In other news, I have indefinitely postponed my venture to develop a multitouch interface for business intelligence. Instead I will focus on learning the suites of open source tools and figure things out from there. Now that has been taken off my plate, it will free up time I had set aside for learning what has now become iOS, and it makes me regret the moola I spent on my MacBook Pro instead of two Mac Minis for the homestead.
Be that as it may, the new availability of time raises once again the spectre of XRepublic, my sorta-kinda life defining technical project. To that end I will slightly alter the way I write here at Cobb, letting certain aspects of XR be tried out here.
XRepublic is that thing that the blogosphere has yet to accomplish which is to give instant polling to millions and create a large virtual parliament in which people make collaborative statements. It is like a Wikipedia of common opinion and belief, always in the act of creation - such that every fully formed opinion gets linked to its assumptions and arguments.
I have always conceptualized XRepublic as something driven by people directly, following the Well's dictum that 'you own your own words'. But I did have a space for representation. IE the creation of a virtual Booker T Washington or Michel Foucault by a scholar. But what has emerged in the rise of social networking is the fact that many people simply cut and paste words that are better than their own.
I am finding this quite useful even in my own blogging, and so will continue to increase the percentages of borrowed vs original content. I have begun to do so in comments, and will continue in that vein.
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