dear freakonomists, is this still creative industry, approximatly mid nineties?
southwest toronto or mideast bologna? worried, scrupolous but still hungry?
how does it differ from the tactical shootouts of
3 books-a-year-net-theory-once-to-be-called-activism-and-before-media-theory?
IT still struggles, IT still fights for its voice, its ambitious, ambigous,
a wanna be upperculturereal entering talk bot. aren’t we infrastructure yet?
think about it. think about all the dressed monkeys, last sunday at the
video screening. la la la. well done. one monkey has a degree,
another a lobotomy, anotherone ended in whitney or tate. monkeys
nevertheless, well trained ones indeed. some listen to the name of deleuze and guattari,
some just mumble prememetic utter, others achieved some mastery
of the derrida minuetti. humble expectance on the aristocratic table of
prof. markov III. wittgenstein’s laughter sounds just too fakey. maybe
he found out a way to think with his ass? you ought to be left
in los angeles with an overdose of double-cream-something, waiting
for your exam-deadline-admission-competition tomorrow. yes, you did it,
escaped the lab, and today we can say, you are a well trained monkey indeed.
welcome to culture. post the post, avant l’etre, cultural stuttering in supreme
virtuosity, playing that classic rock theme, 1020 years later with stunning
verve, cultural kindusttry, coming back from dhelio or prague, pompously
lcokkness discguised as political attitude. you think there’s anything militant in
“subverting” more than your grannies dvd-collection on myspace?
F. ONE:To what extent do our gestures in visual culture get watered
down, recuperated and sold back to us? F. TWO:Can this be avoided?

setups like this should be in every household by now according to 70ies scifi b-movies like rollerball. the interesting part is how to drive these beasts with useful info-flows, you’ll need some rss widgets with extra large fonts. financial stats, flickr, photos, webcams, video feeds. and the energy efficiancy? why paying for 2000 watt/h 24/7/365 to run the default fishtank  screensaver, when you can have a real fishtank for less, crazy jon?

It would be wonder if American bloggers wouldn’t develope their “own” jargon. We can speak of the top of a pyramide of attention of bottom-up citizen blogging which is lead by a relatively closed circle of “class A” bloggers. Such a classication refers more to quality control in industrial production than the ranking in sports which would be how one would use it Germany (“Oberliga”). In these language games, which are certainly right now heavily researched by academia, a term which appeared often describes the writing style of blogger, more a common attitude than a distinctive form to differentiate one blogger from another. “Snarky” to my ear it sounds more like witty sarcasm than cold cyncism, it contributes more to the Young Urban Professional than to the authoritarian character described by Adorno, who’s cynicism is a way of distancing himself from his own ethical involvement. The snarky voice of blogger seems to have an east coast origin, or better british origin. It has not reached the center of Californian “positivism”, as expressed in the “inspired” writing of Tim O’Reilly and colleagues at O’Reilly Radar, which is maybe a good example for a specialized “blog” which is not just a self-run-ego-booster but rather tends towards an interesting model of coders of programs as writers of articles and self-promoters of their philosophy of coding.

The importance of the “universal tone” of the snarky voice is expressed by the connotation of the attributed sound of the human voice. to have a “voice” on the net, is maybe the most central aspect of blogging, especially because this sound is expressed textually and only newly in the direct form of podcasts. Snarky refers ethymologically to the nasal aspect of snoring or snorting. This sonority refers both to a certain private informality of the “pyjama blogger” but also a certain state of routine and disconnectedness to a feedback which would allow to modulate the expressions. the opposite would be described by another emerging term “Emo”, which stands for emotional and expressive, and is used both in music and programming.

again, to me the sound of blogging is more like the one of the office chats, the talks around the coffee or copy machine in the morning. the brevity has less to do with the time of the readers but the one of the writers, which very soon have to direct their attention to their days work. in this way blogging is the conversaiton of the world wide white collar force, which is often working from home today.
 
in distinction to the authoritarian character described by Max Weber in the rigidly hirarchized administration of the Prussian State, the new authoritarian character is a liberal one, he is contributing to an economic culture which integrated a protestantic work ethics and loaded it with hedonism and fun. the new authoritarianism is much more machinic and structural to a degree of micro-management. another word which is very fashionable with bloggers is procastination. it describes a hesitation of fulfilling small tasks. it is enemy number of the blogger. between snarkyness and procastination lays the new work ethics which follow the subjectivification of the knowledge worker in the neo-liberal world society.

