Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. "All twenty screens were showing Attack of the Clones at midnight..."

As you can tell from the Google sitesearch function, I've been looking for weblogging tools to make the archives accessible in a more intelligent way (Even I get tired of scrolling through a month's worth of gripping prose. ahem.) Talked with a classmate and friend, John Borthwick about it, since he's always been very smart and on top of where the web's going. (two data points: Read his testimony in the MS antitrust case here. AND he was an early supporter of Blogger back when things like that could be a business. [and now, with BloggerPro, they may be again. Thanks, Ev!]) So far, nothing, though.


The crux of the problem is that archives work well for searching along the time axis, but not much else. Regardless of what David Gelernter says (in this case, in an interview with George Gilder), time is not always the best way to sort data. Of course, he doesn't say that it is, but his schtick right now is Lifestreams, a time-based knowledge management paradigm. Even the interface king, Steven Johnson doesn't have anything to say about what I guess is an IA (information architecture) question. (In a recent Salon article, Johnson does talk about weblogs as the utopian collective mind, "making sense of the web's infinity of links." I mean, that's great for the universe, but what's in it for me? All the recent buzz about weblogs seems to focus on their power as a newsfilter/zeitgeist-o-meter, or top-ten-generator. All that's well and good; Isigned greg.org up for the Weblog Bookwatch. But there seems to be an aspect to weblogging that is distinct from this supposed desire to be the next Andrew Sullivan. As Albert Maysles said in an earlier post:

Most people never get the chance to have themselves truly represented and thereís nothing that they'd rather do than have people. . . somebody...pay attention to who they really are, to give them that recognition.