All the web tools have ways for us to tag and mark and make our categories. Hidden in the rest are our true strengths and weaknesses. If you have had a self critique or had others tell you about the little things you didn’t even know you were doing you will understand what I am thinking here. We see what we want to see as many slicksters, con men and government agents would tell you if they didn’t eant something form you. They, in fact, depend on us to be that way. How do they just know what you want to here or what you will do if you can be put into a very specific situation? Situations that occur at the poker table where the grizzled old poker player (or half cocked, I don’t give a shit young gun) with a six shooter full of aces at the right time will know you are bluffing at the poker table. I posit that if you write down some thoughts, and this has gone on for several millennial but without the aid of a shiny mac book pro (13” SSD that truley screams with what I can throw at it :-) ); a mac book pro that lets you record your own history and experience. Hell, icons of the past have had huge media companies distill their life works and aggregated media. For the everyone, is this really just a map/reduce with an interface to message and release the results? What do I see? I see a place where I upload my database, my photos and photo database cause apple prolly has some great meta data for my photos and videos, my outgoing email (we most certainly want to filter out any external noise - anything external of us is not part of self) and a blank slot for perspective. Perspective is a way for me to attach meta thought about meta data. This is what you see, here is my thought on that. A thought starts with a flame a flicker and a flourish. Unified said it best: Thoughts Light Fires. Some fires burn on and on if you light them at the right time. Text gets parsed out into raw form and distribution plots (ala nltk) get made for the various distribution patterns. The results in the distribution patterns are mapped back to the original file. This is Unix, everything is a file. The meta data for the original file is extracted, starting with date and location if they exists otherwise just move on. Then, images are linked by date or location if they match up. Where the user comes into play is to use a presentation tool, (I am totally influences by my recent experience with impress.js as a user interface, an interactive presentational task bar. Oh, everything is red, its not published. Look, I zoom all the way out and all I see is red. Well, I am OK if I put out those images of the 21st party I had - Along with the explanation that I am so extremely lucky to have friends and siblings at the time who generously overlooked the ridiculousness that I got up to that night and *spin it* the way I believe it happened. All the big organizations do it, including governments. Yes I drank a lot on my 21st birthday. Yes I fell over, and it was silly of my to think I could drink that much whiskey. We didn’t even make it out to the bars, well I didn’t at any rate. A trip to the bathroom and then to my bed. This was all before midnight I believe but time and other influences make the memory a bit hazy Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what the details are and non of that was true. I am betting that will be something some people can relate to. So I can decide to publish something that may be other places on the Internet id one of the above theoretical siblings would have happened to go home and write on his social media site a comment about omg look at him he is pretty wasted, oh yeah happy 21st bro, take two aspirin and drink a quart of power-aid when you wake up. And I can give my context. Sure some people will abuse this but I believe they will lose in the end, just like if the poker player *abuses* his intuition about another players habits will eventually get the tables turned on him by the other player. I start out with an impress(.js)ive graph on a web page that is all red. I can move around and zoom in on the content. I can take sections or parts of a section and make them green. There is only public and private. If I want to show something only to a select audience well there, well I suspect that google and facebook are much better at that. This is not about social but it is also not antisocial in the way that going to a park and sitting in meditation is not anti-social. I tell Hannah that it is ok to be quit and that everyone needs their own quit time. As I head into the latter half of the thirties I do not seem to get enough *quiet* time. Time where I could read an entire book in a day. Time where I could kick a soccer ball against our barn wall until I couldn’t see the ball anymore because the sun had set. Time to play mission impossible over and over until the wee hours of the morning and later the same thing with SNL and the quirky movies that played on early 90’s broadcast TV lat at night. This is about a way to craft your message to a global audience that is distracted, over worked and under selfed. Everyone could do with just five minutes more of self. Well, maybe not Austin, he is probably still a little wtf its cold out here and I am tired and hungry. Where did that wonderful automation go? So we have subtle habits that lie under the currents of every day life and no tools to make use if those subtle habits. The poker analogy still holds, just because you know where your habits are not in your best long term interest doesn’t mean you need to broadcast that out. But it is good information to have and keep in your mind the next time you write a email back to someone or bitch about the problems you have to solve. Rarely is venting as satisfying as solving a problem and venting never gets you any closer to the solution. So I am not venting, I am sitting here, seeing the tool that will interface into a personal, small data search engine that analyzes your most intimate data. Data that is for your eyes only and stored right on your own computer in the browser database and you can delete it at any time if yo didn’t then its your fault. with a run on sentence here and a run on sentence there you can keep the data as private and personal as the other private and personal data that lives on your computer. I see this zoom-able map of personal content and media as a way to be my own marketing and marketing communication department. Its all already there, why hand it off to someone else? Remember we start with a zoomed out map, like at the end of the impress.js demo and everything is red. As we start to zoom in we get the ability to make pieces public. It is always all or nothing. Just because something is easy to do does not abdicate our personal responsibilities. Remember - there is a bunch of unsubstantiated search engine noise out there that may or may not apply. This, our self project, our projectME is important. If not to us or to the global audience then it is valuable to our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Could you imagine if Grandpa I’s grandparents had kept diaries and we had (digital) access to them to search. Not just for genealogical reasons but for the price of milk back then, the common ailments of that day and the luxuries that were afforded to them. Thats what I see being valuable to the generations yet to come and valuable to the one who can make the tools that everyone can use to do distill their digital DNA (data as mentioned above at the beginning but Digital DNA sounds cooler) into the living components of phenotypical expression. The expression of self through our thoughts (email/blog) and our actions (photos, calendar and video).
1/5/2012 ~ 8 min read
