Linkstew

Last night I was doing a lot of file management, so I wasn't terribly surprised that OS X asked me "A newer item named "filename" already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the older one you are moving?" more than a few times.

And every time, my reaction was the same: "Well, I don't know, hold on, let me check." And so I went to the terminal, and after figuring out where both files were I fired off a diff and then made my decision. But more often than not, the files were identical -- which is something a computer the computer is perfectly capable of telling me. So how come I have to go out of my way to figure it out every time?

Copies of the same file getting smeared all over your hard drive and network seems like a pretty common occurrence, based on both my personal experience and my experience with the "real world," and yet aside from the "newer" metric, your computer really doesn't go very far out of its way to help you with this problem.

What I want to know is, in this day and age of overkill computers, why hasn't any desktop OS implemented file diffing, or better yet, md5 sum checks, when a collision happens during an interactive file move or copy. "An item named "filename" already exists in this location, but the files are identical. Do you want replace it with the copy you are moving?"

Admittedly, computing md5 sums on large files can take a little while, but we're already putting a complete stop on the rest of the operation anyway, so it could just display a progress bar and message where it would otherwise display the difference information while it computes the md5 sum, and still give the user the decision buttons and the timestamp information in the meantime. Then, the user could either immediately make a decision based on the information, or wait for the md5 sums to finish before making the decision.

I like sleeping. Like, a lot. And once I'm asleep, I'll do anything to stay there. What usually ultimately gets me out of bed is the urgent need to do something: Having to go to the bathroom or to a meeting at work have been the primary things waking me up these days. And when neither of those come up, I just been sleep in absurdly late.

Nothing I've tried has worked to wake me up, because my cunning sleeping mind always works out some way to shut up the irritation. And even if the noise does wake me up, my half-awake mind is usually on my subconsciousness' side, and would far rather stay in the happy fuzzy glow of being half awake than actually get up.

So I've decided that what I want/need is a Simon Alarm Clock. Have the first several beeps start quiet, to gradually wake you up, and then have it get more insistent if you don't start playing. Make it configurable, so you can set how high you have to score to turn off the alarm clock. You'd probably want a way to detect if the player is trying and getting close, just in case the player sucks at Simon. The battery cover would have to be optionally screwable, to protect the batteries from your devious unconscious mind. And there are more details I could ramble on about, but it's a fairly straightforward idea that doesn't need that much explanation.

It would totally work! I'd buy one.

I just read Kevin's article about how hopeless DRM currently is and how it relates to Apple's (fairly strongly) rumored upcoming iTunes-integrated downloadable music service (probably to be announced on Monday), and between that and the subsequent conversation I had with Kevin, I got to thinking about what features the Ideal Downloadable Music Service (hereafter referred to as IDMS) would offer.

I was an emusic subscriber for awhile, and contrasting my emusic experience with what I expect from Apple's upcoming service offers a couple of significant insights into what the IDMS would offer.

The first thing a downloadable music service needs is music to let people download, and while emusic obviously had some music, in the end their song selection was just not enough. Sure, there was still a lot of music there, and I downloaded a lot from them while I had my subscription, but even more of what I wanted was not there, and that's why I ultimately cancelled my subscription. This issue will be addressed immediately by Apple's service, because the rumor claims that they've gotten all five major record labels to agree to make their music available through the service.

The IDMS would, of course, have as many songs available as possible, if not every song, ever.

But just because it has every song ever doesn't mean that the system is going to be useful. No, the system is also going to need to be easy to use. Here, I'm going to draw on both my experiences using emusic and my experiences with peer to peer file sharing programs.

With P2P, there's a lot of wasted time involved. First I have to find someone who's offering the song I want at a decent quality, and I have to hope they don't go offline before I finish downloading it. And of course, this doesn't even get into the issues of trying to find entire albums -- First you have to find a track listing for the album so you know what you're looking for, and then you have to start looking for all of those tracks, and you usually end up getting them from different hosts so the quality and consistency of the files can be all over the board. And neurotic as I am, I always end up going and immediately listening to the songs when I download them, to make sure there aren't any problems with the rip. And don't even get me started on mislabeled songs...

Basically, once you add the "time is money" factor to the P2P equation, the music you're getting isn't actually free. And the frustration involved in using P2P will probably cut years off your life.

