Comic Strips, Sucky Software, and Currency

I had this vision of a "web page", that resembled a newspaper. I'm going to try to use words to describe it, but I mean, with all the content on the web, finding the good stuff, and formatting it for a single page to be scrolled and read I think is the next step. Case in point, comic strips. Between xkcd, pbfcomics, penny-arcade, and now hark a vagrant, the thing that I kind of miss is having all the content organized on a single page, like the comic strips in the newspaper. I really think newspapers would probably do themselves a favor by focusing on organizing content on the Internet, formatting it, and setting it up for presentation to end users. I don't know, maybe they don't really have the technical expertise to do something like this, or maybe there really aren't any tools that can make this happen. My guess is that JavaScript could be used to do this, but I'm not sure. I don't really know a programming language well enough. I know one thing, embedding content from different websites into a single page is an ugly business using tags. I tried it before, and it's unwieldy. At least for me.

This idea of a "webdata" content management system got me thinking about technology in general. I was trying to think of technology, particularly software, that is useful and doesn't suck. Here, the definition of suck is correlated to how useful the software is. For instance, Facebook and Twitter? Personally, I think they suck. I really don't think it offers any real usefulness. Maybe this is the case for me because my friends suck, or maybe I'm onto something, and the content that is usually produced by Twitter and Facebook users suck. Of course Myspace sucks, I mean Myspace is like Facebook's dysfunctional cousin. Web logs I think are kind of useful, but I'm *really* tempted to say they suck because most of the blogosphere sits in obscurity. I mean my blog is obscure, I wouldn't say that it sucks per se, but it is definitely obscure. I think the circulation of my blog is like 2. So blogs kind of suck, because finding good content is difficult, as a result of the sheer quantity of information in the blogosphere. I mean, all of this stuff is fancy technology. Who knows how many lines of code Facebook, wordpress, blogspot.com, twitter, and myspace use. So yeah, they are complicated, which is impressive, but I don't find them particularly useful, and I think most people don't. I still think the majority of people out there get their content from television. And after this it's probably video games, and after this it's probably the Internet. And by Internet I don't mean the blogosphere. I think the number of people who read blogs and rss feeds on the internet are a very small percentage of the population. So, I guess another thing that doesn't suck on the web is youtube.com. It's useful, and by useful I mean that there is decent content on it, and personally I think it's going to get better. Granted the content is, in my opinion, very different from the content that is on television. Or it's just rehashed content that's uploaded from Cable TV, like these videos from the "liberalviewer" on youtube that analyzes fox news, or this unaired/aired video of Jon Stewart on Bill O'Reilly's show , but I still think it's valuable content. Well, valuable is probably kind of a strong assertion because I can also see how youtube content is dangerously close to falling away into obscurity. I mean, the stuff that most people watch isn't really stuff that I'm interested in, like babies laughing, and music videos from Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Pitbull, and the stuff that I've been watching falls into "thousands" of views, not millions. I mean, even the popular stuff on youtube is watched by less than 1% of the US Population, based on a million views and the US population standing at 300 million. I don't know, I suppose it could be a problem with technology saturation. Maybe people would be interested in this content if they could get access to it. The TV was actually on the other day while I was watching youtube, and I couldn't fathom why *all* content isn't available on the Internet for free. I guess it could be because of the cost of storage space and servers, but I already figured that content at the Cable Company sits on a server of some sort. I think the Internet has proven robust enough to handle the traffic, though, perhaps a big reason why people don't watch youtube is because there isn't sufficient bandwidth. I think the main reason is money can't be made by giving people access to it, which is basically the same reason why Microsoft doesn't open source any of its software. Oddly, it's technologically feasible to put content on the Internet and give people access to content. Like bit torrent, hell even I can give access to content that I've downloaded before, using apache on my laptop, though it is only online when I am. Here is the link, but really, my own webserver is already obsoleted by bit torrent. That leaves one last piece of technology, Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. IRC has been around a long time, but I still think it's the strongest method for communicating on the Internet. Typing and reading are still the most efficient way to communicate on the Internet, and it's loggable, which can be very useful.

