Category: Inventions

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?

Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex.  Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing?  And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television.  Television is powerful.  It’s one hell of an addiction.  After air, water and food, I think I’d have to list television as the next necessity for life.

I want to do a quick look back at the history of television, but then move onto using my science fiction vision to see if I can picture something better than TV.  For the purposes of this essay I define television as a visual 2D screen with audio, so it doesn’t matter if the actual gadget is a Sears Roebuck cabinet with CRT from 1955, or iPhone from 2009, it’s still television to me.  If you can watch a live or recorded TV show on it, then I call it television, so something like the Kindle ebook doesn’t count, but an Asus netbook does.

What did people do before television?  I was born in 1951 and grew up with the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named it.  As a child all the adults told me stories about life before television.  My mother’s mother, Nanny, was born in 1881.  She told me about life before cars, airplanes, radio and television.  The only way I could relate to my Nanny’s tales of old America, was through the westerns I grew up watching on TV – those shows showed life with no radios, cars, airplanes or televisions, like Dodge City, in Gunsmoke.  It hurt my little head to try imagine life without TV.

Last night I watched, “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode from the first season of Star Trek, which I first viewed on September 29, 1966.  Because I grew up thinking television was a new invention, it’s hard to believe that was 43 years ago, and that the first shows I remember seeing at age four, were 54 years ago.  That generation that raised me, the ones who knew a time before television, are dead now, or sleeping in line waiting to get into heaven.  I imagine rugrats today believing that television existed in the time of Jesus.  Television has so perfectly integrated into our minds, culture and life, that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without the TV screen, or its daddy, the movie screen.

Now, I’ve got to ask:  Is there a better invention than television waiting to be invented?  Some people are going to point to the computer, but I’m going to claim that what we love about the computer is the CRT/LCD screen, so that the Internet is really just a different kind of television show.  Ditto for video games.  I used computers before they were connected to TV screens, and although I found them fun, most people would have considered them boring with a capital B.

Television is a gestalt experience.  Forget about all that damn ESP mumbo-jumbo, television screens are our real sixth sense.  Until we get a neural jack in the back of the head, like Neo in The Matrix, the television screen is our information pie hole.  Up until the advent of the Internet, the screen was one-way.   Now, the screen is a two-way street to the hive mind.  As I type this, I’ve got Lala.com open in another window playing “Boom” by P.o.d.  If I wanted, I could open Netflix, Amazon Unbox or Hulu, and watch old-style TV shows.  Also, I wanted, I could use my webcam and send video back into the system.

But my question still remains:  Will there ever be a better invention than television as a communication’s tool?  When my Nanny was little, the newspaper was the only form of mass communication.  News from around the world was slow and sparse.  And it had no immediacy. 

By the time my mother was born in 1916, radio was beginning to replace the newspaper as the media of mass communication.  To obtain a glimmer of this mind-blowing this transformation was,  I can only recommend watching Empire of the Air, a Ken Burns documentary, which is easily found on Netflix.  But if you want a much deeper insight, find the out-of-print book by Tom Lewis that the show is based on.  The effort will be worth it.  Radio is really the audio portion of television, and network the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Television is older than most people think – the technology begun to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly gained success in the late 1940s, and then blasted-off into the Leave it to Beaver world of the 1950s.  Many people think of life before the 1960s as black and white, because of old movies and TV shows, and think it was the psychedelic sixties when reality took on Technicolor hues.  Now that we spy on reality in 1080p, I bet future writers will look on the second half of the 20th century as being the fuzzy years. 

Radio allowed millions of people to have a shared experience.  Now that’s leaving Kansas for Oz.  Television expanded on the power of radio, so routinely tens of millions, and on extreme occasions, hundreds of millions, have shared a single historical event.  What next invention can top that?

Cell phones are having their impact, now that they are becoming universal, and Apple and its iPhone are pushing the envelope by evolving its invention into a pocket television, because the iPhone is only another form of a TV screen.  And as humanity evolves towards those higher beings in WALL-E, sitting on their moving recliners with their faces glued to TV screens, seeing the world not with their eyes, but their television, I can imagine it as the ultimate addiction.

Writing, and its descendent, the book, was the asynchronous form of mass communication that took over the world.  Radio synchronized people’s lives.  Television brought that synchronized communication to our major sense organ, the eyes, and it has dominated the communication landscape ever since.  Can it be topped?  I suppose scientists could invent some kind of machine that could broadcast reality directly into our brains, bypassing the screen, but I tend to doubt it.  If they could, we could live like the billions in The Matrix, never knowing if we’d taken the red or blue pill.

Such inventions are a long way off, so what could geek science invent before then?  TV eye-glasses already exist.  The goal is to fool the eyes, but despite fantasy shows like Caprica, there are some major limitations to virtual reality.  As long as the viewer just watches we can create better and better ways to view distant reality.  But if the viewer wants to interact with virtual reality they quickly face limitations.  It’s like waking dreams, if you try to manipulate them, they fall apart.

