I don’t like to give away all my secrets, but I do like gloat over how clever I am. You’ve probably noticed all my interface changes here over the past few days. One of my favorite things that I added, which I want to specifically highlight because I’m so proud of myself is the way which I changed the “Submit Comment” button to say “ADD + VALUE”.

It is at once a not-so covert indoctrination attempt to promote the SIX STRATAGEMS, and a nudge towards what I see the computer interface of the future being like.

If you’re immersed in a datawake, right, you’re going to be presented with reference point keyword clusters of information (perceptual nodes). And you’re going to have some options about how to interact with each one. Perhaps the internet of the future is going to be more about weaving and less about surfing. I think that may be a good metaphor. I also like gardening as a metaphor as well. But basically you’re going to have options for each node. One set of ideas I came up with for it:

HOLD
PASS
DROP

Simplest way to break it down. You have certain items you encounter which you’d like to hold onto for later, but not in any specific way or for any good reason. You just want to hang onto them because you might need it, and you would like a way to find it again quickly and easily. Bookmarks in browsers suck for this. Some web bookmarking services are okay but I find them too clunky. Tumblr is close to what I want, but not quite.

Maybe “PASS” is too passive here, actually. I was thinking PRINT might be a better word. Basically you’re holding onto it, but taking more positive action on it. Maybe SHARE would be good here? I don’t know. The end result could be analogous to what we do now when we publish to a blog, or send an email, etc. DROP would be for things which you have some particular interest in seeing at a given moment, but don’t want to hang onto, and don’t want to have officially associated with your datawake. That is, you don’t want future patterns to necessarily be derived from it.

Okay, now I have veered away from talking about the ADD + VALUE button though. I see that as being a nod to a second set of options:

ZOOM
GROW
FREEZE

Something like that. Zoom would be to slide into larger scales or smaller scale views of something. You could look up the topic which contains the current node, or zip down to specific word definitions (frame by frame in video, perhaps?), etc. I imagine you would be able to organically “GROW” a set of data by adding in a new variable which will morph it into a new direction. This requires a time element, though, so you could also flash-freeze whatever the data structure is that you create and maybe preserve it in like a menagerie for data animals or something.

So I guess you could think of the ADD + VALUE button as being almost like feeding petting zoo animals pellets of food. Make sense?