How Not To Blog ?

Could memory be just an exchange of information with a simultaneously-occuring, "past" self?

Betsy has a vision of the future but its vastly different "look and feel" isn't too compatible with her current mental architecture. Betsy then forgets her memory of the future with her next breath.

Is her past self is blocked from recalling her present self simply because it can't compute what it sees, just like how she gradually forgets a dream when she awakens? (In porportion to how awake I she is that instant. My dreaming self thinks that it will easily recall every detail of the dream, but my waking self hasn't a clue.)

When we dream, are we actually exchanging information, in real time, with other selves in alternate realities? Is my subconscious brain really that creative when I dream that I can actually read a brilliant short story that I would have never thought of, or compose stunning, original pieces of classical music? Are flashes of insight strokes of mental luck or did we briefly "tune in" outside of ourselves using an innate temporal/dimensional communication protocols in our mind?

It might be that some of us can more intuitively use these protocols than others. They might be highly creative and insightful individuals. Super geniuses. Seers. Or just plain nuts. (How many crazy folks actually do see or hear someone else that we think isn't there? And what the hell are newborn babies looking at, anyway?)

I can't recall the number of times I dreamt of a personal event, remembered it upon waking, only years or months later to experience it in exact detail (no more than a few seconds, at most), thinking "Deja Vu" to myself.

Why, sometimes when I am in dream, does a person calling my name in my "waking" reality become part of my dream before the person says anything at all? And sometimes when I am waking, do I smell my kindergarten classroom or a dish that my mother used to cook as if I was there at that very instant?

Some of the sub-atomic particles which compose us experience time as simultaneous. We call the leaping of electrons through time scientific, but do not extend its possibilities to encompass any personal reality the way the atom itself does.

Quantum physics suggests that time as we sense it does not actually exist and that all of our perceived "time" is actually one simultaneous occurence, but how should that affect our personal relationship with time?

Here's a site that lists some creativity techniques like other people's definitions, anonymous voting, assumption surfacing, and six thinking hats to name a few.

Following I illustrate what could be a new breed of auction system:

::All bidders in an auction, except for the winner, must pay the highest amount they bid to the winning bidder if they lose.

::The winner of the auction then pays the seller's reserve price (known since the start of auction), and keeps the remainder for his/her self. And, of course, wins the auction item. The reserve price is paid regardless of whether or not a winner's profit will be made. (All payments are made automatically by the system.)

or better yet,

::All bidders in an auction, except for the winner, must pay the highest amount they bid to the seller if they lose.

::The possibility that each person could be the winning bidder and end up paying nothing for something they desired would (hopefully) put upward pressure on the price.

::The seller's sense of risk is decreased by the prospects of receiving much more at the end of the auction than that being sold is worth.

In each scenario, the bid price could be lofted dramatically by each bidder's greed. In the two scenarios, the winning bidder essentially could pay nothing and come out ahead.

In the first scenario, "Winner Takes All", bidding for a $200 item could reach an average of $8-9 across 75 participants, for example. You would probably have more participants bidding the price up than in the second scenario due to the winner's added incentive. Most bidders would bid extremely low at first, but towards the end of the auction would probably bid up the price dramatically in order to win.

In the second scenario, "Winner Slides", bidding for a $200 item could reach an average of $6-7 across 50 participants, for example.

How much is a person willing to risk to get something for nothing (or nothing-plus-risk)?

The number of participants would, of course, be limited so that the prospects of winning are still appealing to each bidder. You would also need an escrow system whereby a person would make deposits and then bid against those deposits.

It is, in effect, an auction lottery.

Ming's post about psychologist Max Bazerman's experiments with his students and a bit of money got me thinking on the above.

Folksonomic tags, I think, would be very useful augmenting (or in lieu of) blog topics. The image below is an illustration of such usage, using a few articles from this blog. It is simply a chain of tags that alows the reader to quickly determine the scope of the article where, previously, the title only provided, well, a title.

