kottke references this blurb entitled, ‘natural life cycle of mailing lists’ in a recent rant about metafilter. of course it could simply be titled ‘natural life cycle of cliques’ :
“1.Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
2.Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
3.Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
4.Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone — newbie
and expert alike — feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).
5.Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don’t limit discussion to person 1’s pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
6.Finally:
1.Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an ‘old’ question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).
OR
2.Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third ‘delete’ key, but the list lives contentedly ever after).”
it seems like feed was on to something interesting with its latest special issue on urbanity:
“While the content of this issue will be familiar to longtime FEED readers — a group of essays and
conversations organized loosely around a theme, in this case the theme of the city — we have decided to experiment more with the design and the technology of the special issue format, which means tinkering with the “user experience” of the issue, as they say in the software world. We wanted to make “Street
Level” as fun to explore as it is to read (not unlike a city itself) — and to make it a launching point for other urban explorations. ”
alas. it would appear that my 56k modem is too slow to enjoy the fruits of their labor. o.k. rather, i’m too lazy to sit around for most of the ‘features’ to load.
anyone who harbored any thoughts about being environmentally friendly by taking part in the ‘new’ economy and not partaking in the sins of our forefathers by pushing bits instead of actual physical materials can now jump off your high and mighty horse:
“As California’s tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the
state’s power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord.”
“Computers consume about 13% of the nation’s power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.
The Internet’s borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.
To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ”server farms” consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. ”
i definately need to change the rhetoric box with this quote regarding bt’s brilliant patent claim:
“”We are impressed to learn that your company patented the principle of the hyperlink in the mid-70s when people were still wearing kipper ties and flares…Congratulations!””
david gelernter’s sees the future and it’s distributed and pervasive:
“The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd. The individuals in the swarm lose their identities. The computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the Cybersphere. Within the swarm, individual computers will be as anonymous as molecules of air.
“If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn’t that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination. The “site” is like a military unit in the field, the general moving with his troops (or like a hockey team in constant swarming motion). (We used essentially this technique to build the first tuple space implementations. They seemed to depend on a shared server, but the server was an illusion; there was no server, just a swarm of clients.) Could Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes. ”