Oh that’s great! I missed that blogpost, originally. Thanks for the link.

Totally fascinating. Seriously.

That’s true for art that originates in the analog realm. But now that you mention it, I guess that creative work originating in the digital realm often doesn’t entail that same kind of distinction between original and reproduction. Setting aside the aspect of live performance, what is meaningful about the original version of a literary or artistic work that was created digitally? Even for the creator, that work is experienced only as a rendering or reproduction.

Ah. Right you are.

Fine for an open plan house where you can rely on space heating. And it looks like that Tulikivi uses the clean/efficient 2-phase combustion that’s becoming standard for all modern wood-burning appliances.

For a house that’s divided into lots of small rooms, though, you really want central heat. Here’s my report on how things worked out with the Eko: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/01/11/central-heating-with-a-wood-gasification-boiler/.

But we can grab hold of the idea, even so. Content remixers are reproducers, I suppose, and maybe they erode the heroic aura of the original a bit. Which is why Windley might look him up, along with the People’s History of the US.

Myself, I want a soapstone fireplace. It captures a vast majority of the heat, then slowly radiates it out over the next 24 hours. Very efficient (and comfortable and beautiful): http://www.mountainflame.com/tulikivi_soapstone_fireplaces.htm

Re: P2P. Yes, from a technological standpoint, if you have a single chokepoint that would be the better thing to do. But remember, we also have to keep up the “glasses” vs. “projector” analogy. A single chokepoint is effectively a projector, and might no longer fall under fair use to remix Google results in this manner. But if you keep it P2P, you get to keep the “glasses” analogy, and therefore fair use.

Yes, that’s a huge opportunity to concentrate knowledge, spread awareness, and exploit serendipity. Not sure why P2P is relevant here though. If you’ve already got the results flowing through a chokepoint you can just leverage that directly.

“Does Google allow reuse and remixture of their results in this manner? Does Bing?”

Above my pay grade :-)

“My wife and I especially liked the interviews with the biomass fuel fellow from the Northeast.”

Jock Gill? Yeah, he’s a treasure. I absolutely want to do more of those, but don’t (yet) have as many connections into that realm.

(My wife and I especially liked the interviews with the biomass fuel fellow from the Northeast. Any chance of more interviews on that topic?)

Back in the early 2000s when I used Kazaa (for strictly legal purposes, of course, ahem) I could easily get dozens of results for one of my queries in the 50s of milliseconds. Latency wasn’t an issue because the query was exponentially parallelized.

So I’m not talking about storing the index of the web in a distributed fashion, I’m talking about storing an index of Google results in a distributed fashion.

All you need to be able to do is get the top 3-4 results for your query back from the P2P network in reasonable time. The remaining results are below the fold, and can come a few seconds later with no perceptible difference to the user.

Through a combination of local caching and smart (topically similar) P2P neighborhood restructuring we can take care of lots of these issues. You could even create supernodes that acted as clearinghouses to speed up the vast majority (big head) of queries.

Furthermore, if this does not have the potential to work on the open web, why not restrict it to SMB company environments? Like some of the work that Barry Smyth is doing. Instead of a company hitting Google with the same queries over and over again, from different employees, a behind-the-firewall P2P result sharing network would (1) not only be faster than Google, but (2) provide more potential for the business to innovate on top of those results.

But look, even if P2P Search never overcomes those problems, and never succeeds against the big boys, the issue remains: Does Google allow reuse and remixture of their results in this manner? Does Bing?

If not, why not?

Yes, that is what I’m thinking w/respect to glasses-sharing. But the laws of physics still apply. Until/unless latency falls much closer to zero, and we all cache and index the Net’s entire corpus on the devices in our pockets, central indexes will continue to play a key role.

What aspect of that essay seems relevant to you in this context?

You’re right; I didn’t do a good job of justifying that leap. Let me try it this way:

If you can lend/give/license your glasses to me, who is to stop me from grinding part of your glasses down, and incorporating them into my glasses, so that I now have bi-focals? And if Gary then shares his glasses with me, and Phil Windley also licenses his to me, I can make tri-focals and even quad-focals. Multiply this by the hundreds of millions and pretty soon you have “P2P” information retrieval / search. Think Kazaa meets search.

Very few people will actually need to go visit the google.com (or bing.com) website anymore, because as long as the P2P “remixing”/”reusing”/”sharing” system has been seeded with Google-produced results those will propagate by themselves.

Every hour or two, you might want to refresh active query results by having a couple of nodes in the glasses-sharing P2P system go back to the Google and/or Bing source and see what the current results are.

But even with an occasional source refresh, look at what you’ve done; you’ve cut direct traffic to the search engine by orders of magnitude, because everyone is remixing/reusing the search engine results with each other.

And huge cuts in traffic translate to huge cuts in ad clicks. Therefore huge cuts in revenue.

Poof.. there goes the advertising model — and search engine revenue — up in smoke.

Currently intellectual property law prioritizes the “original” creator over the remixer, except in some fairly narrowly defined cases. But the remixer is in a lot of cases the person adding the most value – by providing additional utility, by placing in a social or semantic context, etc., that the original creator didn’t anticipate.

As a lot of this content looks more like software than words-on-a-page, the free software model (writing it is free, distribution is ad hoc, making it useful gets you paid) seems to be increasingly appropriate.

I read this blog in Google reader, which remixes RSS feeds in a combined server/browser computational model. A paradigm of the proglassector. Who gets paid for this? It looks like google does, at least via the ads that appear at the bottom of many of the items, but at least in this case there’s a kind of “content VAT” that trickles down to the creator.

I don’t see how that follows. It’s just that there will be two complementary axes of personalization:

1. What those services can do for me, augmented by whatever knowledge of my friends and associates they already have, or that I choose to give them

2. What I can do for myself, in collaboration with my friends and associates.

“I do actually rotate my search engine usage”

I use multiple providers for every search, because I always want the benefit of a second opinion and a different perspective. For the same reason, I would seek maximum complementarity between search-driven and self-driven personalization.

But your point is well taken. It’s not just “serious information professionals” who should seek such diversity, it’s everyone. And that’s something we need to teach everyone, from an early age, as part of a thorough grounding in critical thinking.