the Alpha

If it isn't VALUABLE maybe I won't come back to the content... So if I'm creating content that isn't VALUABLE maybe I only check back on it to see who "liked" it. And who cares who liked it? VALUE to ME is what I need in a writing platform...

Why is this platform valuable? METANOTES IS ONLY AS VALUABLE AS THE CONTENT USERS CREATE WITH IT. That makes sense, right? So our users must be encouraged to create more notes and spaces incessantly to keep the momentum going.

YOUR GOALS ARE WHAT IS VALUABLE ABOUT YOU. You may have unconscious goals like "taking good care of my family" and you may have conscious goals like "one billion spaces spawned!"

Brainstorming your GOALS makes more of these creative solutions happen because GOALS are more persistent.

That amazing apartment I lived in was CREATIVE and not really PRODUCTIVE.

It was probably my fault... but I produced basically nothing of value there even though I had soooo many IDEAS.

This difference between IDEAS and actually PRODUCING something is remarkable because while you're generating IDEAS you feel very very amazing... And then you wind up with nothing in the end unless you shift into PRODUCING.

beta through psi

not just "creativity"

i don't want to just make another big puffy cloud of content when it comes right down to it. I'm sick of "content".

I'm DISCONTENT.

the Omega

• Build resistance to desultory usage through software specifications.
• Gain experience and make further spec recommendations.
• Get the feel of typing into METANOTES 5.0 so that it can be described in marketing documents.

des·ul·to·ry ˈdesəlˌtôrē

lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm. "a few people were left, dancing in a desultory fashion" synonyms: casual, cursory, superficial, token, perfunctory, half-hearted, lukewarm; More antonyms: keen (of conversation or speech) going constantly from one subject to another in a halfhearted way; unfocused. "the desultory conversation faded" occurring randomly or occasionally. "desultory passengers were appearing"

• Emptiness is why Google got big... ** Empty in contrast to the mess that was the Yahoo/Excite "portal" paradigm.
• ALL THE HITS BEGIN EMPTY... YouTube Twitter Facebook Myspace ** Geocities

These are empty spaces for PEOPLE to fill up with their OWN stuff. This is ultimately the CREATIVE urge... rendered PRODUCTIVE at last.

Interesting question, whether this very typing is PRODUCING as opposed to just creating. I think that's why I want this website to be tuned around GOALS... because by setting a GOAL on this page at the outset, I avoid DESULTORY CREATION and my notes in this space become GOAL ORIENTED from the get-go...

Everything I wanted makes no sense now because all I ever wanted was to create a hit... And I see now in hindsight how little my life in LA had to do with that. Here in Fremont life is absolutely without any goals. It's funny that I am in a "goal-free zen state" now all of a sudden because everything I thought was a goal before turns out to be only vaguely pointed in the right direction.

I'm coming at this next year with a blank slate and I guess that's the only thing I want in life. A blank fucking slate.

You see... I have come to see "creativity" as an ENEMY WITHIN...

Unless one PRODUCES one is just full of mere opinions and not contributing. Folks who are creative can be a huge waste of time.

I'd like to think we can do something a lot better than just another place to chat... more a place to REALLY THINK.

Now the GOAL of a space may be to find hot pix to treasure later, of course...

I think that's why Andy Warhol has a special place in the history of art. Warhol created a FACTORY for his art, and had his people screenprint COPIES of his art for sale...

He was PRODUCTIVE in a way other artists weren't as a result of this strategy.

It's the origin of Unamerican... Not many understood Unamerican as an ART project. As ART, my goal was "create once, produce everywhere".

This is the NINTH note I created on this page, and it should have been my FIRST.

Now that I see that I didn't define the GOALS of this space upfront, I can see that the typing I did until now was DESULTORY.

Perhaps I now understand that all writing that is not GOAL ORIENTED may wind up degenerating into drivel.

Folks don't need philosophy, nor do they need their OWN philosophy. They need to pursue their GOALS... I know this because I myself just caught myself becoming desultory.

This is a list generated manually of low hanging fruit ideas from the brainstorm on this space.

In the future a TO DO LIST panel next to the TIME LOG panel would let users collect tasks as they come up.

• easy URL paste popup for images ** a photo icon next to the star maybe?
• inline emoji
• colored notes
• attribution and timestamping in notes (perhaps as a tooltip)

The bullshit dynamics of LA life eventually ebbed away and I was left with a solitary life of reading books and making theories this year. Pretty much all I did was lose money in the stock market in the last few months of last year... However the more important loss was my utter loss of momentum, of GOALS. If only I had been looking at my true goals persistently maybe I would have been faster in getting things done and avoided the fucking stock market entirely because I was busy doing what I am now and only now here in Fremont prepared to do... Which is ebb out of the real world completely and play with this utopia we are constructing here.

Exactly what I wanted to do immediately upon returning from a desultory visit to Starbucks... I wanted to create a space and start writing to myself.

I don't quite know why. I just wanted to WRITE. That's a key usage model, to be honest... The meme before was "a new kind of word processor"... I think that's why both John and I remarked upon Ommwriter during its brief "hm that's interesting" phase...

it'd be nice if a new visitor to this space could be visually aware of which note was created first, which second et al. like a little running number count.

bonus points: let the visitor toggle into a view which rearranges the notes by creation order.

because emoji would rule in note chat we could have an emoji icon on the right bottom of a note during editing mode so I could do this ;D after notes like that last one... #lowhangingfruit

Dynamics are things actually changing. Things changing means the opportunity to grow... or collapse and cut losses and grow somewhere else, at least.

