OK, I got my email backlog chopped down to manageable proportions. I set aside some longer things to read during the course of the week. Now so far I have subscribed to 2 RSS feeds and a few mailing lists, and I have to ask the question: how the heck does one drink from the information firehose that is the internet?
Back in the mid 90's I produced an electronic newsletter called Bits and Bytes Online Edition. (I'll be posting all the back issues here this week in glorious ASCII-vision). People found it entertaining and useful. I would pick out little quotes that made my neurons fire just a little faster, point out cool stuff on the internet etc.... I'd save my stuff up until I thought I had a little self contained issue and send it out via email. Sound familiar? Well it should -- and it does -- but I am still lost in space with regards to what to do here. I was out of the information hunting and gathering game for about 5 years -- let's see, if internet years are like dog years only worse, several generations have passed me by. The game is afoot!
I could narrow my focus and concentrate on certain areas of interest. But I grew up reading the Whole Earth Review, and this has turned me into a confirmed generalist. Specialization is for insects! But to concentrate on technology like I did before, well, it's already being done, and being done quite well considering the fact that we are still in the stone ages in terms of our computer tools.
But I do want to be a part of this; I am catching glimpses of a larger picture developing here, of something being born, leveraging the mental power of thousands of (reasonably) intelligent apes augmented by our primitive electronic technologies and producing -- what? The beginnings of a group mind? That's what I think is happening here. We call it collaborative filtering or something like that. But to me it feels like the beginning of so much more. Technology has the potential -- when properly used -- to solve so many problems. It all comes down to putting the right information and tools in the hands of the right people -- I've seen the word bootstrapping used hereabouts lately. I hope we can bootstrap our way to a better world. We pretty much have to this, to regain control of technologies and ideologies that if left unchecked have the potential to end life as we know it on this planet: Koyaanisqatsi, life out of balance, a state of life that calls for another way of living.
12:05:28 AM 
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