I fear the lateral web

Not too long ago, I re-organized the way that my feeds are linked, to try and make it easier to follow only the parts of my Internet life that one might choose to follow.

This is breaking apart.

Maybe it is because I've had too much coffee today and am unable to focus, but I am getting a healthy dose of THE FEAR from the expanse that is the Internet.

I know that no one cares how I organize my feeds, not really, anyway. They'll follow this particular feed, or not, depending on whatever.

But I have this sense of the Internet really going on forever, and not stopping. Like I'm trying to corral liquid mercury.

I've been experimenting with the Chrome browser extensions, and some of them are pretty cool. I've got my Calendar extension, and my Gmail extension, so my incoming messages and events are popping up with little iPhone-like badges. If I really wanted to get crazy, I could get a Google Voice account and the extension would let me call and send SMS right from my browser. All of this is pretty cool, previews of coming events for a Chrome OS, and a "app-less" computer browser set-up.

Then there are the other javascript goodies, like "email this page", "tweet this page", "search for maps based on addresses on this page" "wikipedia this", etc. All good, fairly functional stuff.

But then there is Sidewiki.

If you've never explored Sidewiki, it is a Google-powered Wiki for EVERY WEB SITE ON THE INTERNET. You open it up along side another page, and you can add editorial marginalia to any web site.

It is designed to be tour-guide notes, perhaps helpful comments. Most sites still have no Sidewiki entry, and those that exist are pretty sparse or obvious.

But I think you can see where this is going.

A lateral internet, comprised of "hidden" marginal notes. Fire up the Borges-Bot--it's time to compose some more conspiracy-inducing strands of the lateral web. Imagine a sprawling web site full of blank pages. With no text they remain largely un-indexed, and take nearly zero hosting space on their own. What function they do have, is to serve as anchors for long Sidewiki explorations. Un-themed, "private invite" chats take place. Links are shared. "Un-searchable" conversations take place, which are of course archived by Google, and used for unknown purposes. Romances and revolutions live and die without ever leaving the Sidewiki.

I had the same feeling about Buzz, to tell you the truth. I don't really use Buzz, but at the same time, I DO. You see, I use Google Reader's "Share" function, serving up shared items from my RSS feeds, and presenting them on a single page, with the ability to comment. But then, in commenting on other's shared items, and reading the comments, I noticed that some are coming from Buzz. You see, with Buzz, you can link in your Reader shared page, so any Shared item is automatically converted into a Buzz. One item is copied to another, making equivalent Internet posts in two different sourced feeds.

You can do the same thing with Twitter: my Twitter feed is copied to my Buzz feed. So, if the rare circumstance occurs where someone is only following me on Buzz and not on Twitter, they can still see all my 140 character wisdom.

But, on Buzz they can comment. So, there might, potentially, be a long conversation based around one of my tweets that no one following my Twitter feed would know about, unless they were also on Buzz. So this is not a simple copy of an item, but a generative spawning of the original item... or at least potentially, in that Buzz has the ability to comment.

Still with me?

All of this creates huge Boolean logic problems, if, like me, you are obsessed with having "one feed to rule them all". How do you funnel all the input formats upward, maintaining each in an OR connection, not missing anything, and not duplicating anything? Especially when each service has a different "favorite", "like", "comment", or "promote" feature? And where is all this data, anyway? Who controls my "liking" of something? We are meant to think it is tied to the original item. But it doesn't.

But where does "comment" exist, exactly, in the nebulous world of Internet services? It's not meta-data, at least not "meta" in relation to the "data" of the Internet. It's side-data, tuned by separate services, and presented along side the overall data of the Internet. Content itself, semiotic aporia that it is, is becoming de-contented by the exo-content. Where is the meta-content? HTML is becoming the meta-content, because rather than the strictly meaningful content, it is the only content universally accessible, by which exo-content is accessed and distributed.