On the other hand, there was emusic. If they had the music, they always had the full album, and there were never any flaws in the files, but all the files were only encoded 128kpbs. The big problem was that the default interface of having to download these files with a web browser was very tedious, and even with a third party tool to help me download whole albums, it was still a time consuming multi-step process to go from finding the songs to downloading them to putting them into my music library. Considering I was already paying for the service, the additional time is money factors left me even more irritated with the process.

In contrast to both those, the IDMS needs to seamlessly integrate into your music listening flow, allowing you to easily and reliably find and download high quality music (as individual songs or complete albums) directly into your music library. The only way a pay to download service is going to be successful here is by making it so much easier and so much more reliable than the other options that it will win users by allowing them to immediately purchase, download, and listen to what they want, without wasting any time with the problems of P2P systems that I described above. I expect Apple's upcoming service will meet most of these criteria fairly well.

So far the IDMS has every song ever, and it's a one click operation. But if every song cost $2, who would use it? So, the IDMS is going to need to be sufficiently cheap per song to entice listeners to purchase more songs than they otherwise would, allowing the IDMS and the record labels to make money through bulk sales. Because each additional song sold only costs the IDMS a miniscule amount in bandwidth, the more they sell the better. This point is all about bulk bulk bulk. Heck, it'd be nice to entice people with an unlimited download subscription option. And I think I'd actually be upset if buying the entire album wasn't cheaper than buying individual songs. And on this point, I have no idea what to expect from Apple's service, but more than a dollar per song is completely unreasonable, and even a dollar per song is way too much in my opinion.

Before I go on, let me share a couple of quick anecdotes about my experiences with the three primary forms of music distribution I've been dealing with lately:

I still buy a moderate number of CDs, and the first and last thing I do with a new CD is rip it before tossing it onto the shelf. Of course, sometimes I have to go rerip the CD when something goes funny, but the big problem is if I lose the CD and lose the mp3s, then I've lost the music and would have to buy a new copy of the CD. Or if I lose the CD and some fantastic new digital music technology comes along, I'd have to buy the CD again and rerip it into the new format. Bah and Bah.

With P2P, if I lose the files, then I'm going to have to go through the frustrating process of finding them again. Blah and blah.

And perhaps worst of all in this arena is emusic: My subscription allowed me to download unlimited music for $10 a month, but since I've cancelled my subscription, I can now no longer redownload the songs I've previously downloaded. This is worse than you think, because before I subscribed, I bought a few TMBG albums from them individually, and though I paid for those independently of my subscription, I now no longer have access to those files if I somehow lose the mp3s. I've written them a few angry emails about this, but with no luck. Boo and boo.

So, while what I described above is a downloadable music service that I'd probably use, it's still not the IDMS. In particular, here's the killer feature that would put the I in the IDMS:

Once I've bought a song using the IDMS, I should be able to download it as many times as I want. Now, you might think this is obvious, but first of all, note that I emphasized the word "song," and second of all, the possibilities for this are pretty amazing.

Remember above when I mentioned having to rerip CDs if a better music technology became available? Imagine just being able to download a smaller, better sounding copy of a song you already bought instead. Heck, have the IDMS notify you about this if you want. (Though it'd kinda suck if the new technology had some foul DRM in it, but we'll hope for the best)

The emphasis on this feature is that the user buys the right to download that song as many times as he wants, and not just the right to download that particular copy of that song.

Imagine being able to walk into an Apple Store or Apple Cybercafe with just your iPod, sitting down, logging in with your .mac account, plugging in your iPod, and downloading and putting some different music you own on your iPod.

Imagine being at a friend's and saying "dude, you have to hear this song... hold on, just let me download it from my library... I already bought it."

Imagine promotions based on songs you've already bought -- free remixes, etc.

The trick is, the features of the IDMS would be so useful and the price for songs so cheap, that DRM won't ever even be necessary. People will want to pay to use the service because of the advantages it offers in their music listening lifestyle. I actually believe that people would prefer to just use the IDMS than to mess with trying to find songs via P2P programs. If built correctly, the long term benefits of the IDMS would outweigh the short term advantage of the "free" aspect of the P2P system. Not only that, but the IDMS would be better in the short term in a lot of ways, as described above.

Of course, the IDMS has a lot of room to be evil, too, so here are a few of the gotchas to possibly look out for:

• Forcing users to upgrade their songs when a new technology comes along that has "better" DRM protection.
• Selling user's purchasing patterns to marketers. While this has always been a danger with online shopping (and credit cards, etc), this would be more problematic in this case because the IDMS would have easy access to all of your music purchasing history.
• As soon as your music library is hooking into the net, the possibility of having the IDMS client detect "possibly illegal" songs in your library gets kind of scary.
• Some way for the IDMS to "revoke" a song you purchased would be very unhappy.
• And on.

