Author of Earth, which as a sideline offers a view of a society with advanced web-like information technology.

blog http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/

http://www.davidbrin.com/

http://www.levity.com/corduroy/brin.htm

Author of The Transparent Society, about privacy. Here's a related interview

Here are some bits from Earth where a key character is surfing her inbox, via her "Hypersecretary" filtering agent. This is a big inspiration for my Universal Inbox theme...

During the last 24 hours there have been 3 priority-9 world news items, 2 regional alerts for Britain, and 4 on general topics from Reuters, you chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.

You have received 6 letters and 35 message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. 65 more letters and 112 blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

In addition, there were 413 references to you, in yesterday's scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level-7 or greater relevance 1411 times.

"Let's see what happens to that list when we use threadshold 7, categories 1 through 20... surprise factor of 20 percent." (Which means that 1/5 of what she sees are randomly selected from the big pool listed above...)

Colors demarked significant passages, enhanced by her Semantic Content filter...

Jen noticed that none of the sentences were even highlighted. Her semantic-content program couldn't find a single explicit sentence to set in bold!

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