The signified was considered to be the anchor of the signifier, as the real that informed the ideal. But now the signifier informs our understanding of the signified, because we can only interpret the real by deploying our ideal categories. But then next, in this imaginary timeline of logic, the signified exerts control again, by being the signifier for the signifier's signified categories; because only drawn in the material of the signified, can the signifier be extensible or sensible.

Example: we know what dust is (signified). We have an ideal picture of a dry, dirty cloud of particulate, settling on all surfaces (signifier). Because we have an ideal picture of dust (signifier), we are able to say, this is not dust (signified), it is sand. But then, when we reach forward to spell out the difference, we must feel the dust on the ground between our fingers, and compare it to sand, and if we did not have these (signified) we would have no concept of what we meant (signifier). The signified is the substance of signifier, and the signifier is the form of the signified. Then they "act as" the other. The signifier is the substance of the signified, and the signified is the form of the signifier. Not only is the duality between the two important, the position in the metaphysical grammar is important. Because they are different, and yet they flip flop. It's as if your right hand was only not your left because it could sometimes be your left, and by this, it was not always the left. You can only have a left and a right hand if you have both a left and a right hand. Otherwise, it's just a hand.

I know. But aren't you glad we are binary beings? Imagine if we had a third hand? (ps you do: your genitals. A subject for another post.)

Back to the internet: we used to have meta-data: data that told us how to organize our data. Now the data that tells us how to organize data is exo-data: it resides elsewhere, it is only laterally linked, it is sometimes it's own data, and some times the "original" data is the meta-data for the exo-data. In other words, a feature of the relationship between data and exo-data is that sometimes the exo-data is the data and the data is the exo-data. Imagine if "the internet went down", and someone stumbled upon the contents of the Sidewiki server. They would have all of this tangential data, and some understanding of the organization of what it was originally associated with, (it's pretty easy to figure out the relationship between data/group and data/group/subgroup) but some of it would have unknown referents, and some of it would stand on its own, or maybe it wouldn't, but how would you ever know? How can you tell if a comment is a response, or an essay on its own? How can you tell if a reference work is real or made-up, apt or extraneous, if you don't have access to it?

I think the period of time when we have "control of our data and history" will be relatively brief. We'll be back to the days where fires destroyed knowledge forever, where referenced works were unknown, and where knowledge lived and died with single people. Except it won't be fires, but support discontinuing, broken links, and un-archived sites. The amount of data necessary to track all the data is an exponential figure. Storage may be increasing exponentially, but it would have to increase at a rate equal to "amount of data" X "exo-data to make sense of the data". Can it do this? How do we even guess at what these values are? How to we measure the rate of change of these values?

(N+MindFuck)^X. And that's even without all the semiotics ramifications of the sheer fact that I'm trying to express this on a blog, right? WHERE IS THIS POSTING TO? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? CAN EVERYONE HEAR ME?

But on a consumer level, how the hell is a "social network" supposed to develop across all these servers? The days of Facebook and AIM were pretty simple. You have a friend list, and you can talk to the people on your list. Now there's all this... crap.

Thinking about it this way: I didn't used to have any data backup at home. I had one computer. Then I got a partner. She had a computer. I got a USB hard drive, and started backing up both of our files. But with the extra space, we both ended up with more data than our computers' HDs hold combined. Then, I got a network storage server with more capacity, and do a double back-up, migrating files upwards from the computers to the USB drive, to the NAS. I'm lucky if I can remember the pattern of Boolean settings to make sure I am only over-writing data in the right direction, and still have everything backed up.

I used to really like keeping track of my mp3s meta-data with iTunes. Forget it. Now there's no way iTunes own library database can keep it all in line. I'm lucky if it can still find all of the mp3s, without making duplicate copies to local libraries all over the place.

But most consumers don't even back up their files. They fill a hard drive, and when it crashes, they abandon it. If they can pay someone to do archeology at that point, maybe they do. And then they start over again with a new drive. How are they supposed to navigate these interlocking "social networks", let alone understand the semiotic ramifications of meta-data cum exo-data?

