wanderingstan

Most of the internet is about the now, and getting even now-er. Why wait for people to upload concert pictures the next day when they can send them straight from their phone to Facebook? This trend will certainly continue, but lately I’ve been thinking more about the flip side: the retrospective, the looking-back.

Most recently, Andrew Sullivan’s excellent article “Why I Blog“, (hat tip to Feld) hints at it when he says

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night.

I’ve noticed this with Twitter as well, where I can go back in time and see exactly what I was doing and feeling a year ago. I also encountered it when backing up old email archives from 10 years ago and finding powerful emails from friends mixed in amongst the business chatter.

What’s interesting is that this fine-grained retrospective power is a New Thing.

For the last 3 years my Dad has been scanning his old slides and photos. He has now done over 13,000 of them, including writing captions for most of them. (He’s blogging some of them at Vern’s Memories)

That’s pretty amazing, but it’s nothing compared to the abundance of data that my generation, and especially the younger “facebook generation” will have! The other night at dinner my friends and I were joking about how our decedents will be overwhelmed with minutia about our lives (e.g. Twittering “At dinner, talking with friends about decedents being overwhelmed with minutia. Pork rib was good.”)

The only point here, if there is a point, is that current web tools kinda suck at the retrospective. That’s to be expected, because retrospective is impossible at the beginning. But when today’s kids are 75 years old and looking back on their lives — and most of the traces of those lives resides in twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever New Thing is around the corner — you can bet that there will be a need for some better retrospecting tools.

First, I’d like to welcome the new readers who found wanderingstan this weekend via the posts on TUAW, Gizmodo, and others!

For those of you just joining the story: Last Thursday I posted a picture taken by Gwen Bell of her house-mates baked MacBook. As soon as Paul showed the photo I knew it had potential to go viral.

And so it did. The TUAW version of the story was Dugg (1828 so far), and I’ve had almost 15000 reads of that post.

This got me thinking: The web is beginning to operate very much the way our brain does. This is especially visible in the case of Digg.

You see, every neuron has a firing threshold. It has inputs from many other neurons, and when enough of those incoming neurons fire, the cumulative effect may be enough to cause it to fire.

Each digg story operates the same way. Each digg is a input activation for the story. When enough activation occurs within a short time period, the firing threshold is crossed: the story moves to the front page. (Note that the exact value of this threshold is a secret which Kevin Rose isn’t telling!) This “front page firing” causes activation of millions of readers.

Here’s a typical response chart for a neuron, and the physical structures responsible.

So what would this look like in Digg/Web-land? Here’s my take:

To stretch this analog further: Some of those readers will love the story so much that they then blob about it. In other words, the reader’s Personal Blogging Threshold™ was crossed, just like the firing threshold of the neuron. I suppose you could say twitter is the correct outlet for people with low PBT’s.

And how else can I end a post like this than with a “Digg This” button? Here you go!

This is my first every diary entry, about Bermuda Kite Day (Pics!).

I’ve more or less journaled my whole life. In college I’d write for an hour each day, but then I’ve taken breaks of up to a year.

The urge to write is a funny thing. Every few years I’ll read through my old journals and it makes me feel closer to my old selves. Often I’ll find that my memory about an event has become distorted. Then I realized that had I not written things down, I’d still be clinging to the false memory!

Recently I read Stumbling on Happiness, where Gilbert makes the point that we are our memories. I couldn’t agree more, and having more memories makes me feel like I’ve lived more of a life.

The trick, then, is the transition to the online world!

The great thing is that so much more than mere writing can be captured: bookmarks, photos, movies, clickstreams, tweets. It’s all part of who I am right now. And in the way that filtering of memories in my head determines my self-image, the filtering of my online markings determines my web-image.

This is all to say that I will be rolling out some changes shortly, and also re-doubling my efforts to blog more! (Seth and Greg are also blogging about their lack of blogging. Is something in the air?) So like Greg, I’m going to work on getting smaller thoughts out faster rather than waiting for those blissful time to write full-blown essays.