DRL Echobox

life has been strange, at least, the last few days i've been in austin. cyrus had to heimlich dad at dinner last night, converstations have been intense. i think this is the longest time i've been away from home, ever before. i guess i've got my thing going on in portland.

i found out hank died. or at least that's what they think. carneal says noone's seen him since october, when he went to the hospital. bummer.

bright lights: hayden saw the site today, and was the first person to really understand it right away. he's signing up as a user. talking to amy is fun. i think i'll call her now.

alright, I guess it's time I come out and tell you about my secret project: creating an upload / download hub for independent music on the web, where anyone can participate as an artist or a listener, where the files have no hint of DRM, and where artists can actually make money from thier work. better than the iTunes music store, and without the CDbaby buy-in fee for independent artists.

Music for Dozens is still running off the computer in the basement, but sources near the project reveal that soon it will be relocated to a real hosting service, with bandwidth and everything. also soon to be implented: actually paying for tracks using real money, instead of just clicking a button and getting hundreds of free trackpoints. get 'em while they're hot!

m4dz

i feel like i'm witnessing the front edge of the envelope of a phase change in thought and communication. almost like a revolution, in the way that the intellectual forbearers of the Declaration of Independence must have felt, sitting in thier salons, thinking of the way things could, or should, be.

Greg and I stayed up most of the night talking about tagging, folksonomies, taxonomies, and all the other new internet modes of relating information. the things that have come in the wake of the realization that google's spider-it-all search philosophy doesn't take you too far unless you already know exactly what you want are only the the tip of the iceberg of possibility. del.icio.us, flickr and the new m4dz.com only capture the flat name space of recall and recommendation, and not even that efficiently.

the things we invisioned tonight - mapping del.icio.us tags and links to yahoo or dmoz taxonomies, dynamically creating hierarchies of information using tag relationships, the subtleties of how tagging captures subjective, point-of-view specific relations between information sources, while taxonomies captures birds-eye-view, objective information structures, and how to link these two structures - I feel these things being discussed all over the world (almost as though parellel conversations are happening all over the city - but the city is much larger than the city), by people more in the know than myself, but also by people less familiar with the terrain, as well. this is what gives me the feeling of revolution - a revolution in the way thinking and communication is organized.

we can more effectively share our outboard brains, now that we can map our memories and perspective in this new way that bridges subjectivity and objectivity. it remains to be seen how this new capability for thought can do concrete things for the world and its ills and wonders, but i don't think that will be the case forever.

part of what makes me feel good about Music for Dozens and the work i've put into it, is that it could play a role in popularizing the tagging meme - a meme which derives its power from mass utilization. i do feel that if/when tagging is as commonplace as television, whole barriers to the advancement of good and truth in the world will crumble.

everywhere i look is fucking inbox. i've had to turn off the 'i' key in blogger... i'll have to edit this again.[two hours later - eyboard restng on cd cases to eep the nnards cool 'm stll typng wth out --ik,<*8--eys.] in the closet, there are boxes of books, clothes, papers, and ephemra. greg's bass di is on the coffee-table. the cat's need attention, and so does the litterbox.

i've been thinking about implementing david allen's GTD. what he says about needing to set aside serious time to do "the initial processing" seems apt, but daunting in my situation. things of the matter is, that I feel i can do it.

maybe i'll keep ya'll updated on my propgress. on the plus side, feel l.