As absurd as it sounds, if a service came out that had the features of the IDMS I described, it very well might convince me to buy music I've already bought, because it'd be the last time I'd have to buy it. I'd happily pay for the peace of mind in knowing that if my laptop were destroyed, it would be a trivial matter to rebuild my music library the next morning, rather than a painstaking process that'd take weeks or even months, and who knows how much money. (If you think that sounds strange, just remember how many albums you owned on both vinyl and tape or tape and CD, or even all three).

Of course, some of this is probably a pipe dream, but a boy can look at the stars, can't he? For now, we'll just have to wait and see what Apple actually offers.

I was inspired to write this article on a train ride back in February, and that's where I wrote most of it, too, without any internet to do any research. So of course, as soon as I plugged in I found articles like this one from more than two years ago, and I'm once again reminded that there's not an original thought in my head. But, I already wrote these 1,000 words, so here they are:

In my day, I've owned PDAs, mp3 players, a few Game Boys, a digital camera, and a cell phone. These days, I only carry my cell phone, my laptop, and my iPod with me regularly. The bulk of these devices is a reason that I stopped carrying some of them regularly, but it's not the primary reason.

At one point, I had wireless internet on my Palm V thanks to OmniSky (are they dead yet?). It was nice for what it was, but even then it seemed obvious to me that that was merely a temporary solution. Today, convergence is the name of the game, with more and more cell phones providing PDA functionality, and some are even providing gaming functionality.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the mobile devices (including cell phones, PDAs, game players, and to a lesser extent mp3 players and cheap digital cameras) are rapidly approaching a convergence. I won't be at all surprised if the more popular devices are going to be the ones that provide more features.

For that matter, the home entertainment market is hurtling towards convergence, too, with my PS2 able to play DVDs and connect to the internet.

Nintendo currently dominates the portable gaming market, with its Game Boy line being the only real contender. However, Nintendo has said on multiple occasions that they are a game company, and were only interested in supporting gaming with their devices. Witness the lack of DVD functionality in the Gamecube as a prime example of this. Generalizing this behavior and putting it in terms of what I've been talking about, it's unlikely that Nintendo is going to be very receptive to the convergence trend. In fact, I would be honestly surprised if Nintendo hopped on that bandwagon, and bundled phone or other features into the base Game Boy configuration. Sure, Nintendo may reintroduce peripherals like the Game Boy Camera or the Game Boy cell phone connector, but accessorizing is more Nintendo's habit than converging. (Because there's more money in accessories!)

Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony and Microsoft (and others) attempt to compete in the portable gaming space not with a dedicated game system, but rather, with a gaming platform piggybacked onto other devices, with the most likely target being cell phones. Heck, Nokia's upcoming N-Gage is just the first in what I expect to be a string of gaming platforms piggybacked on top of other devices. And I think, with that strategy, it is likely that someone will overtake Nintendo's dominance in the portable arena, primarily because I don't expect Nintendo to embrace the convergence that their future competitors will be offering. The more popular devices will be those that offer more features, so people will buy phones that also happen to be able to play games, and since their phones support the games, they'll buy the games for that platform.

So convergence of portable devices is coming, and I expect piggybacked platforms to have a pretty significant impact, but I'm not actually happy about that. And it's not just because I'm a Nintendo fanboy. No, I'm not happy about this because I subscribe to the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." Witness my love of UNIX as proof of this. So I'm not happy about this convergence that I'm expecting because I'm afraid that we're going to end up with a sea of devices that do many things half assed. My iPod plays music incredibly well. My Game Boy plays games well. My phone answers calls well. My CellularGamePod, on the other hand...

I don't mind convergence. It's not a bad thing, and for people who can't afford multiple devices, it's probably a good thing. But I think a better solution that could be more significant than convergence in the long run is the idea of a "Personal Area Network."

• Components of a "Personal Area Network"
• A cellular link node for network/internet access. This could be a cell phone, a computer, or even a PDA with a wi-fi card installed.
• Bluetooth (or another, ideally less "nasty" protocol) to allow devices to communicate with each other. This would also enable network access for non-networked nodes in the network.
• An auto-discovery protocol. Preferably Rendevous, but (if I recall correctly) JINI might also do the trick.
• Some standard protocols for sharing standard data between devices.
• Then, add devices to yourself as you see fit. Some of these devices could be devices which offer more than one service.
• And most importantly, all of your data is stored on your local devices -- not accessed through the network.

