In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately dairy-house decree:
Where Alf, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
the sacred cows wandered and fed,
And there were gardens bright with soft young grass,
Where blossomed many a pound of fresh-churned butter;
And casein scents filled the air,
Engorging the nostrils of naughty milk-maids.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian milk-maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Cottage Cheese.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dairy in air,
That sunny dome! those cows of wonder!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Moo! Moooo!
Her flashing eyes, her swinging udder!
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And squeeze the teats with care,
For she on sweet grass hath fed,
And produced the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon,
128 fl oz, of Paradise.

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816

Holy mackerel – you call that a customer review? That’s a friggin poem. It’s art. Well, actually it’s satire. The original poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge written in 1797-98 is like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

    But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
    A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
    As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced :
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
    And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.
    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
    And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war !
    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves ;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw :
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Now that’s just funny, but there’s more. There’s a lot more. Here is another customer review by Pete “Dizzley”:

Oh silky substance!
Oh nature’s boon!
I long to feel your wholeness!
Your galactic touch,
Your soft white form,
And suckle in your milky-ness!

Oh Tuscan fields!
Oh Elysian pastures!
I walk as Maximus before the arena,
Smell Roman earth
And Tiber’s water
For Tuscan Whole Milk I couldn’t be keener.

My heart is pierced!
My soul bereft!
I asked dear Amazon to fill my needs.
Across the ocean
The goods were ferried -
But only got Tuscan Whole Cheese!

Now this poem is original. And clever. I love it. There are 900 more.

It seems to me like Amazon’s customer review feature is being used for something completely different from what the original intent was. It has turned into a sub-culture. It has become a social community. Totally unexpected.

Here’s another unexpected one: over at Live Journal, one of many on-line blog-hosts, there’s a user named Campfuckudie. Well, it’s not a user. It’s a bunch of people enacting a roleplaying game. They are making up a story by writing comments to blog entries. Here’s how CFUD describe themselves:

Welcome to campfuckudie, a crack multifandom RP (meaning Harry Potter, Edward Elric, and Nara Shikamaru are all welcome to attend) where zombies run amok and non-players are encouraged to participate through personal comments to the characters and NPCs. Here at the Camp, we strive to create an interactive fandom B-movie that borders on some damn well-constructed stupid.

And you look at this thing and start to realize that there are hundreds of people participating. And the question that gnaws at the back of your mind is “what is this thing??” They even have a Campfuckudie wiki.

After some research, you may (or may not) find out what CFUD is all about. Or the milk.

• Swedes are easiest to recognize in the cafeterias: they’re all wearing expensive downhill equipment and walk like zombies.
• The Norwegians are easy to spot as weel because they’re the only ones who bring their own food and also do their downhill skiing in cross-country gear. I kid you not. It’s an impressive technique and they don’t walk like zombies.
• The Danes are easy to spot in the ski slopes: living in a completely flat country with absolutely no skiing tradition, the Danes know nothing about skiing. Most noticeably, they have no idea how to slow down or stop once they’re going down hill. This makes them a nuisance and also a danger.

Unlike most Swedes, I speak Danish perfectly since I’ve lived there for 14 years. So this entire week I’ve been teaching my family how to swear in Danish and scream insults at out-of-control Danes flying down the slopes totally out of control. My son Leo had a close encounter with a Dane doing about 55 mph just before wiping out in an explosion of snow. My wife was in his face screaming before he even got to his feet. I like that. Unfortunately she was swearing in Swedish and I could just see that the poor Dane was completely cluseless. So if you ever go skiing in Sweden – learn how to swear in Danish.

So I get home and everything is great. The laptop is a lot better than I thought (to be honest, I wasn’t expecting very much from a Celeron processor). And I realize we’ve gotten to the point where we might as well migrate my wife off of our broadband provider’s email system, because they were actually acquired by a bigger broadband provider about 2 years ago. At the time they said they would migrate everybody, but nothing happened. So I suggest she just uses Google mail because it makes everything so much easier. No worries about back-ups and so on. To my surprise she agrees.

Now, the kids also have Gmail accounts, and I’ve had one for years, which is the address I use whenever I have to register for anything. So it’s not like it’s new or anything. It’s just that suddenly for the first time the whole family is on Google. I created a new and secret Google email account for myself (my actual name), and we all created calendars that are now shared. This is really cool. I also went ahead and connected my Google calendar with Scheduleworld. I can now synchronize my schedule with anything that moves.

