The world feels like it’s slowly congealing, not into a sort of gray homogeneous mush, but into a diverse federation of cultures that identify strongly with their heritage and decidedly work together in a system of markets.

This is best captured by the news of Radovan Karadzic’s capture in Serbia. Here is a quote from the New York Times:

Serbs are not desperate and they have not sold out, but they have seen that the nationalist rhetoric and slogans are empty and don’t work,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor of Politika, a leading Serbian daily newspaper. “They see their manifest destiny in Europe.

I’ve never been  of a fan of the idea of a world culture or government. It has a influential niche, but it will never be (or at least, I hope it’d never be) universal. Social order works best when applied at a local and regional level, and takes into account distinct population’s leanings. But order and cooperation at a global level is still possible. When we look at history, it is the need of resources that creates conflict. Even religious strife can often be traced to competition of resources.

If the protocol for the allocation of resources is understood by all and considered legitimate by its constituents, then it is possible that seemingly incompatible peoples can work together. Markets appear to be that protocol. The fear, though, has  been that a single dominant market can – and will eventually – envelop its smaller members – as many think the United States has been doing across the world. But as countries have matured in this global system,  we are seeing a re-embrace of regionalism at the cultural level, but globalism at an economic level. I think the European Union – for all its flaws – is a model of a wide system that leaves each region autonomous, while providing a framework for cooporation. And the positive reaction of the Serbian population on the capture of Karadzic, shows the value of markets, even among extremely proud people.

But now, I am back in the States and enjoying transitioning back to normal life.  I hope to develop a few projects that have been on the back burner for a while now.

I live in Facebook land, but frequent a summer home in the Wikipedia islands. Where do you live?

This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers us the opportunity to resituate the problem of electronic publishing in a potentially productive way, and in so doing compels a new perspective on certain aspects of the historical development of publishing. This paper will take that look backward as a means of considering the significance of a project like CommentPress — which should be understood not as the apotheosis of electronic publishing, but rather as one example of a fruitful avenue of development — for the future of textuality online.

“What if you could travel to parallel worlds: the same year, the same earth, only different dimensions…?”

That’s the opening line to one of my favorite science fiction shows in the 90s called “Sliders.” The premise of the show was simple: a group of lost travelers traverse through different dimensions where history has played itself out differently, and need to navigate through unfamiliar cultural norms, values and beliefs. What if the United States lost the American Revolutionary War? Penicillin was never discovered? Or gender roles reversed?

An aspect of the show that I found interesting was in how our protagonists quickly adapted to subtly different worlds and developed a method for exploration: after their initial reconnaissance, they’d reconvene in a hotel room (when it existed) and assess their often dire – situation.

The way they “browsed” these alternate worlds stuck with me when reading Mary’s recent posts on new forms of fiction on the web:

Web reading tends towards entropy. You go looking for statistics on the Bornean rainforest and find yourself reading the blog of someone who collects orang utan coffee mugs. Anyone doing sustained research on the Web needs a well-developed ability to navigate countless digressions, and derive coherence from the sea of chatter.

Browsing takes us to unexpected places, but what about the starting point? Browsing does not begin arbitrarily. It usually begins in a trusted location, like a homepage or series of pages that you can easily refer back to or branch out from. But ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like World Without Oil, which Ben wrote about recently, require you to go some obscure corner of the internet and engage with it as if it was trusted source. What if the alternate world existed everywhere you went, like in Sliders?

In college, a friend of mine mirrored whitehouse.gov and replaced key words and phrases with terms he thought were more fitting. For example, “congressmen” was replaced by “oil-men” and “dollars” with “petro-dollars.” He had a clear idea of the world he wanted people to interact with (knowingly or not). The changes were subtle and website looked legitimate it and ultimately garnered lots of attention. Those who understood what was going on sent their praise and those who did not, sent confused and sometimes angry emails about their experience. A

(I believe he eventually he blocked the domain because he found it disconcerting that most traffic came from the military)

Although we’ll need very sophisticated technology to apply more interesting filters across large portions of the internet, I think “Fiction Portals”, engines that could alter the web slightly according to the “author” needs, could change the role of an author in an interesting way.

I want to play with the this idea of an author: Like a scientist, the author would need to understand how minor changes to society would manifest themselves across real content, tweaking words and ideas ever so slightly to produce a world that is that is vast, believable, and could be engaged from any direction, hopefully revealing some interesting truths about the real world.

So, after playing around with this idea for a bit, I threw together a very primitive prototype that alters the internet in a subtle way (maybe too subtle?) but I think hints at a form that could eventually allow us to Slide.

Harper’s has a new web concept designed by Paul Ford of F Train. History bears heavily on the refurbished site, almost overwhelmingly — especially compared to the stripped-down affair that preceded it. But considering that Harper’s has a more than ordinary amount of history to cart around — at 157 years, it’s the oldest general interest monthly in the United States — one has to appreciate the rather ovewhelming task that Ford and the editors faced. A journal that has published continuously since before the Civil War, on through Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, civil rights, the 60s, the Cold War, right up to the present carries a hefty chunk of the national memory — and a lot of baggage, good and bad. So it’s fitting that the new design is packed with dates, inviting readers to dig into the past while also surveying the present. I can’t think of another news site in which the archives mingle so promiscuously with the front page spread. The result is a site that feels as much like a library as a periodical.

There really aren’t good interfaces for representing large amounts of data through time, and the current website’s clutter is evidence for that. There are tag clouds that gives us a small taste on what could be done with time. But nothing exists in a large scale.

I think Harper’s website has the potential to make us to reconsider the role of a magazine and the way we engage with them in the digital age, and not just for Harpers or massive collections. While magazines have historically been self-contained published works, often with clearly stated views (much more so than newspapers), I think if people engage with them as archives of ideas, we could also see a change in the way magazines see themselves.

The magazine form has always had problems: it’s strict periodic format (monthlies, weeklies, etc) is an artifact of the print form. I think this redesign shows that we might to reconsider magazines as vessels filled with ideas; connected, but not bound to time. And since these vessels provide all the content all the time, then we can imagine time as the thing you “flip through” (as opposed to pages) and not a special mode of browsing. This has always been the case for researchers, who’ve used bound magazines in libraries… but this could be the way all engage magazines.

I recently heard an interesting discussion between Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly and Franklin Foer of The New Republic on the direction that their magazines were taking. The consensus they arrived at was that blogs stripped away their need to cover topical issues and have allowed to focus on what magazines have always done best: long narratives.

This is not really a new idea. I mean we can see things like The Complete New Yorker on CD-ROM, which provide a collection of all their work. But what I think is significant here is that the default unit in which we engage with a magazine could change from issues, to just one unit: the magazine.

The Golden Apple:

The This American Life [...] document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, various assorted drunks, and, of course, cops. Featuring stories from Radio Diaries producers Joe Richman and Wendy Dorr. And a story from Nancy Updike, funded with help from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a grant to Hearing Voices.

Kid Logic:

Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

“This American Life” is also now a television program… I was suspicious at first, but they pulled it off! The first episide is really good! Watch it!

When Knut [...] was born last December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who later died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.

“Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws,” animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which has featured regular photo spreads tracking fuzzy Knut’s frolicking.

“The zoo must kill the bear.”

Interference? But the mother, Tosca, was a performing animal in an East German zoo!

Luckily, the same activist who suggested we kill the cub elaborated:

Albrecht told The Associated Press his beliefs were more nuanced than reported by Bild, though he applauded the debate the article had started.

He explained that though he thought it was wrong of the zoo to have saved the cub’s life, now that the bear can live on his own, it would be equally wrong to kill him.