Surf*Mind*Musings

I’ve enjoyed several podcasts of late:

• Alex Barnett & Kevin Burton on RSS reading
• Web 2.0 from Joshua Porter

Looks a host of players are up to more hijinx with attention.xml, which I want to seriously audit soon, but the topic at hand is a nifty turn of phrase from J.P.: “The accretion of tiny hacks” is transforming the internet.

The technological and attentional commons of the internet has created a radioactively boosted level of technology evolution. It sputters and backfires, but through a nefariously faceted backbone of communications, competition, and collaboration infrastructure is resulting in interesting new forms of business and user activity.

In fact, one might view the rise of Firefox in this light. I am proud to have contributed to a few of the initially popular hacks. The ability of internet savvy users to add the functionality they care about, and in the bigger 2.0 picture, participate in specific services they care about, provides the evolutionary equivalent to fitness. The ability to mash-up these services with open protocols provides the DNA combinatorics along with entirely new computational efforts.

Stretching the analogy to absurdity, the internet even has it’s very own creationist movement, denoucing the commons with FUD on security risks and the essentialness of DRM. To their credit, the exposition on how generativity is expressed on the net far exceeds my meager previous post on the topic. But such doom and gloom!