The redundancy in blogs is like the redundancy built into human speech, into holographic memory, into video encoding. Redundancy through citation assures human understanding. Redundancy through multi-channelling blog posts (the same post on multiple blogs or in html and RSS) and through topics/categories amplify post-to-post context.

About scale and storage scarcity. The traditional cite about the information avalanche: 200 years ago America published in one year the equivalent of one Sunday New York Times (I’m getting it wrong but you know what I mean: more published and we read more in a weekend than previous generations read in a lifetime). Now we have the Encylopedia Galactica at our fingertips and the classic problem of finding stuff.

I’ll argue that capturing everything, even with all its inefficiencies, is only a temporary (2-3 year) problem that Moore’s Law will fix. The real opportunity and challenge is making sense of the artifacts. Using them to solve real problems. Like deciding if this brand of soy milk is tasty before you buy it. Or find a job. Or a bone marrow donor. Or lucid answers to philosophical questions. Or true love.

let me start with a quote inside The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth:

“But you can’t look up all those numbers in time,” Drake objected. “We don’t have to Paul. We , merely arrange a list and look for duplications.”

Perry Mason, Case of the Angry Mourner (1951)

The first thing thing that went through my mind was what stephanie perrin spoke about in april during the iwis: perhaps there is a species specific reason why we forget. We may need to learn how to erase certain things for the sake of peace of mind. Perhaps the human psyche cannot and should not touch upon certain types of remembering.

There is the oral tradition of remembering, which involved song, dance, poetry. Then came the written word: first amoungst priests and then for commerce. It spread amoungst persons and then there where libraries to store the known knowledge. As literature came into being, it was questioned by a peripatetic (spelling, well perpataou means to walk in greek, it just sounds like that to me and you know what i mean) Socrates. He questioned the written wisdom of the poets and the playrights; what is it that we know? is it all an argument, a sophistry?

Then came a Nietzsche with his questions and syphilitic aphorisms.

Within the haze of history, there is a hazy remembering and forgeting. So how will this create a collective remembering and lead us to finding what will be stored forever and what will be somehow be part of less enduring fate of meaningless clutter.

While Arun Blake was in NYC, we discussed his “glog” and the entire recording of the that meeting we attended, there was lots of stuff before and after that was simply social clutter, and not the meat and potatoes of what we need to hear to get at the concepts.

I guess history will be increasing influeces by the overall archiving process whether it is of blogs or glogs.

I read your blog from the bottom up: then re read it down scanning what my readers eye found most interesting, then i read it from beginning to end, with the writers intent in mind.

I think dealing with information, persons will begin to take it apart and look at it from multiple cognitive perspectives, just as persons surf and hyperlink, and trackback.

I disagree that we are developing multiple on line digital personalities, but rather, this gear changing ability is changing the internal narrative that we used to call the super ego into a rerouted frontal lobe that interacts with the limbic system in parrallel with the external devices we use to extend our selves. Hence how our minds evolve to fit into this world will be similar to the inventions we build to archive, and data mine and sort. So storage will grow faster than 10 to the 10, or super K as Knuth puts it in his computers and God lecture. Now thats a big finite number: but we never get to infinity outside of the human brain. I do not believe there is capacity in this generation to achieve a real time zero conception towards defining the methods by which we summerize “allness.”

My assertion is that as long as there is always something more , or beyond human comprehension, the we move forward in history. once we create an enviroment when we are not creating more data to be stored and analysed than is possibly to be stored, then we contract historically into a dark age. When we undermine the human ability to conceive infinity, we enter the real of finite certainty, which is really bad for humanity. “Allness become a modern tower of Babylon, with the reaction of nature being a disaster that can happen from these technologies stuck in the finite of machine.

To be free, we need to be creative, which will make individuals able to create meaninful self histories. Within these self histories we will find the human triumph of beauty dispite adversity, which will be the moments archivers and researchers of the future will find most interesting.