Scott Wilson's Metaphors

met Scott Wilson yesterday in Innsbruck. funny that he was here (merely by accident), because the ideas about micro-attention design were so similar. his brilliant FeedForward project basically is a personal RSS feed-mixer, a desktop client (but), as opposed to other RSS client's mailbox'n'files-paradigm.

best thing yesterday was Scott's virtuosity in thinking in metaphors for microcontent circulation and ambient microcontent flow experience. alas, i remember only parts: misguided unremarkable trunks circulating on an airport luggage line, with lots of interesting tags from airports all over the world. Sigurd Rinde's (in fact: Jyri Engeström's) beachball thrown into some congregation, a social object carrying the tracks of where & when (and by whom) it has been bounced. (Sigurd's www.thingamy.com is an intersting business plan builder software: demo.)

there was the idea of enhancing the basically empty new "Learning Spaces" built into new university architectures in UK with adaptable collective "interesting-stuff-in-looped-microcontent-channels"-feeds (the newest or highest rated items collectively tagged with "attention", for example).

so if FeedForward (newest version) is a mixer (claim is "Remix Your Information Environment"), the MicroPulse (bad name, just placeholder) will have to be a sort of ambient transistor "radio" with all sorts of channels (based on tags) where content items run in loops, just "being there" (which means you don't have to fear to miss something). (Hey, a FeedFoward blog post mentioned the radio metaphor the day before yesterday! and, of course, there was Radio Userland.) of course the MicroRadio cannot manage all of the interesting feed items. it is a secondary tool: looping microcontent after it has been clipped and filtered through e.g. delicious, microblogging, digg etc., or a similar proprietary authoring tool. i always idiosyncratically dream of using TiddlySnip here somehow.

perpetual motion machine

So here’s my approach: the Web as movement.

Some of the words associated with this metaphor… flow, experience, trajectory, cycle, feedback, ecosystem, dynamics.

But pragmatically, what does this mean? Let’s take Flickr, which is
exceptionally good at doing this. It’s a useful website, sure, and it
is sure of its place among a constellation of people – the social world
of sharing and identity – and a world of other products like cameras,
and screensavers, and toys based on the pictures.

But also it’s structured to bend the trajectory of users
back into itself. External widgets capture users and send them into
Flickr from blogs and other services. Internal groups, discussions, and
the “recent activity” feature keep users cycling round. A way of
sending temporary invites by email to show pictures to friends who
aren’t yet members – guess passes – turn ever user into a pusher, and
every photo into a gateway drug that will end in Flickr membership.

Flickr is a perpetual motion machine that puffs out beautiful photographs.

So we can have a bit of a breather, I want to have a look at a few
other systems which are self-contained or a series of movements.

[Facebook is another great example. Read about viral loops and widgets for more.

And, just incidentally, I’m reminded of the Greg Egan short
story in Axiomatic: “Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies”. Highly
recommended!

Oh, the image: I’ve been playing with solutions to Laplace flow equations, and this is some of the output.]

Powered by ScribeFire.