 Like, you know, like there's a channel on this issue. So this is a feature of the link for February 22nd. Yeah. And we were discussing, I guess, dynamics in like a list of communities. Yes. And like, I guess you mentioned this problem or I guess just Peter of like having like, I think it was something like having a designated channel for a topic but the channel being not where people were essentially. So maybe some disconnected in different facets or? There's a, OGM was originally kind of founded around a Google group mailing list. And Jerry's got a lot of love and affection for email lists in general. As a communication medium. CSC Madermas was actually basically founded out of frustration with the list. And, you know, there's a lot of, so my observation of mailing lists, let me, so rant on a little bit. My observation of mailing lists are they're easy to dominate. They're easy for a few people to pick up and dominate. You wouldn't be surprised that most of the time it's by guys, but it's by anybody who talks loud and doesn't listen very much, right? So they get, they get skewed. So the noisy people take over the list and then the quiet people move away from the list because it's not a discussion anymore. It's, you know, a few people ranting at each other. So. That's true of every medium, I wonder. It's less true of chat. For instance, Slack or Madermost or Discord or something like that. It's harder to take over a room because somebody else can just make a room a channel next door, right? And you ended with a little bit more democratic, not technically democratic, but kind of democratic. You ended with the law of two feet shuffling people to the right place, right? And so if I don't want to listen to the big omnibus discussion with the people bloviating, it turns out there's, you know, a few of the people drift over and we're talking about something that is really interesting to me, right? Fascinating, whatever, right? To us, right? So people find their own spaces or reveal them. So I guess at the bottom we add a tool that allows people to develop ancillary spaces, maybe. Yes. And then I think there are just some design choices and email lists that are also bad. We never, we used to have a long, long, long time ago. We used to have Neticut that said, you know, for instance, change your subject lines, trim all the junk out of your message before you send it, you know? Between people not getting schooled and Neticut coming into the web, and I actually blame Gmail for a lot of this. Gmail, the client hides all the quote stuff, but that's only good in Gmail. Everybody else has to see all the junk that the Gmail people are continuing to create onto this message. So the messages get to be thousands of lines long of quote stuff. So you're describing like something like it turned out September, or like a... A little bit, yeah. And a lot of it is the tool, you know, that the tool was never improved past or it wasn't improved. So Gmail is a good example of a tool where they improve the UX, the UI of it for those users, but that convention isn't spread across multiple clients, right? So I see all of the quote crap in my client because I'm not using Gmail. You know, so in the olden days, when we used to do, you know, when MIME came out, for instance, I'm not, MIME is kind of good and bad. It's, you know, moderately well designed. It's not great. It's okay. But everybody did MIME at once, right? So you could send MIME messages for everybody. We kind of lost that. And so we got balkanization of the client situation, the way people use the email and things like that. So the interfaces like work to... And, you know, the subject line is meaningless kind of, and it's still there. So some people kind of use the subject line. Most people don't use the subject line. It's hard to do moderation well. You can either have a moderated list or not a moderated list, but you can't cherry pick out. You know, it's like, it's just, there's a bunch of stuff that never got fixed in email that because Slack designed it, DeNovo modular, the fact that they were just copying IRC, Slack designed a bunch of stuff where it's manageable. You know, it gets managed. You can do things like rename channels or whatever. You know, it's better maintained. It's easier to maintain the conversation space. So for a couple of reasons, email is still the lingua franca or the tool, the tool of, you know, least common in our radar tool, which is a good thing. So you can reach everybody. The bad thing is that for conversational medium, it's pretty poor and we have better stuff nowadays. But then you get people who go, yeah, I'll use your, you know, I'll use Discord or I'll use Mattermost or I'll use Slack, but that doesn't cover everybody. There's a bunch of people still stuck in their email box. Completely separately, by the way. So what I did on the OGM list, I said, I'm not with the intent of changing everybody. It's like, I can imagine a better kind of listserv thing where lists are a lot more alike channels and they're lightweight and easy to set up and tear down and they're easy to find, you know, other channels with kind of similar people. I called that mini list. Another, Jack Park made a great observation about email. It's a universal message client for any system that uses email, which is not very many of that nowadays, but once he pipes stuff in the Gmail for him, he knows how to search all of the messages, right? So instead of going to Discord and Twitter and Slack and whatever and trying to find a message, you know, if you shovel it all through your universal interface, then, you know, you've