprehensive archive of works written by Editor-in-Chief Raymond C. Kurzweil. Also, a directory of selected articles about Kurzweil or the Kurzweil companies."
"After the Singularity: A Talk with Ray Kurzweil By Raymond Kurzweil
John Brockman, editor of Edge.org, recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity and its ramifications. According to Ray, "We are entering a new era. I call it 'the Singularity.' It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that--to think human beings are fine the way they are--is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology." (Added March 27th 2002)"
Plenty more there along those lines...
The Singularity - interesting - originates with Vinge and links cyber c with the romantics?
"This page has links to a number of papers by Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold, of the Department of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, about identity and Web pages.
We've also included links to a number of other sites that we've found useful and interesting.
We're keen to make contact with other people who are interested in this area, so feel free to email Hugh or Jill, especially if you're thinking of linking to this page or to any of our papers: we'd probably like to see your site.
Jill has a questionnaire (and an opportunity to contact her for an interview) about identity and personal home pages."
This is a site worth having as it identifies something very vital - web pages and identity. Vityual life does not require the paraphanalia of The Matrix, just the Net as we know it.
I recall this discussion and found it again. Here is a nice post
from Dimitra Barnard-Martinez (earthsea@accent.net) - It is
amazing what is buried in the 20 years of usenet.
General Directories and Indexes of Sites.
And I am there with a Psybernet link - among some interesting resources. Check this out for psyber stuff.
Centralization doesn't scale
"If you want to go to a really fundamental analysis, what we're perpetually rediscovering on a scale of complexity is that centralization doesn't work. Centralization doesn't scale, and when you push any human endeavor to a certain threshold of complexity you rediscover that."
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sign on them. They validate, are up-to-date and have been spell-checked. If there are glaring errors, or even minor ones on those pages - let me know.
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