Thursday, September 6, 2007

William Gibson: EBay as Guest Curator?

William Gibson, the godfather of cyberspace has a cool interview in the Washington Post.

In it, Mr. Gibson contends that there is a great opportunity for people to become connoisseurs due to the inadvertent curatorial power of eBay: "Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement."

Maybe eBay is another way to deploy the power of "Web 2.0" into museums?

In any event, an interesting interview.