We can create virtual worlds like Second Life, but no matter how sophisticated such worlds get, will they ever be better than televised views of our reality?  Think of the difference between ABC World News Tonight, the latest Star Trek film and Up, a current animated film.  One shows scenes from around the world, one shows real actors mixed into CGI scenery, and the last is total animation.  Cartoons have always been a staple of TV, but would you want to live inside one.  Well, hell yes, for short times.  So virtual reality is one candidate to supplant TV.

This means, in the decades to come, there will be kids growing up with virtual reality as part of their lives, and old farts like me will be telling them stories about life without virtual reality.  How significant will be their cultural paradigm shift?  What if every day you could walk through a different art museum from cities all over the world, but without taking any flights?  How close could virtual reality get at showing the details of each painting?  What if we had the technology to scan each canvas so it was equal to looking at it from 2 inches away with our eyes, with the choices of various wavelengths of light, and the choice of having the light source come from 8 different directions.  Would that beat standing in front of the actual masterpiece?

I’ve always wanted to see Paris, but a phobia against claustrophobic transatlantic flights keeps me from going.  What if I could wear a helmet, recline in my La-Z-Boy, and walk the streets of Paris every night for an hour.  That would be television too, unless I got beyond the sense of viewing reality through a 2D screen.

We have to think about the holistic nature of television.  Television means vision at a distance, with the implied implication we’ll also get sound.  Writing and books, were information at a distance too.  Photograph and movies were the precursor to television.  All are based on 2D transmission.  Something better than television will have to be 3D.  Thus if I use this new invention and feel like I’m sitting in a room at MIT hearing a lecture or walking on Mars, then that will be a major step forward over 2D television at a distance.

Science fiction has been exploring such ideas for decades, and it has  taken that speculation even further with the concept of downloading, which is recording our minds and putting them into computers.  How far will reality ever get to catching up with science fiction is open to debate, but I do think VR goggles or helmets will probably be common in the near future, maybe before I die, and I will play the role of Nanny when talking to children who spend most of their time with their heads in VR helmets.

But at a personal level, what do I want from television and its possible replacements?  This is where things get philosophically interesting.  We use television for entertainment, vicarious thrills and gathering information.  What that implies is our brains are bored with our existing location in time and space and we want to fool them into believing we are located in a different time and space.  For centuries books were the technology we applied to this simple quest.  Intellectuals will claim that reading Pride and Prejudice is superior to watching one of the many 2D screen versions, but the details of a televised version are so vastly richer to our senses.

I know lots of people who shun TV screens, either the broadcast kind or the computer kind.  They live among family, friends and pets, pursuing hobbies and enjoying nature.  They live in the now, like all good Zen monks teach, but I’m not one of those kinds of people.  I grew up on television that has conditioned my mind to want to constantly teleport via 2D screens to distant places, real and imaginary.  Is that good or bad?  A world without television is like being an ant and not knowing how big reality really is compared to the little environment in which I crawl.  Does knowing matter?  I think so.

Thus, I’m sure if a better invention than television came around, I’d jump on it, if it allowed me to teleport with more details.  But there are other things to consider.  I’ll put this into an analogy that horny young men will understand so clearly, and be just as obvious to people who aren’t horny young men.  Which is better, a real live naked woman, or a naked woman on HBO?

JWH – 6/13/9

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

Every science fiction fan should read Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.  Kaku surveys all the famous concepts of science fiction, often referencing when he first encountered the idea in famous science fiction books, movies and television shows.  With each idea, aliens, starships, light sabers, death rays, robots, and so on, Kaku sets the stage by bringing the reader up to speed with the physics behind the idea.  He carefully explains what we know, what current experiments relate to the concept, and what future science might still discover.

I bought Physics of the Impossible on audio and liked it so much that I bought a hardback copy for reference.  This week, the Science Channel is rerunning the three episodes of Kaku’s Visions of the Future which makes a perfect visual supplement to the book, showing Kaku going around the world visiting labs working on these cutting edge breakthroughs that will lead to our science fictional future.  Many of the experiments Kaku talks about in the book can be seen in these videos.

Michio Kaku divides his book into three areas:

Class I Impossibilities – “These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Force Fields
  • Invisibility
  • Phasers and Death Stars
  • Teleportation
  • Telepathy
  • Psychokinesis
  • Robots
  • Extraterrestrials and UFOs
  • Starships
  • Antimatter and Anti-universes

Class II Impossibilities – “These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world.”

  • Faster than Light
  • Time Travel
  • Parallel Universes

Class III Impossibilities – “These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Perpetual Motion Machines
  • Precognition

Kaku is very generous here in his categorizations.  For example telepathy.  He doesn’t try to make a case for what most people would think of as telepathy, one person reading another person’s mind.  Instead he shows how close we might get with machines that can scan minds and read vague conceptual patterns in the scan.  By chance, 60 Minutes ran a segment on Mind Reading this week. 