Der echte Beamte soll seinem eigentlichen Beruf nach nicht Politik treiben, sondern: »verwalten« (Max Weber)

Nachdem die Raumdebatte der umkämpften Datensphären als vergangener konservativer Traum angesehen werden kann. (vgl. Declaration of Indepence of Cyberspace, Rede von virtuellen Räumen usw.) geht es nun der vorauseilenden Netzzeit an den Kragen. Wenn das Netz den Raum zumindest als Universalbegriff vernichtet hat, so soll nun die Zeit ihm folgen. Allein, die Trägheit des Sozialen scheint sich dem zu widersetzen.

Zuerst wird die Zeit umgerechnet in Nutzerzeit, Klickstroeme, und Aufmerksamkeitsbeträge. Es ist der Versuch der Quantisierung und damit Erschliessung und Ökonomisierung der psychischen Energie, die damit verbraten wird, interaktiv umherzusurfen, zumeist unbezahlt und scheinbar arbeitslos.

Im Wettlauf mit fälschlich der Betrügerei bezichtigten Klickrobotern, liefert die imaginierte Kauflust der “Eyeballs� die wacklige Währung welcher Google seinen immensen wirtschaftlichen Erfolg verdankt. Die Gewinnerwartungen entsprechen einer Wette auf die Kaufkraft 2.0, das Netz als universellen weltweiten Marktplatz als den es sich in der ersten Phase auf katastrophale Weise nicht erwiesen hatte. Google tritt dabei mit einer charismatischen “Ethik� auf, fast wie eine Nichtregierungsorganisation zur freiwilligen Verbeamtung der weltweiten Netznutzerschaft. Die Entlassung in selbstverantwortete Freizeitbürokratie ist ein langer Weg. Ein weiteres Vehikel dieses Erziehungsprozesses wird ein künftiger Dienst (�C2″) zur kollektiven Zeitorganisation, welcher Terminkalenderdienste in die Mailapplikationen usw. einbaut.

Dabei bleibt das Web im Kern dokumentenorientiert, Produkt eines Beamtenapperats des ungewissen Wissens. Zumindest in den Köpfen seiner Nutzer, und auf ihren Festplatten in Ordnern und Unterordnern, Linklisten und Stichwortkatalogen gibt es noch viel zu tun. Unzählige Memoiren sind zu schreiben. Auf den Webseiten mag sich so einiges in Bewegung setzen, aber es bleiben doch Texte, oder besser gesagt: Listen, Urtexte, die nach ständiger Fortsetzung verlangen, da es sich um direkte Erweiterungen von Lebenslinien handelt. Die Objekte darin, Fotos, Filme, Mp3s, Verweise auf Namen, (Verwandte, Tiere, Freunde), Orte und Waren, bleiben in der Minderheit im Vergleich zur Masse von Verweisen auf wieder andere Rahmen-Dokumente. Web-Texte werden damit mehr und mehr technisch, verfahrensorientierter, protokollartiger, und die Verweise beginnen Programme zu steuern, die wiederum Mengen von Verweisen verwalten.