Fuck, I can pontificate about semiotics, but I'm still not sure how to organize my feeds. Does the cloud make it simpler? More complicated? I just deleted my Facebook, because my interest stalled before I figured out all the new settings. Maybe I'll restart when Diaspora comes out. So what will be the lifetime of a social network "data object"? How long will each of us live on Facebook, before the connections become a burden, we pull the plug, and start new?

I fear the lateral web. But I love exo-data.

Interdome Content-Object Shakeup

Been thinking a lot about Tim's (of Quiet Babylon internet-fame) project, "Unlink Your Feeds".

The problem of multiple, interlinked feeds has long been a burgeoning neurosis of mine.

Let me share my problems with you!!!

I love interconnectivity. I use my Google account with great zest, trying out the new features as they add them. A lot of them are useful, but a lot of them I try to use, simply because having everything linked together makes it easy to experiment. I don't have to invent a new password and username to try X service, I just click the link. If I don't like it, I just stop using it, and never pay it another thought.

Additionally, Google's interconnectedness is a huge plus. There are plenty of portals and application uses between Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and so on, which I don't have to spell out for you. I use my iGoogle page as my widget desktop, and then access my cloud holdings from there. The interconnectedness makes it superior in function even when it lacks particular features, and all of this has made me continue using Blogger rather than going solely to Wordpress, caused me to shun Facebook, and even avoid using Twitter for a long time.

But Twitter... oh, oh Twitter.

It's just too damn easy. All those one-line witticisms I come up with during the day, with no one to share them. The ease of retweeting, rather than saying something original. The ability to take a picture of a strange car and share it with the world, all from my cell phone, while still driving with my knees.

Twitter isn't owned by Google.

So, I have this other feed going. In addition to my RSS feed, and my Reader feed. Now that I know what a wonderful world Twitter is, I get curious as to what the hold-outs who refuse to get Twitter are saying on Facebook. And I think maybe I should start cross-posting to Facebook.

Then they created Buzz, which is the Google-Twitter I always wanted, except that it still sucks, so everyone read on Twitter is still only on Twitter. So I linked my Twitter feed to Buzz, as well as my reader account.

And now I live in this hellish world I have helped create.

Tim is right--we cannot live like this. And while the idea of cutting the feeds free, and using each as each is best suited has a nice, Marxist "to each according to his need" sort of feel, I still have this need for interconnectedness. I just can't blog, feed Reader, Tweet, Buzz, and Facebuke (the verb?) separately and simultaneously. Hell, I'm supposed to be writing books! I still want to maintain my Internet presence, and read what I want to read, so there has to be some over lap.

How, oh, how, can I make all this damn technology work for me?

The secret to using a Google Account, in my opinion, is to be flexible, and also to be patient. Many things work, and over time, Google makes them work better. And, work better together. Also, as I experiment with different tools, I change my use of them as they work, and work differently, together. Only recently did Google Docs get to a point where I was comfortable doing serious writing with it. And, since I spend less time online in "open surf mode" than I used to, I now only bookmark certain feed posts, rather than keep detailed notes about various web sites.

The same is possible with my feeds. I think I've hit upon a way to link them so that people who want to know what the deal is can still find out, without redundancy, and with most of the input automated.

This is the way it is working now:

I am looking at these feeds in terms of objects of communication. Any feed-ready information posted to the web is an object, treated as an individual, accessible, feedable piece. Different classes of objects hold different amounts and kinds of content, which may or may not overlap other objects' capacities for content.

Additionally, certain objects may have a certain shape, which allows them to fit into different data flows or lines of assembly (feeds). For example, I can set up Buzz to attach Twitter-objects to Buzz-objects in my Buzz feed. However, this shape is a shape of intensive flows (in the sense that it allows a certain change-of-state transition of the object, rather than a transitivity, like A = B = C). I'm getting all complicated with my terms, but basically, think of it like how yeast can bake into a loaf of bread, but bread cannot be dissected back into yeast. A Buzz-object cannot be translated into a Twitter-object (at least not yet).