Follow the link to see a video that illustrates exactly what Kaku was covering, and presents even newer findings.  They show people in a MRI machine drawings of basic objects like a knife or hammer and scientists can record the brain images and analyze them with a computer.  The 60 Minutes’ producer volunteered to be scanned and was shown ten objects.  The computer program then analyzed her brain scans, correctly identifying 10 out of 10 objects.  This isn’t telepathy, but it’s pretty darn amazing.

The book does this over and over again, referencing dozens of cool contemporary science experiments.  There have been many books like this one, for example, The Physics of Star Trek back in 1995 by Lawrence M. Krauss.  The Kaku book is just the latest, so it has the most current survey of neat science tech.  I love to read such books every two or three years to catch up on the latest discoveries.  These books are sobering for the science fiction fan, and they explain why I give such bleak predictions about science fiction in my recent essay, Science Fiction in My Lifetime.

I gave far better odds on intelligent robots than Kaku.  I based my prediction on models in nature.  For example, before there were airplanes we watched birds, so we knew something could fly.  Consider faster than light travel.  We have never observed any object traveling faster than light, so I consider FTL travel an extreme long shot.  We know biological machines can be intelligence and offer a continuum of examples from the lowest animals to humans.  Airplanes are not like birds, but they fly.  I think we’ll eventually invent a pattern recognizing artificial neo-cortexes that can match and surpass our intelligence.

I highly recommend Physics of the Impossible for people who love science fiction.  It’s very well written and understandable.  You don’t even have to be particularly science minded to enjoy the book.  And if you don’t read science fiction, this book will catch you up on a lifetime of far out ideas.  Physics of the Impossible would make a fantastic eight part documentary for PBS.

JWH 1/6/9

Science Fiction in My Lifetime

When I wrote this title I intended it be about science fictional predictions coming true in my lifetime, and especially what might still happen before I die.  Then I realized it could also imply I was writing about the great science fictional books that came out in my lifetime, leaving me room to speculate on what far-out ideas could appear in the near future.  Over at Visions of Paradise, Bob Sabella chronicles seven waves of science fiction since H. G. Wells, and wonders when a new wave will hit.  I’ve lived through three of waves Bob describes, the 1950s transition from pulp mags to book SF, the 1960s New Wave and the most recent Cyberpunk movement, but I think we all live in a reality partly shaped by Herbert and Jules and their literary descendants.

Right now the science fiction scene is dormant.  Most of the new books in the science fiction section at your favorite bookstore are fantasy books, or adventures set in classical science fictional worlds, like Baroque art encouraged by the Catholic Church.  No radically new science fiction concepts have been created since the 1990s with the concepts of mind uploading and the singularity.  What I’d like to do is recap the big SF ideas of the 20th century and then try to predict where science fiction might go in the 21st century.

How many grand ideas imagined in science fiction stories will become real in our lifetimes?  Humans landing on the Moon is the shining example for science fiction stories going back hundreds of years.  Before that, submarines and airplanes were predicted long before they became a reality.  Some concepts are harder to judge.  Many science fiction stories were written about overpopulation, terrorism and running out of natural resources after the year 2000, and some of those dreary predictions are coming true, just read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

How likely will the exciting, positive concepts of science fiction, bear fruit in our lifetimes?  Some people are anxiously awaiting flying cars and rocket backpacks.  Other fans are expecting alien visitors, while some folk can’t wait to go where no man has gone before themselves.  How many science fiction readers hope life-extension will keep them reading science fiction until the 22nd or 23rd centuries?  I know, I’d love my own Jeeves the robot.

I keep writing about the science of science fiction over and over again, but what really are the odds of these fantastic things happening before I die?  I had a revelation in the shower this morning.  Science fiction’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last 35 years not because of the validity of it’s ideas, but because the story telling has gotten dramatically better and thus appeals to a wider audience.

I thought my wife and lady friends were getting more and more into the ideas of science fiction when it became obvious they loved SF movies because of the hot actors and thrilling story telling.  Most people have zero expectation from science fiction, it’s just good fun.  They don’t want to homestead Mars, or expect the galactic overloads to come save Earth from ourselves.

I’ve been reading a number of classic science fiction novels from the 1950s this year and I’ve been amazed at the ideas, but disappointed with story telling aspects – it’s no wonder that science fiction had limited appeal back then.  I keep reading for the ideas and predictions, judging the science of science fiction, but the real success of science fiction in the last few decades has been in telling better stories.

