« Cookin’ it in the S.F., yo | Home | The Ocean View Guide »
Giving ‘digital convergence’ a good name for a change
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:59 pm on 10/24/2003
We’ve got plenty of weblogs that say, “Here’s the cool link I found,” and plenty more that say “Here’s a cool link someone else found and why I think it’s cool.” What we need are more weblogs that say, “Here’s a link I found, and here’s another one, and here’s why they are cool together.”
I’m thinking of Lawrence Weschler’s “Convergences” pieces for McSweeney’s as a model here. All they ever do is present a few images from diverse sources, and provide a platform from which Weschler goes off about various ideas – something which he’s pretty good at. (He’s apparently done some for Salon as well.) It’s all very James Burke and Connections-like… which can get a bit twee, but no one can deny that those cats are smart.
I guess I thought of this because the story on Amazon’s new whole-book search mentioned it as an efficient tool for finding unexpected connections. Then I read with great interest this deal on how to brand Mozilla (found via Slashdot), and stumbled (via onfocus) upon a frightening, yet oddly quaint, article on how to modify consumer memory for fun and profit.
What’s the connection between those two? Well, it made me think of the old line from some AOL exec (soon to be enacted here in the US): “Netscape Online is an idea so good, 20% of Netscape users think they have it already.” Could Mozilla’s adoption be aided by rewriting history until people think they’ve been using it all along? Would that help clean up the word-salad of the Internet newbie’s understanding of what they use, or just confuse things further?
And that brings us back… to steam engines!!