The advantages and uses of such a PAN innumerable. You could access the contact list on your iPod with a borrowed cell phone to make a quick phone call. You could connect your laptop to the net using your cell phone or a friend's. Your Gamecube and Game Boy could talk to each other for connectivity. Two Game Boy owners could play each other without need for a cable. Take a digital picture and email it to a friend through your cell phone, or store the picture on your camera as identification, without using a shitty camera-phone. And on.

Basically, some devices would "offer" services, and other devices would "request" services. Phones both offer and request contact data. My Game Boy requests net. My laptop would offer and request a lot, depending on its current configuration (I'd certainly want my laptop to offer net if it were plugged into a cable modem, instead of messing around with a cellular link). And my iPod could offer music and conacts (though bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth to stream music -- just one of many reasons this would ideally use a better protocol than bluetooth).

When my phone connects to a device offering contact data, it would browse that data remotely and not save a local copy, unless the owner of the data allowed it (though if the owner doesn't want you to download the data, he probably wouldn't let you browse it in the first place) and the browser of the data requested a copy of the data. This protects the owner of the data, and keeps each device from getting cluttered with data unnecessarilly.

I probably shouldn't be emphasizing contacts so much, because that's an example of pure data that should arguably be availble just from "the network", but that's a topic and an argument for another article. Better applications for this PAN technology are probably things like the digital camera services and the net services I described above.

The biggest unsolved problem in the sketch of a PAN I described above is security, but I can imagine numerous possible solutions to that problem. The first solution that popped into my mind was giving each piece of hardware a hardware based keypair. Don't make any way to get the "private" key from the hardware short of tearing the hardware apart and working some EE magic. Then make a "known_hosts" for your PAN, and your PAN can use something akin to ssh host key verification to allow access to your network. Of course, firmware upgrades would always have to be supported in case of flaws in the protocol... Something a little better than having to manage a "known_hosts" would be cool, but like I said, this is just one solution of many. And heck, for all I know, bluetooth might already have some way to do secure ad hoc networks, but I'm on a train right now without a PAN, so I can't connect my laptop to my phone and check. =)

I'm sure most of these ideas aren't very novel, but the entire vision is still my ideal future of digital devices. I wish I could do more than just hope things turn out this way.

When "About the Finder..." was posted a few weeks ago, it seemed like I saw it linked on every site I read that day. And yet, here I am not only linking to it, but two weeks late, to boot.

While a lot of the ideas are nice, I mainly wanted to draw attention to Sircusa's write up of "live search folders" and "iTunes for files (a finder powered by arbitrarily extensible metadata)." First, if just those two ideas were implemented in Panther, I'd be thrilled.

And second, after reading Siracusa's article, I was left regretting that I hadn't written up my ideas for basically what he suggested sooner. Admittedly, my ideas were no more original than his. Mine were also inspired by iTunes, Copland, and the BeOS File System. But I'm now more motivated than ever to start sharing my thoughts on how things could be that much more powerful and usable. Hopefully I'll have something posted in this vein by the end of next week.

So at the end of the last new Buffy episode -- the one where Dawn thinks she's a potential slayer for awhile -- Xander and Dawn have a heartwarming little talk about how you can still be important without having any superpowers. Xander talked for awhile how he'd been helping Buffy for 7 years, and at the end Dawn said "Maybe that's your power... Seeing, Knowing."

And I sat up straight and were anyone else in the room, I would have commented on Xander's stint as a bartender back in season 4. But since I didn't have anyone to talk to, I wrote down this sentence on my laptop instead: "Xander was a bartender, and bartenders are romanticized as seers and knowers! Xander's stint as a bartender was a metaphor for his role in the group!"

Which, rereading the script for Beer Bad is pretty obvious, but that sort of thing is one of the reasons I like the show: various themes continually reoccur in different ways throughout the show, and sometimes subtle references to other episodes happen all the time.

And, woohoo, new Buffy tonight. Pity I already accidentally saw a preview, which spoiled the surprise for me.

One of the classic questions of cognitive science is "Why do things look as they do?" Two opposing answers to this question are "Things look as they do because we are the way we are," and "Things look as they do because the world is the way it is."

On the one hand, things look as they do because the world is the way it is. Photons are emitted by light sources, bounce off of things, and into our eyes. The wavelengths of these photons determines the colors we perceive.