Der neue unbezahlte Beamtenapperat kann sich innerhalb der strukturellen Uferlosigkeit seines Systems gut mit sich selbst beschäftigen und braucht nur minimalen Input aus seiner Umwelt. Er ist darauf bedacht Hierarchien aufzubauen, Charts, A-Lists, Rankings. Jeder Hilfsjournalist, der ein Journal (Blog) führt weiss wie man Ereignisse züchtet, sie protokolliert und gemeinsam aufpäppelt, diese Aufmerksamkeitsakkumlationen sind relational im Netz festgehalten und tendentiell flüchtig. Vorzugsweise: Technikthemen, Celebrities, Politische Polemik und Börsennachrichten. Diese Nutzergenerierte Fülle an ähnlichen Inhalten mag als Reichtum gesehen werden, angesichts der Daten die nicht zur Verfügung stehen, die in externen ehemals öffentlichen Archiven gefasst sind, und womöglich einen Unterschied machen würden, stellen sie nur einen kleinen Anteil am Gesamtdatenschatz dar. Das Gebot der Transparenz das derzeit die Web2 Welt durchzieht, ist ein Oberflächenphänomen, darunter geht es gleichzeitig darum ganze Wissensschichten , also traditionelle Wissenspeicher, aktiv, also durch Nichtbenutzung und Nicht-digitalisierung zu vergessen bzw. künstliche Knappheiten herzustellen in der Hoffnung auf Wertschöpfungsprozesse ex nihilo. Was die Suchmaschine und ihr unbezahltes Heer an Klick-Beamten nicht findet gibt es nicht.

Die anstehende Umstülpung der Welt in einen Datenkosmos lässt manche schwindlig werden, weil die Art der Ordnung dieser Datenwelt alles andere als klar ist. (Gut, deutlich ist, dass heute wenige ihrer Nation wegen Hurra schreien, sondern sich eher viele auf ihre Kerngeschäfte zurückziehen und dabei einem Totalitarismus der Marktes unterwerfen.) Wenn also die Varianz des Neuen derart eng, nämlich in seiner Pragmatik technisch und ökonomisch gefasst ist, dann ist es die Funktion des Netzes nicht die Zeit zu vernichten sondern die Welt in ihrer Kontingenz und Bedrohlichkeit zum Verschwinden zu bringen, und sei es in Form von Aktienkursen, und ihrer spezifischen Form von kontingenten kollektiven Zeitoptionen.

Da die heutige Wirtschaft, mit ihren Derrivaten, auf einem hohen Grad an Unwahrscheinlichkeit aufbaut, muss das System intern, von dem was es über sein Aussen weiss, einen umso höheren Grad an unbarmherziger Vorhersagbarkeit und Redundanz produzieren. “Alles läuft nach Programm�. Das Kontinuum der Zeit als das lineare Versprechen des “und dann� als ein ruhiger Fluss eines kontinuierlichen Auf und abs, ist ein kulturelles Konstrukt. Bei etwas näherem Hinsehen zerfasert diese abstrakte Dauer in ein diskontinuierliches Netzwerk von Geschwindigkeiten, von Beschleunigungen und Trägheiten, auf der blinden Matrix einer immer höher getakteten Maschinenzeit. Da diese so unanschaulich rasant ist, braucht es Rythmem, Wellen und gemeinschaftliche Rituale der Zeitkonstruktion. Die Nachfolger von Uhren, Kalendern führen zu zeitbasierten Benutzerschnittstellen, die sich vom Format des Dokuments nur scheinbar verabschieden, und das umsetzen, was die Beamten “Vorgänge� nennen, Aktenordner mit “Projekten�.

Beim Vernichten von Zeit helfen die neuen verschärften Copyrightgesetze, “Du darfst nicht kopieren was du nicht kopieren darfst�. Diese machen schwieriger aus der analogen “alten� Welt legalen massenhaften Nachschub an Rohdaten zu ermöglichen. Zur Not wird vorsorglich der gesamte Backkatalog der letzten 100 Jahre mit einem Kopierschutz versehen. Also verschwindet vor allem die Zeit, die in den alten Archiven gefasst war, nicht für immer, aber für die Mehrheit.

