The Committee of Gossips
Scoble just sent me a message about this new Channel 9 video, showing JP Stewart’s car mods. It’s the same hacker spirit directed into hand-coding BIOSes for gaming console mod chips, or writing bittorrent trackers, or any number of other things that are exciting despite (and maybe because) you can’t really make money doing them. It’s the spirit that used to be directed toward Linux, and Fido net, and all of those other things we used to obsess upon before they became profitable.
It also reminded me that I wanted to talk about the ?committee of gossips?, another way of looking at the semantic web. Think of a large apartment complex with a suitable number of retirees who sit around playing bridge or mahjong all day. Maybe the men sit on the park benches, but the old women like to watch everything that goes on. Nothing escapes their attention, and everything that happens is transmitted among the ?committee of gossips? in clucks and whispers at lightning speed. You might think that you have some privacy, but hovering just out of sight, always watching, arethe ladies of the committee. These old women know that the whole complex would descend into a downward spiral of disrepair and depravity without their watchful eyes and ears, so they take their job of gossipping with a sense of duty that most mortals cannot comprehend.So when something happens that affects the community, everyone knows about it.
This is really what the semantic web is about. Everyone can become a spy for everyone else. With ubiquitous computing, with ubiquitous recording devices, you can ?gossip? more quickly and effortlessly than ever before. You can gossip with more people, even with people who you’ve never met. And you can do it automatically.
And there is no reason to stop there. I want my car to gossip with your car. When your car hits a pothole, I want it to automatically send out some clucks and whispers to all of the other cars in the area; so that when I’m driving through the area, my car will know ?a few other cars told me there is a pothole here, I should slow down.? Turn everything into a spy for everything else.
August 21st, 2006 at 6:42 pm
[...] At first, I thought, “what a terribly unethical way to attract cyberstalkers to your social networking service!” It’s not as if these people need any encouragement. But then I remembered the “Committee of Gossips“. The Internet makes it harder for people to hide from obsessive stalkers, but it also makes it harder for obsessive stalkers to operate in secret. [...]