Glacial Erratics

Raymond M. Kristiansen is thinking about attention:    (PGZ)

This nicely describes the long term goal of the Purple suite of tools and ideas (PurpleNumbers, GranularAddressability, TransClusion, PurpleNet, PurpleNetwork and friends). In a fully fleshed out purple universe, all chunks of content are individually addressable and reusable (as micro content, if that's your preferred term) throughout the network, with flexible access control.    (PH1)

All your stuff exists in your pool. All my stuff exists in my pool. Anything that I say you can reuse is accessible by you with a straightforward identifier that points not to a particular page, but to the individual paragraphs, headers or list items within. This same model could be extended to audio and video as well.    (PH2)

The identifiers will be unique across the entire system, making them resilient in the face of edits, even edits that move the content across domains.    (PH3)

In the present day, purple numbers remain limited to single server implementations (there is experimental support for multiple server using tools). The Blue Oxen Collaboratories have a fairly integrated set of tools that use purple numbers, and the Indiana University Knowledge Base developers and editors use purple numbers extensively in their daily work through a network of mailing list archives, rt, blogs, irc tools, wikis and document repositories that use purple numbers and transclusion.    (PH4)

The systems provide what amounts to a shared infocloud for the participants where there attention and cognition is supported by an available but not in their face network of addressable information.    (PH5)

I'll try to flesh out some more details in a later entry.    (PH6)

Update: I've pointed to the quotation with PurpleSlurple, I'm ashamed I forgot.    (PHC)

More about purple:    (PH7)

• An Introduction to Purple from E.E. Kim    (PH8)
• Purple Numbers Coolness Draft    (PH9)
• Purple Number Identity    (PHA)
• Purple Number Signs from Tim Bray    (PHB)