got your tools that you like to use, you know, Gmail search or whatever. Yeah, the universal, yeah, right. The universal interface, universal field aspect is very valuable, maybe under exploited even nowadays by Gmail, even though it tries to be that and of course the corporation is aligned, presumably with us, with our goal. But like I've seen, like, so I wrote up a matrix, I think, or it had to happen. And I know for at least a few projects, we are trying to like build the one inbox on matrix, essentially, sort of to, which has like all this wood is like, you know, rooms, like it can present like a native, like a Slack-like threaded interface, but also it is well-designed to like support bridges. So yeah, so I guess the approach I'm dreaming of and I thought it would be more interesting direction is define a new like a common platform or protocol and then just build bridges into that one. And, you know, like only pay like, or the order of N integrations, instead of like N square or whatever you need to do for like a full mesh. But then again, you know, if we choose matrix and the next community chooses Slack, we're back to square one and that's the issue with like coordination. Yeah. And why we come back to email areas. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I just, I find that email is very difficult to manage, at least for me personally, I think a lot of the, and this is something I've found in the W3C stuff that I did. Which is that there is a big generational gap on using email. Basically, once you cross over into the millennials and after, they don't want things to go through email at all. And then anyone older than the millennial generation still prefers email. And this is obviously a generalization. But I think part of the problem is that people my age see email as a must monitor in a way that I don't think some people do. But in the sense that like, if somebody's sending you an email that's of import and you have to respond immediately. So the idea of a casual messaging process through email, like no longer works, right? The perception is that's a texting thing now or you know, Slack or Discord or something like that. I think that I mean, I mentioned this other thing. The big problem with Slack is it's not open source and the data in it is not open. Like a lot of people pull data out of Slack to do stuff but it's technically against the license, right? Like you're not allowed to copy chats out of Slack. And in fact, I have some academic friends who are like incredibly depressed about the move of open source projects out of IRC to Slack. Oh, Discord. What? Oh, Discord as well, I've seen that a lot of times. Yeah, yeah, or Discord because it means that where previously they could do academic analysis on the conversations that are happening, you can't on Slack. The Slack terms of service state you are not allowed to copy content out of Slack. The chats in Slack are not allowed to be extracted from Slack in any way. Obviously a lot of people just ignore it but if you're an academic doing the longitudinal study and you're publishing and you wanna say like, here's common terms in this open source project or here's how things get answered, question formulation or here's the composition of contributors over time. None of that can be done with IRC, with Slack anymore, right? Because you can't publish an academic site be like, I decided to violate the terms of service of Slack, here's my study about what I got from that. Doesn't work. I mean, it will be cool. I mean, I think people should do that maybe but of course like when the career is on the line, yeah, understand. Yeah, I just really dislike, I think the problem with a lot of messaging services versus email is like I said, my perception is if someone sends me an email, I have to respond whereas I want my messaging for a chat service or like something that happens like email groups to be something I go to, not that comes to me which is a very significant distinction. I know like you could have filters, I have like 1200 filters in Gmail but like it's still difficult to manage in email, I think. Yeah, so I've seen like the two more promising things I've seen, I mean, promising from my particular view is like matrix, like I said, in particular like people were building like, I think glitter, just matrix, there's like a different like interfaces in the matrix protocol, element is quite all right out of the box. And then on the activity path side, which I know it's like a different direction but it's more like an inbox, email-like inbox oriented protocol with actors and so on. And there's like Lemmy, right? Which is like a federated Reddit which aims to implement essentially like a distributed message board or like a message board that can federate on this. And for some discussions, I guess when you were discussing also like groups we were discussing like email groups, I remember the old experiences in like this PHP, PHP, VB business, like a bulletin board, bulletin boards back in the year 2000, how they were mostly like the most moved to Reddit. I would guess and you know, if you think about it also like it was the same kind of move from something you could run yourself to a centralized platform, like a world garden. So this pattern coming up everywhere. