Woodstock
So, the original was the seminal defining event of the 1960's. Google couldn't even find a decent link in the first page of hits for the 1995 version. The 1999 Woodstock wasn't even in Woodstock, but took place in Rome, NY and enjoyed looting, burning, and other assorted fun. I wonder what it is all about that changes the peaceful 69 from the violent 99.

Maybe it is the lack of a solid cause like Vietnam. Maybe it was the attitude of commercialism that pervaded the Rome version. (Did Rome fall in a day? Maybe so in 1999) Maybe it had to do with it taking place on an abandoned airfield instead of a dairy farm.

I think that maybe we are or, at least, have been moving through a transitional phase of interaction. People are holed up watching TV, playing video games, playing with their computers. Maybe we've lost the ability to act appropriately in large crowds since we spend most of our time alone or in small groups. Maybe the advent of instantaneous communication via cell phones has made our crowd socialization skills atrophy. As great as the internet is as a communication medium, it is still lacking in crowds. Maybe that is what chat rooms are, but it is different. We are what we are face to face, but we assume differnt personas in the internet, in our blogs, and within chat rooms. The key to the web is the communication. Markets are conversations. Maybe so. Conversations are fine, but our massive social interactions are somehow skewed. You can't even attend a sporting event without expecting a lot more than a game and a marching band at halftime.

Events like Woodstock are too unscripted for us to know how to behave correctly. We lose contact with our individuality within the crowd and allow ourselves to act in ways that we never would in "normal" circumstances. To let ourselves go, seems to be the equivalent of allowing ourselves to be violent. Even our "spontaneous" celebrations of the home teams championship erupts into violence. Where am I going with this?

Just this. The internet, the web, cell phones, technology, whatever is still lacking a true integration with the crowd. Chat rooms are almost it, but how do we take the chat room into the crowd and the crowd into the chat room? There is a basic disconnect with other humans on a day to day basis that hasn't quite been answered by all of our wonderful 21st century technology. I love the technology, but the next round needs to address the crowd, the crush, the street, the celebration and provide us with meaningful ways to interact with others within the crowd. With love, respect, and generosity.

The Interconnectedness of It All
So, everything is connected and we need to visualize it all. Somehow. A few thoughts occured in a form of strange (or not so strange) synchronicity (this or this or maybe something else). Some things that have bubbled to the top of late, although seemingly unrelated to what I am supposed to be doing or have been doing or had been planning on doing. Anyhow, here they are. Started with becoming briefly re-acquanted with the term Semantic Web. Here is a nice Scientific American Article about it. Basically, it is about defining ways in which context can be encoded so that meaning can be shared between various applications that can create agents that can automagically do our bidding. For real. More simply, it is the next generation meta-data effort. Meta-data never really resonated with anyone. Semantic Web is a much more exciting and provacative term. The W3C folks are in the final stages of defining the standard for managing this information.

So, really. This is cool. Interesting. Sort of acedemic like most of Berners-Lee's stuff. After all, the dude invented the world wide web. That's cool. All this interconnected stuff came in when I was reading the JOHO blog. There I ran across this link to Touchgraph. Now this is cool. Not really the semantic web stuff from W3C, but the inherent and explicit connectedness of links in web pages. Even less scientific (in a sense) is the truly artful connectedness of Alice In Wonderland.

So, like, really, dude, its like, you know, totally all connected. Is there some depth to all of this? I think so. But maybe less in the formalized markup of the W3C standards and maybe more in the way of the touchgraph sort of thing. An emergence. An emergent meaning not designed into the web, but part of the natural (natural?) order of things complex. Or social. Is society complex or is complexity social? Chicken or the egg. Theory would argue that complexity in physics led to complexity in life which leads to complexity in societies.

So, it is all connected. But I still search for the meaning. Maybe that is the significance of the Semantic Web. That there is meaning. The links hold explicit meaning instead of the implict meaning of all the links pasted in above. What is my meaning of having all these links? They must be related if I put them there. Right? Right. Even I can't really tell you the meaning of them all to me without your own interpretation of their meaning which may be very different than mine or Tim's or David's. Does that matter? Probably not. But they are there, so perhaps that is enough. It is enough for me. And enough of this.

Keeping it Alive
Regardless of the team, I feel the need to keep this going. I'll be inviting others eventually.

I like Opera. I wish that the sites were more compliant with the standards that Opera supports. It is amazing to me how much faster most pages load in Opera. Of course, if you go with the evils of MS, you end up with all kinds of crap that doesn't work. I'm bitching from the pits of hell - IE is my default browser. Because of the monopoly (legal or otherwise), everybody uses their tools which force you to use their browser. Excuses for my sins - I was just taking orders. Whatever.

April Arrives and . . .
. . . still I blog alone in my team blog. What could it be? It can't be body odor, since it is virtual. I suppose that I may have some sort of virtual body odor, but I'm not sure what form that would take in cyberspace. Maybe it is cyberhalitosis. The emanations from my entries make the so-called teammates turn away, avoid contact, maintain their distance. Maybe, just maybe, I'm a cyberass. I do know what that is and there are certainly some cyberasses in existence. I'd give links, but the list is simply too long. Let's just decide that this is my problem. I'm a cyberass.

I kind of like it. Cyberass. Cyber ASS. CyBeRaSs. CYberAss. Or maybe cyBERass. That's me. I'm gonna find new people to add to the council. Some that will blog like they have never blogged before. Er, I think maybe that was the problem. Maybe I'll get some that will blog like that have blogged before.