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I was tooling around at work today and surfing through utilities on Newsgator to try to expand my RSS vocabulary. I found a site called blog explosion that purported to be able to explode my blog traffic. I signed-up because I like the image of a blog exploding with words and pictures broken into crooked letters and tattered digital photographs strewn throughout a smoky urban cyber landscape. So far my blog hasn't exploded. But I will be keeping an eye on it from a safe distance in case it does explode.

I finally got someone to respond to my craigslist posting for another person to play squash with. The winner of the get a chance to play squash with a total amateur who needs more people to play against is Kelly. She has a boyfriend from MIT and just got back from a ski trip to Colorado. Hopefully we can play after the ski trip. I need to get into tip-top squash shape for the return of Dave as he has promised. He is planning on drinking lots of beer and not exercising for a month and expects that I should be good enough to beat him 50% of the time when he returns. The gauntlet has been laid.

I also finally returned my Blackberry to California leaving me with no more email on my hip. Jorey and I had dinner and we had some fun discussions about entrepreneurial endeavors. We did note that we all have lots of email addresses that we use and everyone knows the level of importance when you get a certain email. An alum.mit.edu email is good for a trusted friend and business confidant. Jorey and I can send those back and forth to each other. A companyyouworkat.com address means that you are establishing a real business contact that you intend to follow-up. For friends but not business contacts they can get your personalized me@myfullname.com address. Lower down the ladder are the yahoo.com, hotmail.com, and gmail.com addresses that are used depending upon the person for chat rooms, signing-up for suspicious spam offers, and people you don’t want to hear from again. When you get an email it is good to know where you stand on the email ladder.

I was also thinking about the growth of non-private information and social networking as I passed someone walking towards Zaftigs. I thought to myself as I passed that I could know so much about that person if I could identify their name, email, or cell number as we passed. I might be able to go into Friendster and see who I know who is friends with them, classmates to see if I was in the same school or know someone who went to my school who knew them, linkedin to see if I've done business with the person, some geneology site to determine if I was related to them or if I knew someone who was related to them. The links are almost all in place and with the right human computer interface I could have everything with a ping from a cell phone and a mining utility that hunted for the relationship between me and them. It does sound very much like a 1984 Big Brother style system that completely invades people's privacy but at the same time it is just saving time doing what people waste their time trying to do as they socialize with each other. Aren't a million people already keeping publicly accessible blogs and doesn't linked-in have a few million users?

Maybe in the future people will socialize and learn to live with this wealth of information about everyone that they meet being immediately available not just when they go home to look-up the information on their computer but as a real-time part of the interaction with a stranger. These tweens that are jabbering at IM all day with poorly matched CaPiTals are going to make the transformation from Olsen twins to college grads in the blink of an eye. For me it would be a great lubricant to remove some major social anxieties of meeting someone and not knowing who they are. I recently introduced myself to a key business contact at a potential partner using Linkedin. It felt normal and right to do so even for me, a relatively cautious networker.

So tonight I finished watching Ghost in the Shell. I had started the movie when Ami was over but I fell asleep. I started watching again before walking over to meet Jorey so my mind was filled with Japanese futuristic genetic cyborg psycho-babble. The imagery in the movie is amazing although it is hard not to chuckle at the poorly acted and possibly poorly translated weird Japanese cyber lingo. The vision is very similar to the information everywhere future that I am expecting in the not so distant future as wearable integrated computers connected to cell phones and PDAs are ubiquitous and easily connected to tools like social networking sites, RSS feeds, and organizers.

In the immortal words of the merged spirit of the Puppet Master and the woman cyborg known as the major at the end of Ghost in the Shell who had been reborn in the body of a young girl after the two perfect naked female bodies had been ravished by fighting, car accidents, and being blown to smithereens from the neck down by snipers in helicopters from section 9 trying to prevent project 2501 a.k.a the puppet master from reproducing in the Tokyo archeological museum:

"I understand it now and there are more words that go with the passage. These words are – When I was a child my speech, words, and feeling were all those of a child. Now that I am a man I have no more use for childish ways. Now I can say these things without help in my own voice because now I am no longer the woman known as the major nor am I the program that is called the puppet master. And where does the newborn go from here.... The net is vast and infinite."