A title focuses on exactly what the piece is about. It rarely mentions all of the peripheral context of the piece and oftentimes doesn't tell you about other important parts of the article. And besides that, many titles are vague and off the mark. Even some of this blog's titles are just plain silly. How many readers am I missing out on because I thought of some stupid title? (Or just didn't use a tagchain for my title, garnering the appropriate amount of community interest for my post?)

Tags work best for long articles but would also work well for shorter ones. Shorter articles would requirer fewer tags, but it might prove that skimming a couple of tags is much quicker than skimming that short article to determine if there are any points of interest. This becomes more important when so many of us are becoming overwhelmed by trying to scan blogs and other sources of information for articles of interest. The number of interesting and relevant blogs will only increase in the future.

Your blog program would, of course, require a module to effectively use such a system. It may work like this:

Type your post as your normally would. When you submit your article, your program scans the article and determines which words (repeat words, words in a database, user-defined words, whatever) will be tags for the article. There is also room to add your own tags, but this process automates it for you. You then select which tags you want to use as tags by selecting the weight of the tag, on a scale from 1 to 10. Tags not given a weight will not be used.

You decide what each weight and tag should be - it's the folksonomic tag chain.

In the article, the tags are displayed alphabetically and according to the weight you have given to it (changes font size and perhaps color). Clicking on a tag in the chain will take you to a page that displays the appropriate tagged articles from your site and other sites (delicious, Technorati, etc.)

This method can also assist RSS aggregators in filtering articles for you. You could set your reader to display articles from X blog tagged with Yahoo with a weight of at least 6, for example. Or perhaps Technorati (or Yahoo, Google) could search for: "social networking"+4, Friendster+8, CEO+2. It's a bit like using +friendster as part of your search query, except that you can make certain words more important than others.

Another extension of this system (perhaps in the year 2020) would be to RSS-feed tagchains from other sites to your blog, making the tagchains truly folksonomic, and community-chosen. You might think, for example, that your article is about your trip to Peru but others have determined that the most amazing part of your article/post is the recipe for quinoa you posted (heck, that might not even be one of your tags).

An RSS-enabled chat client could allow your blog post to be sent as an IM to subscribers (feedback), and IM conversations to automatically post to blogs (feedforward).

Feedback

In feedback, your blog post is sent as an instant message (IM) to others. Others, receiving the IM, could easily respond to the message and have their response post automatically to the blog post. If you're interested in participating in the conversation, you click "Participate" and you will automatically be able to see the responses of other and participate in a flash chat session (think flash mobs, for chat rooms). If you're not interested, simply close the message window.

It could be made so that only those subscribing to a particular topic, category, or tag would see messages linked to that topic, category, or tag.

An RSS blog feedback system could have explosive consequences for blogs- as- collaborative- communities, or simply nice places to hang out.

Feedforward

In feedforward, every message you send to another would post automatically to a blog. This would be topic-driven, so that if you IM someone you first select the topic category and give the conversation a name. Your respondees' messages are automatically tied to the topic. When you want to discuss a new topic you simply 'change topic'. (This method would also serve as a constant reminder that others will see their conversations).

Anyone seeing the corresponding blog would see all conversations properly organized into the appropriate categories.

I think feedforward would benefit businesses most as more of them migrate some of their conversations to instant messaging systems.

Such a system could not just augment pointless meetings, for example, but replace them entirely if properly used. Colleagues could participate in "meetings" without actually being in them (just looking at the blog or blog feed at their convenience). Meetings could take place intermittently over days instead of crammed into 1 hour sessions. If they see something of interest or something to which they could contribute, they could easily pop into the conversation.

Really, the two systems could easily be one system. However, for ease of understanding I have illustrated them as separate concepts.

(See my previous article, RSS & the Evolution of Online Chat, for more crap.)

What's going to happen when people have a thousand feeds? Wouldn't it be nice to have these thousand feeds, but only display those that are tagged with what I'm looking for? Is there an RSS feed filter? I don't want to see everything that comes through the pipes. Alternatively, display only those that are titled with (or have included in the body) my pre-defined words.

[Update]

I'm referring to RSS aggregators here, not blogs that display RSS feeds. There are so many aggregators out there, somebody's gotta have it.