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of interesting, right? Cause like, I feel like a lot, some forums moved to Reddit but there were a lot of forums that did stuff that doesn't fit in Reddit well. I don't know. I feel like they just disappeared. They'll stack exchange as well. Yeah, but like, I don't see stack exchange as a board in like the BBS sense, but I don't think it's a forum in how forums were run in like the 2000s to 2010s. Yeah, yeah, like something awful or maybe there was a wide variety of them, but like you just look at like the number of sites running, for example, like PHP BB or any of the other common bulletin board systems that still run or that still are kept up. Like it's a significant drop. It's just not very common anymore. I do feel like there are certain conversations that as a result don't happen anymore. Like I remember one of the really popular things to do in the 2000s forum culture was you'd run like threads of games or narrative fiction or something like that, like tabletop games, I think. Like that sort of activity is not really fit in a chat and it doesn't really fit in Reddit. Where does it go? It seems to me like all of those places where I saw that happening in the past are mostly gone, that sort of asynchronous play. And I think it's just gone now, which is weird to me. So it feels like, and I'm gonna go back a little bit to the models the way I describe them. Like there are shiny nuggets which are little objects of content. Some of them are in streams, which are called mailing lists. Some of them are in streams which are called Slack channels. Some of them are in other kinds of streams. And each of us has different preferences as to when and how we'd like to see them and how we'd like to deal with them. And the tools don't give us a lot of choice about where to put them or how to do them. Each tool has kind of a bunch of default settings about, well, you kind of do it this way. So with mailing lists like Google groups or Yahoo groups or whatever, they show up in your email inbox because that's the default setting. You could go over to the website, you could turn off email notifications. You could go over to the website and you could browse messages, but I'm not sure anybody does that. And then for me, if I put a filter on a mailing list, the moment I'm filtering it into some other folder in my email client, which is my default email client, I never go look in that folder. Like that I might as well have unsubscribed from the list, but every now and then I remember and I open it up and I like just browse a little bit and go back, but that's my volume knob. It's like filter and unsubscribed filter or keep it in the general inbox, in which case every day it's part of my sweep to sort of get rid of stuff or at least to have opened it. And none of these things, as we talk about all the different platforms, each new platform means you have to sign up for a new account, figure out a new habit, add that account to your sweep is sort of what I call this every day. I did a brief, I did a YouTube short about like what is your daily sweep? And that's really cumbersome. So why can't we, and I think some of these things maybe like Element and Riot or whatever else, I don't know. Some of these sound like they're trying to deconstruct this problem and give us each more choice to arrange these nuggets in streams in ways that are more amenable to our own work practices, which sounds to me like a great thumbs up. Like that sounds terrific, let's do that. Or am I assuming too much from some of these projects? Because it would be great to melt some of these different platforms into a set of offers we can sort of customize. And then I don't want every user to have to customize their platform, but rather Tiago Forte could say, hey, I've gone and customized this cool set of tinker toy platforms into this framework because this is how I like to work. If you like my workflow, just use this arrangement. And then we can do others. But then each nugget is visible, available, quotable, promotable, demotable, whatever. I don't know. And then we can sort of figure out what are access controls around the nuggets. Interesting. Yeah, my understanding is that there was like, so okay, so one of the things of building something like a cross poster to Matrix or to run in your protocols is that I know for a start that you can run gateways that are two way. So you can interact with other platforms like Taylor or Matters and so on, just completely remotely. Because the protocol is reaching us to say to be able to represent people who are elsewhere, for example. So then you can message from Matrix, for example, you can build a workflow that messages someone in particular in a different platform and the bridges will handle that. It's not like one way, like email where, you know, it's like, you get a dump and then you have to click through and go back to the platform to interact. So it's a richer experience and to some extent it goes to what you're saying, Jerry, that it will let us build something that is more dynamic and according to our preferences. The other thing that you're saying. Yeah, sorry, I hear. Oh, just real quick, I was gonna note like the indie web community has that exact thing where they have an instance where you can sign on to their chat using Matrix, IRC, Discord. I think that's it. I think it's Matrix, IRC and Discord. There might be one more system that they'll file. So it's definitely very possible. Nobody seems to have documented how they did it code-wise, but it looks very cool and I'd love to replicate it. Right, indie web. Yeah, and so here's where like, I sometimes want to like just do like a crash course of indie web with Chris, right? Yes, that's interesting. I will see it. I guess on the other, yeah, on the sharing sweeps or like I guess that's something like personal workflows or sets. So for me, and this is like just what's in my