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actually think the shift in online communities is going towards niche social sites. Sites like Myspace and Facebook are big and their user base is overwhelmingly diverse. I think the trend now is to move towards communities that are based around shared interests, especially with the proliferation of things like ning. Will the walls between these networks break down? Probably. But I think there's always going to be a desire to commune online with people who share your interests. This is actually good news for marketers because niche communities mean more targeted marketing opportunities any way.

A network that works well on a mobile platform--knows where I am, who within my network is near me, offers recommendations, etc. + the concept behind FriendFeed which aggregates multiple networks gets us closer to the "air" analogy. It's really not that far off. Just waiting for wi-fi networks and handheld usability to catch up.

“These modules seek to penetrate, but in a passing way. A second of your attention is all they ask. Nothing is firing that rends or cuts. It’s a massage, really, if you just go with it. And why not? Some of the most talented people on the planet have devoted their lives to creating this psychic sauna, just for you.” Ersatz environments and colourful advertisements have been with us since the fifties, de Zengotita adds, but the multimedia blitz we experience now represents a whole new level of persuasion. “Saying that it’s just more of what we had before is like saying a hurricane is just more breeze.”

Today’s mass dream, split from the organic foundation of the world and cobbled together from shards of television shows, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, films, ad jingles, ringtones – the whole mad fantasy of what’s hip, what’s not, who’s in, who’s out and the international villain du jour – is the raw stuff of the ‘Collective Unconscious 2.0’.

Mainstream media culture currently has all the signs of full-blown psychosis. This is analogous to Jung’s shadow. Confronting the shadow is unpleasant on a personal level, but healing cannot be effected without being confronted with the truth – and as folk wisdom has it, the truth hurts. What is positive about this process is that we’re being forced to confront the very worst in the imaginal output of our great, untethered, free market economy.

We are, ultimately, the stories we tell each other of our past, present and future. We become what we seek. It’s up to us to rule the imagination or leave it in the hands of a select few to shape the future of the mass dream. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

June 10, 2009

"It can discover and learn millions of relations, not just one at a time. With TextRunner, there is no human in the loop: it just finds relations on its own."

enter, for example, "kills bacteria,"

insights that "chlorine kills bacteria" or "ultraviolet light kills bacteria" or "heat kills bacteria"

then visit the Web page

ways to preview the text

triples

prototype

the ability of software to achieve rudimentary understanding of text

unprecedented scale and scope

analogous to technology developed by Powerset

a tool that was limited

TextRunner technology handles

arbitrary text on any page, including blog posts, product catalogues, newspaper articles, and more

"this work reflects a growing trend toward the design of search tools that actively combine the pieces of information they find on the Web into a larger synthesis."