slice of life

We have online diaries and web-logs. Think of it, the moment-to-moment history of people with too much time on their hands is being recorded for all time... at last. No more will we wonder "what were the peasants thinking while the pedants penned their biased and self centered histories?"

There is one problem: how do you organize these works in some way that they are readable? Like a good novel, for example (with pictures) -- we need a organizing principle to group the texts.

So, first you make a spider that crawls these texts, there are a few major formats, so extracting dates and such should not be too hard. Next we'd need to establish the location of each piece of writing, this could be done by using one (or all) of the many "where is your blog/diary" type pages. Also, any locations mentioned in the entry that could be resolved to a single place could be referenced. Beyond time and location would be the third dimension: relation. Using info from databases like "blog tree" and some fancy stuff with key words the weblogs and diaries would be linked to each other by "relationships" these would come in various strengths and types.

Now that the index is done we have sprinkling of points across the globe, they shoot out at us as time advances. Some of the points move over the surface of the globe as they travel forward, between the points tiny threads stretch link and snap. Now I take a wand and wave it through this model in a big 3d sloping curve. Up comes a story: images captured by the spider come along too. This is a story that travels through space time and relationships, but never with more than one degree of separation.

Now we have a exciting way to read the new collective history!

(note, the links that I talk about are both between individual entries and whole web logs. You have no control over what links are chosen for your log (that's part of the fun) I know that live journal and everything2 come close, but not close enough (no spider, no free form wand-driven interface)