My friend Bret Pettichord got the following spam. It makes me so proud! (sniff sniff):

Subject: She’s got natural you know what, fake thick lips and has starred in several movies
Date:Wed, 9 Jun 2004 01:04:19 -0400 (EDT)

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Does it help to try to keep these two senses of links distinct? If not, then I’m more confused than I

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqodtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Um, where is the post I posted here earlier today? Anyway, I thought I had psoted an advance notice, taken from Scott Rosenberg’s weblog, of a Salon dual-review of two books, one of which is Small Pieces. But that post doesn’t seem to be here. Maybe I fucked it up. But the article is up now, lead story on salon.com — an excerpt: But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and “network effect” growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors’ eyes were transfixed by the business’s convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became “advertisements for myself” for the masses. “Communities of interest” — devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates — formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid. It’s this story that’s addressed by “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” — an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. “Bamboozled at the Revolution” is trade-magazine reporting; “Small Pieces” is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger’s musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli’s chronicles of boardroom chaos. Sorry if I’ve blurred a couple of different senses of links that should be kept distinct. On one level, we posit links as connections between people – as Kevin and David and I had in mind in speaking of connotation, affinity, etc. These occur via voice, interpretive inferences from collections of links, etc.. I think Alex Golub zoomed in on this in his piece about SPLJ. What struck me then, and comes into play here now, is that this all lies in the area of interpreting links – the hermeneutics of links. There is also the rudimentary functionality of links – what Ward calls the grammar – having to do with the the simple on/off way they work and how we use them. On the level of the current state of the code, we either 1) link or 2) do not link. If there is a link, we either 1. click, or 2. do not click. (More accurately, we have a few other “options” – we can run the mouse over and get an idea of where we would go if we clicked, and we can click and open a new screen (addition), rather than replace what is on the screen with a completely different screenful’o’content (substitution). I do both of these quite a bit.)

BTW, this seems to come from the now-moribund Small Pieces Gang Blog

Categories: Uncategorized dw