This has nothing really to do with technology and culture, just an image I love from my recent trip to Sicily.  It’s the duomo in the Ortygia island part of the city of Siracuse.  It was built in the 7th century, on top of, and incorporating, the much earlier Temple of Athena (5th c BCE).  Such a meditative, spare, space, after all the fabulosity of the Sicilian baroque architecture throughout the south of the island.

I actually had to spend a fair bit of time looking at it to figure out whether it was ironic, an art project, or a serious social networking cum messaging service.  Such is the nature of our time-shifting existence that I find it increasingly difficult, really and truly, to tell whether something is A/completely absurd or B/ a great idea.  Is this of a piece, say, leaving a letter with a lawyer to be read after you’re dead? Or is a difference in kind….a sort of proto-time travel?

Foxnews.com says that:

“According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO’s ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.”

The speculation is that it was the work of university students, which is the digital equivalent of drunkenly stealing a street sign for the dorm room.

In addition to reminding me to watch L.A. Story and Land of the Dead again, it made me think about what happens when digital information is more widely dispersed among our real, physical environment. Will it take the ‘true-for-now’ tendency of the web out into the wild?

It’s amazing how much more exciting it is when you actually hear it as audio, rather than as a bunch of scripts. A kind of alchemy, really. Now only another 41 to make!

I suspect there are things we get from each other by being in real, physical space that we will never be able to replicate at a distance, but can we get better at ‘doing’ distance? For instance, the largest stumbling block seems to be creating opportunities for happenstance, for overheard conversations. What would it mean to replicate that idea of idle moments and happenstance over distance?

Anyway, it should come up in a couple of interesting conversations in the next while. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I’m moderating a wrap-up panel at HICK Tech, a very cool all-day conference about technology and rural issues, that takes place in Owen Sound. Very much looking forward to it. At the end of May, Spark is heading up a panel at this year’s MESH conference, with the tentative title “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?” about this idea of location, and whether distance really matters anymore. I went to MESH last year and had a great time.

In addition to the viral quality of Facebook, there’s the fact that it’s so stupidly easy to add these apps. It seems as though focusing on who really is an ‘active user’ and how you define that is going to be important in figuring out real audience and real value. If you define ‘active user’ as someone who has used an application in the last 30 days, well, so what, really?

I admit it may seem ridiculous that I’m starting a new blog, when I update poor crispermachine so infrequently, but I’ve set up this Vox blog to focus specifically on the link between new social media and MSM, with an eye to experimenting with new ways of doing journalism. Please come visit! Leave your thoughts!