Old things didn't used to be so old 

I may be re-reading all of George Eliot. It's not a firm promise to myself; I'll abandon it if it doesn't continue to be pleasant. Right now it is. I started Adam Bede a couple days ago. I've already read some of the novels more than once, and I read Middlemarch every two or three years.

I noticed that my copy of Adam Bede, which I probably ordered from Abe Books, has the first owner's name written inside the frontpiece: Mrs. le P. Haskett, June 25-'06. It was first published in 1859, 47 years earlier. So, it would have been about as old as Atlas Shrugged is now.

So then, I couldn't shake thinking about those kinds of time intervals, and about the human lives that old objects have seen. Yesterday I was wrapping presents to send to my older son, on an old oak round pedestal table that was the first piece of furniture my grandma bought when she was married, I think in the early 20s. How many gifts have been wrapped on that surface over the years, how many meals served on it, in good and bad times, over laughter and tears. I've had the table since 1974.

I used to work for Franklin College in Indiana, a small liberal arts college founded in 1832, and named after Benjamin Franklin, who had been dead only 42 years at the time. It would be like naming a college today after John Kennedy.

I'll come back to our century soon enough, but I'm liking my mental stroll through the past. It slows down my heartrate to read 19th century fiction, and there's an extension to the nostalgia in Eliot, who liked to write about life several decades earlier, in an even slower time. Adam Bede starts in 1799.

Apollo seems like just the ticket 

Via Alex Barnett: podcast interview with Kevin Lynch, Adobe. He's quizzed by Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor. (Wonder what's up with that. Has Steve left Podshow? He's listed as executive producer on the latest CalacanisCast, too.)

I signed up for the Apollo beta. I need that to really get a good feel. Despite my abstraction handicap, it does sound like it fills a big gap to have a workable way to run online apps offline. If you need a visual, too, here's an archived presentation on rich internet apps by an Adobe product manager and developer relations guy.

P.S. The Adobe Labs site is a wiki made in PHP. They've adopted the viable Macromedia products like Flash, but don't seem too interested in stuff like Cold Fusion. Good riddance.

Longing for affinity in proximity 

Queen Street Commons on Prince Edward Island drew inspiration from Lloyd's, one of the famous London coffeehouses, where you would make deals, hang out with people in your vertical and get the latest news. I think you could even rent a permanent booth that served as a little office. Can't you just see the modern rendition of a space like that, with an ethernet hookup? And there would have to be an arrangement whereby you get your skim latte in quantity, pay by the hour to keep it coming.

When I heard about the PEI house on Net at Night (can't recall if it was the most recent one or the the episode before), it brought Dave's bloggers newsroom to mind, and then, following links to other emerging commons and hubs, it rekindled all kinds of old utopion longings.

There's a human need to gather with your own kind. The internet is made for that on an intellectual level, but it's the opposite of high-touch. So while you may have found 300 other people on the planet who have watched the 1995 BBC/A&E Pride and Prejudice as many times as you have, you still feel isolated in your togetherness. Ironic.

Schemes like co-workspaces, artist's retreats and colonies, utopian communities, coffeehouses, bloggers pressrooms, kibbutzes, and co-housing all have a commune-like hippie appeal for me.

I think the mode that would suit me best -- on a frequency continuum from one-off event to everyday workspace -- would be the 17th-to-19th-century-style (not Starbucks) coffeehouse mode, a place where you could come on a casual basis whenever you need the contact.

Internet in a cup 

This 2003 article from the Economist likened the internet to the old London coffeehouses.

Hey! I made Techmeme for the first time, ever 

Thanks Alex. And possibly, thanks to Shelley, too, for having the ovaries to do the pestering about gender representation that few of the rest of us have the stomach for -- but guiltily appreciate and benefit from.