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That’s Why It’s the Web

Sometimes when you surf around you find the strangest connections and then at some point you almost wind up looking at yourself in the mirror or at least seeing your own footprints. Sometimes you find a link between the electronic and virtual and physical and personal spaces. Here’s one that happened today. I was thinking that I should print out the book Keep Focus” that Gair Dunlop wrote for Liquid Geographies and cut it and assemble it. But I wanted to stay in the virtual world and I popped over to Meerkat to see if anything interesting had aggregated. The first thing that I saw was an entry by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about Warchalking Runes and that linked to the coolest idea for marking a symbol (related to Hobo language) on the sidewalk wherever you find WiFi (you know, like Airport) access in a city. I posted an entry a while ago in this very blog using WiFi at a cafe, so it’s been on my mind. The idea of chalked symbols around the sidewalks mapping out entry nodes to the Internet is such a cool combination of real space and cyberspace that it made me smile…what a great idea! Then moving back from Warchalk, I find out that it was made by Matt Jones, who has lots of cool ideas such as Web Dogme. The whole Dogme idea in relation to film is a better theoretical concept than method of constructing compelling film in practice (when you come from a world where you work on films using limited equipment and crew, the idea of having a set of rules and voluntarily giving up stuff to be more pure is a bit contrived…but that’s another topic), but I think that Matt’s onto something with the Web and I think that I’ve been an unwitting subscriber to his manifesto which is kind of cool as well. Now, I’ll wrap it up a bit with the connections that seems strange and wonderful. Earlier in the day I looked at an entry in Doc Searls Weblog about a cool application that recognises songs through a cell phone and identifies them…Matt Jones is in the picture… the other connection is that Gair’s book is connected with SoMa (Social Matrices (a think tank for culture)) which is hosting PRIVATE REVERIES, PUBLIC SPACES tomorrow where Matt mentions he wants to bring this Warchalking stuff up. If I wanted to I could bring in even more connections, but I think that you get the idea. Sometimes don’t you feel like you are in your own Truman Show” with everything arranged so you find stuff at just the right time?

Up next Mr. Show I’m the proud owner of the new DVD of the first and second seasons of Mr. Show. Pretty much impossible to describe, Mr. Show is the brainchild of Is It Now? Just saw “Minority Report” tonight. I have to say that I really enjoyed it. While “A.I.” was creepy and unsatisfying to me (I kept thinking that
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