Yeah, the Internet does move fast... Personal Commentary5/2/2000; 11:50:11 PM Mar 3, 2000: On Misnomer, Dru Jay discussed yesterday the relationship of my essay on Weblog Communities and the Tragedy of the Commons. I have to apologize to him; I simply forgot about referencing that stuff as a source of some of the root ideas. While my thinking on the topic doesn't stem solely from that reading, they did contribute a lot to the ideas. His comments are dead on, and I've added a link to that day on his site to the end of the essay; it really belongs as part of it. Do read the comments if you haven't already.Since the features just aren't worth anything yet, in a couple of hours, the Linkback page will simply cease to exist. Hopefully, by this time next week, I should have context and decay working. (I figured out how to do them both at once, simplify the database by linking only to a site without regard to the contents of the links, and overall simplify the process immensely while gaining features, speed of processing, and decreasing time-to-program. Sometimes a little bit of design thought can save tens or hundreds of hours of work...)You know, it comes home yet again that the Internet DOES move things along more quickly... I'm disappearing for a week and I expect that half of you will forget I exist. I'll probably miss at least one big story. (The recent Amazon patent controversy is only what, 3 days old?) I'll miss multiple small ones, but interesting ones. In other words, the penalty for disappearing for a week is stiff around here. (Wait until my honeymoon, I suppose, it'll be even worse.)If I disappear for 3 months from home to go to college, my mother can catch me up in significant events in the church, my extended family, and the events of interest in the town in less then an hour. Meanwhile, she has little clue what goes on online in my life, because that much interesting stuff happens online in a day, and I can't explain it all to her in a reasonable amount of time. Even my fiance thinks I'm a little bit nuts running a daily website. (To the best of my knowlege, none of those people are reading this on a daily basis.)Of course, a lot of stuff happens in the real world, too, we just never hear about it because we lack the communication channels.Step back for a moment and look around you at those who are not connected to the Internet (not just online, but actually living 'here' to some extent). It's easy to forget how differently we see the world then those who are not connected... we get news in hours, including thoughtful opinions, commentary, and opposing positions, if you know where to look. (Sure, network news comes in hours, too, but its a very limited subset of what I see online.) Fads occur in a matter of hours, and can last no more then days. (Mahir, anyone?) There are two sides to nearly every issue, even the ones you'd think are a cinch for one side like "internet censorship", not just the Network News view.For me, who's never really known a world that has been changing at anything less then exponential speed, it is so easy to forget that even now, it is not like this for everybody. I am incapable of understanding on a gut level a world where change is slow, news is from last month, and adding 1,000,000 numbers together is impractical because even if you take the time to do it, your result will be too full of error to be useful.Just a bit of introspection here, and hey, I'll end it with a cliche, why not? Where will I be 5 years from now at this rate of change of rate of change? (That's not a typo.) Wow. The answers boggle the mind.(And to think... one of the projects I'm working on this week will only serve to speed up the weblog communities even faster then they already work now, and to help them draw closer together dynamically... I'm certainly not helping to slow things down any...)