mind, I'm gonna discuss now, of course, like anything of this, but like for me, like a browser extensions, browser automation are like actually relatively underdeveloped when it comes to this. And there's been recently I saw something quite promising selling social co-op, essentially like extensions developed where you can actually take control of your, let use of the control of the data, regardless of what the, which actually APIs or interpreter tools the websites offer. So essentially what I have dreamed of, which is if you go to Twitter and you see a time when you're in your time and you're in every post, those you save, the extension saves them for you because they were for the interaction between two people. So you can say, I want to save a copy of that and maybe even like the information for the person and so on. So like a siphon and like, I think in general like automating the browser could yield essentially any workflow and we could share those, right? Share automation at the browser level, but I don't think the incentives are currently set up to enable that. So maybe a community, it could be a community run but it doesn't seem like it's gonna be corporation run. We can also pause on this topic, which was sort of happened randomly from the three conversation Pete and I were having and head to other territory that anybody else would love to cover with us together here. Or we could check in a little bit and see where we are in order to discover what we'd like to talk about. Yeah. Chicken's in? Chicken's in, good. Anyone want to go first? I'm happy to go first then. Whoever has the most colorful background goes first. I like that, I like that a lot. I have too busy a background, but I couldn't help it. And everything has a story. I need like a clickable GIF, a click background wallpaper so you can just say, oh, what's that? And then if you click on the map, it should zoom you to, oh, sweet, love that. Now I'm lost, I'm totally mesmerized. And then if you click on the map, it should zoom into the map and then you would see where April has traveled to, during her lifetime, and then you could go from there to other places. Wouldn't that be cool? So a couple of things top of mind for me one is broadly what kind of structure do I need to find in order to be a steward of the shared memory for humans? Closer to things, I'm still very interested in note sharing and what does that mean and how do we do it? And Flancena keep wanting to find some time to sit with you and actually sort of do that. So let me know when you have a window or two to just sit down and just figure that out together. And then, thanks. And then I'm trying to record more what I call brain drops or short, basically I'm using YouTube shorts because I'm not literate at TikTok whatsoever and I can at least handle sort of the YouTube interface and post something. But I'm liking the 60 second constraint of trying to say something useful and then I'm trying also to figure out how to weave those together into a broader Indra's net of content on different topics. And yesterday I was in a really fun conversation about Quakers and the history of Quakerism where I know a whole bunch of nuggets that I've never recorded and I'm like, okay, I should just sit down for a half hour and record a bunch of nuggets and then sit and weave and post them into the medium and see what that does just as a base. And then last, I'm working with Paul Roney to reconstitute the Tools for Thinking podcast and he's very interested in the history of computing in particular the early seminal visionary documents like Memex and Ted Nelson's writings on hypertext and so forth. So that's a body of interesting stuff. Pete and I are in a group of called Sense Doing that meets on Mondays, which is focused right now on either masking or air filtration or what would a healthy society do as policies around the pandemic. That's a body of work. And then there are other conversations and other sorts of things that might also make a corpus or a body of work to share notes on and to basically collaborate on. So I'm trying to do for all of these or one of these the note sharing that I'm talking about in under the broader context of instead of just like throwing links onto this ties back to the start of this conversation here instead of just throwing, hey, this is a cool link onto a mailing list. How do we actually like nurture the big fungus together so that there's resources left afterward that make more sense after everybody's curation, everybody's addition to the resource? Sorry for a long second, but that's all in my head right now that matters that it might be relevant to FOTL. Awesome. I can go next if you want. So, I mean, top of my mind, there's a lot of stuff happening at the day job which is only tangentially related, I guess. So, you know, like we have this protest and like probably won't work for much, but you know, like there's also, not the word directly, but you know, stringing the ties between employees and so on and the local customers, which is nice. But then like dealing also with like a planning for like my possible like for future, one in which I'm laid off or I quit because of this and the other in which I don't. And like, I don't know if I probably mentioned this to a few of you, but like my day job dream has always been to actually influence the company positively. Like sort of like, you know, finding, I always, you know, like nudging the iceberg in some directions or like just like finding like, I would, a fulcrum, you know, which seems to become less and less likely as time goes on, but you know, I'm not