I’m happy for that, but I want to focus on the science fiction ideas.  What are the likely odds for many of science fiction’s most popular visions coming true?  Let’s use the year 2050 as a cutoff.  If I could live to be 100, it would be 2051, so that’s close enough to call 2050 the end of my lifetime.  The odds I list are just my best-guess hunches because there is no way for anyone to really calculate them.  As far as I know, there are no bookies taking bets on these future endeavors.

Colonizing the Moon – 1 in 10

It’s been over 40 years since man has walked on the Moon, so this almost seemed a dead dream until China, India and Japan took a interest in the Moon and started up their own space programs.  This is very positive, except that the world-wide recession might slow things down.  Still the Moon is the logical base to start a beachhead on conquering space.  Colonizing the Moon is the cornerstone of all our science fictional dreams about space travel.

I think Robert A. Heinlein owned the Moon fictionally, with classics like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit-Will Travel, The Rolling Stones, The Menace From Earth, The Green Hills of Earth, Rocket Ship Galileo and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  John Varley and Rudy Rucker are modern writers who have been homesteading the Moon in recent years, giving it a twist with mind uploading, cloning and mad robots.

Some of these books are among my all-time favorite books, but I’ve got to admit, none of them have approach colonizing the Moon in any serious way.  For such an old subject this leaves lots of room for future science fiction writers to work.

Colonizing Mars – 1 in 100

Growing up in the 1960s I really expected to see manned missions to Mars in my lifetime.  It just seemed such an obvious step after the Apollo program  Men like Werner von Braun and Robert Zubrin made it sound so doable.  Well, it’s not.  If you do the research you’ll find just how tough a job going to Mars truly is, not impossible, but well on the edge of the limits of what humans can do now and the near future.

And I think it’s silly to think about Mars until we can conquer to Moon.  If we can send men and women to the Moon for three years, and prove we have the skills to keep them alive, then it will be time to talk about Mars.  However, colonizing Mars is the next step after the Moon, and for many, it’s the main goal.  On the other hand, I believe the road to the stars is paved with airless chunks of rock and we have a convenient one at hand to practice our space survival skills.

Many scientists have said it was amazing luck that some of the twelve men who made it to the Moon weren’t killed.  Most of their luck came from making short journeys lasting less than 2 weeks.  Moon dust would have ruined their suits, landers and machinery if they would have tried to stay much longer.  Is it possible to build self-contained habitats that will last three years, the length of a Mars mission?

Science fiction has always made the near impossible sound easy.  Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars have set the standard for Mars colony science fiction.  His work is far more realistic than most SF writers, but still way too full of fantasy.  Science fiction writers might be visionaries, but they have trouble seeing the details.  Speculation on how to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars is wide-open.  Terraforming is a great idea, but explaining how to build a computer on Mars without help from Earth would be magical.

Manned Missions Beyond Mars – 1 in 100,000

Theoretically, it’s well within our means technologically to colonize the Moon and Mars within the next 25-40 years.  We could make some amazing breakthroughs in technology that would allow us to go further, but we need to get busy, and I think public opinion will be against it.  To go beyond Mars will require developing nuclear rocket technology on the Moon or out in space.  Mars is about the maximum range for manned missions using chemical rockets, and that mission would be far easier if we could perfect nuclear rocketry before we try.  The people of the Earth will not let scientists develop nuclear rockets anywhere near our home world.  The Moon is a fine place to work with radioactive elements.  The real future of manned space travel will depend on the industrialization of the Moon.

Asteroid miners have been a staple of SF since the days of John W. Campbell took over Astounding, ignoring the fact that it’s much cheaper to find the same resources locally on Earth, the Moon or Mars.  Unless space ships can be built on the Moon, mining asteroids is silly.  Any colony on the Moon will want organic elements, and especially hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon.  Moonies will probably want to mine comets.

Manned Interstellar Flight – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I guess it’s possible we could discover some magical space drive system that will let us zoom off to the stars before 2050, but it’s highly unlikely.  Personally, I think the only way for humans will travel to the stars will be to build giant generational spaceships that can operate for thousands of years, but even that idea is mostly fantasy.  We might have the will and tech to build interstellar spaceships in a few centuries, but for now the idea is almost pure fantasy.  Star Wars like galactic civilizations are absolute pure fantasy.  Even our very best hard science fiction novels are really just thrilling stories, and are rather pointless for our needs of predicting the near future.  Hard core space opera gives us grand hopes, but the chances of colonizing worlds around other stars is about equal to finding biological immortality.

Intelligent Humanoid Robots – 1 in 5

Asimov, Simak and Williamson ruled the robot stories, but robot stories aren’t as popular today.  Robots and robotics seem to be moving full-steam ahead though, with scientists like Ray Kurzweil predicting an artificial intelligence singularity in the near future.  Hobby robotics is probably much more popular than hobby rocketry ever was.  Anybody with some programming ambition can get into robotics.  And after Spirit and Opportunity’s success on Mars, I can even picture an ever evolving series of robots going where no man can afford to go.  That’s a goddamn shame, but that’s the way it is.  I hope NASA at least starts building in real-time high definition video feeds from it’s metal Martian explorers so us biological creatures back on Earth can feel like we’re walking on Mars vicariously.

