From a conversation with Ouroboros:

Peter:
Text remains an unsolved problem in a lot of ways. All our interfaces for computers have descended from the idea of typewriters, which were themselves optimized for secretaries taking dictation and not thinking themselves. We still don’t know how to make text entry and editing systems that support creativity easily
Ouro:
that is a fine observation
Peter:
As a matter of fact, that’s going in the idea bin.
Ouro:
but creativity has always had to interface to the tools that exist.
Peter:
Ulysses for OSX is a good start.
Ouro:
at one point, this meant that literature had to have an underlying meter
Peter:
How do you mean “underlying meter”?
Ouro:
writing had to occur as poetry – Homeric era, skalds
Peter:
Perhaps, because it was descended from a bardic tradition of spoken/song tales
But with the modern novel we’ve basically moved on
Or at least “they” have
Ouro:
yes, because the tools of the era of the modern novel allow memory to be supplemented by writing on paper
Peter:
And I don’t see why our bitchin tools can’t support meter well – we have all sorts of good AI for text rhythms and determining whether things might rhyme
Ouro:
but it is not necessary anymore
Peter:
Right. And the whole problem is now figuring out what is necessary
and how to use it
Peter:
Right now, when I’m writing creatively, pen and paper is still the medium of choice. Someone needs to do a good study of why, and then take those lessons and apply them to computers
Ouro:
are you sure that the reason is not that it’s learned?
Peter:
Somehow, the sketchiness of the text reinforces the sketchiness of my thinking, and the way the paper supports diagramming and drawing and doodling and makes it hard to erase helps me out a lot
Ouro:
ah
Ouro:
these are isusues of the medium
Peter:
It’s surely partially learned, but there are also good psychological reasons that deal with how we relate to physical object vs how we deal with computer text.
And computers are flexible enough that there is no reason that paper should be better. I want to be able to quickly sketch out my thoughts and then have the computer help me edit them into a cohesive whole as I keep notes on what I liked and rearrange sections and change wording.
Ouro:
hmm. crux has been talking about a lot of the creativity software fo OSX lately.
Peter:
I want to keep my whole revision history forever and I want to be able to easily see old versions so that I may cull the best from all that I have tried to do
Peter:
Ulysses is a program designed to support creative writing, and it’s what got me started thinking in this direction, because I found it allowed me to create creative text very easily, much more easily than vim or word or any of that other stuff
Ouro:
interesting
Peter:
I have another “medium is the reason we never thought about it for so long” idea
Ouro:
…
Peter:
Folksonomies, like flickr and del.icio.us, where people tag stuff however they want to build collaborative, personal, and very messy taxonomies were never thought of, largely because us nerds always go for the easiest solution.
Ouro:
which was?
Peter:
When you are creating a blog, whether it has categories or whatever, the easiest way of doing it is with flat files in directories. And if a file is in one directory, then it only gets one tag – it can only have one category.
Ouro:
ah
Peter:
So our tree based file systems led to tree based classification.
Which in turn made it so that the simple idea of tagging with keywords and using that as your category markes is revolutionary.
Ouro:
this is part of the migration in thought to storage from a flat file (or even a tape) to a database?
Peter:
Perhaps it is. I am unsure. We’ve had Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python for a long time.
Peter:
Do you know what happened first: d.i.u or flickr?
Ouro:
flickr was first, I think.
Ouro:
which I say b/c it grew out of an extant project
Ouro:
misuba knows the details
Peter:
So did d.i.u, however – the memepool guy made them both
And d.i.u is essentially memepool where everyone can participate and you can give things more than one category. (An aside: The founder of flickr says they were inspired by del.icio.us)
Ouro:
that’s interesting
Ouro:
yes, it is like memepool
Ouro:
in early use, it had reminded me of that directly
Peter:
But it’s sort of sad to me that the “multiple tags” innovation took us fricking 5 years to come up with, so it’s comforting to look for some reason besides “collectively, we’re kind of dumb”.
Peter:
I think what we really need in order to get this whole thing running, where we can have ideas like multiple tags occur naturally, is to democratize computer programming as much as possible.
Ouro:
right
Ouro:
more crazy ideas
Peter:
That way, we can throw a hojillion part time monkeys at the problem, and thus increase the odds that these ideas won’t lie dormant
Ouro:
genetic robustness
Peter:
Like freaking blogs. It took us like 6 years to think of the idea of a weblog
Peter:
So the next target of choice for getting people to program for fun is, interestingly enough, people like you
Ouro:
heheheh
Ouro:
as a vector or agent?
Peter:
Sort of periphery people who are surrounded by coding nerd and have their own ideas, but for whatever reason aren’t overcoming some sort of activation energy.
Both vector and agent, I suppose. But I was thinking agent in this context

(As a sidenote, I think that the Socratic dialogues might be considered the first chatroom cut and paste.)