Author: Alan

I came across this essay summarizing certain ideas on where the web may go and why and I was struck how, on first review, it did not make any sense – not in the vision but the elements. There is a problem with people playing with the idea of the web which seems to be based on knowing more about the web than knowing about ideas. The utility the web can bring is through its organization not necessarily further complications of linking or these semantics, some sort of basic artificial intellegence. Before any of that makes any sense, it must be fixed to a comprehensive reference related to the way ideas work rather than the media, the web. Off the cuff, there are three ways ideas work: like a myth, like a hierarchical codification or like a dictionary – Plato, Aristotle or Samuel Johnson. [Are there more?] The stuff of dynamic ideas are not good in myth as myth is given – the tough bit is figuring meaning. That may be where the web is now as it is run by those in love with it, who love leaning over deep pools.

How it speaks to itself, as we do in our minds free of myth, will require not mimicking how we think but something more between the what and why – ideas. Someone needs to distill the ideas out of all this content and make them maliable, transformable, comprehensible. Winer’s categories are a very bad codification as it based on personal taxonomy which will likely only compound confusion – a bad filing system loses documents without them leaving the room. Google is a very bad dictionary which cannot guide you to what idea is the best or more useful for your purpose, a shoe box of receipts awaiting an accountant’s hand.

We don’t need the web to think for us. It is not there yet. We need the web to be able to even tell us what it contains first, what it has gathered – not just that it has gathered.

“If we just run away do you think Al will catch us?”

My pals Mark and Katie 16 years ago. I met Kate after having invited myself to crash on Mark’s sofa when job hunting in the UK. I never did get a job but learned much about ale and the British Museum and Bragg that trip. Missed the King’s Cross fire by ten or fifteen minutes. Now a solicitor and a BBC knob turner of some sort with kidlies, they were waitress and freelancer then.

Too sick to go to work, to open the new computer boxes from Dell, to get off my butt to make tea right now. So is herself. 442 visits yesterday – anyone want to head over to make tea? Milky, please.

Via Mike, Stuart McLean has a blog via his publisher. As with Nils, I wonder how the dynamic of the free blog and the professional “ain’t life funny” kind of commentator will work out.   Will you sometimes pay when often get it for free?

As I wrote about over at STG, I am reading Nick Hornby’s Songbook, which is essentially a non-linear autobiography in the guise of a discussion of some of his favorite pop music. I don’t know if I would be so interested if it was in the guise of a discussion of some of his favorite cricket players. This can happen. Richler’s last book, On Snooker, was somewhat similarly structured – his skill overcame his admission that snooker players are some of the most pathetic peronalities you will ever meet – as is often the case most single skill celebrities.

Anyway, I have gotten about halfway through Songbook and it is one of those experiences – like Football’s World Cup – that you wish the source were chained and required to put out everyday forever. But, then, I have that rule about not encouraging slavery. Writing about writing about music is not that far off dancing about architecture. But I’m going to add to this post as I think about the book more. It just came out in paperback so you may want to pick it up.

Summer of 2001, I travelled with the SOBs to Connecticut to conclude a bit of business, travelling in a camper van borrowed from this guys which I think had the license plate “DOT COM” or some such thing. I was reminded of that trip after 9/11 when I wrote at Steve’s site on the 17th:

…I thought about the road in Connecticut I drove down with Dan and Nathan after getting a bit lost one evening trying to find the sea from a place near Hartford. The road was parallel to the one we wanted as it turned out. It was fifty miles of large homes on forested lots – multi-car garages, guest houses. As we drove south cars passed us going north, going home for the night. When we hit the coast road, the commuter train station was full of people heading for what looked to us Maritimers as luxery cars, coming home from a workday in the City, in Manhattan. The next day, I bought a big Connecticut flag – like I like to wherever I travel. I flew it at half mast Sunday.

I remember thinking about one particular guy, just getting out of his car in front of one of those huge houses, bending over laughing as he saw the van and then the license plate, perhaps evidently lost.

As part of that trip, we went to Bill’s Seafood in Westbrook on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. Had a soft shelled crab on a bun and marvelled at what must be the most excellent selection of hard liquors I have ever witnessed. The bartender, Jake, was a grey-haired pony-tailed master who, among other things took the time to take an interest in us, where we were from and why we were visiting. Bills is advertised as being by “the singing bridge”. Coming into work this morning in a downpour, I heard and was reminded that the causeway in Kingston is also a singing bridge and remembered one from twenty years ago when I used to visit Bridgewater, N.S, to hang out with the archibald boys. A singing bridge is just one of those open steel weave bed bridges – metal WigWag. I think that is one of the nicest nicknames for a purely utilitarian bit of civil engineering I have come across.

Here is a very good breakdown of what I am seeing in my referral logs as of the last few days.

Add that to reply spam.

I am listening to the The Connection on North Country Public Radio this morning and their phone-in/interview of Roy Moore, the former Alabama Chief Justice who placed a block of stone with the Ten Commandments on it in a courthouse.   During one call, I heard a most extraordinary statement, that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. Quick recourse to Google linked me to this discourse on the distinction. I always considered a republic a sub-set of democracy just as is our Canadian constitutional parliamentary monarchy. Was I wrong?

I wrote this over at Reinvented just now:

How could you miss the nuclear fear? Terrorism has nothing on the propect of Leonid unleashing the 17 warheads aimed at your home town and making it a plateau of black glass to the horizon. Folks have been blowing up stuff and civilians since at least Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent 100 years ago. How much is what has happened in the last few years really new? I still fear the rusting hulks of the Soviet nuclear fleet at Murmansk, Vlaidivostok and Kaliningrad far more than the guys play acting the very bad Bond script. [That is what I am starting to worry about quite seriously…how long will it take for the war on terror to be over if there are no more 9/11’s? How does it end?]

I wrote it in response to two statements [thread here] which quite surprised me:

• …who needs nuclear fear when we have terrorism (by a mid-20s person); and
• I missed the Cold War and nuclear fear too — totally passed me by (by a late 30s person).

I found these points of view not so much unexpected as they are pervasive so much as bizzare in their utter focus on the history of the very recent. Far greater threats to the western world were almost commonplace throughout the 20th century, even just the last third I lived through. Are we now so sphincter-locked that we forget…forget how to be defiant and get on with it all when we were able to do so faced with far greater risks and fears?

I am not suggesting that either the threat or the fear isn’t real but I cannot shake the feeling I immediately had on that day watching the TV as so many died – this is like a very bad and very ugly Bond film script. There is something in the shallow dimensionality of where we are now [which I do think is largely unrelated to Bush or Iraq] that makes me feel there are new gaps showing in the culture… but I cannot say where they are or what they say about us.