See another HNTB article, Folksonomic blog post titles? Better RSS feed filter methods? Better Search?

Now that the dude over at delicious has quit his day job and will work on the site full-time, I'm sure he and whomever else has invested some cash in the site is doing some thinking about where to take it (my money is on Google).

Google has more cash flow right now that HNTB has punctuation. It would be wise to invest in and integrate the popular site (and its concepts) into the Google gameplan. So, we must ask ourselves: How will del.icio.us make money?

What is can do, of course, is start with a community-based advertising scheme. Instead of just linking to a new used book service that I'm using that I think is wonderful, I could not only link to it, but tell the community what I really think about it in my user comments, and get paid for every click or order.

Think this isn't a good idea? Go to your favorite blogs or websites. Chances are, one or more of them will display Google Adwords (ads by goooooooooogle) somewhere on the page. These people are advertising products and services that they haven't even approved of. How much more valuable is a link recommended by someone you have some degree of trust in? A whole lot more.

Advertisers would list their products and services in the Tagwords directory. Users would pick out those products and services they're already using, add them to their bookmarks with their comments, tips, hints, recommendations, etc., for that product or service. If someone visits my links*, clicks on your product/service, and orders something, you better believe I want a premium price for the introduction. (The site operator would, of course, take a cut of that, too.)

(*Note: there's so much more that could be done with tagging and tracking sites like delicious and Technorati. I think the door has only just opened for these services. I'll try to crap it out in another post.)

Sure, there's plenty of room for abuse of the system, but a lot more room for non-abuse. Because the site is community-based, those users who abuse the system would simply not be successful at it.

Folksonomic clouds like delicious or Technorati must make changes if they're to integrate revenue concepts into their sites.

When I visit Technorati, I want to be able to look at their links, and easily add any link to my favorites. I should then be able to add my own personal tag and comment on the link for future reference. (And perhaps make the tags publicly viewable on my personal page.) "Tads" can then be implemented within this context. And how about giving me the ability to go to the next page while you're at it?

delicious should allow users to add a notes and other metadata to their bookmarks. (See del.irio.us for some reference.)

Though most users (including myself) would be annoyed at the new system for the ads, I think if the tagword ad (or tad) is 1) relevant; 2) not annoying; and 3) recommended by the bookmarker then I don't think most users would have a problem with the system. Remember, the last part is the most important part.

Of course users would display their regularly scheduled links. And you could set it up so that a user could only display one tagword ad for every x number of non-tads in my bookmarks.

Any visitor that visits my link page or searches for a tag will see my tads along with regular results. The number of ads per result set could also be limited so that a particular tag isn't littered with them.

Bloggers already link to do products and services that they love all the time. Why not make a little money in there somewhere at the same time?

Google is already trying out a new form of contextual advertising called AdLinks, where you can click on a keyword or keyphrase and be taken to a page of relevant advertising. If it does indeed partner purchase with del.icio.us, it would be taking the concept one step further.

The April issue of Wired talks about Marc Cuban's efforts to convert all 270 of his Landmark Theatre screens to digital.

What it neglets to mention is that Ireland's Digital Cinema Limited will convert all of the country's movie theaters (about 500) from 35mm to digital during the next twelve months.

Film studios in the US are reluctant to do the same (hence Marc Cuban) due to the initial cost of conversion and, well, they're just old farts who can't see the future for the gas.

Each theatre in the US would cost about $50-150k to upgrade. However, the movie studios would save a bundle by not shipping film in canisters to those theatres every week. Studios would be smart to split the costs with theatre owners. They could easily make up the difference in less than a year by expanding their current offerings.

Forget about upgrading ~36,000 screens. Take $200 million and try it out with 10% of that figure (50/50 split) to test the digital waters. Within 1 year you're estimated to save about $100 million in costs, not to mention probable greater consumer interest through that and expanded offerings. Hype it up.. do your thang. Heck, you could even lower ticket prices to celebrate. People would flock to theatres.

What could it mean to have a digital theatre in your neighborhood?

