Links 15

March 14, 2009 ·

I had a quick trip to the UK to meet with Duncan. My return trip was my first international trip in about five months. I realized, as I was leaving the customs area: I couldn’t see George Walker Bush’s picture anywhere, grinning at me, to welcome me back to America.

I paced back and forth along the back wall of the LAX customs area. I couldn’t see any picture of Obama. I asked a security guard, “Don’t you have the President’s picture on the wall?”

He gestured at the wall further down - there it was. Barack Hussein Obama’s picture smiling at me, to welcome me back to America.

I became excited. “That’s Barack Obama! On the Wall!” At first the guard didn’t seem sure if I was allowed to walk along the back wall of customs. The he relaxed, “Yes.”

I smiled at the wall for a moment, and resisted the urge to wait for my iPhone to boot up to take a picture.

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year(s) in (p)review
February 4, 2009 ·

2007
proposed to Merci
graduated from Graduate School
founded a company based on my thesis
moved to East Oakland.

2008
Saturday 7 June we were married (3:45pm 06/07/08)
Monday 9 June we moved from East Oakland to San Francisco
Tuesday 10 June we secured a round of funding for our company

2009
make the best game of the internet
love my wife on the daily
walk on the beach with mah dog

(thanks to Randy for the prompt!)

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15 years of fun online: nonfiction transcription to layering game
January 26, 2009 ·

Fifteen years ago, my web site looked like this. Today, there’s a lot more links, everywhere! Internal, external, updated passively and actively - there’s just more digitized data permeating our lives.

When I started writing I wanted to find a place for myself in the world. I wanted a mate, I wanted to work with passionate people, I wanted to explore computers and publishing. Those things have come to pass, I need to find new things to write about :-)

So just about nearly all of my creative energy these days goes into my job. I’m fortunate because I’m working with fantastic people, and the work we do touches on very deep questions I’ve had for a long time: how do we make hanging out on the internet more fun?

In 1994, I thought “fun on the internet” meant trading lively fun links. Because there was fascinating stuff popping up in the corners of the web, and no way to search, and no one to tell you what was recommended (only NCSA telling you what was “new”).

Now I have a Twitter client open to hundreds of lively minds I follow, and these folks send out < 140 characters a few times a day, and I can harvest fascinating articles, awesome helpful tech, the most artful distractions from the links they find remarkable. I have access to millions of web jockeys who curate links on thousands of subjects. Most every publication I want to read is on the web somewhere. It’s a fantastic sea of information. Finding fun on the internet is not so much of a problem; making time for fun might be.

I’m not sure the world overall seems happier now than it did when I first encountered the web. Is all this online communication bringing us closer together, with more understanding, more access to knowledge, more evolution of ideas? Maybe we haven’t quite arrived at cyber-utopia; it’s nice to still have something to shoot for.

These days I’m shooting for immersive social fun across all of human information on the internet. It’s an experimental Firefox toolbar we’ve been working on for almost three years. We call it PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. And it’s just the sort of boundary crossing I have found so exciting working with media. Telling personal stories on business machines? Using the internet to trade endless pictures of cats and captions? Using all this nuclear failsafe network tech for idle human expression?

Hell yeah!

So it’s exciting to find another media boundary to cross: what do you mean, surfing the web is a game? Well, computers can quantify stuff, so let’s take computer brains and hook them up to the work we do sifting media to entertain and educate ourselves, so we can start to keep some scores, and then we’ll use game dynamics to link ourselves up socially with other folks, and now suddenly the web has another layer of reality and excitement on top of it. A game layer! A game layer on top of our ongoing lives!

Why bother with games? Spend a long weekend with extended family and try earnestly expressing yourself the entire time. See if someone doesn’t suggest that trivia, property-trading, word hunting or card matching would be a better use of time.

So next time you stop by this weblog, and say, hmm, man, Justin used to be a lot more interesting when he wrote more about his life online, visit http://pmog.com/ and play the game that is like I’m writing my life online, except it’s happening right now, and you’re a part of it :-)

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howdoi
December 29, 2008 ·

(to be sung like the 2/3rds the chorus of “do your ears hang low“)

how do I post from my phone,
how do I post from email,
how do I include fresh photos
and run “mylife -tail”

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Booting Up
December 24, 2008 ·

For a few years I wrote letters to myself on my birthday. Hello, here’s what was happening to me. I did this on my public website, since that’s where I addressed myself most other days of the year.

Now it’s been a few years since I’ve done that kind of writing. I foreswore deeply personal exploration for internet publics so I could instead get to know a local individual better. That worked out quite well. My days are hugely exciting, exhilarating, charged with companionship and focus.

Online personal record keeping has become epically widespread and popular. There are so many ways to chronicle your time on Earth using the internet. I’ve put this page together to pull together a few of the information streams emanating from my life into a single place. Plus, I look forward to an empty text box, that I might upload parts of my brain - there are some things I would occasionally like to remember with my fingers!