There is an idea frequently referred to as Technological Singularity. Simply put, the concept is that pace of technological progress has been accelerating throughout human history; going a little faster all the time. Eventually the theory goes; technology will be progressing so fast we’ll break though the barrier of humanity itself, cultural light speed. The term singularity (a black hole) is used because like in astronomy, by definition you cannot see what is on the other side of a singularity. Nothing that passes though it can ever escape to tell those left behind what’s on the other side.

I can buy into that, and you can draw neat graphs that even let you pick dates, but several questions remain.

I propose the following answers, increasing ability to aggregated intelligence and the concept of objective reality.
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I have been working away for a few weeks trying to fuse OpenID-type technology with peer-to-peer-type technology. P2PID I like to call it.

I’m pretty sure such a beast is the solution to a lot of the grief seen on the net today. Issues like credibility, who to trust, peer review, not having big companies control the world, etc. Someone just has to figure out how to make it work.

My studies of late have lead me to read some philosophy. I’m pretty confident 21st century information architecture has a lot to learn from 20th century philosophy. I wish I’d gotten into it years ago.

Since almost none of this stuff is on the net I figured I’d start blogging a few quotes and maybe babble about them later. We’ll see. To start here’s a pile of stuff from the English translation of a French book called anti-oedious by gilles deluze & felix guattari. When I read this and think about the Wikipedia I get all tingly.
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After much slacking off, I finally fixed the links to the various bits of software I released way back when on this blog. Profuse apologies for slacking off on supporting these things, more evidence that communities are better at knowledge generation then individuals. Especially lazy distracted individuals.

Dircaster seems to have taken on a life of its own and is up version 0.4e without my help. Awesome! I am going to see about releasing it into Sourceforge or something so it can be more easily maintained by others.

I’ve also given up on comments. Further apologies. Feel free to e-mail me at ryan (at) shadydentist.com. The plan is to write some sort of wiki plugin for wordpress to take their place but that is still pending.

I want a way to track all my clicks when I read the Wikipedia, and ideally your clicks too. Who looked at what article, when and from where they clicked in and out.

Think of all the cool things that should be possible with that data. Figuring out which articles had strong connections to one another across multiple degrees of separation; from different perspectives based aggregate user types. I’m not sure what some of the results would be but I’d love to be able to find out.

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Read an interesting interview with Leo Grillo about the details surrounding Zyzzyx Road, the movie reported to have the lowest box office receipt total in history ($30USD). It makes me think we’ll see something significant soon that hybrids the business models of sites like CDBaby and Magnatune and applies them to distributing indie movies.
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Alan Goldstein on Nanobiotechnology.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this article since I read it a few days ago. His use of the pace maker example is great.

The article itself is perhaps a bit overly dramatic but the idea of breaking the carbon barrier and exchanging information bidirectionally between cells and machines does have spooky ramifications.

I’m not too worried about unstoppable self replicating cancer cures yet but I agree that such technology would rapidly obscure the definition of ‘life’ past the point of usefulness. After that, who knows…

Television is changing. Personal Video Recorder technology combined with the Internet is letting people watch what they want when they want it. I believe ultimately this will lead to major positive changes in the content.

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Wow, a year almost slipped by there. School and summer keeping me busy/lazy. I was reading about OpenID today and got excited. Email based verification has lots of problems and OpenID solves them well opening lots of exciting new possibilities.
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Wow, I guess tagging got hot. Yahoo bought Flickr, and now Del.icio.us too.

Some thoughts. I use both of these sites heavily and there seems to be a lot of concern that Yahoo is going to stick ads all over everything and generally muck things up. I’m not sure. Admittedly merging Yahoo’s ID system with Flickr’s wasn’t super pleasant, but other then that they haven’t changed anything I can see.

Keep in mind that they say Del.icio.us only has 300,000 accounts. Peanuts by Yahoo standards. Yahoo could start a social bookmarking service and have 300,000 users in there inside a week. Flickr only had 250,000 when they sold.

I think Yahoo is after bigger fish. They suspect tag based classification is going to be a huge deal and they want inside knowledge. Google knows it too, the labels on Google Base are basically tags.

What I want to see is what happens if you resort the results of a google-type text search based on Del.icio.us-type tag clustering and popularity. If I search for ‘poker’, show search results first that have a high number of ‘poker’ tags applied to them in the tag system. Or are frequently bookmarked by people who frequently use the tag ‘poker’, as they are likely intimate with poker on the net.