But on the other hand, things look as they do because we are the way we are. Any optical illusion is evidence of this, because in an optical illusion we perceive something that is contrary to what exists in the world.

The Cognitive Science classes I've taken here at Berkeley concede the necessity of environmental stimulus, but beyond that are pretty organism-centric. The phenomenon of optical illusions (among others) is taken as evidence that our experiences of the world are dependent on our biology.

But "because we are the way we are" always seemed to be missing something for me, and today I figured out what it was.

Why do things look as they do?

Because we are the way we are because the world is the way it is.

We see the colors we do because our eyes are visible to a specific wavelength of light. Why are our eyes sensitive to visible light instead of infrared? Because the majority of the light that reaches the surface of the earth is in that wavelength. Why does the wagon wheel illusion occur? Because the proximity heuristic used to help solve the motion correspondence problem was more accurate than other failed (and hence unknown) heuristics, which gave the organisms with those heuristics an advantage.

If our species had developed on a world where gravity behaved differently, or where other wavelengths of light predominated, we would be different organisms, and we would most likely experience the world differently. Our brains were shaped by the environment in which they developed, making our experiences just as much a product of our environment as they are a product of our biology.

(Please note that I am not talking about "nature versus nurture." That's a whole other can of worms that I'm not even going to get into.)

Inspiration struck me tonight, and realized why I blog: I'm backing myself up.

Now stick with me for a moment while I explain this, because there were a number of steps involved in my reaching this conclusion.

When I find myself explaining the difference between "RAM" and "hard disk storage" to someone who doesn't really know computers, I always end up using the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory to help him understand things.

"RAM is like a person's short term working memory he uses when he's actively thinking about something," I tell him. "RAM is that 7+-2 you hear so much about. RAM is where your computer keeps what you're typing until you save the changes, just like short term memory is where your brain keeps what you're thinking about until you make the effort to 'commit it to memory.'"

"Hard disk storage, on the other hand, is like where your brain keeps your memory of your first kiss," I continue. "You have access to it when you want it, and the rest of the time it just sits in your brain until you need it. When you hit 'save,' the hard disk is the memory to which what you typed is committed."

"A person can only think about a few things at once with his short term memory, but by buying more RAM, your computer can think about more things at once. And a person can remember a lot more than he can think about, and by buying a bigger hard disk, your computer can remember a lot more." I explain.

But in Microserfs, a comment is made that "We've reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies," and that statement stopped me in my tracks.

In a flash of insight, I turned the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory around, switched Human Memory to Human Knowledge, and ended up with Human Knowledge is Computer Memory.

Looking at it from that direction, I realized how amazingly volatile and short term all of human memory really is. We don't "save" things to our "long term" memory. Long term memory happens to be a little less volatile than working memory, but both of them will be lost if we crash.

I realized that if I don't externalize myself, then when I "shut down," my unsaved changes will be lost. I blog in order to save me. I'm backing myself up so that once I'm turned off, my data will still live on.

Through the looking glass of Human Knowledge is Computer Memory, my short term memory becomes registers for my CPU, and maybe a little cache, while my "long term" memory is just my main memory. It's all volatile, though. My blog is my hard disk.

And sprinkling in a little Douglas Adams for good measure, the human species becomes a massively parallel processing computer. Every human experience provides our internal computers with more data that, in combination with data each one of us has acquired by accessing stored human knowledge, produces more data that can be added to the human experience.

But to be part of the human experience, that information has to be saved, by blogging (or other means). Catalogued and indexed in computers, human experience is preserved and available for future generations to build upon, eventually synthesizing the question whose answer is 42.

That last paragraph is awfully human centric, but it's humans who save their changes for later humans to synthesize into still more complex ideas. Like this one.

After google indexed me to hell and back last month, I didn't really notice any change in the number of hits from google searches I was getting.

But more than two weeks later, my hits from google searches jumped from about 20 on September 30 to 162 on October 1. The week went on, and I had 135 on the 2nd, 111 on the 3rd, 121 on the 4th, 125 on the 5th, 155 on the 6th, and 161 on the 7th.

"Wow, this is pretty neat," I thought. "Too bad it'll probably die back down once google indexes me without including the why pages."

And I figured that would be soon, because googlebot had started indexing me again on the 3rd, and was done by the 6th, and it'd ignored the why pages.

But then, on October 8th, I jumped from 162 hits from google searches to 238. Cricky!

