floating atoll

The unconscious lazymind

What I need is a Lazyweb style site where I can post my open questions about life the universe and everything and hope that knowledgeable people will stumble upon them.
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I've been kind of directing my blog towards this purpose, though I don't always ask questions as such; it seems the most useful purpose I can come up with, offering questions out to the world for thinking about.

Only asking questions, though, would seem off-balance; offset your questions about the world with answers to unasked questions, though, and perhaps you'll show someone a question they never thought to ask.

Think of it as being a single node in a subconscious hivemind: questions and answers offered at random, with no visible correlation to what the rest of the mind is thinking — and yet somehow it all ties together, as we wander the web of unassociated thoughts and create ties between them.

Multi-hued purity

A multi-layered, multi-hued work of genius that ensures that the colored top of each playdough container is at best a close approximation to what's actually inside.

Robert's fun with playdough highlights one of the aspects of genius that runs counter to hyper-specialized society: the best works of art are usually a meld of many separate things, and once you've joined them, they never come apart quite the same again; a little color always gets left behind to add to the mix.

Radio iChat: Advertising shows over the 'net

Hydra has spawned some interesting discussion since Emerging Tech; Steve Gillmor highlights a really good quote below:

I fully expect Hydra style note-taking to become the norm at technical conferences amongst Mac owning participants. For a single company sending multiple developers, it allows the participants to much more quickly digest and build upon the conference content in a forum. For individuals or those folks that simply play well with others, it allows the individual to gain knowledge from a group of people that likely have very different backgrounds. [via Clay Shirky]

Now if we can get Apple to open up Rendezvous across the Net.�
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There's one problem with what he suggests, though: Rendezvous wasn't designed to function fully over more than a single network. One of the core pieces of Rendezvous, "service discovery", doesn't carry beyond a given machine's local network.

This is probably good, for things like iTunes shares and my powerbook's web server: I really don't want everyone on the 'net digging through my stuff.

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind being able to present those same services to a select few people — and interestingly enough, all those people are in my iChat buddy list.

Thus, I propose extending iChat to become a conduit to specific people, as I approve them; then those specific people receive service "broadcasts", when I start a service (like Hydra). It's like Aimster, only in a highly generic form: any existing Rendezvous service would work over it. Now I can open a chat with a coworker, approve them for service discovery, share the source code via Hydra, turn on my iSight, and we have instant remote collaboration.

As an added benefit, now everyone on my iChat buddy list has the potential to be a music broadcaster. By publicly sharing access to discover a specific service, they can publish radio content to any of their friends — and I think that has far more value than any use of Rendezvous I've ever seen.

Combining videoconferencing with radio distribution, artists can give and receive instant, live feedback on their songs, answer questions, talk about other things they like, whatever. Lines of communication that didn't exist a year ago suddenly become available.