Spock Bag
posted 14 Oct ’05, 1.30pm MDT PST on flickr
I embroidered this Spock bag for Mason the other day.
I am trying to determine of the recent small trickle of emails notifying me that “XXXXX has requested your trust on Spock” is of merit or just another blotch of Quechup.
So before I beam up or do any sort of social software mind meld, what do I make of something billed as:
Spock is the leading people search application. Spock searches the internet to help you find information about people in your life.
When you join, you can build your network to find where everyone you know is on the internet. Every time you search, Spock will personalize your results to include information that is relevant to your network. You can enhance your search experience even further by establishing a trust relationship with people in your network, allowing you to search each other’s networks for relevant people.
Hmmm, not exactly seeing the sweet spot, can anyone throw some light my way? I’m finding myself just a wee bit more cautious.
So spocking myself finds me in many life forms. There I am following the baseball playing Alan Levine and shoot, Baseball Alan gets the slicker URL, I am http://www.spock.com/Alan-Levine-Is8ay1WP… and I see Mr Spock has mind melded with my blog, LinkedIn profile, and more…. feels weird, like the stare on the bag in the photo.
How many more social networks do we need? They are popping out like pregnant rabbits.
Perhaps, I should just arch upward my pointy eyebrow, and say…. “Fascinating.”
Or, I ought to be out looking for some sort of cloaking device.
This is what my friend wrote yesterday about Spook.
I tried this out a week or so ago (http://www.spock.com/Patrick-Gosetti-Murrayjohn-Cy5ti1cC) . Maybe a bit spooky, but my reaction to it was more ‘whoa! neat!’ than ‘whoa! spooky!’. Partly that ‘cuz it’s working with semantic web technologies, which always excite me. I think that part of the spookiness comes from the greater info gathering and organizing capabilities that come with semantic web stuff.
The link from Sue also implicitly highlights what seems to be a premise of it–that there is a user-responsibility to provide clarifying info. That’s just a good web 2.0 principle at work–improve the system through user contributions. If it can manage to scrape more and more meaningful info from the web (say, through rdf, microformats, or sneakier scrapers), the data will only get better and the spookiness will, I think, disappear. In it’s place, nifty unexpected and relevant connections will start showing up.
I like the perspective Patrick- it is much iin the spirit of more of Weinberger’s miscellaneous-ness.
I did not agree with the view and the comment threads from that post Sue:
http://manwithnoblog.com/2007/12/15/spock-is-spooky/
where people demand that their personal information is being harvested without “asking their permission”- Mr Spock is semanticizing your information that you have already put into the public web- from public LinkedIn profiles, public web sites, all stuff that is easily found a la Google.