Many people believe artificial intelligence is impossible.  I figure if nature can accidentally stumble upon the recipe, than scientists should be able to figure it out sooner or later.  The question is how long.  Robots are cheap enough compared to manned space exploration, so we should see a continual increase in robotic intelligence on space missions, and that might evolve into intelligent robots.  The military is also pushing robots to do more.  The more we ask of robots the more intelligence they acquire.

What’s surprising is I don’t think science fiction has ever done any really good realistic robot stories, either they are people-like and cute, or they are like Gort, all-powerful and scary.  Commander Data was among the best, but not very realistic.  Before 2050 I think we’ll see some pretty amazing robots, and just maybe science fiction will predict what they really will be like.

Visitors From Space – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I’d really love to be proven wrong here.  We could use an alien like Klaatu or Karellen to knock some sense into us, but I don’t think that will happen.  What are the odds of intelligent life developing anywhere in the universe?  What are the odds of intelligent life developing twice and near enough to each other to visit?  It must be tremendous.  I’m not saying it’s impossible.  Let’s say it will be nice surprise.

For story purposes, the concept of visitors from space is pretty tired, although it will remain popular.  The idea has endless possibilities and offers so much fun and thrills.  Essentially, it’s a fantasy concept equal to stories about angels and vampires.

SETI Contact – 1 in 1,000,000,000

Detecting an intelligent signal from space is probably far more likely than having aliens over for coffee.  Detecting intelligent alien life in the universe would have profound philosophical implications to our society, so it’s strange that this topic is so seldom tackled by science fiction.  Often it’s a setup for physical contact or acquiring super-science, like Contact by Carl Sagan.  We need more books like His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem, The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt and The Listeners by James Gunn.

I figured if we were real lucky, and I mean astronomically numbered lucky, SETI would detect a signal from space before I passed on.  That’s the most exciting thing I can practically hope for, but I doubt it will happen.  I think if we build some really gigantic space telescopes we might visually detect artificial elements in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets.

Cloning Humans – 1 in 100

I’ve always considered cloning boring.  It’s making a human without sex, but you end up with another human, big whoop. Most science fiction is about 20 year-old cloned bodies grown in a month, which is silly.  Also, the idea of copying the brain patterns of a natural human onto a clone’s brain is also silly.

Uploading Minds – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

Mind uploading is a growing topic.  It’s all part of the Human 2.0 theorizing, and has been slowly emerging in science fiction for decades.

[You can see the complete documentary here, or go to YouTube and watch all the parts.]

Whether you copy my brain to a computer simulation, clone, or android mind, I’m still going to die in the process.  What’s the point?  This is no route to immortality.  I’d much rather design an AI mind than copy my own.  Being alive is about experiencing the now, and that’s not copying memories.  However, seeking to reach Human 2.0 status is where much of the science fictional action will be during the 21st century.

The Cutting Edge

If you really want to explore the frontier of what’s happening scientifically, right on the border of where science meets science fiction, be sure and read the Edge.org.  Top thinkers from around the world examine the most far out ideas on the planet.  Most of the articles are very down to Earth, but some could be used to springboard into science fiction stories.

The Future of Science Fiction

From what I can detect, I’m thinking the appeal of science fiction is even waning, at least for the moment.  I examined many months of book reviews at SFSite.com and only a handful could be considered new breakthrough science fiction.  If the editors there removed all the obvious fantasy titles their site would shrink dramatically.  Many of the titles that most SF fans would classify as science fiction, are really adventure stories set in old comfortable science fiction worlds with few writers trying to imagine anything new conceptually.  Like I said above, science fiction writers have gotten much better at telling stories.

Right now I think of all the predictions dreamed up by science fiction writers, I think robots, AI and Human 2.0 explorations are the ones most likely to come somewhat truer in my lifetime.  SETI contact with alien signals from space is going to be like finding one snowflake in all the snow storms of Earth each winter.  It could happen, it might take a thousand years, or a million years, or it could be next year.

I don’t think we’ll ever seen visitors from the stars, and I doubt mankind will ever be an alien invader.  Science fiction has always been deceptive about interstellar rocketships, implying they’d be something like a new model airliner from Boeing.  That thinking is on the order of asking how fast does Santa have to travel to visit every house on Earth.

Until men and women colonize the Moon and Mars and we learn how to build with materials found in outer space and create a new economy that has no dependency on Earth, we won’t be able to think about traveling further than Mars.