Das Ergebnis kann jeden Abend im Fernsehen, bevorzugt in den Diskussionsrunden der letzten öffentlichrechtlichen Intellektuellen nachvollzogen werden, die damit beschäftigt sind, sich in ihrer Mitte zu treffen und gegenseitig ihrer Wahlfreiheit zu versichern. Die Autoreferenzialität und Berechenbarkeit des neuen unbezahlten Medien- Beamtenstaates den das Internet des Web2 heranzüchtet, vernichtet nicht die Zeit, sondern die Welt draussen, die man den jeweiligen Experten und Sachbearbeitern überlässt, zugunsten eines autopoitetisch kalkulierten zeitlos-diffusen Mittelmasses. Der “Grüne Bereich� der Redundanzproduktion wird damit immer umkämpfter und fiktiver.

Es dauert noch eine ganze Weile bis ein RSS Feed nur noch auf andere RSS Feeds verweist, und die Datenbjekte ganz ins Fliessen geraten. Bis dahin behilft man sich mit Dialogen, die in der Blogosphere, nicht so recht in Gang kommen wollen, sondern eher wie auf einander verweisende Monologe solipsistischer Monadenbewohner umeinander und vor allem sich selbst kreisen. Die zeitliche Gerichtetheit des Journals, bietet auch in der Multiplikation seiner Einsamkeiten keinen angemessenen Vergleich mit der sozialen textuellen Dichte, also auch der Verdichtung der Zeit, welche durch Usenet und Mailinglisten erfahren wurde. (Die Blogosphaere als fiktionaler freier Markt der DIY-Intellektuellen wird ohnehin abgelöst durch die Gated Communities der MTV-Killer Myspace, oder dem Worldofwarcraft der Businesswelt OpenBC.)  Der erklärbare Hang zur verdrucksten Selbstbestätigung und autoriären Peer-to-Peer-Gruppenbildung, ersetzt nicht den Verlust der gelebten Zeit, in der man auch hätte etwas anderes machen können.

Also bleibt es weiterhin der Text, der die Zeit ordnet, die Ordnung von Überlieferung und Lesbarkeit, wenn auch mehr und mehr Text der in Form von Todo-listen für Nutzer oder als Befehlslisten für und von Maschinen geschrieben. Dieser Text ist kein Garant für Geschichte mehr, er wird zahlreicher, lückenhafter und kurzlebiger, und verrottet schnell in den ominösen Datenhalden von Google und Co. Für die “zeitbasierten� Datentypen wie Animationen, Filmchen usw. gibt es noch keinen so rechten Platz, für die Musik wurde bereits der Ipod gefunden. Ein Apperat jedoch der “zeitnah� alles mitschreibt, welcher alle Telefonkonversationen aufzeichnet ist schon nach Enzensberger unmöglich.

Am in die Freizeit verlängerten Desktop lässt sich nicht so gut die Zeit vergessen wie am Fernseher. Das geht mit Spielen schon besser, doch die stecken in einer Art Stummfilmkrise der Innovationslosigkeit. Es gibt keine kontinuierliche Medien-Zeit, sondern nur paralelle monadisch-neoliberale Subjekt-Zeiträume, Nutzunsströme. Die übergeordnete universelle Zeit des GMT plus 2 – Netzes, ist die des Empires zur Zeit der Kolonien. Die Kolonisierungsbewegung geht heute aber längst nach Innen. Der geografische Raum ist mehrfach erobert. Die meisste Zeit die im Netz “verschwindetâ€? bzw. akkumuliert wird, in gehorsamer Aufmerksamkeit, neuerdings motivationspsychologisch zur ‘economy of intention’ erweitert, verdichtet sich zu einem Zustand ständiger Bereitschaft. Eine Mischung von Gerichtetheit und Zerstreung. In ihr wird die Lebenszeit der Nutzer zur imaginierten Wunderkraft der Poweruser, die, wenn sie schon nicht die Uhren anzuhalten im Stande sind, froh sind, sie jedes Jahr um ein paar Gigahertz schneller laufen zu lassen.

