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cory doctorow
Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O’Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy,
once proposed an “ignore thread” feature for mailers: Flag a
thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide mes-
sages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those
messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate.
Last week’s dinner plans become this week’s discussion of next
year’s group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the
messages flow back into your inbox — and a single click takes you
back through all the messages you missed.
We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that
create a gray zone between “delete on sight” and “show this to me
right away.”
RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new
items posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they’re even
better at keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend’s
brilliant journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS read-
ers don’t distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance
of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder
from Slashdot. They don’t even sort your RSS feeds according to
the sites that you click-through the most.
There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet — not
just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my
assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable
by a single determined person. Today, I can’t even keep up with
a single high-traffic message-board. I can’t read all my email. I
can’t read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can’t
plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry
I read. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information
on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-
to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.
It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as
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