Wired mentions the better image quality of a digital film and the ability for movie theatres to easily balance out visitor load by shifting people to other theatres when a movie is more popular than expected. It also talks about "..high-res broadcasts or sports events, Broadway plays, fashion shows, and multiplayer electronic games". There's also the ability to show live concerts, take advantage of the Wi-Fi capabilities of Sony's PSP and similar devices, show more niche films (which are cheaper to produce and distribute digitally), nightly showings of popular television shows, and more. I think many people would purchase tickets on a frequent basis simple because the picture and sound quality would make it seem very real.

$7 for films and $3-5 for other showings. Theatres make more money from concessions, anyway. They could easily bring in more people to the theatres more of the time. They could have people coming through the doors all the time, not just at night and on weekends - older people during the day, younger people at night.

Currently, people only go to the theatre for movies. But they could be going for a whole lot more.

Integrating RSS functions with email functions is a logical path for email. There isn't a clear solution to the spam problem in sight, emails are pretty much 'final' when sent, email addresses are generally inflexible, inboxes are generally a big mess, and a lot of email from friends and coworkers is redundant and unnecessary.

The following idea for a personal messenger helps to alleviate some of those problems.

Goodbye Email Address
Your new "email address" is a web location that may look something like:

https://secure.rssemail.com/user/thom_flan/49t3k202ikw03k1.xml

Your new address is now as permanent or disposable as you want it to be.

Ideally, you should provide a unique message address to each of your friends, family, etc. So, you would have as many address locations as you have friends and family. Click a button and the messenger automatically creates a unique message address and announces it to the parties you choose.

You can also provide unique addresses for groups. Your family would get one address, your friends another, businesses another, etc. You can provide a regular email forward (eg., [email protected] - good for one send per friend) to people when you're out so you don't have to remember or repeat your entirely unique RSS location.

Now, no one can send you an email simply by spamming random email addresses, like when you have a Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL account. You can also easily organize messages before you read them (see below). If a spammer somehow finds your address location, just block that location out automatically.

Move Over, Universal Inbox
Who thought of the universal inbox? Every piece of mail you receive coming in through the same door is like your mailbox at home. The benefit of being digital is that we can organize and manage email better, automatically.

You can automatically have all messages from Bob arrive into one or more particular folders, while putting Bob's wife in another. You can then put the two into categories. Additionally, you can have an Unknown folder where all messages from unknown senders end up.

The New Post
If someone sends you a new message they are actually 'pinging' your address location with their message. The message is live, meaning that the sender can change it as many times as they want before or after you read it. This is not only good for revisions and mistakes, among other things.

You can also automatically feed certain messages to your personal, private, or public website, or even other people. Messages shouldn't be 'sent'.. they should be posted in a manner that's accessible to both sender and receiver. This is the internet, after all.

Attachments could probably be sent to a FTP-type location for user-download, with the message ID tying the two together. RSS-based media enclosures may also work. Ideally, this would be sender-side, where the recipient would click on the remote URL to download to their desktop. Unless you really want all of Aunt Betty's uncompressed vacation photos sitting in your inbox.

Sending Messages is Just As Easy
To send a message, just click on a person's name or paste their feed URL into the address box. Write your message and send it as you normally would.

If you change your mind about something in the message, you can theoretically change it before the recipient has a chance to read it. Because the message is only received when a user refreshes their 'inbox' (as opposed to a server receiving it and not letting you do anything) there will be no regrets and less "disregard-that-last-email" messages.

Interface
Either a standalone client, web access, or both. A web location with a secure login would work best for mobility.

Obvious Benefits from Using RSS
-Much easier to receive messages on portable devices
-Possibly: ability to make some messages public (see below)
-Messages can be received more securely, using an SSL server instead of bouncing around unsecured mailservers.
-View posts on your terms (if, when how, etc.)
-No virii embedded in your messages
-Unwanted messages reduced tremendously
-Tag incoming and outgoing messages
-Easily opt-in and out of newsletters and other types of mass-mailings.
-A lot more that I haven't covered

Future Directions
I think the best reason to develop an 'rssmail'-type system is for the potential ability to change the access rights to messages that you send and receive. And that's because not all emails you currently receive or send are personal. These could be ported onto a more public platform, or made accessible by/to a selected list of users. So instead of sending an email to certain persons, those persons can choose to access your message feed at their convenience, then selecting which of those messages they want to read. ("Spam" from friends would be one example.)

