a hunch that hunch is great

So I got in on the private-invite-only-super-cool-people-thank-you version of Hunch, the new site from Catarina Fake (co-founder of Flickr). I had asked for an invite but that didn't come until today. Luckily Nick Plante (or Nicke Plante as they say in Europe) kicked me one of his invites yesterday and I was able to try it out. It is simple, easy, intuitive. Everything you would never expect to get. It is great.

In general, I think that Hunch is really one of the first sites I have seen to embrace a new renewable resource. Perspective. In Hunch, the questions don't change per se. There are new resources being crawled for keywords by keyword hungry search bots. And the people that write the questions (sometimes treated as 'games') don't seem to have predefined paths (e.g., the Where should you live quiz on Facebook suggests that *everyone* live in Ireland). So what changes? You do. Your perspective. Your context. The answer to a given question changes almost constantly. Because of this, the site is not complete until you take part in it. Until you answer the questions.

Roland Barthes spent a long time theorizing about this kind of thing in the seventies. His paper "Readerly, Writerly, and Beyond" seems more like something from a futurist than an literary critic. This "Beyond" that Barthes describes as electric, receivable and changing is capsulized in the medium of the Internet. New Media Poets get this. The Hypertext and Hypercard guys get this. But Academia can't make it happen. It wasn't until the early to mid nineteen nineties that our culture began to embrace post-modernism; and the web is only a few steps behind.

Sites that are completed when you write the ending are technically, Writerly. Like Whitman's Merge, a shared space between the you of right now and the site. But they are also something more because of their collective nature. They are a changeable unit of interaction that is somehow merged into the collective.

So is Hunch that perfect new media website? No, probably not. But it makes use of some exciting principles whether intentional or not. Hunch has a long way to go here and it will be exciting to see how well we can help them reach that space.