Ok, I posted that blurb last Saturday not quite knowing what to expect, but hoping for an interesting response or two. A few people have cross-posted (which always tends to shock me a bit) and I've gotten a number of responses, mostly by email. They settle down into a couple categories:

• Yeah, what you said!
• That overlaps with a bunch of what I wanna do.

and going on for a while. I think about lists like that too, and I'd like a number of the things he lists. Being a programmer makes one believe one can make things so they're exactly to your liking. And one can, when we're talking about how your information is organized. Unfortunately there are still not good enough tools to get me what I want without some heavy duty programming. Personally I hadn't had time to do most of it, so I'm suffering in some areas. I can easily think of things I'd want to be done differently about my e-mail storage, and it is a mess, but I haven't given it enough priority to go and program it myself, even though I know I could.

Now, I don't aggregate ming.tv any more for reasons that have nothing to do with his technology discussions. But is it my imagination or isn't he the Creative Commons guy?

"The Problem Today"(tm) is not that we don't have the tools or the technology. We have both in abundance. Enabling technologies is what the 90s and early 21st have all been about (a trend that will no doubt continue in parallel forever.) But what I see now, in the blogosphere and beyond is NOT "how do we...?" But "Now that we can..., what do we do with it?"

People are foaming and fuming with the desire and motivation to get their hands dirty in "Interesting Projects"(tm).

With Xml, Sql, C++, Perl, Python, Zope, Movable Type, HTTP, Jabber, Tk, XUL, CSS, XSLT, ok yeah and Java, we can do anything. Anything. On my home lan, for instance, I'm running nearly half a terabyte of disk online at all times (no you can't get to it.) Most of the cpu is spent sucking down massive chunks of usenet and trying to fit articles into categories and predict their groups "without looking". An outgrowth of that was the signal to noise ratio calculator. Both of these work pretty damn well. But the final application? It falls squarely in the land of "Oh, I dunno, I figured it would be fun."

I do have a couple ideas. The Interest Engine project of mine (correlative analysis of "what you might like because s/he likes that too") is coming along VERY nicely (I'm kinda surprised at the results, myself.)

But these again are core enabling technologies. They're toolkits designed to make it easy for a higher-level programmer (and by that I mean scripters, etc.) to build applications that "actually do something".

In short (a little late huh ;) we NEED PEOPLE'S IDEAS. These ideas, the little snippets of "god that'd be nice" and "this would never work but I'd really love it if" serve as the springboard for things that would absolutely work.

Remember, your itch is someone else's itch too. (Ok, maybe a bit too colorful. But you know what I mean.)

If there's anything I've learned in my 8 months in the blogosphere it's this:

If you have an idea or a thought that you take for granted, SAY IT, POST IT PUBLISH IT. Because someone will read it and say "I've never thought to phrase it that way" or "you mean it's not just me" or "wow, I never thought of that, because if we did that we could do THIS." or a combination of the three. ALWAYS. The more stupid I've felt about posting some piece of emotional trivia the better and more enthusiastic response I've received.

If we're not here to share those kinds of ideas then could you please point me to the place I thought was here?

Now Ming, wake the hell up, go get that wish list, and start posting stuff. I know you know better. That goes for you too!

And that's nowhere nears all I have to say about that.

1:31:36 PM    comment []