2003-04-25 Rolling ETCon notes 1 - Idea about smiling JC Herz was saying that people's expressions cause the emotions they're usually supposed to represent. So you smile, and become happy. You wince, and then you feel empathy. Maybe people are like those old 8-bit computers that didn't have enough ram so they had to store information in the screen: the sprite on the screen was isomorphic with the representation of the sprite. It wasn't stored elsewhere. So maybe the feeling of "happiness" is really big to store, we can't afford to store it twice. So we store it on the screen (on our face) and everything keys of that. 2 - Idea about the term "social software" It's know that words get emotionally tainted with the ideas they represent. So we can have a cycle of words, for example for colour. "Black" is a world that gets tainted with the negative feeling of racism so it becomes a bad word and we stop using it. But we still need to express the concept, so we use a new word "coloureds" instead. But it cycles in the same way. It's fine, words are time-bound, dynamic. So maybe community -> social_software is the same. Groups are so damn bad on the net that "community" gets tainted with that awful limiting claustrophobic feeling, and we have to get a new word. Obviously, this takes about 3 years. So in 2006 we'll need a new term for this concept. And then the new word makes us think the whole term is new, so we get excited again. About how Hydra is being used at this conference: http://www.kittyjoyce.com/eric/log/archive/000557.html Hey, I shouldn't forget this: the front-end of Chandler is in Python, and I could have a hack at that. [My notes at the bottom of groups.txt are a sum-up of the themes of this conference. Cyberspace is like the proto-ocean, from that talk I saw at the ICA. We're building the distance-sensors, the eyes.] Some assorted links. On Sapir-Whorf: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000557.php The Tyranny of Structurelessness http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html Swarms and Mobs at This Year's ETech http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2003/04/25/swarms_mobs.html "Weblogs show the future advertising model of the web, ads need to be at the level of items not pages" http://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/000340.html The weblog of the guy who implemented Piles at Apple http://www.pacificavc.com/blog/ and the Piles paper itself http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1998.2/rose.html#HDR2 (thanks Kevin Marks) .... Quick index: -> Wednesday Apr 23 16:37 bookmobile.txt Apr 23 17:14 gonzo.txt Apr 23 15:37 oreillyradar.txt Apr 23 15:37 semanticsearch.txt Apr 23 15:37 smartmobs.txt Apr 23 15:37 smartmobs_hydra.txt Apr 23 15:37 swarm.txt -> Thursday Apr 24 10:50 alankay.txt Apr 24 17:53 datamining.txt Apr 24 17:52 gamecontext.txt Apr 24 10:34 kevinlynch.txt Apr 24 17:53 socialsoftware.txt -> Friday Apr 25 15:53 drexler.txt Apr 25 15:53 google.txt Apr 25 15:53 groups.txt Apr 25 15:53 smartdust.txt Apr 25 15:55 turing.txt => ROLLING NOTES Apr 23 15:37 wed-am-rolling.txt Apr 24 00:18 wed-pm-rolling.txt Apr 24 17:54 thu-am-rolling.txt Apr 24 18:10 thu-pm-rolling.txt Apr 25 15:53 fri-am-rolling.txt Apr 25 15:57 fri-pm-rolling.txt .... Still a couple of things to do: . Get links to other people's good notes, checkout out the main ETCon trackbacked grid . Figure out some kind of roundup .... # And... breathe. 1;