I googled “i like pie”, and the first page that came back was this. I like it.
I saw The Notorious Bettie Page last week down at the drafthouse, and it was damned good. Gretchen Mol does a helluva job making Page believable without making her a lightweight. The whole film is pretty and well-shot, with moderate good talkin’-lines, but Mol has great presence and a lack of self-consciousness so total it really sucks you in.
MySpace is, obviously, The Devil™, but it occurs to me that it’s become successful because it does a damn good job of taking things that were around before: web logs, home pages, contact lists, and a community searchable by affinity–basically a personals site. It’s the last two items–the bits that connect the people together–that add so much more value to the first twol. It’s a kind of peer to peer site for…peers.
I read this Wikipedia FAQK at Wired a few days ago and it made me laugh. Wikipedia is famous because it’s like a peer to peer site for knowledge. Of course, your peers are occasionally dumbasses, so the wisdom of that is occasionally debatable.
I love Wikipedia though.
Digg is cool because it’s like peer to peer for cool shit. The genius of it is its simplicity. Anybody can digg a page, and those that get the most diggs show up at the top of the list. It’ll be great until it’s worth somebody’s while to pump up their digg, and then it’ll go all PageRank-y.
Google is cool because it’s more peer to peer than you realize. The essential idea behind Google–and this is seems rather passe now, but all the parts had been laying around for years before Google put it all together–is that pages that a lot of other pages link to is more likely to be informative than one that few do.
That is to say, if you and I both write up a page about, say, the joys of sex with kittens, and 900 people link to my page, and only 10 link to yours, then it’s a good bet that I’ve written a better kitten-boinking page than you did.1
That’s PageRank™ in a nutshell. In practice, of course, it’s almost infinitely more complex, but the theory’s the same.
What all of these technologies have in common is that they take something that any individual person has–knowledge, opinions, acquaintances–and takes advantage of the network’s ability to connect them together to create additional value through aggregation (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts style). In other words, people network effect = value = peace and prosperity for the world = money.
Yup, I’m bored.
I missed you this weekend.
-k. ^-^
1–This blog does not encourage or condone kitten-boinking, and in fact is sickened by the very thought of it. Poor little kittens. Makes you wanna put ‘em out of their misery, fry ‘em up and eat ‘em.
