A pre-format , pre-protocol conceptual mashup of web-wide activity streams as an early expression of the impossible stream. Complementary to -- and hopefully illustrative of -- the promise of open protocols for achieving entirely new ways of publishing our research, discoveries, reflections, perspectives, contributions, collaborations. Exploring unexpected new ways of documenting, archiving, retrieving, and presenting our very digital lives as streams of interactions with people, ideas, technologies, and contexts. Tools for the internet of things, people, places, and processes when human attention is the penultimate scarce market resource.
This stream will soon be decommissioned and archived
Thanks to all those who endured the maelstrom. I've been signaling this for some time now and fully understand that the stream became increasingly polluted with cross-currents, over time. That's part of the findings. Protocols have evolved tremendously over the past couple of years and we've learned a ton here, even of a lot of that was not visible much beyond log files and analytics bar charts.
The #EarthOS global cognition grid is only now booting up to a useful command prompt and Google+ may yet well be the first retail glimpse of what's to come. Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy. There's much more than meets the eye as we continue to Dream, Design, and Build The Impossible Stream.
“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” -- Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
Walking On Water: Just a State of Mind (and Marketing)
Proudly prostrate in obeisance to the mighty Jobe Jedi brand masters. Marketing has always been about activating aspirations; today, we have fantastically entertaining new ways to foster addictive engagement between consumers and brands. Thanks to Fadi for this fantastic find.
As tweeted earlier one current interest is in taking this approach into Real-time location aware services + Checkin + Legacy Viral + Alternate Reality Gaming.
Now, if only we can get Sony + Gowalla + (maybe) Google Buzz on board in time for an absolutely addictive Comic-Con campaign I'd like to launch by July 21. If we can't have fun rockin' out summer sales, why bother, right?
That gives us just two months to knock it out of the park. With the right Scrum Team, we can definitely do it; but every participant will need to be at the top of their game, or it just won't happen. I'll give it one more week for meme gestation, after that, the fuse probably gets too short for this one.
Why do you keep randomly fetching YouTube items that were posted months and months ago? What is making Sweetcron think it hasn't already fetched these items or making YouTube suggest that they are new or updated?
Sigh
BrightKite and GoWalla anyway. Looks like Foursquare's is still private key only for now, unless I want to play with the API. Will look into that a bit later.
How to have fun helping ourselves and helping the world
Thanks, Ben. This is the most personally moving presentation, so far. I hope to keep taking ACTION to have fun helping myself and my family so that I can become for effective in helping the world.
Free VZW Msg: Put the planet in your pocket -- Skype Mobile is now available on Verizon Wireless! Get FREE unlimited Skype to Skype calling & Instant Messaging to millions of users around the world. For instructions to download text the word "Skype" to 2255 on your phone or go to http://www.verizonwireless.com/skypemobile
So I did the txt and got: "Msg: To get the Skype mobile app to ur phone, click on link: http://www.skype.com/vzw. Text STOP to quit/HELP for info. Msg&Data Rates May Aply [sic]."
Clicked on that link, and ...
Sorry, Skype mobile™ is not available for your phone. Switch to one of Verizon's best-selling BlackBerry® and Android™ 3G smartphones. Visit http://www.skype.com/go/skypemobile to learn more
Okay then. You contacted me on my Droid, VZW, and I followed all your prompts from that very device, and somehow you reach the conclusion that I'm not on the device upon which you contacted me. Nice. LOL!
From Esquire, excerpts that illustrate why I generally support and often admire Dennis Kucinich's political perspectives and decision making processes:
"The angst that members are feeling about this bill — the temperature that's been raised in the body politic over this bill, the characterizations of the bill in a debate that's been quite distorted — all of those things argue against bringing up another health care bill in the near future if this bill were to go down."
"Well I had to consider that. Because I have to take responsibility for that."
"People were telling me, "Dennis, you are helping to gather momentum in the direction toward the defeat of the bill." That's what people were telling me. That's what the message was. And: "Is this something you really want to do?" And of course I have to consider, when the vote is close, and however the final tally turns, but whether the bill passes by one vote or five votes or more, the question of momentum was something everyone was concerned about at that point. And people were concerned that if I continued to maintain my position of hammering away at the defects of the bill that I may cause its defeat. That's a legitimate criticism. It's something that I had to take into account in terms of my personal responsibility for the position that I held, and the impact that it would have on my constituents. We always have to be open to people who may hold a view that may be different than yours. Because you might learn something."
