(No, I haven’t gotten tired of blogging already! I’ve been moving cross-country, and had to go without net access for several days. It was rough, I tell you…)
A fellow named Robin Sloan has done a flash movie that’s sort of a future-history documentary on the growth of “EPIC”, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, and the corresponding death of the mainstream media. A snippet from the transcript:
2006 – Google combines all of its services – TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.
I had a few random thoughts about all this:
#1: Hmm, I guess this has nothing to do with the Robin Sloan I know at Arbortext who does application development on their Epic product! (Now it’s called simply Arbortext 5, I gather.)
#2: The future painted here isn’t very distant; some uses of today’s technologies look an awful lot like what’s described.
#3: I’m reminded of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which dynamically created newspapers are tailored to a reader’s social stratum.
#4: I’d think the EPIC vision would need a strong notion of identity (traits, attributes, and preferences of people and other entities) and a framework for accessing and manipulating identity information like that offered in Liberty.
(Thanks to JeffH for the pointer.)
