Healthy Intake

Chris Locke is back in the land of the blogging once again and Jeneane has kindly gone to the bother of listing out some still blogging bloggers whom he and his Cluetrain* conspiratorial cohorts moved to start blogging in the first place.

* Did I ever tell you that The Cluetrain Manifesto was the book I took with me half way round the world and back on our honeymoon to Thailand, Singapore and Bali in April 2000. Imagine, if you will, sitting around a downtown Bangkok hotel swimming pool in 90 degree heat and 5000% humidity, supping on margeritas and munching on fine Thai cuisine whilst reading Chapter 1 - Internet Apocalyoso. I think it was this lethal petrie dish cocktail of alcohol, cultural diversity and general other planet circumstance is what did it. That's how I ended up the way I am, basically.

btw. I just got promoted again today, for the 4th time in 2 and a half years.

Actually, that's a very interesting point. When I started this blog I was in the middle to lower ranks in our company. Now I'm the boss, numero uno, the big cheese. What does this all mean? You guessed it. My new QVC Home Shopping BLOGGING FOR SUCCESS home study kit is now available with a 30 day money back guarantee. Just call 0800-BITE-ME where our agents will be pleased to take your call.

Little Brother Is Watching You

Orwell was wrong about more than just the year. 2003 is a perverse rendition of 1984 where we, the proles, happen to be the Thought Police and Big Brother rolled into one with our plague of weblogs, relentlessly reporting everything we see, do and think to the authorities every single day.

Our democratized, capitalist societies functioned well enough when their peoples were disconnected from each other. Governments covered-up, news stories were hushed, the truth was 'managed' for us and this was all done with the best of intentions, all for our own good. But now the totalitarian, Web empowered Little Brother exposes the naked truth before the news managers have even answered their ringing cell-phones. And Little Brother isn't a lone voice which can be easily silenced. He's a thousand voices a second, in a thousand separate locations. Little Brother is Big Brother.

Weblogs. The Web's Memory Dept

I stumbled over this thought today. The Web is organic. Like other organic things it is evolving and adapting as it grows.

Take memory for instance. Is it the case that at this current stage of its evolution, the emergence of weblogs is a necessary evolutionary step required in order to form an active and functioning memory for the Web?

Before weblogs began to appear in any significant number - roughly prior to 1998 - a great many Web pages were either commercial, niche interest, traditional news or academic in their basic function or purpose.

The Internet Archive

does a really good job of storing previous versions of those popular Web pages as photographic snapshots in time, and you could certainly say that this is a form of memory - photographic memory. But it's not a totally comprehensive one especially given the fact that 7Bn people occupy the planet, and it's not easily searchable - you have to know (or remember) what it is you're looking for.

But weblogs seem to act as a form of memory which is richer both quantitively and qualitively and which records information at a much higher resolution.

The Web's new weblog enriched memory contains rich and permanent records of what seems like almost everything on a daily basis. From inanely

personal side-notes

, apparently inconsequential and zoomed-in-detail single events to many thousands of views, opinions, emotions and accounts of major

events like 9/11

.

And this new memory remains permanent unless a fragment of it is lost when an individual blog happens to go down. A bit like brain cells dying off, only to be replaced by new ones every day. A critical piece of what makes this new memory work is the modern search engine. Google and others are able to recollect memories in an instant, sorted in order of relevance or date and in a way that no Super Memory book could ever train the human brain to emulate.

High frequency, hyperlinked, permalinked, filed, indexed memories of everything that happens both on and off the Web and its getting richer and more massive by the minute.

Imagine the Web as one of those robotic giants that are operated by tiny little people inside, a team behind the eyes seeing what's out there, a team who operates the machinery used to make sounds when speech is required, and so on. In that same person, I see that the people who maintain weblogs being the people who work in the memory dept. of the brain, slavishly punching away every minute of the day, creating a massive database of memories, experiences, thoughts and emotions.

I believe that weblogs are not merely personal journals or diaries and they're not just convenient, public repositories for personal memories. They are, in fact, forming and constructing the Web's collective memory.

What on earth are we creating?