I think the dramatic new ideas that come out of science fiction will be about living on Earth.  The potential of combining the Internet, artificial intelligence, robots, advanced learning techniques, simulated computer worlds, and so on will generate new possibilities for humans.  Science fiction writers need to think very hard about what’s going on in this world.  Sooner or later a new H. G. Wells, Jules Verne or Robert A. Heinlein will show up and surprise us.

JWH 12/28/8

Random Blog Reading

A couple weeks ago I noticed that Auxiliary Memory was getting a bump in hits and discovered the reason:  AlphaInventions.com.  This site, the invention of Cheru Jackson was designed to randomly show blogs from around the world, and promote blog reading.  If you visit AlphaInventions you can sit and watch a new blog pop up about every 10 seconds, like a blog slide-show.  There’s a pause button in case you want to stop and read, and a input box and button to submit your own blog.

I’ve manually done this in the past with blog hosting sites like LiveJournal that used to have a random button, and Blogger which currently has a “Next Blog” button that takes you to a random site.  I wish all blog hosting sites offered this feature.  It’s a fun way to see the world.  Hitting the random button is like teleporting into an unknown home and asking the people, “What’s happening?”  At Blogger, over half the sites are in language that’s not English, but the pictures still tell a thousand words each.

I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands of sites in this random fashion and I’ve never found a person like me.  There are a few bloggers that have similar interests to mine, but we have discovered each other in non-random ways.  Most people discover other blogs through googling a topic, from social bookmarking sites, or from the links presented at a blog site they like.  This tends to hide the diversity of the blogosphere because people tend pursue more of what they already like.

Patterns do emerge, but it’s surprising how different people are around the world, or even just nearby.  All over the web people have tried to estimate how many blogs there are, with some estimates running as high as 200,000,000, which I can’t believe.  Here are some numbers from different blogging sites:

  • WordPress.com – 5,056,620
  • Blogger.com – unknown
  • LiveJournal.com – 17,600.000
  • OpenDiary.com – 566,956
  • TypePad.com – unknown
  • Vox.com – unknown
  • Windows Live Spaces – unknown
  • Famous blog hosting sites in other countries – unknown

Still, even if there are only 20,000,000 bloggers, that’s quite a cultural expression of diversity.  Evidently millions people on this planet have an inner-journalist in them.  Those sites with unknown numbers are really big ones, so we could be talking about a major cultural phenomenon.

It only took a couple of weeks to realize that AlphaInventions was failing.  The first time I looked at it a high percentage of pages caught my eye as being readable and interesting.  Now it’s overwhelmed with crap.  There are a couple kinds of blogs that turn me off, but they tend to dominate.  The first are people trying to make money in some lame-ass way.  The second, and more common, are bloggers who like to jot down a few vague lines each day.  Don’t put up a public website unless you’re going to make a serious effort to provide content.  I hate hitting the “Next Blog” button and finding a site that says, “We went to the movies and then went out to dinner.”   Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to write about going to the movies and out to dinner, but you’ve got to make it into a story, or at least a movie review.

There could be tens of millions of bloggers, but there might only be a few hundred thousand serious ones, and if we distilled those down to just the ones you would love to read if you had the time, there could be hundreds.  Finding them is a problem, but as fascinating problem.  Think about it, there’s almost 7,000,000,000 people in the world, and blogging has the potential to connect you with the most perfect friends.

I think Cheru Jackson will need to rethink his concept.  The blog slide-show idea is great.  Letting anyone submit is bad.  I’d like to see the blog slide-show feature combined with RSS feeds and StumbleUpon like technology so the random blogs were all high quality sites with a reader rating button.  In other words, I want random great, rather than random everything.  StumbleUpon is excellent for finding great reading from all types of web sites, but Jackson’s intention was to help the little-guy bloggers, and that’s a good intention.

I think Blogger.com’s “Next Blog” button is the step in the right direction.  If they would add a rating button to their top navigation bar, allowing visitors to rate blogs on the Blogger site, then that could be used to show random sites with positive ratings.  The social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Technorati allows pros to compete against amateurs, and that’s good for that they do, but I’d also like to see an all amateur competition too.

For some reason I mainly read sites from WordPress and Blogger users, with a sprinkling of LiveJournal users.  There are many more blog hosting sites around the world that need to get in on the competition.  Many advanced bloggers hide their community blog hosting services with personalized domain names.  This makes their sites look more professional, but tends to hide their affiliation with their blogging community.  I love being part of the WordPress world, and wished WordPress.com had a random button like the Blogger “Next Blog” button.

Of course, for Blogger.com to offer that button requires their users to show an ugly navigation bar at the top their site.  I don’t know if WordPress users would like that or not.  I see an admin bar whenever I visit my site for administrative purposes, which by-the-way allows me to see a random post of my own.  Maybe blog hosting services could make a custom visitor bar at the top of sites an option.

