Month: February 2005

Brush Up Your Bible: What Hath God Wrought!:

The line ‘What hath God wrought!’ is remembered today thanks as much to Samuel Morse as to Balaam. Having just invented the telegraph, Morse was searching for an appropriate first message when the daughter of a U.S. patent official suggested the biblical phrase. He sent it on May 24, 1844, humbling his own role while aggrandizing the invention. I don’t know if other inventors have lifted the phrase, but we more often quote it now with fear or horror than reverence. Perhaps we’re just cynical about what technology has wrought.

I was thinking about the phrase Fear of God, and how it might be an OK idea. Imagining what might be in the minds of “good god fearing people” when they use such a phrase. In the psalms and probably all over the Bible we are urged to fear God. This got me thinking about the gods of cyberspace – take Hermes for example who defines borders and trade and is the God of trickery and theives, or perhaps Eros who thrives to create links all over the place, sometimes they are hard to undo. So to me it is not cynicism about what technology has wrought – or what God has wrought – but these things are disruptive forces, more potent than tunami’s and deserve our utmost respect.

The Long Tail: Definition: update

The Odeo Blog

Watching this development with interest. Ev tells the whole tale here .

This picture tells a story too!

While on the Adam Rifkin site I saw this interesting item on business. Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Superhacker and Phoneboy He quotes from Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Amazon, I heard an interview with Paul Graham and it deeply moved me.

The conference in the previous post is very well written up here by Adam Rifkin: Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Web 2.0 Love that word: Intertwingled. Ah yes, that is what is defining this era, the way we can now see and work with the intertwingled sphere. Of course to a few of us this sphere is known as the Sociometric Matrix, the virtual mother of friendship, to liberally update and translate the Latin.

The recent post about the new phase in the web, and what to call it. Perhaps it is Web-two-dot-oh, there has been the conference Web as Platform, and I have listened to IT converdations about it. What does Wikapedia say? “No page with that title exists”, but there is a Dot-com page.

I have a few more links coming up on Web 2.0

I am going to take my Google ads off this weblog. I put them there as part of my “exploring the psyche of cyberspace” and have made a few – very few – dollars. I am not really against them, it is just not what this blog is about or for. I have learnt about them though – learning by doing is my way!

I guess I was inspired by Jason Kottke though of course not that I intend to seek payment in any way for this blog, it was more the sense of pure freedom from commercial temptation or even beeing seen as having commercially biassed posts.

OK then just to do a bit of commercial bias before I get around to pulling them: how lucrative are these keywords: asbestos, spears, tagging, tags, web 2.0, George Bush, The Incredibles, hot sex orgasm.

There, end of commercialism.

I am meditating on the word apophenia.

I learnt it while reading “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. Amazon

The Wikipedia puts it well.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the
distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.

As Gibson says in his interview [clip]with Moyra Gunn, pattern recognition means everything.

Seeing patterns is science. It is law, it is language.

I suffered a bit of apophenia myself today while searching for the word on the net I found quite a lot of info. Now that is not apophenia, but in addition to that I saw the word twice in places where I had not searched: this podcast and this entry in John Perry Barlow’s blog.

I am interested in how close the mad version of apophenia is to the sane one. I know people who see strange coordination between events which makes them clearly psychotic. But then the cure in psychotherapy is often to notice how those twisted perceptions actually reveal and echo other patterns in the clients developmental stages.

Seeing patterns comes on so many forms… science and law of course all rely on patterns. In psychotherapy it is our bread & butter: synchronicity, complexes, role systems, archetypes, projection and transference all involve apophenia.

Even in supervision we achieve a sense of satisfaction when we notice a parallel process in the supervision that echoes the dynamics of the client session being discussed.

From the NYT:

For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: February 25, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24 – The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web’s next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city’s Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting – the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

Audio files on the Internet are nothing new, of course. But the recent proliferation of portable iPods and other devices for storing and playing files in the MP3 audio format has created a mobile audience in this country – more than 11 million and growing – on whom podcasters are counting to listen to much more than downloaded songs and the occasional audio book.