Attended a pre-lunch talk with Jaron Lanier, "Can networks be better designed to suppress the worst qualities in human nature?" Interesting meditations on the negative side of mob-formation and blandness in the absence of individuality, Wikipedia-style; offering empathy-evoking avatars in the UI; enforcing a cost to nastyness through persistent, yet possibly still anonymous personas. Lots more, plenty of shrugs, but an interesting view from a guy I've been reading about since I was a young little netizen.

A thought for reposting back to decafbad.com from here: Ignore any top-level outline nodes without children. But, at midnight each night, gather up and repost the day's outline nodes with children, using the top-level parent as the title. This is basically how the OPML blog here treats them anyways. The rational is that something I've bothered to compose into an entry with a title is worth copying over, while anything else is more stream-of-consciousness and tumbleloggy and stays here.

Hello world.