creativity/machine

Both Anne Galloway and Adrian Miles have made connections between two newly coined blogtopian* ideas (does that count as a newly minted term?): grid blogging, which I mentioned yesterday, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s clumping:

What if we could automagically clump our conversations by specifying one (or more) initial entries to an agent I’m imagining as a trackback spider, which would then proceed to harvest and arrange the webbed up links - threaded according to date, relevance, or other such criteria - on an auto-generated page that could become a single, manageable link target in a casual reference such as the one above?

Make sense? In other words, instead of manually reconstructing the threads of a multi-blog conversation, the agent does it for you and publishes the links. Would this not be the next step in leveraging the power of trackback? Would this allow us to map/visualize the shapes of such conversations?

So…grid blogging would be (will be!) about simultaneous reflection on a pre-assigned topic, with dialogue occurring between blogs that already “talk” to each other, with these dialogues extending outwards and spiralling back in via the usual network magic . Clumping would be a way for intensity to gather around each of these nodes - not just content nodes, but conversational ones - as they follow that topic, or related ones, through.

Getting them together would be my idea of…well, blogtopia. (And a far cry from reactive bandwagoning in response to the latest popdex-hyped Wired article). Although since we humble Blogger-powered blogs aren’t even trackback-enabled yet, we could be left leaning up against the chainlink fence gazing wistfully at the playground…

*The term “blogtopia”, by the way, is so five minutes ago, apparently. Although there are only 6 instances of the adjectival form “blogtopian” known to Google.