My belief is that, one day, instead of opening up an email client and viewing email we will view our dynamic message feeds on our own blog-type pages. We won't send or receive messages in the traditional sense. We will announce what we want to send and select those that are worth reading. Some of these messages will be public. Other, private. We will also be able to view selected messages that our friends, family, co-workers, and companies that we do business with have themselves received and sent to others. The future of email... is open.

Online chat systems could benefit immensely from RSS integration and a different type of hierarchy based on the popularity of user conversations.

The difference between the following idea for a chat aggregator and a regular chat client is not only that you can export conversations via RSS feed and display the topic of a real-time conversation on your website (and a user can easily join a conversation by clicking on a topic), but that conversations take place in organized 'fluid segments', which means that a user can easily move back and forth between multiple conversations with ease. Perhaps most importantly, a user does not have to be in a chat room to participate in the conversation.

This idea is based on three main components:

:::Fluid Segments:::
In a regular online chat, a user joins a chat room and usually experiences multiple conversations if there is more than one other person in the room. A user can also join another room and move back and forth between rooms, participating in even more conversations. In this scenario, a room could have a countless number of topics within a chat period, displaying segments of each conversation one after another with no regard to order or categorization.

In chat aggregation, there is a much greater focus. A user participates in topics, not rooms. Topics are grouped forum-style. Sub-topics automatically graduate to Topic status depending upon popularity. Because this type of chat is more focused than other chat systems it will most likely encourage greater user participation and dialogue. Keep in mind that because of the way this chat system is designed, you don't have to be in a chat system to participate in the conversation. The conversation can be, at times, "undead". Meaning, there's no one actively chatting right now, but the conversation is still taking place.

When opening the chat aggregator, you can select the channel that you want and see a list of topics, listed in descending order by those topics with the most replies. Additionally, clicking on any topic will list any of its sub-topics, again displayed in the same kind of order.

Order is maintained because a user has two choices, start a new topic or reply to the current one. In this scheme, the popularity of the topic is of greater importance than its chronological placement. However, a user can still easily scan new topics and new posts (color coded, alerts, etc). Replies to a topic are, of course, still displayed in chronological order.

It doesn't matter if no one else is currently on the feed, as no topics will disappear before a set time (say, 30 days). You can participate in both live conversations and 'undead' conversations at the same time.

Someone could theoretically, using a chat aggregator, participate in a handful of conversations at once much the same way someone could read 100 blogs in one session using an RSS aggregator - scanning each for interesting posts. There is no need to actively participate in every chat topic one is watching, of course, but I think there is a need to have captured the many spontaneous thoughts or conversations that are lost simply because there isn't a readily available facility.

Tags could also be applied to topics, allowing for easy search through Technorati or using other methods. (When was the last time you searched an online conversation?)

:::Conversational Hierarchy:::
Conversational hierarchy is much like regular forum hierarchy. For example: A user creates the "Games" chat feed in the chat aggregator. She then creates a new topic and posts it to the chat feed. Another user can then select either the NEW TOPIC or REPLY button next to the her topic. If he selects REPLY then his reply shows up under hers, indented.

Should a user select NEW TOPIC then the new topic will show up on the same level as other topics.

The trick is to list topics and sub-topics in order of number of replies underneath it. Any sub-topics can graduate to topic level should it have more replies under it than its parent does (minus the # of replies in that topic). Only topics are listed when selecting a chat feed to participate in.

:::RSS Integration:::
Any conversation can be exported in real-time via RSS to any web page or RSS reader. Chat topics become RSS feed titles. If you see an interesting conversation you want to join instantly, you just click on the topic.

You could also display live conversations on your sidebar from, for example, the "Blog" chat feed in descending order of most popular topics. You would only need one RSS feed, and users could click on a topic in your feed sidebar to join that conversation instantly.

