I’m thinking about a media player/writer that consumes a sequence of 140 character microblogging posts that contain TinyURLs. The viewing area of this application shows the specified video, audio, image or text. The URLs are decorated with the start point and end point of the quoted material.
The player can be pointed at purchased lists, personally created lists, shared lists, dynamically created lists, and real-time lists from affinity groups or individual authors. The lists can be filtered to show only video, only audio, only images or only text. Of course, one can select any combination of media types as well.
It’s also a writer, these same microblogging posts can be composed, URLs constructed and attached, and then sent to the real-time stream. It can also create sequences and share them. Other controls include:
Rewind
Fast-Forward
Slow-Motion
Pause
Skip to next
Skip to specified keyword
Mark, and return to Mark
Loop
Copy and Paste
Auto-Scroll text at specified reading speed
All devices, mobile or stationary, are supported– as are all syndication formats RSS, Atom, etc. The viewable output can consumed on iPhones, Android devices, Kindle, Chumby, computers, televsions and GPS devices.
Some additional uses for the system might be:
Turn-by-turn GPS directions
Cooking Recipes
Assembly instructions
Music instruction
Any kind of education / testing content
An example of a live two-way sequence might be: I send you a sequence that shows you how to get from where you are to my house. You get halfway there and don’t understand the next instruction. You ping me with a question about that part of the direction sequence. I respond in real time with a clarification. With the additional clarification you’re back on track. The instruction set we discuss, either via text or voice, exists in a format we both can access and reference any point in the sequence.
Any discussion of ‘Track’ seems to require a brief definition. By now we’re familiar with ‘Search,’ it’s the process of examining everything in an index to find keyword matches– and then ranking the results in the most useful order. ‘Track’ is a filter on the firehose of information generated by the microblogging space. It’s stuff that’s not in the search engine index yet, it’s what people are saying and thinking right now. The ideal time parameters around track are the rhythms of the conversation. Tracked results should reach one quickly enough to be able to respond to a question or statement without the thread of the conversation being lost. Track expands the public instant message dialogue beyond a personal directed social graph. When I track a topic, I’ll see messages from anyone who uses the words I’m tracking.
Our recent Presidential campaign featured diametrically opposed approaches to organization. One campaign employed a bottom-up strategy; the other preferred the top-down approach. This got me thinking about track and the difference between top-down and bottom-up strategies. A top-down strategy is easier to support in that the tracked keywords are very limited and they don’t change unless consciously changed. The creation of an intentional scarcity of tracked keywords also lays the foundation for an economic model.
Here are two approaches to a limited track keyword set:
A bottom-up strategy is harder to support, every user in the system could have a separate list of keyword filters for the full stream. That’s a lot of computing that needs to be done very quickly. As events unfold around us in the world, each user’s set of keywords would change to aid in the discovery around the new topics emerging. The full set of track filters would be constantly shifting and morphing.
Search uses a top-down strategy to prioritize keyword results. You probably want to see the results that most people want to see or think are important. The brilliance of the modern search engine is that it makes that calculation for everything it indexes. It arrives at top-down through bottom-up voting on importance. Services like Mahalo attempt to only provide extended results for popular searches– converging to the top of the pyramid.
Here are some examples of services trying to create lists of what’s popular:
If you track what’s popular, depending on the community providing the attention data, you quickly converge on the least interesting topics. You’re only seeing what everybody knows.
And the broader the community, the more quickly you end up with The National Enquirer or the World Weekly News. Now that the election is over, take a look at the trending topics on Search.Twitter.com. Occasionally you’ll see a micro-community poke through with a hashtag for a particular conference or event, but mostly there’s little of interest.
Each of us is a unique nexus of connections tracing our path through the world. Our individual curiosity provides the fuel, the focus, the set of keywords we carry with us to make sense of, and create, the future. The difference between all of us having the power to track the stream and only the most popular keywords being tracked is the difference between all the books in the world and the magazines available at an airport bookstore. For a short period of time we all had track, now track is the privilege of the few.