to me. So I'm writing a few things internally to see if that, you know, echoes in the right people and you know, has some probability of like compounding unlikely, but since worth doing, in particular in this one more week, we have until we find where we are laid off. So essentially my plan until the next week, when this happens, layoffs seem likely to be announced either on Monday or Friday next week. And I'm just gonna dedicate part of my time. I mean, honestly, I'm still working on projects with doesn't even, it's a piece of weird, but you know, that's what happens when there's an issue. But also I am actually investing a lot of time just trying to think about these issues and see if I can spot like a way of framing what I want to say that can resonate with a number of people, so you know, communication work. And then on the outside, I've been on more to the topic or like monotopic, I started writing something which a lot of my stories start with, I started writing something and very few with I finished writing, yes, but I got, yes. But this something is beyond, it's either called Beyond Markdown and Git or Beyond Markup and Git, depending on how generic it turns out to be. And it's sort of like that scene too, like what I've been calling, I was at 223 with some friends. We're doing like yearly planning and it's fun something to say, like, oh, that's I was at 225. I mean, maybe not come to pass, but you know, like sort of like the market things and also like making them some, like if you go a few years into the future there, like you can dream more freely, I guess. So working on that, but essentially the idea being, you know, what's next? I mean, what's next in building a knowledge commons, I guess, we like meet the minimum by our tools, assuming we have one built on Markdown and Git, which is strictly speaking, like not, it hasn't yet happened yet, but I just like, just for a change, I'm assuming that has happened when writing this, you know, what is the next thing we will need there to like really empower them like commons. So then before maybe, and like it's like, actually, well, let's try to like actually grow the commons and like interconnected, you know, like how it, you know, essentially be the thing for us and the, and on the other side, like how can we empower it and actually like work on the next version, letting go of some of the limitations of the original approach. Yeah, so that's pretty much it, I think. So it's like a fork, it's two forks, you know, like the future forking twice, which seems fun, and that's pretty much it. That's another revolution, of course, as usual. So who wants to go next? I can go next. Yeah, so on the professional work front, trying to push some blog posts through our PR people, it's very annoying. Every, like I'm at the point in my career where every blog post I write needs to be checked with PR, but I'm not, if I was a little bit lower, they wouldn't care. And if I was a little higher, they trust me, but I'm at the exact wrong point where it all, if it talks about anything that could possibly have to do with the company, it all has to go through them. So if it's spending too much time on that, which is very unfortunate, because I have two or three long blog posts I'd like to publish that have to do with advertising, media, and privacy, and that's the hotspot that PR is concerned about. So that's been fun. A lot of privacy stuff in general happening right now. Beyond that, I am continuing to work on the context center stuff, and specifically the timelines. I'm very interested in, I finally got some of the JSON API stuff out that I wanted. So in theory, anyone could query up one of the timelines, get a stack of JSON, and bring it on to their own site. Of course, the format is only my own. So nothing there that's particularly calling back to any other metadata format. It's just what's easiest. And probably should at some point change that. My goal is to finally get that to the point where I push the actual timelines public and the open source, and I really open source the code, but just opening the code to the public. I mean, it's already open to the public, but it's not merged in. Next month, the goal being to turn the actual code that generates the timeline into an 11T plugin that makes it really easy for anyone to do timelines with static sites. This is like built off of Molly White's code who did everything cryptocurrency is going great why am I forgetting this? Let me pull up the thing. Web3 is going great. She's my colleague here in Boston. She's great. Oh yeah, awesome. Well, she is great. I talked to her very early on in this project about how she set it up in the code that she had put up there. And I have been building sort of on top of her original code ever since. We have a few... You have a link? Yeah, I mean, the timelines are not public yet. My timelines are not public yet. I just have the code that I'm working on here. But if you are curious, let's pull up what is actually published. Here we go. This is the dev log. And this is the branch, which is probably part of the problem is I'm going to like actually publish the timelines before the code is really readable. So probably don't want to dive into that code quite yet. But yeah, I've actually been very happy with the progress and I think it'll be ready to push out next month. One of the things that are particularly satisfying, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do was generating share images. One of the things that I think are really great about how Molly uses web three is going just great is that she can take a screenshot of each block and then share that. And that is sort of dynamic and branded in a way that is better than just like a share link as it is. And so the site now auto gens shareable blocks like that. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's the other one. And then she helped someone, I can't remember who's running it, do one for Twitter as well. So it basically looks exactly like the Twitter one. I didn't change much from Molly's styles. It's more about how everything is generated, how it leverages the auto-generated events. It also has a really cool compatibility with the other project I'm working on, the Contextor, which is the link card generator and siler and archiver so that if your entire, like what I'd like to do is have timelines that are just links to major stories about a thing, which is another different use case. And it allows you to just put in the link. If you're running Contextor, it archives it, it creates the shareable block, but then it integrates the shareable block into the actual timeline post. And all of that's working. It's just a few last touches that need to get worked out before I could actually start publishing timelines. And it included the fact that apparently I somehow got a naming problem with this. Just classic for a hobby project. And yeah, that's sort of been the priority as of late. The goal being to get these things up to the point where we can start sharing them back and forth. And if we want to share the links, we can and have it generate an RSS speed to make it accessible that way. They'll probably start publishing the timelines before that happens. Awesome. Thank you so much. I mean, it's all super instant links. Yeah, yeah. That's a big thing. Trying to make it so that it helps show links and make them more easily shareable. I'm all archiving them. Yeah, I'm not a designer, so it's all Molly's design. It's really just building a whole bunch of interesting build processes to make it work and do a whole bunch of more flexible things with 11T. Molly eventually evolved her timeline stuff into a, I think it's Next.js and React, which is cool. I just, I'd use Next.js at work. I don't want to use it for my personal project. Aaron, thanks for sharing that. It helped me weave together a whole bunch of things that were very disparate in my brain. And seeing Molly's timeline was really clarifying. Really super useful, and I love timelines. I think they're a fabulous way of organizing stuff. Are you familiar with the latch framework that Richard Saul Werman put out? No, what does that do? Methods of organization? Exactly, so Werman says in his book, Information, Anxiety 2, that there are just a few primitive ways of organizing info with the acronym Latch. Location, Alphabet, Time, Categories and Hierarchies. And Hierarchies is nice and broad. Categories covers a whole bunch of stuff, but these are the ways to organize. And I'm not a formalist or a logician or anything like that, so I have no idea, but I like it a lot. Yeah, random is nice too, and probably ought to be in there someplace. Serendipity, or something like that. Latches, we need an E. Extraterrestrials, no, that wouldn't work. Anyway, so timelines are one of these majors, which is a great thing. And one of my wish list items for the brain, for example, since it's time stamping stuff, and since content nodes, thoughts, many of them would have dates, would be to be able to visualize the stuff that I've curated in there through timelines in the way that you're doing. So I'm very interested in a bridge from what I'm doing back to what you're building. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important. I think especially for understanding events, like the problem is that we get very unhinged from history and understanding what's going on in the media. And too many of the approaches to solve this are just like date ordering or like date ordering in like a really abstract way where it gets mixed in with other things or not clear linkages or not clear hierarchy over time. I think a timeline sort of perfects that. And one of the problems I've had in the past with approaching timelines is they're always left to right, which does not work on the web. And so when I saw Molly's timeline, I was like, ah, it's responsive. It works up and down. It's built for the web. It's thinking about how people will actually use it. I wanna build a little like skip thing where you can like select a day or select a month or a year. And the other thing that's sort of the big difference for me in my approach is that every timeline item should be its own URL. Molly has a skip link sort of thing in place. They're not normal skip links. It's like a clever thing she's doing with React that lets these things sort of stand as individual URLs. But I think like for what I want, for what I personally want to accomplish, they should have the individual pages and they should be indexed as individual pages by search. And yeah, I mean, I think that's a big part of it, right? Because once you can destructure it, you can restructure it with other stuff. Yeah, so to answer your question, Matthew, in the philosophy of the context center, every topic that I want to be a timeline is its own timeline. So just to start off, like there's one timeline that's COVID and there's one timeline that's, you know, what was the other one I was doing? But like a different topic. So certain topics are just link collections and certain topics or timelines depending on what makes sense to me for that topic. Yeah, yeah, that would be really cool. And it gets into that concept of merging things together, right? The