meta

[cellio]

While waiting for a compile, I just sent the following message to a friend -- using ICQ, the "neat new toy" of 5 or 6 years ago:

This livejournal thing I mentioned a couple weeks back turns out to be kind of nifty. (Nifty in the "community" sense, not really the "geek toys" sense. Though it's got a little of that, too.) I've found over the years that there are some usenet groups that I was really only reading for the writings of a few interesting people; the model here is that people write about whatever they like and you find the ones you're interested in following. (And you can jump-start the process by inspecting the sets of people your friends find interesting. So when Ralph pointed me at this the first thing I did was browse all of *his* friends.)

Something like this was probably the subject of somebody's sociology thesis or the like; I wonder what the conclusions were. :-)

Comments

meta being my favorite topic..

[yitz.livejournal.com]

actually i'm in the midst o writing a not-so-short story.. (the second o three that i hope will become a publishable book--- something i rarely like to mention because it makes me less likely to get around to actually finishing it)

this morning tho.. i was writing some knew material.. in short, there's this female character who is sitting learning from the tree of knowledge, and in a surprisingly unintentional way, this tree is a sort of artificial intelligence emerged from a database of the totality of human knowledge, the way children learn is by asking questions of the tree.. which makes it very much like the internet.. one o the things she discovers by walking around the tree eavesdropping on other children's conversations with the tree is that there are many things she may never have learned because she never thought to ask about them.. each o the children asks bout different things.. etc etc etc

point is, i was writing/reading this and all of a sudden it hit me how similar it was to the internet.. and moreso, how livejournal is such a good solution to the problem o people missing out on such a large majority o the information available to them... so my thoughts were echoing yours.. just thought u'd want to know .. :)