I guess it's time to start posting to Disturbing Search Requests again.

And the people who are searching for information are usually landing at an entry page that is related to what they're searching for. (Of course, the people searching for files, I can't help.) So I'm happy I'm getting hits and I seem to be giving people useful information (In my humble estimation).

The problem is, none of these people are staying. Of more than 1200 hits from google searches, about 15 people have browsed around for awhile (using my related links, I might add! Yay stew!), but only one has come back to visit again. Eh, oh well. I guess one new reader from google searches is actually pretty good, all things considered.

Oh, and don't ask me how I have such detailed information about repeat visitors, etc. You don't want to know.

So right after I put Linkstew++ online, Googlebot started its latest attempt to index Linkstew. Only Googlebot didn't know what it was getting into this time, and the poor little fella's been indexing Linkstew for the past three weeks straight. So far in September alone, Linkstew has gotten more than 20,000 requests from Googlebot.

(For those of you not in the know, "indexing" is what a search site like Google does to a web site so that you can search the web. It tends to do this by downloading a copy of each page it comes across a link to, and storing that page in a database, and "indexing" it in order to be able to quickly say whether or not it contains a word.)

So, what's so different this time from last time? Well, before Linkstew++, a request for any page but the front page returned a code 404 (Page Not Found) instead of a 200. It just so happened that those 404s were pages with the reqeusted content on them, and I had been working some trickery to make that happen. When a user saw that, they never knew anything was wrong. When a crawler like Googlebot saw the 404, it just discarded it and said "That was a 404, so it must be a broken link. We don't want to index that because people get upset when they get search results pointing to 404s."

So Googlebot (and other search spiders) never saw an entry page before Linkstew++. And it just so happens that on the entry pages are the links to the "Why" pages explaining relationships in The Stew.

So, some quick math... 1200 entry pages with 20 why links on each page is only 24,000 pages that Googlebot has to index. Um, oops. I think that a robots.txt entry telling spiders to ignore "why.phtml" is probably in order.

But this incident led me to consider evil applications of what I've learned. I could write a Search Spider Trap, which would generate an infinite supply of pages and links using power sets of the words in /usr/dict/words (or any other list of well known words), and then lure thousands of unsuspecting web surfers into my trap as well with all those common words, only when they get to the trap, it would look a lot like Linkstew... But that would be evil. Hm, I wonder if anyone would ever notice. I'm pretty sure the search spider wouldn't notice, because Googlebot has blindly indexed 20,000 of my pages so far.

Hm, looks like I've got another motto: "Linkstew: Responsible for 24,000 of Google's 1,610,476,000 pages."

I had my first classes today, and one of them was Anthro 160, "Forms of Folklore." And after just one lecture, I'm really looking forward to it. I feel an itching at the back of my brain telling me that this is something that I'm going to enjoy, and I haven't seen anything to disprove that yet.

I've heard three things about this class: Good professor, interesting material, bad bad evil term project. And yes, the project is a little insidious, but it doesn't seem that bad...

The project? Collect (at least) 40 pieces of folklore from friends and family and whoever you can find, and gather information about where the informant learned that lore, and what the informant (and others) thinks it means, and so on. Each item is a separate entity, and is supposed to be prepared individually. Analysis of one piece is not supposed to cross-reference the analysis of another piece. Basically, the project is collect 40 pieces of folklore, and then write 40 short reports about all that folklore. And for seven of those pieces, find a printed parallel of that piece of folklore, and examine the parallels and differences. And yes, there's a shear bulk of work to do there, but I think it will be interesting.

If I could get my ducks in a row and didn't have a project to finish for work, Fray Day would be the perfect place for me to start this project. But that's probably not going to happen. My folklore archive isn't due until December 7th, though, so I've got all kinds of time... so I say now.

For the curious, one of the most integral characteristics of folklore is apparently multiple realization. That is, different versions of the story are known all over the place. If someone says "The way I heard it...", you're dealing with folklore.

And in case you can't tell, I'm feeling very drawn in already, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. I'm vaguely thinking about what a blog version of a folklore archive would be like, but I guess I should wait and see how my folklore archive itself turns out. Well, it would be kind of like In Passing, only more focused and with more detail and analysis and categorization.

Kevin, as ever, is a well of ideas. This month, we've got got the 2001 Weblogger Purity Test Survey. Well, kind of. For the next two weeks, you can submit your questions to be part of the final survey which will be released in September.