Blog hosting sites do collaborate with standards like OpenID, so it might be possible they could create a random referral standard.  I like that people at Blogger or LiveJournal have a certain look and feel, because it makes me feel like I’m visiting a country of bloggers with their own shared characteristics and flavor.  I’d like to randomly visit other blogging countries.  What’s needed is a central guide like Fodor’s, or a United Nations of blog countries to start a visa process.

Of course, these suggestions would put poor Cheru Jackson out of business.  He had a good idea, but each blogging host site could easily recreate it, and in the future, with standards, the cross-border random visits could be set up too.

JWH 12/22/8

Blogging, WordPress and the Future

I’ve been blogging for awhile.  I started with LiveJournal, and then moved to WordPress on my hosted site, and finally to WordPress.com.  I like the convenience of WordPress.com maintaining everything, and I’m developing a wish-list of desired features I hope they will roll out in the near future.

First, let’s think about blogging in general.  The basic idea is to write a post and get comments.  Older posts are pushed down and stored away, and the general method used to find these older stories is either by categories, search box or calendar grouping.  It’s pretty effective for what it does, but I wonder if other methods might be developed to organize the overall site and expand the theoretically limits of what it means to blog.  WordPress is constantly adding new widgets, so their structure is built around adding features, so this post is going to suggest some features I want and imagine where I’d like blogging to evolve in the future.

Paid For Feature Modules

I don’t know if I can expect all my desired features for free, but what if each module was a paid add-on or part of a plus service?  I have no idea how WordPress makes its money.  It’s a great free service that doesn’t appear to use ads and what few add-on features they do sell don’t look like big revenue generators.

Some of the features I’m wishing for could be part of a $49.95/year plus package.  I’ve invested a lot of time in WordPress, so I don’t mind paying.  I don’t want them to go bust – I want WordPress to be around for generations to come.  I assume WordPress wants to maintain their current marketing plan of offering a free service, but I can picture my blogging needs expanding, and I imagine so do others.

Right now there are too many Web 2.0 services.  I can share my thoughts on WordPress, my photos on Picasa, computer work on Zoho.com, friendships on Facebook.com, genealogy on Ancestry.com, my book lists on LibraryThing.com, and so on. 

What I’d like is one place to present the digital me.  MySpace and Facebook want that place to be their services, but I’m not happy with those sites.  They are too restricting.  What I want is one place to combine all the features, and for now I’m thinking my blogging home at WordPress.com is the place to start.  I have no idea if the people who produce WordPress want to be such an enterprise, but I’m guessing my desires are just part of an evolutionary process on the web and somebody will offer them.

The Digital Me 

Let’s think of a blog as an analog for a person’s life.  Right now blogs model people with the diary format.  Before computers, memoirs and autobiographies were two ways to convey a person’s life.  However, those formats depend on linear progress and some random discovery.  When you meet someone at a party you don’t get to know them in a start at the beginning, end at the end, fashion.  Generally you start talking about a subject, and this is covered by blogging with categories.  But if you’ve ever been to a blog site of someone you like to read and they have a long list of categories it’s not very inviting.  And if their current three posts are all boring then you’ll get the wrong idea, even if they wrote a brilliant post just before that.

Science fiction has for years imagined artificial beings or speculated on machines recording people’s minds and converting them into computer beings in artificial worlds.  I’m thinking a blog could be something like that – a download of your personality.  But you need a face to represent the whole of your being.

Table of Contents

Magazines use their covers and table of contents to promote their top stories, hoping an eye catching headline will get you to buy a whole magazine and read the rest of the issue.  However, magazines are not good structures to model a person’s complete life, but the TOC could be a good format to use for an introduction, or your face.  Home pages on blogs take you to the latest post.  I’m wondering if WordPress could create a Table of Contents page to use as the default home page, something that would combine the features of the About page and table of contents, to welcome blog visitors and help bloggers introduce themselves, giving guests a bigger picture of what you are like.  Also, let this page have more layout options, use a 2-3 column HTML table to organize the structure, and allow the maximum customization. 

Since the word categories is already used, have an organizing unit called “Projects” to be a super-group above categories.  I like the word “projects” because I like to think of organizing my life into projects.  Marketing people might come up with a better word.  Maybe tie it in with major personality traits.   Here’s an example of what I mean.  For the Table of Contents page have several user-created Topics or Projects called Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and Reviews.  Under Reviews I might have category listings for Audio Books, Books, Movies, Television Shows, Music, etc.  Under Family I might have categories for Parents, Wife, Kids, Genealogy, etc.  Then allow each Topic/Project to have an icon or small photo in the layout, so visitors at a glance can see how the blog writer organizes his or her life.