"And so as we came closer, and it appeared that I would be in a pivotal position, I realized that the moment required me to look at this in the broadest terms possible. To look at this in terms of the long-term impact on my constituents, of the moment in history in which we now stand, of the impact on the country, of the impact on the Obama presidency, on the impact on the president personally. I had to think about all of this. I couldn't just say, 'Well here's my position: I'm for single-payer, and this isn't single-payer, so I'm going to defeat the bill.'"
Still Looking for the Definitive, Authoritative, Official Google Buzz API?
Unless @dewitt or others can correct or amend, I'm fairly confident that it's all right here:
• Atom buzz feed standard format.
• rssCloud to provide instantaneous RSS updates?
• MediaRSS for rich media elements, video, etc.
• Activity Streams encode social events in standard Atom or RSS feeds.
• PubSubHubbub pushes feeds in realtime to subscribers across the Web.
• Salmon notifies people of responses to their status updates.
• Webfinger makes it easy to find people across social sites.
• Portable Contacts a secure way to access address books and friend lists built up all over the web.
• OAuth to access server resources on
behalf resource owner and to authorize third-party access w/o sharing credentials.
• OStatus makes an easy-to-implement distributed social network.
• ForwardFuturetechture? Wave Federation Protocol is a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves. Released under a revolutionary license, anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server.
Join the experimental Silverton Update Network (SUN?) to see how it works.
Why twiddle and tweet when you can brain2brain beam full 256 char photon packets of your most pressing impulsive thoughts to your own personal cognosphere? Join silverton.status.net today. It's free!
... Everyone would communicate simply and clearly.
This assumes, of course, that the whole point of communicating is to be understood by others. In most, though certainly not all cases, this is probably a fairly safe assumption.
Regardless of how interesting one's ideas sound, if they are not sufficiently clear to enable others to consider exploring or acting upon them, they fail.
If "information wants to be free" then "ideas want to be realized."
The more complex the idea, the more clarity is required to convey understanding.
I suppose this is a bit of an apology for, or brief explanation of what I'm tentatively calling The Open Mind Project. http://bit.ly/OpenMindProject
My research interests are relatively interdisciplinary and eclectic. Yeah, brains are complicated; and their embedded, emergent operational abstractions, aka minds, are insanely intricate. However, both are completely comprehensible, over time.
Which brings me to the comprehensibility, or perhaps seeming lack thereof, of this experimental personal firehose. The experiment is simply to bundle up a publicly parsable aggregation of the mishmash of interests that I express, document, and interact with all across the internet. The majority of items in this stream are either published by me, across a number of blogs and bookmarking sites that I maintain, or archive snapshots of my frame of reference in video discussion communities, forums, and so-called microblogging collective cognition sessions. Where external items are referenced -- notably, Google Reader -- they are presented with comment indicating my interpretation or context. The CSS of these items needs specific work, as does the entire stream, to improve the semantic utility of the raw data.
Granted, it's an astronomically "lossy" approach that is perhaps equivalent to gathering one grain of sand from every beach in the world with the goal of recreating or accurately simulating each of those shorelines; even worthy of making some good fun:
On the other hand, if I provide one grain of sand, and you provide one grain of sand, over time, we might aggregate a large enough sampling to accomplish something interesting.
If gathering grains of sand is tedious, by brain analogy, creating a complete map of the human brain is painstaking and complex beyond any of our previous efforts; yet that fact does not negate the importance of creating that map. Quite the contrary.
All this complexity is comprehensible; even the 1GB per mm^2 massively parallel mushdrive inside our own heads. It's my contention that any and all expansion of our collective human understanding -- even of the most complex phenomenon we are capable of exploring -- is a function of our focused intention and sustained curiosity.