So, to recap. In order from suckiest to less sucky: Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogosphere/IRC/Youtube/bit torrent. I don't know, youtube, the blogosphere, IRC, and bit torrent are too close to call. But I'm going to force myself to put them in order from suckiest to less sucky: bit torrent, youtube, blogosphere, IRC. Yeah, I honestly have to say IRC is probably the best of the bunch, for the same reason that an operating system is such an important piece of software. Well, let me try to explain that metaphor, what I mean is IRC has the potential of providing a means of swimming through all the obscure content that's out there. Unfortunately, popularity ratings are basically meaningless, because oftentimes if not most of the time, the popular stuff on the web is vapid nonsense. So the only other option is the tried-and-true method of word-of-mouth. I suppose twitter might have this capability also, but because of the large quantity of non-sense on twitter, I can't help but disregard it in favor of IRC. So, yeah, that basically sums it up.

Interestingly enough the same kind of analysis can be applied to more general technological offerings. So, in order of suckiest to less sucky: Ipad, Iphone, Android, Netbooks. I mean, netbooks are just more useful than the other three offerings, because of the full qwerty keyboard and the decently sized minimalistic screen. I don't know, I just don't see myself using anything really useful on an android phone. It might be useful for quick text messages, and of course phone calls, but anything really exciting or useful seems to be beyond the software's capabilities thus far. I mean, personally, I wouldn't even want to read a book on a phone.

So the last grand idea I was thinking of, was the idea of money. I think that when Bill Gates first proposed closed source software, and the evils of open source software, he had a point. This is kind of difficult for me to admit, because I really am a believer in FOSS, but I really have to consider how realistic it is. I mean, people really don't care about other people. A billion people go to sleep hungry every night in the world, and most people don't even lose sleep over this, for a variety of reasons. So I'm starting to think Bill Gates was just being realistic. He was just coming to the realization that rich businessmen and politicians would take his software, put it to use, make millions if not billions of dollars with it, and would probably, in the end, not even be his friend. Seriously, that's how people are. So, he promoted closed source software, and helped make a bunch of geeks rich. Sure, he started an unethical monopoly in the process, but that doesn't matter, because when money is involved ethics get thrown out the window. It's not about what's ethical in this world of subjective ethics, it's only about what you can get away with. Goldman Sachs knew this, and they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. I mean hedge fund managers also know this. So what's the point of this? Give up on FOSS because the world is filled with unethical greedy opportunists? No, I think it might actually be possible to nip the money thing in the bud. But it's probably a hugely complex problem with all kinds of caveats. But basically, I'm thinking that FOSS proponents should make their own banks. I know this sounds crazy. You're problably thinking "Banks! We can't make a bank!" But really, what is a bank? If you go back far enough, all banks do is create variables, assign these variables to people, keep track of these variables, and fill the variables with certain amounts of money depending on how much they want to borrow. *All money* is borrowed, and I think this is generally true all over the planet. As long as a currency is fiat, then all money is borrowed from some "master bank". In the case of the US, it's the Federal Reserve, or the FED. Uh oh, I used the "f" word, "fiat". So, before I go any further, I really have to point out that soft currency is the future. We followed the yellow brick road and found the wizard behind the curtain, and now we know that money can just be made out of thin air, because that's how it's currently being done. But we also know that going back to gold is really a bad idea, since that would restrict growth. It would basically make it impossible for the lower and middle classes to "catch up" with the upper class. And forget straight barter and trade, that would also strangle the economy. So we're stuck with soft currency, it's the best solution to the problem of currency that currently exists, and I can't even imagine anything better than it. So, here's the idea. Why don't FOSS geeks make their own bank? Perhaps they already kind of have, but not so much. The only thing I can think of that resembles a bank is hacker cred, but you can't buy food with hacker cred. So basically, geeks would have to agree to honor a currency of some sort, and they would then have to create a website to keep track of everybody's accounts. People could "qualify" for more currency by proving additional hacker cred, or other efforts they put forward, explain what they are going to do with their currency, and members of the bank could vote whether or not the individual should receive more currency, and if so, how much. I mean, the currency is only as valuable as how scarce it is, and/or how much productivity it can purchase, at least, I think. I don't know, maybe that will be my first real LAMP project. A bank. I like the idea. I was also thinking, that the voting portion of the system might even be programmable somehow. There might be a way to figure out a "utility" function fo people's contributions...I don't know, this project is really well beyond me, but it might help motivate me to study LAMP more.

Well, last but not least, the dream I had last night. I don't really remember much of it. All I remember is walking on the sidewalk with a group of older hispanics. It kind of reminded me of church when I was growing up. Seriously, that is all. I do remember that there was kind of an eerie vibe to the whole dream, but I'm not entirely sure why.