Yahoo! News – Philly Considers Wireless Internet for All
Wow… maybe I moved here just in time?
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For the last year or more, JULIAN DIBBELL’s “Play Money” Blog detailed how he spent a great deal of time in virtual environs making real money from virtual possessions. And I didn’t find it until now.
Charlie Fink’s Quote of the Week – Quotes by Andrew Hinton
Ok… I wrote this thing called the Information Architecture Manifesto a while back. And I did a little ego surfing and discovered that part of it is quoted online, in this thing called “quoteorama.” But it’s quoted very very wrong.
See, when I first wrote the Manifesto, it got noticed by a bunch of other web heads out there, other info-architects, etc. Some loved it, and many slammed it. Because, after all, we are a snarky lot, and snarking is what we do. (example: here) (Clay Shirky, whom I dig generally, called it “dorky” …heh…)
Among the snarking, Matt Jones pointed out that the theses may not be all that helpful because they could be about anything, like if you substituted the word “porn” for the word “information.”
Hence, the twisted version that shows up in the esteemed Quotorama.
I did write the archive’s owner and asked if he’d change it. I haven’t heard back. But, you know, I’d really really hate to end up being quoted in something down the road and end up being famous for pontificating on the relevance of porn.
I did some searching on the quotation and it has definitely made the rounds… how odd. I had no idea. Luckily it’s almost always quoted correctly.
here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here
I’m thinking of writing something up about “The 25 Theses… do I still believe this sh*t?”
In this recent article, Wired News: Interreality Business Machines, we learn that IBM is taking virtual economies seriously by developing heavy-hitting software for dealing with the logistics of “pretend” economies in online multiplayer game environments.
Keeping track of thousands of people buying and selling and bartering in real time is chip-melting stuff, if you’re trying to do it while simultaneously keeping track of how each transaction is affecting the world it happens in as well. So, this is one step toward enabling even bigger multiplayer environments.
But it’s also a step toward connecting real-world economies with virtual ones. It’s already happening, but awkwardly, with virtual trade leaking out of the ‘game’ and into other environments, like eBay.
I’m a big believer that reality is socially constructed. No, I’m no hard-bitten post-structuralist… I’m just acknowledging a very powerful truth. I’ve also been exposed to just enough Marx that I happen to believe that our money is a big part of what dictates the contours of ‘reality’ for us.
This development is just one more factor effacing the distinction between “real” and “virtual” for human experience.
If you search for Omni Magazine using Google Search: omni magazine … you will discover that it will list my blog as the second major link. Is that amazing or what? Just because I had a link to it, and a blog entry about it, people who started looking for it on Google ended up finding my blog. How weird. Very.
I still remember so vividly the illustrations… especially the ones depicting Dune. Even before I ever read the books… the visuals were stunning.
Anyway, yeah…I was an Omni geek. So I feel kind of weirdly honored this is happening.
Whoa. I haven’t done this in a while… but I just checked to see who all links to this blog. Just when I thought I was totally ignored, it turns out I am actually listed in some spots! Check it out: Google Search: link:www.memekitchen.com
Please visit the OmniShrine Wiki!
Rather than commenting on this blog, where hardly anyone will ever see what you said or asked, why not post your thoughts in a space that’s more suitable?
Try the OmniShrine Wiki!
I set it up so that fans of Omni can share information, and also be able to subscribe to comments or page changes, so that you can more easily keep up with the conversation!
The comment area on this post doesn’t act like a discussion list; there’s no way for anyone to be alerted of a question or an answer to one posted. That’s why the wiki is your best bet.
Thanks!
My original post is below. The omnimag.com link no longer takes you to the site I referenced back in 2003, but you can still see the glorious prehistoric black-background web experience via the magical “Wayback Machine” archive here via the Wayback Machine.
ORIGINAL POST:
Growing up, I was an avid reader of Omni Magazine.
I lost touch with it after high school, and I heard they’d tried doing their thing online, but then it had kind of died on the vine.
And I ran across the site today…how weird, that it’s still sitting there. A ghost town.
