Just now I logged onto the semantic web IRC chat channel after many months away and immediately saw: <libby> teefal! long time no see Having met Libby a few times on various islands in the Atlantic, I know her as very friendly, so it doesn't surprise me that she'd say hi so quickly. What surprised me is how welcomed I felt by it. This got me thinking about the humanness that interconnects our fragile web communities. Scrolling through nicknames on #swig, I was able to quickly recall faces, voices, and conversations. The fact that these people live all over the...

I'm reading Fritjof Capra again, returning to my Daoist roots. In college I studied cognitive science in conjunction with mystic philosophy. Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. It is called avidya ... and is seen as the state of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome. - Capra Categorizing mentality! And here I just spent two years making a product that explicitly tags everything in life. I can just see...

Tonight we watched Love Actually as inspiration for the sort of interconnected narrative I alluded to yesterday, as was mentioned on JOHO. David's right in saying there's an integrity of storyline that's needed, no matter how many expositional tricks we play, as with Memento. The difference, I think, will be in how we package and stitch together plot, and what we'll call "a work". Tonight's movie used interconnection quite effectively, where each separate plot harmonized with each other like themes building in a symphonic work, unlike some Robert Altman films that seem more like channel-surfing. The degenerate case would be...

I talk a lot more than I write these days. Blah blah blah people. Blah blah blah usability. Blah blah blah semantic web. There's probably good parts to my well-worn rap I could write down, but for me writing's always been about discovering something new, at least when it works. So what's new on this quiet night? What new clarity might be found given all that's going on? I could comment on the many great movies I've seen lately. I could write yet again about the project, or other business blather. I could dredge up some tender detail from my...