17:57, Tuesday 24 Jun., 2003 Link

One of the odd things about [finding new things online/ cyberspace] is it's hard to make value judgements. I encounter new technologies and think 'hey, that's cool!' because I'm used to, in the real world, all nonlocal things arriving through social baleen before I see them. So somebody shows me a new bar, or book, or political idea and I rank that higher than the bar I just encountered, the book I just saw on the shelf. But there's no passive stumbling online. Or rather, there is, but the mechanisms of presentation by a peer group and consuming through stumbling are identical: the www, email. So I find something online and I think 'hey, that's cool!' because I'm used to not discriminating when something gets presented to me like that. I have to learn that I might be one of the first people to see a thing, and I have to make my own mind up.

By taking advantage of low discrimination habits: I guess that's how advertising works.

By training people to lower their discrimination habits: I guess that's how trusted publishers operate.

I was also going to say that there's less concept of 'local' online, in that search engines let you see all syndication formats and not just one. It's not like the real world where you can't see bars in Paris just by hanging around in bars in London. But then I realised it's my definition of 'local' that's wrong. Semantics can provide distance, different mindsets. It's why it's so difficult to find prior art for social software, because the keywords are all different, a gulf between metaphor sets (that is hopefully now being bridged).

Whatever.

On another note, I just stepped out of the shower and before drying myself looked down and noticed that the sun that was streaming in almost horizontally through the window had caught on the beads of water caught through my pubic hair and they were glinting and shimmering a hundred bright points of light, stars all the colours of the rainbow.