Monthly Archives: May 2011

Faces in the clouds

What does technology want?

Can we reasonably expect a protopia from the system of people, laws, and technology? Or should we expect darker things from Industrial Society and Its Future?

My favorite theory of consciousness is that it doesn’t exist – it is an illusion that a system creates to handle all the conflicting demands of subsystems. The internet doesn’t seem conscious yet – but it seems close. Perhaps we are putting our pareidoliac predilections on processes that have no analogue to our lives, seeing faces in clouds of networks and switches.

Doesn’t it seem that a system that spends so much time looking at itself will begin to have a working model of itself, that it will eventually build feedback mechanisms that reshape it in even more interesting ways?
Will it be a community or an entity or are both the same?

Greasemonkey Hack: Adding tags and autosuggest to trunkly

The Backstory

del.icio.us was awesome. It was my first introduction to truly social software. It was my first introduction to tags and folksonomy vs. taxonomy – which blew my tiny mind.

And it was useful. Immediately, quickly, crazy useful. You could find the stuff you had seen! You didn’t have to be on the computer you had originally seen things on! You could bubble up lists of things you were interested in! I was struck with love.

Then Yahoo bought it and did the thing that Yahoo does to promising and interesting websites. It starves and kills them. So delicious is now getting bought by AVOS.

The New Thing

I’ve moved on and Trunkly looks like the best replacement so far. It is free, they will import all of your delicious bookmarks, scrape your twitter and facebook feeds, and one of the first things they built was a way to get your stuff back out of the site. I always like to have an exit strategy. I suggest trunkly as a delicious migration. The developers are really responsive and they have the freedom right now to do new and surprising improvements.

Not a small benefit: It is EARLY and short names on trunkly are available. So I was able to get http://trunk.ly/mk

Finally, the Point

The trunkly submit bookmark form is a bit crap though. I fixed it. See:
ungreased_trunkly
Turns into:
greased_trunkly_tags

You need the Firefox browser and the excellent Greasemonkey addon. Got those installed?

Great – now click here to install Autosuggest Tagging for Trunkly.
. You can always see the source or file bugs on it at the UserScripts.org page.

A Poem about Proper Paperwork

Today is my birthday, and I’ve been overwhelmed with happy birthday wishes. I’m very fortunate and grateful.
I’d like to give you a gift back.
Here is a poem about the importance of filling out forms.
Please enjoy “We Know” in a browser like Chrome or Firefox.

Tonight we will be having dinner at Superfine in DUMBO and then off to see “Black Watch” at the St Ann’s theater. Perhaps we will see you Saturday at Cinco de Matto?