I’ve fiddled with implementing this but Del.icio.us is too slow to grab a few hundred URL histories on the fly remotely. I think Yahoo had the same idea and spent $30 million to speed up the process.

Thanks to the wicked cool people at Flickr! and their API and Dan Coulter’s phpFlickr wrapper for said API, captioner! now supports Flickr! photos directly.

After way less testing then probably necessary, I’m opening captioner! to the public. It’s some javascript that lets you add comic style captions/text balloons to images on the net.

Check it out, your comments are welcome.

To try and avoid killing the site under its own success I’ve returned Aggregato to an invitation only system. It can handle plenty more users but I’m having trouble sleeping worrying that some eager Slashdot editor will do me a favor and totally swamp it. Please continue to use the site and invite your friends.

I’ve added a bunch of searching and many-to-many suggestion functionality to try and take advantage of the tags. Tags are neat, the suggestions are eary good.

Added a bunch of edit-in-place style as well, amazing what you can do with XMLHTTP.

I’m pretty sure that with the inspiration provided by GMail and Flickr the web in a few years is going to look so far ahead of what we’re used to today. The tyranny of the page reload is over.

Announcing Aggregato, a RSS feed aggregator organized with tags.

You can assign feeds multiple tags, which makes very flexible display options possible.

I had been using BradBury Software’s FeedDemon for reading RSS feeds, but had started to drown in information. Inspired by the whole folksonomy explosion and the awesome Magpie RSS parser for PHP, I have written Aggregato.

The site is now open to the public right.

I’m not sure how badly it’s going to load down the server under real world use. I’ve tried to keep everything efficient but I’m sure there will be some scaling issues.
Please do check it out.

The Future

In the future, downloading is good. In the future, musicians and when available their record labels, will be whatever it takes to get you to download their music. The most profitable music will be the music that makes a profound emotional connection with its fans, not disposable of-the-moment pop.

In the future, CDs will be plentifully available and have the nicest most well thought out packaging imaginable. And in the future, ultimately successful artist’s early supporters are rewarded culturally and even financially for their taste.

In the future, you can download all the music you want for free and musicians get paid anyway.
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Another version of dirCaster is released.

dirCaster is a php script that allows one to very easily start Podcasting mp3 files from their web host. This allows original content creators to easily provide a feed for iPodder, jPodder, etc.

This release fixes a bad bug that broke everything on filenames that contained things like a ‘&’ symbol.

More information here.

I have released an updated version of dirCaster, just bug fixes regarding the naming of files I should have done weeks ago. In my defence, I was moving to the other side of the Atlantic.

dirCaster is a php script that allows one to very easily start Podcasting mp3 files from their web host. This allows original content creators to easily provide a feed for iPodder, jPodder, etc.

Adding ID3v2 support turned out to be a lot more complex then I had thought. There are some excellent looking classes to do it but I wanted to keep things very light and easy rather than bog it down with more complex install. The idea is to make it as simple possible.

I’m glad the script has been useful to so many people. Thanks to everyone who suggested and posted changes and features.

More information here.

Version 0.3 released only a few hours later. I’m lazy and always turn on register_globals, but it has been pointed out that this is not default behavior. Thanks Arnie.

WPBT: An easy to install PHP based BitTorrent tracker for WordPress 1.2.1.

I love BitTorrent and have been wanting to make it easier for people to setup their own trackers forever. I stumbled across PHPBTTracker the other day, which is exactly the thing, but the install is a little involved. So I’ve written WPBT, a super easy to install BitTorrent tracker for WordPress users based on PHPBTTracker.

More information here.

Although the original PHPBTTracker appears quite stable, my hack is to be considered experimental. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

dirCaster v0.1 is a php script that allows one to very easily start Podcasting mp3 files from their web host. This allows original content creators to easily provide a feed for iPodder, jPodder, etc.

Drop the dircaster.php script into a directory and it will generate an RSS feed suitable for iPodder, etc based off the MP3 files in that directory. To ‘cast a new file, simply upload it to the directory containing the script.

Check out Brad’s remix feed to see an example of dirCaster in operation.

More information here.

So I guess I’m jumping on the bandwagon and starting a personal weblog. Hello.

The plan is get some opinion off my chest and offer assorted programming gizmos that are a byproduct of my existence.