other, the way that it works is once you understand that you can have any individual timeline item as a standalone item, then it becomes very easy to think about how you could extend that same methodology to remix timeline items from other sources. Yeah, Jerry, there is a lot of conversation in journalism about five or six years ago about atomic journalism, which led to Circa, if you remember that platform. But basically that also sort of approached this idea that like, this is the proper format for it where you're scrolling down and each one's a little atom of a news thing. And the other thing that's really cool is there's a supporting schema.org timeline methodology that is intended for live blogging. Yeah, that's exactly, that is a good reference. It no longer exists, unfortunately, but a similar style of idea. And the problem is like, it was difficult to build. Yeah, it was difficult to build, it was difficult to mod it. Interesting, I don't think I have seen this particular one. But right, like, yeah, so there's a couple of problems in here that I remember, I did move this, the verge just changed this design. Right, the problem of lousy sharing is solved by taking Molly's concepts of these screenshots of the items. The idea of generalist is like irrelevant to me. And like cold and rational and little original journalism, these are problems that come from how aggregation is not done properly in a mechanical sense on the web, and therefore the systems of monetization and attribution decredit it. I was actually just talking with, I ended up going to, what was it, decent social and meeting up with a group that calls itself ESC for maybe end or maybe escape surveillance capitalism. And I ended up meeting back up, I can't remember who, it was you, Peter, who suggested I talk with Michael Grossman. So I ended up meeting back up with Michael Grossman there, and we ended up having a conversation about factor and aggregation. And that's like a big piece of it that I'm thinking about and trying to solve for, like to do aggregation in a way that mechanical systems understand that you're an aggregator versus like a content fee for like just a list of links and not exactly always the thing that it understands. I was gonna say, I thought it was a very interesting event. I think that a lot of the talks in there like have a lot to do with what we think we discussed here. I think there's a group that will lead to all the sessions. Well, this is the juiciest check-in round. Pete, go ahead. Thank you. Aran, that was awesome. I'm gonna skip for today or at least for right now, but thanks. Yes, Jane Matthew, it's you. Yes, you. Okay, well, I'm not even quite sure. I'm sorry I arrived late. I'm not 100%, I mean, we don't do check-ins quite so much in the Europe as we do as you do in America. So, what are you- Does it get you uncomfortable? No, curious and a little bit confound or lost. And last week, for example, at the OGN meeting I was completely lost, I didn't know what was going on, but then I only come to these meetings once every five and six, so, you know, I'm not really, I'm a bit of a slow learner. If, are we just sort of putting out there where we are, what we're doing, how we're feeling, is that the idea? Roughly, I mean, what is in your ambit that is sort of fellowship of a linky? And it might be one thing, it might be like a whole thing, it might be that something you've been chewing on for the last couple of months really fits well in this conversation and you just wanna report on that thing, could be any of the above. Just by means of putting something on the table. Projects and questions, like things you've been, things you go, like there should be. Burning, nagging questions. Okay, so with me, I guess what's top of my mind at the moment are two very closely related things. One is the massive Wiki project, Aaron, thank you for joining in, man, that was really cool. I was really, it was quite an event for me to see, oh, somebody's actually done the thing and created that profile and that really meant a lot. Thank you very much, that gave me a little smile. So thanks for that. We're gonna have a meeting about this. I'm gonna have a massive Wiki meeting about that on Friday so I don't wanna spend too much time about that. In my professional life, I recently thought I had, I was doing quite well in business development because a couple of clients fell from the sky but then I had to say no to one to say yes to the other. And you know how that ends with the other saying, oh, we've got some administrative difficulties. So I'm back to the hunt a bit. I've still got one client, the John Research Center. I'm still doing a lot of work with them but I always wanna have more than one because then I get a little bit more freedom, I think a little more security. So I would really love to get actually some sort of paid geek for doing what I do in my free time which is think about collective intelligence. I've been working on thinking about that for a long time. I mean, I'm genuinely the first I published these five blog posts. One of them is about the massive Wiki project, a pilot project as a demonstration pilot of what a future decentralized collective intelligence ecosystem could look like. I call it a minimum viable ecosystem. I don't know if anybody read any of the posts but for me, getting that out on the first journey that was the culmination of a good years thinking, writing and rewriting is originally it was gonna be a white paper to support a cryptocurrency and then it was gonna be a chapter in a book and then I thought, no, it's not gonna be any