Really Stupid Syndication

RSS is hype, RSS is bad. why should i push that button and subscribe to something i never asked for. what is this whole geeky blogging thing about, i am a user who wants some information and has no time to sit in the Pyjama surfing the net all day. people like us think bloggers are people with personality problems and that the Web of the past was a better Web.

The optimists might say:

RSS is the future, adapt to it or die. RSS and with it Web 2.0 will replace the Internet as we know it, and include all other media in it. RSS will be some magic remedy for the info overflow, and of course, a democratic way of expressing yourself, and take the power away from the evil media moguls. RSS will be the foundation of an improved economy where attention replaces labour, and robots take care of the household.

The scientist joins in with a certain sense of urgency:

RSS is the very antithesis of the website. It is not a ‘home page’ for visitors to call at, but rather it provides a synopsis, or snapshot, of the current state of a website with simple titles and links. [...] Syndication and annotation are the order of the day and are beginning to herald a new immediacy in communications and information provision.

Meanwhile, in the relatively small area of old radio in a new media world, running a little website next to your station, why should you care? You opened up a mailinglist a few years ago, you installed a guest-book script, you even went with the community and gave it a web-discussion board (so they didn’t feel spammed by all the mail-debate) and finally you also gave them a stream, a simulcast of what goes over the airwaves.

It’s a content flow

Congratulations, you are most probably part of the avant garde. Since the mid 90ies the concentration of the radio market goes so fast, that there is hardly any station in the USA which does not take part in some kind of Syndication. Playing radio shows it receives via Satellite or from elsewhere. More of an economic decision then, the rise of RSS allows you today the same for your website, rebroadcast that newsfeed and let others rebroadcast yours. a synaptic network of open flows which tend to stablize towards an ever self-emerging mainstream. radio userland is not only a name and metaphor of one of the products of one of te inventors, but the model for the way RSS is working in a blogging world. the importance of RSS is the channel metaphor, which it borrowed from microsoft active channel. the importance is that the radio of today runs unattended, in the background, channel for channel, and that now users can have as many of them as they like.

Why RSS matters

Interoperability, disruptive technology?

• It is not for the end consumers, but for active users or power users, and people who run websites, people who are into publishing. what’s wrong about it might be only that you feel kind of urged to also become a publisher. There are many ways to participate and nobody forces you to run your own blog aka micro news agency.
• RSS is a way machines speak to machines without gigantic standardisation and big companies involved controlling that. technically, its a compromise between human and machine readablity. things become messy, when they grow to the size of an eco-operating system. RSS ‘broadcast‘ is a one-to-many summary of what a site has to offer which is run by a one-man-publishing house, everyone can become a radio receiver and transmitter of digital content, sending arround a table of content of what’s new at home. But soon RSS will quit the a rock-star career and enter the realm of office automation.
• By linking here and there across the net one stream of consciousness cuts another. RSS is not a document standard, it is a way of updating you about someone else thinking in form a daily reading list. RSS is a lazy way of thinking together, combining the anticipated couch potato of push media, with the social software of tomorrow. Of course most of it is noise to you, and that’s why it needs a lot of filtering and work, aka the global mind of the blogosphere for the advanced consumer.
• For the rest of the world, they can profit from the info-maniacs, power users who bath in dataflows, weazels, pioneers, dabblers, entrepreneurs, gamblers. they get overdosed every day, and eat and digest each others text streams, bloggers replaced hackers. the rest of the world can still read their minds, news sites, used search engines, supported by algorithms and self-recruited human robots. but wether you like it or not, RSS is already filling the bloodstream of news-sites, portals, the print industry. more and more documents contain parts which are machine readeable, so called microformats.