Things that get STUCK are the enemy.

The big idea is that much of the Web is STUCK. It's content frozen in time, like an old blog post... It invites zero interaction.

Going to have to look into Ommwriter again because it might have some ideas for us...

I'm thinking that the content on this page can be re-visualized in various useful ways...

• an OUTLINE VIEW which just renders the page as an easily printable page which can also be copy-pasted as a whole
• a SLIDESHOW view which takes over the screen as a lightbox overlay with one note, then lets you go back/forth through the notes in that space one by one
• an OVERVIEW view which "zooms out to fit a space into your browser" so you can see ALL the notes on a space in one glance, then click whatever looks appealing to exit the Overview and examine that note... Maybe onRollover an abstract of the note is shown via tooltip...
• a GRID view which snaps the notes into a regular rectangular grid like Pinterest

that would let users see their most used tags at anytime

sooo we had the TIME LOG concept and that's still a good one (ycth now)

how about another panel that's a TO DO LIST like a mini Clear?

That way if I come up with an idea WHILE i'm typing away, I have a place to put it.

If you #tag a note, that note shows up when you select that #tag in your Tags menu...

However you can't modify or change other people's notes.

Hence, it's good for us to allow COMMENTS on a note so you can tag a note that isn't yours.

This would also let you comment on a note that isn't yours, without spawning another note (and digressing the conversation thereby).

It'd work like a BACKCHANNEL for a note, sort of like the wikipedia discuss feature, or Quora comments (which you need to click into to see, thus keeping most readers focused on the actual answers rather than comments threads).

• a Tags menu for users to look at stuff they've written that are tagged with whatever they tagged with
• If the user selects a hashtag from their Tags menu, they get a space with only the notes they've tagged with that tag in the space.

i missed it to be honest. i really dig mom and dad and their quirks and simple joys. I fit right in, too, there's a good vibe here. Perfect for typing on a new typing tool. Indian music in the background... rainy day outside... it's very mellow watching my parents and at some point it's going to have to end as I've got an adult life to lead on my own at some point. But then who will be here to care for them? It's a puzzle requiring a plan because infinite money would not solve that problem at all... They're my parents and I love them so I need to be around.

Therefore I've pretty much left everything I valued before behind... Not that there was much... I just wasn't really necessary to los angeles and I'm not the kind of person to force it.

So what could get users to come back to re-read and augment spaces they had created in the past? What makes it so a space isn't marooned? I think setting GOALS as a top-level priority preceding space creation may help me want to come back to review whether I've made any progress...

Without interaction can one really have FUN? Isn't it true that we come ALIVE when we sense that someone else might be reading what we are writing?

In a way I wanted to be as isolated as a lost trekker in an Alaskan wilderness... But I soon discovered that in such a context it felt pointless to be PRODUCTIVE.

It's quite likely that the big reason I'm writing these words is that they will eventually be discovered by someone else... Because alone I didn't write ANYTHING. I meant to write Kindle books and it never happened. I just didn't have an audience at all.

Writing on the Web has always given me a certain feeling of "potentially having an audience". That was why I wrote a lot in the days before Blogger. Then, after Blogger, I felt that there were way too many voices out there for anyone to care about anything I wrote. So I stopped.

When the Kindle platform came out, I should've gotten really excited and started cranking out books. Didn't happen at all.

REVIEWING is where old forms of note taking fall down. WE RARELY REVIEW OUR OLD NOTES... because they're usually MONOLITHIC.

MONOLITHIC content invites no interaction, like a blog post without comments, like a book.

We find it hard enough to read a book, let alone our old notes. This leads to our single-celled lives, unaware of the power of time to cause self-interaction which leads to real knowledge.

Only when you REVIEW your old notes do you really get the understanding out of them when you need them. Creating the notes is burning them into your head to a degree... that's the conventional wisdom, that you may as well burn your notebooks after you take them, which I disagree with, saying "there ought to be more..."

Maybe it's our failure to review the past that leads to our present missed opportunities and mistakes.

I do believe I can create some kind of plan for making METANOTES 5.0 a HIT.

I know that has a lot to do with SPECS and not just PROMOTION... The product should be a hit right out of the box. We can do this by focusing on two things:

• 1) Making the spaces irresistible to USE.
• 2) Making the user find it irresistible to INTERACT with other users.

I'm going to call the first USEFUL and the second FUN.

Why FUN for the latter? Maybe FUN can really only exist in collaborative space. Perhaps the focus on "taking notes" drained away the FUN of metanotes before because we take notes only for ourselves and "that's no fun".

The truth is that for all the sheafs and pages of notes I have taken in various forms I have rarely found FUN in reviewing them... But sharing them with the world somehow probably would be FUN.

Maybe nothing is really that much FUN in isolation. That's sad but possibly true as I can't really say I had much FUN over the last period in my life, the ironic isolation of life in Hollywood.

In retrospect I must marvel at how BORED i was living there... I made up the void by READING...

If You are typing something up Now...

and a Future-You is reading that space in the Future...

THAT'S FUN. That's interaction between two different minds.

REVIEW is where traditional note taking sucks and where this will be FUN in contrast because you can interact with your Past You and know that a Future You will definitely CARE.

The interface triggers dopamine and even though I'm sleepy I don't want to stop... I like that... a LOT. This feels very very good, typing into METANOTES like this... It's the key to winning this battle because it's more fun for me to do this than to stop. Add more FUN to this system by making interactions more FUN..