of these things. It's just gonna be a set of blog posts and I'm gonna put it out there and if nobody's interested then I guess nobody's interested and I'm gonna have to go off and do something else because I can't continue to spend all of my time which should be spent partly on side projects and partly on business development and working for paying clients. I can't continue to do that. So yeah, I would love to talk about that at some point. That's what's the top of mind for me right now. I was interested, I don't know if you saw my, my email to you about what would Agora and Massivewiki and my hub look like if we mesh them all together. That's amazing. Well, it would be amazing but we really need to spend a lot of time figuring out how that would work and even how we're gonna figure out how that would work and I'd love to do it but if you're facing potential layoffs at Google then this is probably not the time that you wanna be doing that. Well, I'm not sure I hear because like I have five months of holiday, say up. So you need to leave me off. Oh, the joy of being an employee, my God. Five months? Five months, yeah. Plus anything around the gig which may not be much here. So I may be looking into six months for just, I mean, presumably looking for a job, but... That's like a whole seed round right there. I mean, I will burn that seed, it's like just like see where it leads maybe, just have fun. The other tools to mix in there are Factor and Catalyst. Factor from Michael Grossman and Catalyst from Vincent. Okay, I don't know, can we boost up a list? Factor, Catalyst. Massive Wiki. In my house. And I wanna... Yep. Anything else? Oh, far. What does it mean? It sounds like we're witches or warlocks with a cauldron and we just pour in all of these different ingredients and see what beast comes up. You know, perhaps it would be useful to figure out what we wanna do first. Put a cauldron cauldron on the floor of the forest and let the mycorrhiza take it. Let the big fungus bring it life. Yeah. I'll add my own archiving tools to this, but I don't have a specific format that I am interested in forcing on anyone. I am very glad to see the people that have a more established system here figure out what they require and then shape towards that. I know. If you look at the blog post I mentioned... Share those links. Share the blog post. Yeah, sure. I'll do it again. If we had this conversation two or three years ago, I would have been trying to force my hub down your throat, right? Because it was this thing I just launched three years ago and I wanted everybody to join up. It was gonna be a centralized platform and I was gonna make a living out of building that without wanting to become a billionaire, of course, but anyway, that was my focus. And the last three years have been me figuring out that, in fact, my hub itself isn't really very important. It might be a continuation of it in the future one day, but what is important is that this ecosystem appears where things like that can flourish if people want them to flourish. So if they can use a massive wiki, they can use an agora, they could use a hub, they could use a blog, they could have a substack or whatever, but all of the outputs, which is pieces of knowledge, can be remixed and found easily and people can collaborate easily. I don't think we can have particularly simple group forming and things like that. So I've gone, you know, I'm sort of like diluting away my hub and just thinking about, you know, what would the ecosystem look like? And for me, massive wiki looks is more interesting than my hub right now, which is a bit strange, but there you are. Anyway, I'll share my link because, I mean, there's five posts, but you don't need to read all of them. There's one link, there's one short post which summarizes three more, which are the three canonical posts, and then there's the one about massive wiki. I'll just share the first one. They're all linked together. How was that for a check-in? Was it okay? That was me. I would say that's a 10. I'm holding up my 10 card. Ah, I guess. S.J., care to check-in? I started in the comments. I'm running an art project. When we started the Knowledge Futures Group, we had a nice, we bought an auto pen and we signed a whole bunch of cards with the auto pen with a combination of everyone's signatures. And we got everyone who came to the kickoff party to fill out a little card with what they dreamed of for the future of knowledge. So this time I want to mail cards to all of the people whose approaches I appreciate and we'll find some way to have a both a physical and a digital demonstration by the anniversary, which will be in July. There's gonna be an in-person meeting in April, April 3rd to 6th in New York. So A, if anyone's in New York, come hang out, but B, try to send the cards back by then. Thank you for that address. Other people email me addresses, wonderful. That's it. My update is about large language models and we can talk about that next time. We should have a session on it. I think we should try the fellowship of the generative and imagine how that fits into all the other kinds of links. Is the event listed somewhere? I would love to, I'm in New York, so. Oh, great. It is not listed. It is just the Knowledge Futures meeting. It's not really a public event, but I'll be around, there'll be satellite events. Ping me, I'm afraid I have a hard, I have an interview that I have to give right now. So ping me, or we can talk about next week. When is this event taking place? Because I might be in New York in the first week of May. Oh, wow. I know it'll be the first.