Linkbacks, biology, and killer P2P blog plumbing.
I meant to post a quick thank you to Jon Udell for the link in his recent O'Reilly Network article, Blogspace Under the Microscope. But beyond the fact that he mentions me, I really like the biological metaphor for blogspace he explores there.
In the short time I've had this blog out here, I've tossed in a few handfuls of small hacks that have incrementally connected it to others and made discovery of some connections automatic. What I'm doing is mostly inspired by what I see other bloggers doing. Something about all this feels very different from what's happened on the web thus far. I don't have, nor likely will ever have, one of the more popular blogs on the block-- but for the short time I've had it, this thing has gotten more connected than anything else I've ever done on the web. It's certainly by no genius of my own that this has happened. There's something big to this.
Pardon the pretention, but it seems that there's this "Reverse-Entropy" going on here through these incremental tweaks and the construction of these small, elegant connecting channels between walls are what will very shortly raise the level of blogspace to.. what, a singularity? Not sure, but it's seeming more and more like David Brin's Earth. (I've got to read that again and pull some quotes.)
So (back to practical matters), Stephen Downes dropped into my blogchat for a visit and we chatted briefly about the linkback meme. One thing we'd touched on was a fully ?JavaScript exploiting referrer service one could use on a site where one could not host dynamic content like SSI, PHP, etc. Jon also touches on pretty much the same thing in musing about a backlink display in Radio.
More centralized services bug me-- I really want to see a completely decentrallized blogspace. But, it's baby steps that need to be taken. Since there's no P2P killer app plumbing for blogspace yet, we need full peers to get hosted.
Some, like mine, are hosted where dynamic content is available and I am capable (and willing) to hack at the dynamic bits. Others are hosted where content must be static, and others have owners who either can't or don't want to bother with hacking on the plumbing. So some central services are still needed to prop up blogs. Baby steps. Get the tech working, observe the flying sparks, and get bored tinkering with what doesn't work.
But it would be brilliant if someday soon, something like Radio can become 100% decentrallized, with installations collaborating to form the space via firewall-piercing instant messaging conduits, pub/sub connections, content store-and-forward, distributed indexing, and the whole utopian bunch of Napster dreamy stuff.
Okay, back to work.
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