Reading back through these passages from my sci-fi novel, REPERMANENT, has got me back to thinking up crazy futuristic technology ideas. I don’t remember if I started it in this novel or in some of the “spambot era” postings, but I used to think a lot about something I was using the term “seedpetals” for, along with the terms thinware and thickware. I’ve also gotten into giving people in real life (not in my sci-fi fantasy world) these seed packets as business cards with wildflower seeds inside. And recently a friend of mine dropped me a bunch of old funk and soul music on one of those removable thumb drive things, and he was talking about using those instead of making a mix CD for somebody, which I think is a cool idea and which fits in perfectly with the IP or “internet package” format I’ve begun experimenting with to distribute Big Elk music.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all these different streams is what I see the future of web technology as eventually becoming. You would be able to give somebody some data seeds {see also: keyword genetics}, and then they would be able to “plant” them in their web garden. Depending on environmental factors and informational ecosystem settings, the seeds would be able to grow into either duplicates of the original content, or else intentional or accidental mutations. And whatever these file-things “grew into” would then be able to produce their own seeds, which you could scatter or distribute in whatever ways you wanted. And you could also have pets or wildlife or trained electronic agents which tend to your web garden and the “entities” growing there. Each one would have a different set of functions: cross-pollinating from other gardens, creating nutrients or recycling old dead files into super-fertile compost.

Anyway, we could drag that analogy out in any number of different directions, but that’s probably a nice snapshot for right this second.