Susan Crawford Proposes Net Ecology Day

No, you don't have to pick up spam up off the floor . Instead, Susan is proposing a day where we all (I'm assuming bloggers and wiki makers, because it's easy to change our web content) post a visual representation of some part of the networks that make up the internet:

The central problem that we need to solve, the central complacency we need to overcome, is the general feeling that someone is (or should be) in charge of the internet.  We need to show the difference between networks and hierarchies.

What if, on one day a year, we globally built a picture of links together?  Each person could put a dot on the global page, identify it, and then draw a line to something online that they care about.  I bet the result would be a very interesting and dynamic network diagram that we could animate.  You'd see the thing pulse and change, as some links became thicker through popularity and clusters connected all at once.  Then, for one day, people could post this living, animated network diagram on their page or blog.  Very zippy.  We could make it possible for people to show "their" part of the network -- what they had decided was important.  (There are, to be sure, a few hurdles to overcome, but don't bother me with your petty technical difficulties (PTD)).

Some visualizations could be strung together to make a movie. Interesting idea. I want to hear more.

Posted by Mary Hodder at October 25, 2004 04:47 PM | TrackBack