The ability to easily export, archive, and search online chat sessions is something that's long overdue. Though it's easy to see why it has been ignored, considering the reluctance of people to participate in current chat systems in the first place because they're such a waste of time.

The Idea
The many kinks in this chat aggregator idea haven't been worked out. (I only throught of it a few minutes ago.) But I believe that the power of one standard, open-source chat platform with feed-ability will at last revive our long lost friend, the chat room.

Social Software for Set-Top boxes, from PlasticBag.

-A buddy-list for television
-Presence alerts
-Watch with your friends (BAD idea - how lame)
-Chatting and planning (what's the input device?)
-Choosing channels and playing games
-Sharing a social library

Great idea, though.

The problem with people receiving spam is usually that they use only 1 email address. They give everyone and everything [email protected] and then complain that they get too much junk in their inbox everyday.

Here's my solution:

1) Register a domain at an inexpensive registrar. (If you pay more than $9, you're getting ripped off.)

2) Spend $3/month for a hosting account like this one where you can get 1GB of space and a catch-all email address.

3) After you're done signing up and pointing the domain's DNS setting to your new host, set up your email client (with many modern hosts it's a one-click process from the control panel if you're too stupid or lazy to figure it out by yourself).

4) Now, here's the most important part. When you give someone an email address, make it unique. If you register at Corbis.com, for example, use [email protected] in the registration field.

5) Receive email as you normally do, in Outlook Express, Eudora, or whatever. When you see that you are receiving spam addressed to a particular email address go to your email control panel at your host (or using Outlook) and BLOCK that field. Example: if company X has sold your email address (which, inventively, you provided them with [email protected]) then you can just filter out any email coming in that has that email address int he "to" or "cc" field.

6) shut up about spam

My spam count (over 10+ domains and countless email addresses) is never more than 3 per day because of this very method that I have been using for years and years. Works like a charm.

View blogs.. literally.

Wait for the images to load. See something interesting? Hover your mouse cursor over the image and read the original text from the blog that it came from.

This would be perfect for an Amaztype-type service. Show me the cover of the book, then give me a summary.

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another? Are they that anti-social? As long as they don't they will never be much more than a novelty. To be truly useful they need to do more in the way of bringing together not only people but more of what people do with their lives. I'm not just talking tags, here.

Tribe, for example, allows you to view events, classifieds, groups, etc. But it doesn't really link any of that together. And that's one of the better sites out of many.

I can't think of a larger publicly-accessible database of people, places, and things than Google. However, its vast database is actually quite disparate and scatter-brained. It does not contain a single, reliable identifying method to link you with what you need to be linked to no matter how good you think it is at finding what you're looking for. Google still has to search through hell and high water for it.

A unique identification code for every event, person, place, and thing is the next logical step. It's where the future is headed and we might as well go there now. There's simply too much to keep track of to not have a unique way of identifying something you're related with.

Wikipedia is the perfect platform on which to bring everything under the sun together. It is already well on its way, with hundreds of thousands of user-submitted articles and bits of information. This could easily be extended to include, for example, the man sitting in the cafe, the cafe itself, the event he's waiting for in the cafe, and the book he's reading while he waits.

Every person, place, thing, and event would be assigned a unique ID (this can be automatically done for both new and current entries). One could then form or enable the formation of a relationship with anything in the database merely by copying and pasting the ID. Put it in your blog profile, mobile phone, an email, feed reader, or other field in your client. It will automatically know what it is because of its categorically-oriented ID, and how to organize it in your profile. You could even select the type of relationship you have with it ("relationship key") from a list of relationship types.

I could, for example, create an event in Wikipedia and then send its unique ID in an email or post it on my website. Others could then import that into whatever type of client they're using and know, immediately, everything about the event. Because of this unique type of information aggregation-by-ID they can know that the place where we're meeting has delicious French pastries and closes at 5PM on Saturday or that John, one of the attendees, owns the cafe and will give us a 20% discount (he also likes to play his classical music collection). If, later on, you wanted to aggregate all of that information into a blog post, Flickr, your PodCast, or ID-tag an email in Gmail all you would need to do is paste the ID. This has a tremendous immediate applications in schools and universities, not to mention everywhere the access of information is involved.