TimeLine

Another fun format to add would be the TimeLine – something to help people remember when and were things happened.  Since people have imprecise memories, you’d have to have a Date field that could handle  years, months, seasons, and days.  I don’t think hours and seconds would be needed.  (Fall 1949, 12/7/82, January 1971, 1963.)  Users could enter birthdays for family, and then school years and schools.  That way people could quickly know how old they were in a during a particular school year, or what years they worked as a bag boy.  Bloggers could enter dates for when they met people, got jobs, saw concerts, had children, went on vacations, etc.  Additional fun features would be hyperlinks to web sites that show the TV schedules, top news, best selling books, big movies, etc. for each year to help prompt memories.

Lists

I like keeping a list of the books I’ve read, my favorites, the ones I own, favorite songs, my CD library, favorite movies, DVDs, movies seen, etc.  Lots of people are list makers, and so having a list making module would be awful cool.  Like the TimeLine module above, this would force WordPress to get into the database business, which moves them more into the Zoho.com type service.  WordPress could offer both custom database applications and do-it-yourself kits.

Genealogy

Blogs are about people.  I use my blog to help remember things.  One of the things I’ve always meant to get into is genealogy – but not in a big way.  What would be amusing for blogging is to enter enough information so it links to other genealogy sites and to other bloggers, so when you meet people you can glance at their ancestry and maybe check if you’re related.  If this linkage grew eventually we’d be able to say to our blogs, “show a family blogging tree.”

Who Is Your Blog For?

When you’re typing away at your blog posts do you do it for friends, strangers, or yourself?  I call my blog Auxiliary Memory because I’m getting more forgetful all the time.  I really would like to use my blog as a supplemental brain.  If WordPress had the security, I’d even like to save private information on my blog.  Not bank account numbers, but just data only I would want to see when I’m trying to remember something, maybe something personal like address books, Christmas card lists, work and home To-Do lists, etc.  I’d also like to keep my last will and testament and parting thoughts, so when I die, especially unexpected, I can leave some last messages.

Now do you see what I mean when I think of a blog as a digital analog of myself?  Right now blogs are a collection basket for thoughts, but it could collect other personal items, like photographs.

Photos and Time and Place

There are plenty of online photo galleries for people to share their pictures, but I’d like one integrated into WordPress.  Why separate thoughts from images.  I’d like to tie photographs to the TimeLine and to the Genealogy.  Currently we enter posts by today’s date and time, but I’d like to be offered a field that would let me enter posts for past dates and time, that way I could organize my photographs chronologically, and work to remember the past.

It’s quite obvious what would happen if you could link photos to genealogies.  I’d also like to link photos to streets and cities, and I would like to connect to other people to share photos linked by time and place.  I moved around a lot when I was a kid.  Imagine putting all my photos from Maine Avenue when I lived at Homestead Air Force Base from 1962-63 into the system and someday getting a message from long lost friends who went to Air Base Elementary with me?

Photo Rotation and Linking

Right now we get one photo for our header to represent our personality.  It would be great to draw from a pool, so on some pages visitors would see images from a random rotation from the pool of personal or stock photos and for other pages, specific photos to go with the content of the post.

This would be a nightmare to roll out for WordPress.  It’s much easier to manage the system when there’s a limited number of templates for users to build their sites.  For this to be practical, WordPress needs to designate certain sized photographs – so all header photos would be the same size for a particular template, as they do now, but offer you the system to switch photos on the fly.  When you create a new post you’d have the opportunity to link to a photo pool folder or link to an individual photo.  This wouldn’t require a major programming change, and WordPress would sell a lot more space.  Of course, it would be nice to link to Flash videos and animations too.

I’m Sure You Get My Point By Now

By now you should see the trend.  I supposed with XML and web services many of these features could originate on companies outside of WordPress, or allow these features to work across all blogging sites.  I love the idea of OpenID and that needs to be expanded.  Selecting a blogging service like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal is like selecting a nationality, but we shouldn’t have language barriers to keep us from communicating across borders.

It may even be possible that various blogging services could work together so you’d have memberships on more than one service and combine the results.  I see people trying to do this now but the results are disjointed, like they have multiple personalities, or they want to have separate public identities.  I hate when I leave a reply on a Blogger site and it wants to send people to my Google identity rather than my WordPress identity.  My FaceBook page should just have a widget that displays my WordPress blog instead of trying to duplicate a blogging feature.

Has anyone thought about the ramifications for blogging for decades?  Or generations?  Permanent storage needs to be addressed for historical purposes.  I always like to ask people, “What would the world be like if Jesus had a blog and we could read it today.”  Whose blog would you want to read from history?  File and data formats are going to have to become standard if they are going to be readable in a thousand years.  And if you spend a lifetime crafting your blog so it represents who you are, do you want it to die just because your body can’t go on?

These are just some idle thoughts on my part.  Start thinking about what blogs could really become.  Just wait a few years for when WordPress rolls out its AI widget that allows you to program a talking personality to go with your blog.  All it’s personality will be based on your past blog entries.  Eventually, we’ll be able to talk to our AI and it will automatically create our posts just from interviewing us.

Jim