Justin Martenstein (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jmartenstein) wrote,@ 2006-03-07 18:29:00 |
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ETech 2006: playsh
Something intriguing came out of ETech today, via Matt Webb of Mind Hacks fame: playsh. Here's the relevant bit from the session desciption.
Something intriguing came out of ETech today, via Matt Webb of Mind Hacks fame: playsh. Here's the relevant bit from the session desciption.
Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations. It is how children establish a model of their surroundings and how animals explore relationships and social dynamics.I'm not entirely sure what it is, but "playful", "narrative", and "social prototyping library" hit all the right buttons for me. The only thing I can figure out is that it is some kind of (Python-programmable) command-line interface to Web 2.0 services based around the old interactive MUD model. I'm going to see if I can get the thing running tonight and find out what it's all about.
Despite early, highly structured approaches to the sociability of computing in mainframe laboratories, computing has evolved a culture of iterative experimental hacking that is essentially playful.
playsh cooks up the best of Web 2.0, and throws the web browser away. It is a narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.
