| 1. | ***It was Marvin |
| 2. | Last week, in a postscript to "What's Going On?", I asked who did the song. Was it Smokey Robinson? No, of course not. It was Marvin Gaye. |
| 3. | I'm lucky. In a moment of forgetfulness, when I want to know something, I can ask 40,000 people the same question. It was an easy one. Lots of DaveNetters are Motown fans. I got a lot of email. |
| 4. | ***Two new questions |
| 5. | So, in doing the web work for the Apple @ InternetWorld site, I have two more queries. |
| 6. | 1. Is anyone maintaining a party list site for the InternetWorld show? |
| 7. | 2. I'd like to accumulate a list of Mac or cross-platform developers with Mac software with booths at the show. Please send your company name, booth number, and a brief description of what you're showing. |
| 8. | Send email to dwiner@well.com. |
| 9. | Thanks! |
| 10. | ***If the net were smarter |
| 11. | Imagine something that worked like DNS, the domain name server structure that gives the net words like www.scripting.com instead of numbers like 206.204.24.4. |
| 12. | John Gilmore, one of the founders of Sun, wants something like this to provide access to PGP public keys. Chuck Shotton, a web server guy and AI man, talks about this kind of stuff too. |
| 13. | I'd like to be a user! In fact, I already am. I broadcast my needs and answers come back. The same process can be systematized and implemented in software so many more people can pose questions and get answers. |
| 14. | At the client end, you'd pop up a page with some of the current questions. If you know the answer, send an email to a server. On to the next question. Bing bing bing. Not artificial intelligence, real human intelligence. |
| 15. | An object database with relations running at each node. A super distributed sandbox that runs on the server and the client and everywhere inbetween. Accessible to C, Java and scripting languages. A traversable hierarchy just like DNS, but instead of mapping names to IP addresses it would map assertions, and allow distributed queries from any Internet user. |
| 16. | You've seen a demo here on DaveNet. Someone has to step up and make the software. I'm happy to help, especially if it builds on the stuff we already have working in Frontier. |
| 17. | We could turn the Internet into a neural net, a knowledge database that you can traverse using algorithms, not just web browsers. |
| 18. | I believe this is where the next major upgrade of the net will come from. |
| 19. | How's that for a strong endorsement? |
| 20. | Back to my web work... |
| 21. | Dave Winer |