Google is great for searching. But wikipedia could be excellent for finding something specific, then using that information efficiently and dynamically in ways that we cannot now imagine.

I'm still waiting for someone to create a web search based on the Google API that displays results on one line only with the keyword(s) in bold. Not everyone wants to see the URL or the page file size, or even its keyword-in-context text. I fear that Google's results are becoming more and more useless due to the efforts of certain search engine optimization parties that don't mind being irrelevant (or just Google's algorithm being off. Maybe this is why some ads on Google have keywords that consistently get a +25% click-through rate - the ads are oftentimes more relevant).

Instead of scrolling further and further down a bulky search result list for many keywords that the SEO guys target, just show me more of what I want to see. I played video games when I was a kid, so my eyes are pretty quick. The 1-line trick would be useful.

This should be part of Google's user preferences, but it ain't.

Really, they need to liven up their core product and give users more options to display and sort what it does best before their search box becomes irrelevant.

I'm convinced that 'blogs' are a stepping stone to a much greater kind of tool just as bulletin board systems (BBSes) were a stepping stone to what is now the internet.

Slate makes mention of something similar to what I'm thinking about. They call it newsmashing, pointing to an old annotation tool called iMarkup.

An extension of the blog-as-network concept would be taking the blog itself and internetworking it out to the actual websites where they want the discussion to occur. This type of 'direct blogging' would, I believe, allow for a greater intensity to develop surrounding whatever is being blogged about.

The HowNotToBlog website would, for example, only be a gateway or placeholder to the HowNotToBlog electron cloud. Kind of like bit torrent sites (TorrentSpy.com, for example) holding only the files necessary to download what you're looking for from other locations outside of the site itself - a reference point. The HowNotToBlog .whtevr file would be downloaded from here (or anywhere) and then you would use your next-generation blog reader to browse the many other locations where HNTB conversations are taking place.

In effect, you wouldn't even need a website to blog. Just a piece of software that lets you participate in endless communities of web existence. Blogging would go from one-to-many to many-to-many. We see part of this now in community blogs like Metafilter where you have many people contributing to the community's content. However, most of the Metafilter community doesn't participate at all - they just sit and watch the conversation taking place. Immense social capital is being wasted right now simply because the tools aren't there yet. But the next generation Blog is right around the corner.

Your Blog Universe reader/writer would filter out all of the other blogs conversations, or channels, that you're not interested in, on the website you're looking at. So, each website would actually be a kind of portal to endless, networked conversations. I could go to the FoxNews website and comment on a recent article and view the comments and annotations made by others in my particular community. Persons involved in another type of public or private community (say, the conservative homemakers community) would not see my community's postings unless they chose to. The differences in preferences would insure that no communities, except for the very smallest, exist in silos.

I may have a different view of Joan's graduation photos on Flickr than her grandma Sally in Georgia. She may not want to read what I think of Joan in her high heels. It may be her granddaughter. Joan's family could see one version of the photos and comment on them, etc., and my horny toads and I could see another version with more humorous versions of the photos. As well, her family could post private information like phone numbers, messages, and additional photos without anyone else seeing. The possibilities are endless.

The reader would categorize posts and other media like photos, videos, documents, so that it's not too messy. You could also chat with others, leave session-activated private messages, view XML feeds from related sites, etc. The technology is here already. It's just not put together in such a way.

iMarkup is a nice tool, to be sure. However, it's taking us back to the 60s when Engelbart was annotating websites and couldn't do much else. I'm talking dynamic peer interaction, here. (No, Yahoo 360 won't accomplish this.)

Blogs today don't really create communities or much peer interaction, either. They're more a tool that encourages interaction with others. The next generation of blogs and blogging won't be based on websites at all. We thought of networking the BBSes and other networks together more cohesively and that was great. Now it's time to do the same for all of the disparate conversations that continue to result.

