WorldChanging has an entry (Link) that touches on the kinds of things I’ve wrapped up into the “kirkyan” concept about which I’ve posted (reLink) and which has gotten the attention of a whole lot of people who read Sterling’s blog. I commented on one site that tracked back – pointing to an earlier post of mine on the military’s UCAV program (reLink). That was on my mind when I posted the comment over on WorldChanging. It’s not all good.

Seems like when we spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on systems for killing people instead of helping them, some day we’re going to develop something we’ll all wish we hadn’t. Of course saying that sort of thing will get rolled eyeballs. Kind of like how people in the early 80’s predicted people would have their own computers at home. How ludicrous is that?

From Gamespot (Link):

Creative boss departs; SOE says strategic goals of company and man “don’t match.”

Raph Koster, chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment, and one of the leaders behind the development of Star Wars Galaxies, has left the company, SOE reps confirmed today.

Based in Austin, Texas, Koster is widely considered an expert when it comes to the design of massively multiplayer online games. He often participates in event panels and maintains an active blog that focuses on the nuances of the genre.

Koster is leaving his post of six years “to pursue development interests outside of the company,” SOE said.

Something tells me Sony is going to regret losing him. Maybe not this year or the next, but from the things I’ve read, Koster probably has a better sense of where the future opportunities are than a company struggling to balance the competing objectives of its various divisions. I’m going to be very interested to see where he lands.

For some time now I’ve watched my blog’s statistics. I’ve used Webalizer and AW Stats. I’ve followed the visitor list closely (mostly to deal with defacer diaper kiddies). And a little over a week ago, giving serious consideration to adding custom banner ads, I decided to try StatCounter to get a better handle on my blog’s traffic. This is what I’ve learned:

Now what’s nice about StatCounter is that afaik it reads only real page views; search bots might visit, but they don’t count. What’s not nice about StatCounter is that (again) afaik, it doesn’t count feeds. Considering that I see lots of feeds in my stats – more than regular page visits – I’m guessing that AW Stats is probably a better gauge of how many people read the content I’m generating.

Add to this my recent findings regarding sites like Technorati. For no reason I can explain, my blog went unnoticed for the better part of a year. And I’m not the only one who has noticed this happening to their blogs. In addition, I stumbled upon something interesting regarding Technorati. If you are discussing a book for example, but don’t mention the title in the headline or in the first paragraph (or some set number of words perhaps), even if your entry has been registered/pinged, a search for that book may not yield the entry. Go back and update the post by moving the title to the first paragraph, and it will miraculously appear. Huh?

What a mess. Not just from the standpoint of someone attempting to gauge interest in the content they generate, but also from the standpoint of someone expecting to have good information supplied to them via a feed. Well, don’t count on it.

Why bring this up? Because I’ve just read something on Wired, “Island Wisdom, Coded in Java” (Link), that gets to the heart of why I don’t use a feed. It’s related to why I don’t think shopping centers and brick-and-mortar stores will vanish in the sea of e-commerce: there is both joy and learning in discovery. Sometimes I find an interesting article where I’d never think to look. Sometimes I happen to read something I’d considered unrelated to my interests and discover previously hidden relationships. Having information fed intravenously is no replacement for searching and discovery.

For this reason I’m considering cutting the feed from this blog. I write this mostly for my own enjoyment; certainly not because of the abundance of conversation here (which is admittedly stifled by the deluge of blogspam on any entry older than a few days) and obviously not from ad revenue. Plus, if I were to add banners pitching the niche products of microbrands, most of the target market – first adopters – would never see it.

So if you draw a feed from this blog, give me a compelling reason not to cut the chord.

Cool. Read more over on Inhabitat (Link) or, if your German is up to the translating task, visit the the Kulturarena website (Link) and follow the links it provides (the Gil Wilk site has some additional photos I enjoyed).

There is so much neat stuff happening in the world and what’s the big news in the U.S.? McMansions.

{Image Copyright © Torsten Seidl, Berlin und Cityrama, Berlin}

There’s a one-page piece over on Wired, “When Virtual Worlds Collide” (Link), that to me is pretty much stating the obvious. If I had to guess, author Steven Johnson read Raph Koster’s now net-infamous declaration on single-player games (I mentioned Koster’s posts earlier – reLink). And maybe – probably – he’s been following news of Multiverse (also something I’ve mentioned – reLink); the effort to create an infrastructure for MMOG’s. What he misses imo are the kinds of comments I’ve made on 3D file formats and their lack of portability in that post and elsewhere (I’ve also hinted at solutions to this issue – reLink). OGLE might be neat, but it’s no substitute for a truly universal 3D format.

Maybe someday.

{Update: Terra Nova has picked up the story and posted an entry, “Yeah, not so much” (Link). The discussion over there might be of interest. I’ve only scanned the comments, but I don’t get the impression some of the people there have followed Koster’s remarks regarding single-player games residing inside a larger metaversal (is that a word?) structure. It’s really mostly about games and narratives, I think.}