Dave's latest JOHO is out.
In the email section he somehow repeats the original version of a little back and forth we had on my sadly-neglected Nonzero blog, implying I retracted it, when in fact we both forgot which blog it was on. Dave kindly corrected this in his blog at the time

Anyway, the point I was failing to make well by exaggerating and parodying was that Dave's orginal 'Web as Utopia' piece makes sense for those of us who are familiar with the web and have fond our place in it, but confuses those for whom it is an alien experience.

I know Dave doesn't really think that the web is 'a transcendent Platonic ideal of Socratic discourse'; I was exaggerating to make the point that we find online what we go looking for, and the web we see is a reflection of ourselves individually as well as collectively.

With 2 billion pages and counting, we can never see it all, and when we venture outside the well trodden paths of the personal web we know, we are more likely to make mistakes in our maps, and come back with 'here be dragons' written across entire continents and tales of men with no heads.

I think this effect, rather than malice or wilful misrepresentation is what is behind such things as journalists' clueless articles on weblogs or congressman fulminating against the net consisting mostly of porn and piracy.

This is part of what I got from reading SPLJ, and I'm glad I provoked Dave into such a clearly expressed retort about connection.

And talking of connecting, try out the Amazon connection browser that (appropriately enough) defaults to starting with SPLJ.

Just to make sure I don't lose this version, I'm 'syndicating' it to the Small Pieces Loosely Joined blog and nonzero too.