RSS is the smallest common denominator in terms of objects, more or less. Any feed, be it Twitter or Facebook or a blog, almost always has an RSS feed generated with it. There are various tools to mash RSS feeds together, Yahoo Pipes being the most well-known. However, I am doing this because I don't want to create a new feed, I want to merge and ally the feeds of services I already use. Many of these services also have APIs, and perhaps I could work out some sort of program for managing my posts among the feeds. However, I'm not so skillful in the programming department. Also, if I use the recognized features of these different feed services already in existence, I'll probably be in better shape down the line to adjust to new features, and also I have the services' dependability to fall back on.

Content-wise, Twitter is the smallest common denominator. You can't find anything smaller than 140 characters. I also use Twitter most frequently, because of its small content size.

Additionally, many objects translate into Twitter-objects. Via Feedburner, I can make my blog posts echo as Tweets. Using Tweetdeck, my mobile Twitter client, I can post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.

Granted, it is annoying to see someone's high score in a video game echoed as a Twitter post. However, I've been posting less and less on the blog, and when I do, it is a often something that started as a Tweet, but then grew too long. In this way, the Twitter-object derived from my blog's RSS feed is just a link to a memo, a "please see my memo re: X". The duplication is, in a sense, to force people to choose. Either they want my full feed, and tune in to the Twitter feed for the details, or if they wish they were spared my constant witticisms, they can just go to the blog RSS.

It is not yet possible to auto-transmute my Reader shared RSS to Twitter, but that's okay, because I can always post a single Reader item to Twitter via a sidebar tool. This is probably for the best, because I can share anything interesting to those who like my reading tastes, but reserve only the "mainstream" articles for my main, common denominator feed.

Buzz can, and in my case is posting all of these things together in one, lump feed. It is a taste of the chaos. But, because Buzz has set out to aggregate all of these things, it is less of a network in itself, with its own flavor, and more of simply an aggregator. The cool part is, it shows up in my Google profile, so if anyone happened upon me via Google, they could get a good taste of what I'm into on the Internet.

Blogger, with all the new Gadgets you can add into it, is looking more and more like MySpace every day. But this flexibility is good for me. I now have two columns here. One to store these text essays, and the other to provide an easy way to examine the difference between my feeds. The Twitter feed, on the top, is the general feed. Next is the blog only, then my Brute Press stuff only, then other-source RSS only. All of it retains its original, unique feed-object character and content, while one feed, the Twitter feed, acts as the main door way, strictly under my control.

Control, after all, is what this is all about. It's a personal micro-manager's Internet dream. The solution I just described for myself will undoubtably not work for anyone else. This probably won't even be my own solution in six months, as I discover new tools, and start using the tools I have differently.

This is the key philosophical lesson of Internet content, content-objects, and object feeds. (You knew there was going to be a philosophical lesson, didn't you?) If you told people in the blog boom that they would be abandoning their blogs for a service where you tapped in 140 characters with your thumbs from your cell phone, they would have thought you were crazy. Same thing if you tried to sell Gutenberg a Kindle, or some other such foolish spatial-temporal technology metaphor-mashup. I'm sure whatever's next will also be just as weird as the present, and the past. Time is aggregation, after all.

The tools we have to communicate change the way we communicate. Big surprise, no? I'm sure we'll eventually figure out our feeds, so we don't have to read cross-posts anymore. Otherwise we'll drown in echoes, or suffocate in Internet Balkanization catatonia. People will sort out how to mean what they want to mean to the people they want to mean it to. Right now, to me, I'm directing my meaning to the people who follow me on Twitter. If you don't like that feed, please consider the other options to the left. If you don't like that, there is plenty of other Internet out there.

This way, both my communications and the people to whom I communicate can grow towards each other and into each other, like roots into the earth.