there is a radio playing on the radio

the main reason why RSS matters is its tendency to mutate, the history of RSS shows a number of inconsistencies based on human ego. Podcasting follows the dream of one standard based on a big ego and a lot of sense of self-marketing. Podcasting as a cultural format is recreating the historic era of the radio serials, it is mp3 plus rss, every week again. you get the headlines, your radio downloads the shows, you listen to it while you have time. radio is nothing fixed, it changes over time and took many forms already. podcasting grows exponentially, while the quality of chart radio falls constanly, they meet way back in the past as amateurism. what happens now, with the all the plumbing between the media types, redistribution, quoting, remixing, tagging? a culture becomes widely practised, where copyright needs to loosen up a bit. live and archive are just two different views of the same data. if it doesn’t get copied, what is worth for? sure this new digital messyness got big, and it will take more than 5 years to replace the CD with downloads. it took years until FM put AM aside.

vertical listening

normally you listen to one content channel per time, while radio listeners are too busy with other stuff to be able to zap very often. for radio and the record and radio industry the bad news of the ipod lays in the rebirth of the mixtape. too many users developing too high skills in putting their own playlists together, much more diverse than any radio formula can ever get. when you combine a number of horizontal flows (aka playlists), and let the computer switch from one to the other based on what it should record, it is possible to listen to all live jazz recordings in a whole radio spectrum, plus your own favorite sports and news shows in 3 languages. Podcasting hints on the possibility of a universal radio recorder, which adapts to your tastes and does not care about loyality to one station of copyright license until you are really loyal. Soon on a telephone next to you.

the art of missing the show

the assumption is on the other hand, that listeners eagerly wait for their favorite show, that they know what they want, and that they are careful listeners, who take their own time as the most valuable thing. how about those who want to forget time? who want to get over the day, through the traffic jam, down an elevator? music is more and more used, to make the passing of time less unbearable to experience. on the other hand, only a few feel bad missing every day thousands of hours of unique programming. the luxury of presence is something which is given by the observers. the live event is one you always aready missed. only a few people, take really good care of their media diet. and those who do, know that it can lead to an obsession, which makes you overly sensitive to the fastfood-content we are constanly bombarded with. like any good archive, the question is how to delete, what to include and what not. What you can do with RSS is getting more connected with all the stuff you never wanted to know about.

disappearing into the future

what is annoying many people about rss is perfectly right, it is everywhere.  in the sense of computer science it has to become “transparent”, which means invisible. it works only in the way, that it is working invisibly for the user, so it is not part of the user interface anymore. the next generation of digital media will not show you any “rss button”. you might not even know what you like and while you listen, you leave patterns, which are compared with the ones of others, and finally you listen to your own demographic profile. it means that music is more and more a machinic process of selection. the form of the radio show, its rituals, its voice and ueber-present personality of the Data-DJ, they are already back in the world of podcasting and blogging. RSS buttons are just the feel of the tentacles of this uncanny state of media, get used to it.

.

Two formerly unknown versions of the Ursonate have appeared on the Internet. A Ringtone, “Grimm glimm gnimm bimbimm” and an seemingly original recording of Kurt Schwitters “Ursonate, part V“. A groundbreaking example that dadaism and mobile commerce are two side of the same coin. Art of advertisment, magick of marketing.

Years ago, Frank Zappa enthusiastically supported Avital Ronell’s
attempt to get a radio program called Radio Free Theory off the ground. Didn’t work-Irvine was supposed to fund it but withdrew b/c it was too subversive-but funny that the Ronell/Zappa connection was just made again across the title of her latest book. I can’t tell if you’re poo pooing Stupidity without having read it, Hugh, but it’s one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read; it blew me away..many times.

posted on the spoon mailinglist by Diane Davis Dec. 19 2002 – appearently even Jaques Derrida wanted to become a TJ there…

before the german discounter Aldi comes out with their new laptop MD 96500 on thursday, eager potential buyers could have a look how people liked it down under in Australia, where it was released a few days earlier. result: quite fine, with the usual cons: graphics slower than expected, noise, overheating, slow battery time, and bloated installation, tv card below average…

this is what i posted on eHub yesterday

recently one can sense a growing fatigue concerning the ill defined area of “web2.0�, the question of its true novelty (semantic web?, read/write web, web applications), a darwinism of business ideas, fear of a bubble 2.0 and the relation to the ethics of the big guys (google, yahoo et. al.) some might remember that it took 5 years for the “web 1.0� to end in the dot.com desaster. this was five years ago. what did we learn? no question about the good ambitions and minimalistic elegance of ehub. run by 2 people, it shows already the great productivity of the social web, and a change in digitial culture which one could also call maturity (see also dave winers critical remarks), and yes, the art of flickr still holds and there is still some trust that even if a social browser is not a socialist browser, this next wave will be not as greedy, stupid and evil as web 1999.

