12.25, Thursday 13 Jun 2002

In the list of signs that the universe has bounced off the surface of maximal expansion and our fall is now accelerating towards the primodial monobloc, this email from Dan Brickley on www-archive is pretty bloody high up: MOO, IRC and the Web.

Given that a MOO is basically a map populated with objects that you can interact with, usually by using a command-line type interface. And given RDF is used for describing graphs with resources (or objects) for nodes. And given all interfaces are the same anyway [see my notes], because traversing an interface is just like moving from node to node on a map or a graph. And given all of that, and that in the ylem it's all the same anyway...

Dan Brickley crosses the streams and shadows a traditional MOO and an IRC channel together, two alternative interfaces on the same map. An IRC bot on the channel appears as a non-player character in the MOO. And he talks about activating traditional MOO objects with an XML feed so that a MOO calendar proxies his www calendar. And presumably, so RSS feeds illuminate other objects by acting as datasources.

We're all riding the same alarmingly whitecapping memewave here. See my post a couple of days ago about weblog avatars in IM/MOO-space (which I dubbed the "IMvironment", unaware that Yahoo! had already coined that term). And see blackbeltjones's post on the same, with more comments about weblogs. And recall that at Chatbot++ at XCom/Take It Outside (now with links and assorted media) Edd Dumbill was linking IRC bots with RDF graphs, and the W3C are interested in the bot-to-www angle. And the London.pm bots maillist is a locus for a lot of this IRC/bot/RSS activity. Oh, and Jabber.

You know, when the N-verse collapsed to the (N-1)-verse just now, I'm pretty sure I felt it.