Modern capitalism is such a smelly whore with a bad case of bling bling. No matter who you are or how stupid you are or how awful you treat a business, they will still want your money.

This doesn't mean that you can call a customer service rep an a$$hole or something - you'll probably get hung up on or transferred into Siberia. Unless you're a new customer. New customers get the golden treatment no matter how rude, stupid, or ignorant they are. Companies will bend over backwards and still let you fuck them in the ass if you show them so much as a twenty dollar bill. That's because businesses don't care where their money comes from. It all looks the same to them.

I'm sure even Bill O'Reilly, the first a-hole on my alphabetized list of a-holes, can still get new phone service or open an account at any bank in the US, even if the company was filled to the brim by the most liberal of liberals. He might get some snot in his soup when he goes out to eat, but he'll still get his soup.

The capitalist whore has gone blind from a bad case of syphilis. Even GM and Ford did business happily with Hitler, among hundreds if not thousands of other companies at the time. Patti Vasquez will happily shine the floors of Dr. Evil's laboratory every night.

Like millions of other North Americans, I run a small business. (No, I'm not a paid assassin, in case you're wondering.) If a customer is being a prick, I let him or her know. And then I tell them that I don't want their business or their money.

Yes, I turn down business. It's my Rude Customer Policy.

Why do I want to waste time and effort with your stupid ass? Do you think I care how many legs you're missing and how much of a discount you want because you pay so much for medicines every month? Are you angry that it's been 5 minutes since you left me a voicemail at 1 in the morning or have sent me an email, and you haven't heard back from me yet? Go fuck your grocer! Take your business where they'll do anything for it.

Customers are choosy with whom they do business. Businesses should be, too.

People will never feel comfortable paying for Wi-Fi access at exorbitant rates. Who wants to be charged by the minute or hour.. or megabyte... just for the privelege of being outside the home?

When is someone going to come along with a nice little script that allows businesses to sell targeted text ads (like Google Adwords) to display to users surfing on their wifi networks for free?

Is broadband really so expensive that companies can only think of how to charge for the "luxury" of internet everywhere? They're missing the exponential value to business everywhere by limiting the natural outgrowth of being online at home.

In my example above the more you would like me to use your wifi the more money I could actually make you.

Businesses and enterprising citizens would be screaming to spread their wifi connections everywhere. The whole country would be blanketed with free high-speed wireless in less than 3 years.

To help the process, I wouldn't mind some kind of innocent tracking cookie in my jar that allows you to show me only those ads you're pretty sure I would be interested in. Don't show a lot.. perhaps rotate one ad (and one ad only) every 2-3 minutes. That way, I'd want to see what the next lone ad is, instead of wanting to avoid that section of my screen entirely. I think an ad scarcity model would work because I think most people would long for some kind of external message/validation.

Google or some other company would surely make a killing on such ads, guaranteeing their own future relevance in the process. I would almost say that Google needs this kind of growth if it wants exponentially greater profitability.

Continue to think of WiFi as a commodity, and you miss where the real money is. Traffic.

Philip Winn talks about his experiences with the new Napster at Blogcritics.

In 5 years, who will remember either? The iPod's cool novelty will pass gas, and there will have been an even better device to come along that will start another wave of copycats. A small device with a full-color display that lets you experience music like people are starting to experience and share photos and blogs with variable pricing plans would do the trick.

The only great thing about mobile phones in the US is that you can purchase a subsidized one that would have cost you a lot more if you commit yourself to a service plan. (You're also locked, which would be a benefit to the media companies.) Europe, with it's much better and more flexible GSM legacy, is actually looking to the US companies as a model for expanded profitability.

Why not the same thing for an iPod Shuffle and regular iPod? $40 and $15 a month for 2 years for the Shuffle. You'll break about even with the first $40 on the Shuffle. Wrap it with a revamped Napster-like buffet music plan according to how much people are paying you every month, and by locking your users in you can at least stave off an attack from another hardware company with a better product until you get your engineering department in order.

In other words, give me a good reason to give you more of my hard-earned money. The illusion of cheap is good enough for most people, including the millions more who haven't bought your products because of the price.