The Network has changed some of the essential requirements for a conversation. A place at the table is no longer necessary– only time remains as a primary home for conversation. It’s time that now calls the tune, conversation unfolds in sequence, through the river of time across multiple real time media streams.
Remember ‘that time.’ I don’t remember all the words, or how they were strung together into sentences– or even the order of the sentences. I remember I spoke first, or was it you? But I remember ‘that time,’ I remember the ride we took. I remember the big ideas we passed by– they really made an impression. They changed the way I think about things, and therefore changed my world.
Detached from place, the conversation unfolds in a virtual space. It’s the place we all call in to. Somehow, I imagine that space without light- only sound echoing in the darkness. Without visual cues, it’s a building up another kind of give and take. It’s almost impossible for me to anticipate when you are about to speak. But after we’ve talked in that darkness a few times, we develop a sense for the music of it. The rhythms, the melodies and themes provide the pocket of the groove for the next solo to blend into.
An augmentation of the conversation occurs for the speakers when the darkness lifts and they open their eyes and view the live Network. Place returns, and it’s the Network’s space that we have in common. The visual space of the virtual conversation is an undiscovered country. We use that space to verify facts, to remember names, find support in statistics, and point to a location for later reference. As we speak, we browse and co-browse, we hunt and gather fuel for the conversation.
What of the fuel? What ignites a conversation and keeps it going? From what source does it draw its energy? There’s a point at which you can stand and watch as the future comes into being. It comes, not out of nothingness, but rather from the re-combining and re-describing of the things around us. The moment when you stop watching silently and begin to bring language into the frame, you start to understand the real usefulness of the new. The new wants explaining, it seeks language.
Sometimes it seems as though we’re talking in circles, never getting closer to the center of the matter. But conversations are never perfect circles, they’re always spirals. Or perhaps a circle in the sense of a hermeneutic circle:
The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text, rather, it stresses that the meaning of text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.
Our dialogues and monologues have entered a kind of floating world, detached from physical space and reattached to place within the Network. While the shape of the conversation is much the same, it is augmented by an extended access to memory. When I refer to my notes, they are infinitely deep. The danger is that we may end up simply reading to each other and lose our voice in favor of a chorus of quotation. It’s only when we color outside the lines that we uncover the new. For a truly exploratory dialogue failure isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
We live in an age of rivers and streams. As the internet becomes the live web, it’s an increasingly large set of streaming data– images, video, text and sound. We’re back to the infinite number of cable channels that we surf between and among. These streams move at different speeds and are made up of objects/items of different sizes.
Television is the new internet. The Network swallowed the old television network whole. Of course, that was after the DVR permanently changed broadcasting’s relationship with time. Now even live broadcasts can be paused and reversed. The DVR started with one tuner, and moved to two tuners, so two shows could be recorded at the same time. YouTube added an infinite number of tuners.
The remote control is the user interface for the DVR/TV. It switches between channels, scrolls through recordings, searches by title, and controls the flow. These controls are starting to find their way into the live web. Both election.twitter.com and real time friendfeed have added the pause button to stop and start the stream.
Martin Heidegger returned to the ancient Greek idea of aletheia to think about the idea of truth. Here’s a brief explanation:
…aletheia is the truth that first appears when something is seen or revealed. It is to take out of hiddenness to uncover. It is not something that is connected with that which appears. Allowing something to appear is then the first act of truth; for example, one must give attention to something before it can be a candidate for any further understanding, for any understanding of space it must first somehow appear. Untruth, then, is something concealed or disguised.
Contained in aletheia is the river Lethe , one of several rivers in Hades– it literally means forgetfulness or concealment. Aletheia is discovery, uncovering truth that is hidden from view. We can search the past, the stream that has passed us by; or we can track the stream as it first appears. Our tools and interfaces to manage these rivers and streams are primitive. We barely even have a working remote control. Our toolkits are designed to manage documents, we need tools to manage and create streams.