And now I’m sort of caving in. What the hell – I’m using Google email and calendar for the whole family. Why not test the photo sharing too? It’s a program named Picasa that installs on your PC, and then a web hosting business that hooks right up with it. The first 250 MB are free, and after that you pay through your nose. Well I understand why Google acquired this, the client app is very, very slick. I manage to upload hundreds of photos in no time. This is cool and fun. I’m hooked.

OK, I’m on the slippery slope now – Google documents and spreadsheets are next in line. I actually played around with Writely before they were acquired by Google, and their word processor was cool then. It’s even cooler now.

There’s not much left now is there? Before Google could only set a cookie to track me. When I wanted to search for something, they could recognize the cookie and say “Hey, we’ve seen this guy before. Last time we showed him ads for women’s underwear. Let’s try men’s underwear this time.” That’s about as smart as it got. Not so now. They have my name. They now exactly who I am now. Theyhave access to every single email in my inbox and event scheduled in my calendar. They have everything I’ve ever searched for. They have my photos. You think Google is king of targeted advertisement? You aint seen nothing yet.

• Word of mouth, or usually email. Check this out or this is cool being key phrases.
• A list of bookmarks. This is how Yahoo started. Just a categorized list of links. You saw something and hey that sounds interesting and then you click on it.
• The list of bookmarks grew too big to handle. Enter the search box. We invented a verb – to google – and got 534,000 hits whenever we went looking for something.
• StumbleUpon came up with a new way of finding things. Instead of doing an organized search, why not just find something random? It sounds silly, but it actually works great and is very fun. Give it a try if you haven’t already.
• del.icio.us came up with something similar but slightly more efficient. Now we can all share bookmarks, and instead of trying to manage them in folders by category, we simply give them one or more tags. This is surprisingly powerful. For instance, you can subscribe to a specific tag and get a list updated in real time of pages other users are assigning that tag to. You really need to try this if you haven’t already.

Now, regardless of which method of discovery is used, there are strong forces at play here wanting to control that discovery process. In fact, this is Google’s business model in a nutshell. Google is making a fortune selling targeted ad-space to advertisers. Yahoo is in the same business, so it’s no surprise that they acquired del.icio.us in December 2005.

The big problem that Google is facing is that the only reason they are so big at the moment is that a search engine is what’s in people’s mind set. It’s how they imagine content discovery. But as del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have already demonstrated, there are good alternative ways of doing this.  And if people discover that, Google will be in trouble. Because discovery is king.

“Gösta Ekman!?” my wife cried. “Are you nuts? Gösta Ekman never played Beck! Gösta Ekman is a stupid comedian. Beck is a detective”.

“Um. Actually he did play Beck. And he was quite good too.”

“No. Never. I’ll bet you anything you like.”

“Anything I like?”

“Anything you like.”

Ok, this is where I have to leave the table, connect to the Internet and double check. Good news.

“You owe me anything I want.”

“He means sex” our 12 year old son Leo stated bluntly. “Duuuhhhh” his older sister Nadja replied. At this point dinner was definitely over.

I got in a better mood after buying a very cool CPU cooler with a blue neon cathode light for Leo’s computer. The old one had gotten loose for the 3rd time, so I figured it was time to replace it. So I’ve taken the thing apart and cleaned the processor with Smirnoff blue vodka. Unpacked the new heatsink & fan, and then I notice a big red sticker on the heatsink with a warning saying to keep this surface spotless and clean (the surface with a sticker on it). Well, that sticker wasn’t going anywhere peacefully. I finally had to give up ripping little pieces of sticker off the damn thing and bring out the heavy artillery: my wife’s nail polish remover. That finally did the trick, and I cleaned the whole thing with Smirnoff again just to be on the safe side. Now Leo’s processor is a cool 34C. Before I swapped the cooler, it was running over 70C under load. It gives me an odd satisfaction to know that all 4 of my homebrew computers have had their insides cleaned with Smirnoff.

We drifted off with our backpack full of hot chocolate and sandwiches, but I kept chuckling at Selma, and I kept getting her name wrong calling her Semla instead. Now, in Sweden a Semla is a very special treat: it consists of a cardamom-spiced wheat bun which has its top cut off and insides scooped out and then filled with a mix of the scooped out bread crumbs, milk and almond paste, topped off with whipped cream.

Now it just so happens that my wife Anne is a baker’s daughter, so in the evening she made a whole tray of miniature Semlas that we feasted on after dinner. Man, these things fill you up.