An impromptu State of the Web Address by El Zorro

“We’re experiencing a bit of turbulence from the side-effects of structural limitations inherent in centralized closed source system development model – beyond a point nobody on the outside really knows what is going on inside.”
El Zorro

Now by and large although i’ve never met them personally i believe that the techies working on flickr cal et al are brilliant and wonderful people – particularly the ones who openly give back what they’re learning to the community (ie Link && Link ). before rounding off about a sinister conspiracy theory you must also consider that the problematic these people are dealing with is immense (think : data volumes, storage, servers, real-time distributed databases, massive in memory ram cache, hardware and so on). implementing any new functionality to such a system requires a serious understanding of so much that even with the best due diligence and safety harness there’s always room for the possibility that something is not quite working out the way it was intended (especially if the messages between technical/commerical/executive) get confused in translation / implementation

what the likes of big clustered centralized sites like flickr, facebook, youtube et al are doing has never been attempted before so technically and to an extent ethically (in terms of the socio implications of globalized virtual cross border multi-cultural meme exchange systems) they are exploring the model and (hopefully with our participation) making up the rules as they go. what is important is that the community feedback is consensually applied and not subordinated to any kind of “lets do evil” type strategy.

flickr, i still think you guys are doing a great job which is why i like so many others still love to hang out here and share little reflections from our lives. i know that you listen and from past experience when something makes sense (or not as in the suggestion in this thread) you act.

looking at the wider picture i begin to wonder whether this is actually the way to go – does what we are seeing here mark the beginning of a fragmentation and de-centralization phase along the lines of my personally favored open-source model – that which evolved with bsd / linux and at a higher level of abstraction spawned smtp / web / wiki / bbs – that is to say the technology framework becomes itself collaborative – ie it is open-sourced, becomes in its centralized form completely transparent and is freely distributed to anyone who wishes to host this on their server (on the basis that what they learn and the improvements they make are re-merged in for the good of the whole). with the advent of web2.0 api’s and interconnectedness the distributed model may still come back into vogue once the current regression in a back to the future sense towards the mid/mainframe structure unwinds. think eco-systems of interconnected clusters – all potentially interacting and sending messages to one another in the way that say atoms, molecules or reflected light does. ask yourself why did http/html succeed in creating the current version of the internet we use? ok the trade off is that the single globalised community (photosharing in the case of flickr) fragments and what you get is a vision of networks of individual entities selectively collaborating, coexisting and interconnecting according to their own affinities and blinkering (or wide opening) their particular worldview according to where they are and how they like it.

actually this issue may be more fundamental than what we are seeing here – as i suspect your google search result screenshot alludes – the problem may be wider than we suspect – ie. real time personalized re-writing of your personal view of the internet by the people who know whats best for you – those kind corporate and political entities seeking actively to define and control your flow ™. infowars, firewalls, censorship, filtering, projection, suggestion, brainwashing and mind control – patterns and strategies designed to serve the respective best interests of competing ideological-politico worldviews each seeking to assert itself as the defacto version of reality – whats happening right now in the wider online sphere (or should i say, what could happen) makes orwell’s vision of a nightmarish big-brother future look understated.

personally i think its time to admit defeat and give over the control immediately to the uber-intelligent ai supercomputer intelligence masquerading in its current infantile guise as a harmless bunch of wifi rabbits (www.nabaztag.com). Republished from d_nurv’s stream on Flickr

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