the timboucher experience

I don’t know how close we are to this in the real world of technology, but in the world of technology which exists in my head we may be pretty close to this sort of thing.

I’m thinking of it a little bit like how spam pages work right now. Which itself is quite close to how Google pulls a page description of the HTML pages you’re looking at, or a bit of text around a keyword cluster and shows you it compiled on its results page.

Talked about this before, but I’m wondering: why should the web surfer ever have to leave a search engine site at all? This is probably where Google is going: figure out how to pull or suck or feed or stroke sets of relevant data to whoever - or whatever - is looking for it.

The search metaphor itself would then be built somehow into the actual browsing experience, so that you’re not always having to frame jump out of the primary experience window into the address bar or the search box. Who wants to remember a URL anyway? That’s what AOL keywords were all about. Not sure how cool they are these days. OBVO is sort of based on them, but only loosely.

So instead of these long pages of HTML a user scrolls down, and then clicks on a link to some other long page which you scroll down and click, etc (with the only thing breaking you out of that routine being the search/address bar frame-jumps), it should look or act or feel almost more like a crossword puzzle. I almost wrote crossworld puzzle. That makes sense too. Some kind of viewer which allows you to look simultaneously, like you’re looking at a jewel or some kind of fractal, you see simultaneously what a word or concept means across many modes, methods and means of communication. And you see instantly in digest form which you customize yourself and which learns from your patterns. You see digested how that blip that reference point translates across many subcultures and streams of meaning. In semiotics, they talk about codes. You need codes to be able to decode or translate meaning or information buried in noise. You need some kind of method or system which does that but which is malleable enough to show you many such strands at once. Data operates in a multiverse, not a monoverse. Google right now controls meanings of words by selling advertising based around those words. While their search results may not be as skewed as the old Goliaths they competed against in their youth, the fact that they are selling keyword-based advertisements means that people writing and coding in the marketplace of ideas are always going to have to pitching their own meanings and usages slightly or heavily in the direction of what words “pay the best” or are worth the most. A search engine should transparently tell a story of the battle for people to determine meaning of any word, phrase, image or concept. Wikipedia is the only player in this arena that I know: you can see, roughly, who changed what on a page of information - often with a public open debate around whether those changes are valid and how they could be improved. What if that concept were applied to a query-based search engine service? Where you could see who bought how much control over a word or phrase, trace the usage and modulation of that object of study over time, and even predict future trends around it.

I don’t see any technology companies addressing emerging markets in this way or dialoguing with moreso artists and less coder and programmers who will determine what the thing is that comes into being after computers are dead and gone. Maybe it will be a whole new world. Maybe there could be new possibilities we haven’t dreamed of. I’ve been thinking about this, if only today: I’m ready for there to be something new in the world. I think it’s time. I think we’re ready. I’d like to be a part of it.

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