Emptybottle.org

…I’m going to keep hammering on this. The world at large is beginning to notice the blogosphere. The marketing shills smell money in the air. The bright-toothed, fast-talking, lucre-fixated hordes are girding their well-toned loins and casting a hungry eye our way. It’s coming damn it : the signs are all around, and you should take opportunity to be very afraid.
Alternately, you could make like me : leer dementedly and cock a snook at the bastards.

Reading Joey’s dispatches from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, I had an idea. Now everyone hush a bit, because this is a rare thing, and even the slightest breath of wind could blow the little f–ker away….
I was thinking about the chronological organisation of blogs, and how, flexible as tools like Moveable Type are, allowing me to organise my posts by category, for example, (Old Empties – Categorically on the sidebar) or by how much interest visitors have had in discussing the things I’ve talked about (Recent Conversations on the sidebar), I hunger for a way to conceptually group things. The use of pre-defined categories still feels too rigid for me.
What would be cool, and what I’d like to put together if I had the 1337 5k1llz, would be a sort of Memepop, a Daypop that tracked the memes (ah crap, I am so sick of that word) ideas enjoying circulation in Blogspace at any given moment.
It would use the Google API perhaps, or perhaps not, but it would allow you to (via a XML-fed plugin to MT or Blogger maybe?) grab a quick list of the top 40 (say) ideas with mindshare amongst bloggers at any given moment (Domain hijacking, googlebombing, semitism and anti-, the ‘Creative Commons’ are some current examples), and flag your new post, if it were a thought that you wanted to drop into the river, as relating to that topic. This act of flagging then feeds back into the Memepool, and pushes the idea higher up into the consciousness of the Blog Hive Mind. A high level conceptual way to thread your way through Blogspace, to organise conversations from the bottom-up and later revisit them…
One big question would be how to cleverly populate that list in the first place…through human suggestions, or through some clever parsing of the Daypop Top 40 or it’s equivalent? I don’t know the answer to that. But I can see that once it reached a certain critical mass, it would be very very cool.
It would be mondo-groovy to be able to flag this post, for example, with consensus-created categories (dynamic ones, which might disappear again from the Top 40 in a week or two) “Emerging Tech Conference” and “Threading in Blogspace”, knowing that other people out there are flagging posts with the same ‘categories’, and be able to hit a site and see the threading, woven through blogspace, laid out for me, sorted chronologically or conceptually or otherwise…
Perhaps I’m just talking crap again. It gets hard to tell sometimes.

Dr W mentions this and asks “Does this mean that malevolent corporations will inevitably poison the well of conversation?”
I feel a little self-congratulatory pointing (I did it a few days ago here, and on Metafilter recently, too) to this wee rant I wrote a couple of months ago, but Rule #23a of Effective Weblogging is Work Those Archives, right?
Anyway, I hope this is germane. I haven’t had my first coffee yet, so who knows…

In light of what Shelley said today, which may or may not have been in response to any degree to my comments yesterday, I feel I should clarify a bit.
I said

I made a mess of that. Besides getting lost in the syntax and being too cleverclever by half, I managed to obscure my actual point. Tales of the commonplace, stories about the small things that make up our daily existence, can be fascinating. They can be beautiful, or heartbreaking, and they can shine a light on our own lives, and help us to understand that, really, we are all the same, us hairless primates.
It’s not that I find tales of ordinary, daily life tedious. Not at all. All the meat and juice comes from it : all the tragedy and comedy of our lives is woven into ordinary, daily life. “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” goes the cliche.
But I do find a badly-told tale tedious, no matter the subject. If your story of your trials and tribulations at the local Starbucks (to use the same example I used before (and I’m hoping no one who happens by here has actually written one of those recently) has all the music and muscularity of a shopping list, it’s unlikely that I’ll find it interesting.
I make no claim to being the most pellucid, or entertaining, or skilled writer, or even having any greater skill than being able to string a few words together in an occasionally pleasing fashion. Far from it.
I hope I’m not coming off as elitist. But, speaking for myself, I’m only interested in the minutiae of someone’s daily existence if they can relate to me those tales of the commonplace in a way that piques my interest.
(Edit : Uh. I just realized thanks to a BB post that Our Gonzo Standard Bearer and All Around Ranteriffic Guy, a certain Mr. Locke, recently talked about his experiences at a Starbucks, and did so in a most engaging fashion. The example used above was not intended as some sort of bass-ackwards commentary about that. I am nothing like that subtle. My brain simply doesn’t work that way. I suppose that’s what I get for reading EGR after I’ve had a few…)

Those following the googlebomb discussion over at BB‘s might find this MeFi discussion interesting.