If you’re a Firefox user, check out a fairly new extension called Greasemonkey. Here’s a blog that has a good introduction to it. The whole thing’s pretty wild. Greasemonkey is a piece of coding that lets people change other people’s websites. Well, maybe that’s not the best explanation. They don’t actually change the site itself, they just change how it’s interpreted. There are other products available now that do that: things that zap ads out of web pages, so you never view them, stuff like that. But Greasemonkey is interesting because it let’s you build on top of sites, and then share the utilities that you build with other Greasemonkey users. The best explanation of this comes from that other blog I linked to. They talk about a script called book burro - if you have this installed in your Greasemonkey scripts, when you go to Amazon, you can right there in your window have a little drop down box that gives you pricing for this same product from other sites. The trick is that the whole thing functions pretty seamlessly into the site it’s written for.

NIVI writes on it:

Greasemonkey lets you mash-up websites. It lets you extend and script websites and integrate that script right into the original site as if the designers had intended it to be there. It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.

The whole thing seems totally crazy. They go on to talk about how it’s going to screw up old business models on the web, and invariably create new ones. The concept itself I think is really interesting just in general. I’m trying to figure out ways this concept could be taken into either other media, or used as a metaphor for thinking in other areas. For example, what if you could get your TV to give you an embedded fact check for news programs? Or it could do a cross-reference with other stations, to show you how they are all working off the same script. Or it could immediately put together a “six degrees of separation” diagram between various people who are pictured on your tv screen. You could have a list of business dealings, education, intermarriage - shit like that. Anybody with good ideas, I’d like to hear them. The more far out the better.

PS. Trixie does the same thing as Greasemonkey but for Internet Explorer (that is, if you’re a cave man and you still use that browser).