20 August 2006

Self-knowledge via Web2.0

"Computers could be a tremendous way for us to look at ourselves in a very spiritual way... could teach us more about ourselves than we've been able to look at, so far." --Kate Bush
anything you publish
on the internet

gives you the new opportunity
of standing back, and asking

how will others see this?
what does it show them about me?

whether it's your favorite bookmarks
your favorite mp3s
your favorite pictures
your favorite books

your political views
your personal life
your autobiography

what patterns do i favor
that i never realised?
which do i avoid?
how do i compare to others?
what can i learn from
their ways of sharing?
how do they react to mine?

are there patterns that embarrass me
in their naivete
immaturity
selfishness?

what am i uneasy about sharing?
what happens if i share a tiny test bit?
(does it help me grow?)

what research/exercises
can i do to feel less uneasy?

how do my tastes vary
mood to mood
month to month?

shall i share different facets
on different pages
different sites?
under different names?

can i summarise all facets
on a single informative page?

can everyone
however different
re-use the format of that page?



18 August 2006

The Stalking Expert

it's easy to set up
search-engine rss-feeds
that watch for new material
on a given topic

but suppose your chosen topic
was a living human

and you wanted
obsessively
even sinisterly
to watch for every tiny hint
of what they're up to
using ALL available searchengines

especially monitoring
their online presence(s)
if they have any

forums they post to
forums that gossip about them

nicknames, pseudonyms, avatars
titles of their creative works
lyrics and other quotes
family members

building a database
of facts-already-known
so that old material
can be downgraded

tapping into a continually updated
clearinghouse
of searchable sites
(Stalker Central)

and imagine that this
becomes routine

this week only
stalk any ten celebs
for $19.99




14 August 2006

Finnegans Wake on the Tree of Life

if joyce was right
then every story on our
radial ontology
should be part of a yin-yang cycle
with a distinct natural rhythm

each healthy storyrhythm
jamming improvisatorially
with all the others

with the most extreme cycle
the saga of a hero's
trespass and fall

wrenching apart his city
his civilisation collapsing

eventually reborn
like daisies on a battlefield

and the hero's hesitancy
before this dreadful fate
producing a
[catch]
in the great rhythms

a hesitant nation of meditators
tuning in
to the rhythm of their breathing

listening for the [catch]
in the improv jam





13 August 2006

The human sciences on Flickr

20th century social science
can be caricatured
as 10,000 pseudoscientists
in search of something to measure

for if you tried to reconstruct
the 20th century human psyche
or diagnose the 20thC human predicament
based solely on those ten-thousand's
testimony
your reconstruction would be shallow indeed
not even recognisably human

abstract statistics on human lab-rats
or at best stilted case-histories
feigning 'objectivity' by suppressing humanity




but imagine we could offer them
ten million family snapshots to measure

to classify by apparent emotional relationships

to trace the emergence of character traits

toddler dances unselfconsciously
kindergartener mugs self-consciously
girl tween begs the camera to flatter her

adolescent grows surly
open personality closes up
too cool to grin

first love imbalanced
one leads, one follows

intimations of disaster
even in the wedding pix

tough guy transformed by fatherhood

etc etc etc

the classic literary themes
now accessible as objective data records

ready for a new strategy of 'measurement'





09 August 2006

A radial ontology for webpageviews

to review:

we seek to ground
all thinking
in a precise common visualisation
of local spacetime

Earthglobe flattened Bucky-wise
time-layers stacked, most recent on top

colored lines tracing worldpaths

with any statistic
mappable to color

usually red for high values
and blue for low




and today we consider webpageviews

15 years of hosting

with the webhosts at any instant
in those 15 years
ranked for popularity

with the top one-fifth colored red
the bottom one-fifth blue

so we can trace
ever-increasing numbers of hosts
starting blue/slow

most never cracking green

but some few catching on fast
some few more catching on slow

popular hosts tending to cluster
geographically
in the hi-tech corridors

centers of red and orange
diluting outward to yellow and green
with the boonies normally blue

(exceptions being of special interest:
who's that, bucking the trend?)




popularity could alternately
be gauged cumulatively

so slow and steady tortoises
beat meme-of-the-hour hares

earlybirds earning regular colorboosts
just by enduring




now let's break this down by pages

pages color-ranked by popularity
instantaneous or cumulative

hosts adding pages
quickly or slow

the most popular sites
adding hot news hourly

with any individual page
quickly lapsing into obscurity

(which are the steady tortoise-pages,
the Net classics everyone must read eventually?)




now let's break it down by words

less read blue
more read red

headlines and first paragraphs
are read most
boring sections skimmed
only the best writers
making every word count




so now we count
for each second of passing time
how many times each English word
is being read
worldwide

and we collect these stats for a day

and build a list
of the million commonest English words
red orange yellow green blue

now we alphabetise that list
and reduce each word to a dot
of its appropriate color

and we project that line of dots
into space
along the orbit of Moon
one million dots
across 1.5 million miles
(leaving us lots of mental room to expand
although the scale is finally irrelevant)

and into those 1.5 mile gaps
we insert alphabetical word-pairs
aardvark-aardvark
aardvark-aardwolf
down to aardvark-zymergy

ten word-pairs per inch
each a colored dot
to represent that pair's popularity
using the same colorscale
as for single words

and now we divide each one-tenth inch
to hold a million threeword triplets
and again and again and again

until any popular 5000-word web-rant
has its own colored dot
based on how often it's been read




now

we move all the red-dot word-strings
into the closest Earth orbits

the orange dots almost as close
yellow and green also intermediate
blue dots still at Moon's length

and we link each wordpair/triple/etc
to its component words/pairs/etc
by elastic bands

(since a pairing will normally be
less common than either component
these bands will link inner-more components
to outer-more groupings)

and we'll let the elastics pull the dots
into mega-clusters

(red dots still constrained to red orbits
but freed from their original alphabetical positions
within those orbits)




one can hope
the resulting groupings
would match, eg,
the basic Yahoo categories

technical word-clusters
sports word-clusters
literary word-clusters
political word-clusters

and an individual's web history
ought to favor certain clusters




if we track any individual's surfing
we can visualise the stream of words
they're reading

shrinking our whole Moon model
down to a disk that fits
within the circumference of their brain

lighting up, each moment
the dot for the word they're reading
and for the most-recent pair
triplet etc

so when they finish reading
a popular page
they'll have incremented the 'counter'
for that page's particular word-sequence

maybe boosting it
from blue-orbit to green