The design is so perfect for mid-to-late 90s ‘cool’ website design. Lots of 3D shapes floating in black space.
I wonder if anybody still tries entering the “Deconstructing the Titanic Sweepstakes” there?
I keep coming back to An Atlas of Cyberspaces – MUDs and Virtual Worlds. I keep looking over the maps represented there and being amazed … and remind myself that in spite of how they look, these are not fictional worlds. They are places where people’s minds roamed (and in many cases still do) and interacted, where things important to their lives happened. You can argue that what happens in a virtual world isn’t important, or shouldn’t be…that it isn’t healthy. But that’s irrelevant… it happens whether we think it’s a good idea or not. People live in these places, some for many waking hours, and they love them so much that they devote such care and attention to mapping them. Does mapping them make them more real? Well, no moreso than mapping Disney World makes it real, or mapping Manhattan, for that matter. It is mapped only because it is real.
One really fascinating thing about these maps is that they don’t just map geography, but function, language, and other things that make virtual worlds different from meatspace.
One amazing example is this 3-D molecular-model-type map made by Peter Anders. He wrote a terrific paper on envisioning virtual communities as well.
Isn’t it strange how all this breathless fascination with virtual spaces came to a crashing halt around 1997-98, when the commercial web became the big story? It feels like a huge intellectual and philosophical human enterprise that just prematurely stopped before we really learned anything. I imagine people in Universities are still discussing some of it, but I don’t see it talked about in the mainstream anymore. One day we’re going to have to pick up the task again, or we won’t have any better handle on what we’ve wrought.
Ok…. no, the title to this post has nothing to do with “the war”… it’s about a site I just tripped over while peeking my head out from under my rock long enough to see what the rest of the ‘net is up to. The site is “Television Without Pity” which I discovered by first finding a link to this hilarious commentary on vintage 70s cuisine which was put together by a very bright blogger and writer I then found at Poundy. Who apparently writes on occasion for TWP, which also has a really fab commentary running on just about every TV show of any import, one of which is perhaps my fave current show Six Feet Under, currently chronicled at Television Without Pity Six Feet Under. So there.
Yahoo! News – Google Buys Popular Web Publishing Tool reports that Google is providing a home for Blogger. Great news. I moved away from using Blogger, but I still think it’s the best thing going for most people. It almost disappeared a couple of years ago, due to no money and increasing support costs… luckily they pulled it together long enough for this deal.
It’s interesting to me especially because Google and blogs have such a symbiotic relationship: they feed one another relevance in a massive global loop.
Even though it’s now 9 years old (and what a long 9 years, given the changes in technology since), Julian Dibbell’s VLS article, The Writer a la Modem, is still a terrific, lucid articulation of what it means to be online. And, I would argue, it’s a point that many of us have forgotten about since then. When the ‘Net became commercialized (only a year or so after this article), the fascination was all about the Web and e-commerce. But now that all that stuff has blown over, what we’re left with is the fundamental issue of “cyberspace” — a term that I’m starting to think needs to come back into vogue. More on this later, but for now I’ll just say that I’m realizing that my own assumptions and beliefs and theories about what Information Architecture is “really” about are informed by my earlier experiences with multi-user dimensions and such. Anyway, Dibbell (who wrote “My Tiny Life” and the infamous article for the Village Voice, A Rape in Cyberspace”), puts things pretty well in this article — here’s an especially good paragraph:
Cyberspace is a place all right, but it is an insistently textual one–insistently and in fact traditionally, for cyberspace’s grand illusion of alternate dimensionality represents not a departure from the nature of writing but a refinement of it. Writing, since its invention, has been a technology of virtual presence, simulating the here-and-nowness of both the writing subject and of whatever conceptual or sensual objects that subject cares to conjure. The technology of cyberspace may dazzle with its newness, but it really only extends the capabilities of an artificial-reality machine older than the Pyramids.
I hadn’t run across this site before, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I love about the Web: wordorigins.org’s Big List of Words and Phrases. Find out the origins to things like “Red Handed” and “Sabbatical.” Dweeb heaven. (Me like.)
About this blog
Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
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