Robot Wisdom auxiliary

Twitter reminds me of the netnews golden age, especially alt.religion.kibology pre-2000. Many specific memes go back at least that far:

oldest recorded:

prOn: 14jun1994

invisible pants: 17nov1994

no pants: 1995?

not wearing pants: 19apr1993

the olpc project was launched
with bluesky promises of
price/performance breakthrus
for the generator
the wireless
and the screen

promises that were inevitably
quietly downsized
until now they appear to have
production models
but still no public stats at all
on price/performance

and hints that the wireless
and the generator
only work with an expensive
infrastructure assist

which we should have expected all along
because price/performance in the cellphone industry
with its billion dollar r&d
is nowhere close to nNeg's magic beans

but there's a much more modest
downsized model that ought to be do-able
using the pre-www
netnews paradigm

village servers with satellite internet
and stationary-bike battery chargers

children (and adults) with 5ドル pdas
with alphanumeric keyboards
with one- or two-line displays
and flash memory modules
that can easily hold a weeksworth download
of text-only reading
browsable at leisure on the pda
where offline followups
public and private
can be composed

along with a list of promising
blog-links to be downloaded next time

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

1. IMPLEMENT 'trn' (THREADED READNEWS) IN AJAX-- make it faster than the original, with fancier killfiles
   
2. fix the bug that always #-jumps to the wrong post in a thread
   
3. treat tags everywhere on the web as virtual newsgroups (so if i tag anything 'drewbarrymore' it shows up in a virtual drewbarrymore newsgroup)
   
4. offer an oldest-first sort-order, for 'archeological' research
   
5. encourage visitors to rate posts, to blog them, and allow them to view posts in highest-rated-first order