Day 1 with the flock browser: there’s a long list of flock bashings, probably mostly as an immune reaction to hype. Bubble 2.0: Goldrush on the westcoast, or the meme of pandemic communication. The problem about web 2.0 is clearly, that it is all about repackaging web 1.0, restarting the same old engine of californian ideology and utopism in its core, it’s a short cut arround the plan of the semantic web, and again only a few of the new startups will likely survive. Only this time one included a few more post-leftists concepts, open source, free content, but don’t get it wrong – flock is not a socialist browser, there must be a point of sale.

Claiming that the same could be done with Firefox extensions is misleading as installing more than a handful of them seriously make things unstable and slow. Hopping between applications and blog service sites doing serious cutcopypaste gymnastics is also not what turns the consumer into a producer. The old goal of the participative web is: every reader a writer, every page with a back channel.

What is forgotten in all this fastly hacked-together high level usability optimization is what made Java already foul on private computers, the lack of speed. So my browser of choice remains indeed the norwegian closed source product Opera and not the open-source phoenix Firefox.

FF is still too much bloated, and a browser as the most used tool and desktop replacement, cannot be fast enough. Speed is the killer feature of Opera,
so watch out how Opera will be integrating the best of flocks new features:

1. replaces old-school bookmarks with one-click social bookmarking to Del.icio.us
2. tagging is there if you want to do two-click bookmarking and tag
3. a new bookmarks manager with an integrated rss reader
4. built in search engine that indexes every page you visit and has a Spotlight-style as-you-type UI
5. keeps a list of the sites you visit most frequently
6. multiple bookmarks toolbar (one for work, one for play etc.)
7. finds feeds, lets you view them
8. caches the feeds so you can read them on the train
9. aggregated RSS view for all of your bookmarks folders
10. integrated blog editor (support wordpress, movable type, blogger)
11. one click ‘blog this’ feature (it does the blockquotes, citations and all that stuff for you)
12. Flickr integration (drag and drop pix into blogs)
13. shelf: a web scrapbook that helps you organizae stuff you want to blog

and of course it’s open source and cross platform.

details at http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/13.php [flock.com]

Slashdot | Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches

One could easily add another 13 things which could make browsing a bit better, and do to firefox, what firefox did to mozilla, then apply it back to Opera where the most innovations came from anyhow. Hint: possibly the open plug-in standard (NPAPI) will help….

so here is my missing feature list: 

1. Wikipedia Editor preferebly like Opera Notes with WYSIWYG Wikitext
2. Statistics and Comment Ping  (Technorati et. al) more Blogger Workflow support
3. Podcasts and Vblogs
4. Validation of Links, CSS Code etc.
5. Creative Commons Metadata and Rdf headline function

   

Anyways, flock is for those who need the “social features”, trying to economize and industrialize on the few running models of the blogosphere. Some see this fuzzy set of new web applications already as a mass medium next to newspapers or radio and as easy to use for the rest of us. The assumption, that after the first waves of hackers, emo-geeks and artists, the gentrification of the web must follow, the best bet for those web2.0 startups with the big fonttypes and bonbon palette, is to become the starbucks of the digital family, and standardize on the standardisation of an experience (here coffee, there rss feeds). This goal might remain a pipe-dream for 9 out of 10 RSS aggregators and social bookmark services, and depending on your perspective, you dig in and continue what you’re doing, so you’ll have survived another crazy meme in gotham city or sim city suburbia.