In some venues, I've been tagged as a bit of as a futurist. With deep gratitude for that compliment, I prefer to not wear that particular lapel pin. In dabbling with the forward peering scenarios that I explore, I prefer the idea of futuretechtecture: the process of researching, exploring, debating, defining, and designing desirable outcomes and applications made possible by the dynamic, evolving affordances of current leading and bleeding edge scientific and technological developments. To borrow a meme from James Hughes, I share the belief that achieving a sexy, high tech, radically democratic future is not so much a matter of speculation or prognostication; as it is an essential objective worth articulating and co-creating, as the real-time aggregation of our collective choices, at the boundary between our everyday endeavors and the aspiration of our fittest natures.
Are we beginning to pick up on the pattern, finally, given the context of the most recent Capitalism++ blog posts, my dear Normals? I doubt it, but every few years I figure it's worth checking in again, shining a little LED into the back of your eyeball to see if there are any signs of the fog lifting.
Not yet, apparently.
If you're laughing right now, maybe we're getting somewhere. If you're offended beyond all sensibilities, then this screed's for you. Read on for more of your favorite addictive amygdala-juicing tongue-torquing manuscription; and it's all FREE, thanks to the magic of That Evil Government built interwebz and greater than 40% Actual Aggregate Structural Unemployment.
While the old testament recounts Israel's wandering 40 years in the wildness, the postscarcity testament reveals that the West has been wandering for 50 years in this bizzarre J.O.B. Trance.
The reforms we've been advocating over the past five years or so are nothing new; in fact, many were scheduled for deployment about the year I was born, and JFK was the man to get the program started.
Guess what kind of people didn't like that too much? Right. People with high powered rifles and generally suffering from hyperventilating, hyperbolic, revisionist tea party disorder.
So here we are, 50 years later, with all the same dysfunctions, only HALF A CENTURY WORSE.
Alright. Enough of the Blip.FM Buzzmix Marathon ... g'night fellow buzz'tards. Maybe when we wake up in the morning, we'll find the Life's Meaning Fairy has left a Life for one of us, under the pillow.
If so, and if you happen to see this and feel inclined to take on the challenge of figuring out a way to better parse all these various import streams, by all means, hit the Contact button at the upper right and maybe we can work something out that will benefit the cause of Activity Stream Freedom. Thanks.
IMO, this buzz experiment is like a first, if awkward attempt, at enabling a fledgling global cognition grid to help us find our own true selves through all the amazing connections that we didn't even know we already had in place. There are always plenty of caveats to any upbeat Utopian perspective, of course; however, there are also plenty of problems with a perspective that insists that the current status quo is the best of all possible worlds.
I also propose that the GCG can and should become a Harry Potter-like Sorting Hat that filters us humans and configures us into research and project teams for maximum happiness and productivity in discovering and understanding the nature of our universe while enabling us to each explore and establish our most adaptive roles within it. Such ideas have been the subject of science fiction for decades; today, to borrow technoprogressive prose from the inimitable Dr. J, the tangible means for "a sexy, high-tech, radically democratic" participatory #futuretechture are clearly at hand. The GCG design-build decision is no longer a matter of whether we will be able to do so; but rather, whether or not We Will To Do So.
Back in the present tense, this means that we should be able to have a fairly high degree of confidence in the fact that if Google Eywa (well, an optimally configured Buzz recommendation engine, for now) lets someone through to participate in our thought-stream, it's probably a fairly benign, or even potentially really helpful entity. This is not yet the case and is a fundamentally crucial design criteria.
Parenthetical Inset: I'd love to read many more essays from many more perspectives on implications for such a scenario. Feel free to write them, or if already written, simply point to your work in the comments here. I know that's a practice frowned upon in today's concept of The Bogged Down Blog; however, this site is not about creating another pop culture blog comment repository; it's about learning how to figure out the UFIS concept.
Why does all this interest me? You'd have to scan this entire stream and web site for the full answer, but one simple reason is that I believe in the work over at SIAI and I am increasingly convinced that only the right Source Code Design and Audit Processes in the eventual AGI can save us from our individual and collective lesser, suboptimal ourselves.
Finally, it certainly seems that this post -- which I will continue to reflect as far and wide as possible, to eliminate FUD -- provides grounds for more than a little positive trans-cortical uplift.
