Thursday, February 5, 2009

Tangled Web 2.0

Once upon a time, rather recently in fact, a couple of sharp Bay Area tech types came up with a creative idea: Apply the technology of online social networking sites to the great social network of history.

As with most creative ideas, the inventors do not entirely know what they have come up with. In fact it will become whatever its users end up making of it, within the framework of the connecting architecture. There is a whole hypespeak of 'user generated content' and Web 2.0 to describe all this, though in truth it is as old as Usenet and the salad days of Compuserve Forums.

In any case the inventors did another smart thing and hired me to create some initial seed content for them. And that is what I have been doing for most of last year, which among other things explains why I've been remiss about this blog.

Online it is easier to show than tell, so here is a link to the front page portal of Emmet Labs, and here (repeated from above) is a link to the 'social network' of good old Bluff King Hal, Henry VIII. Go ahead and do the obvious thing: Click on the links to his wives. That's where I started. As you'll see, what I've done is only a beginning - I haven't even added Ferdinand & Isabella of Spain to the network, Catherine of Aragon's parents, let alone Christopher Columbus. But, after all, that is the whole point of 'user generated content.'

Most of what I've done for Emmet is in the Tudor network, but I also touched a bit on battleships, and inevitably even some people and connections relevant to rocketpunk. So drop by for a visit, and feel free to comment or contribute!


While I am touting myself, this is also a good place to mention the European Courier, to which I have been contributing political commentary since the presidential primary season.