This was going to start out as a just "cool shit" post -- I found another Chicklet Maker, one from Luca Zappa (he calls it a Brilliant Button Maker - which it definitely is). 
I love these little buttons. They are kind of a standard ... at least from a size point of view. But there is all sorts of room for creativity. I think everyone should have one! Mainly because I would like to collect them. And use them as links instead of plain text. Like mini digital business cards.
So now I'm thinking about digital collections. Several years ago when Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon software company had launched its new website one of the activites you could do on was explore the site with characters from the CD-Rom games (Rockett was the most prominent character) and you could collect digital treasures that you could share with your friends. And some of them were in limited quantities. So if you got a rare blue butterfly and gave it to a friend, that was a sign that you were really good friends (note .. I am totally making up the blue butterfly part ... I don't remember the specifics of the treasures).
Some of the same principles and motivators applied in Ludicorp's Game Neverending (oh, GNE, how I miss you). There were lots of things to collect and use, but also, you were rewarded for giving away digital objects. NeoPets .. all about collecting digital objects. The basis for any MMORPG (and for the synthetic economies they create, also a good article about this in The Walrus) is also the collection of digital goods.
I marvel at this type of collection (a far cry from my philatelic days) because it isn't *real* (in the atomic sense). It's just bits. It's electrons!
There was a piece in Wired several years ago (actually, almost a decade now) by Fil Yeskel, an engineer from IBM. He recounts a conversation he had with a young student about the whereabouts of a picture once the computer was turned off ...
"Where did the picture go?" she asked.
"It's in memory," I answered.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that the picture is now stored in a different way and in a different place."
"OK, where is it?"
I sensed that misty path that lives in the marrow of every technophile.
"Not where - what. It's not a picture anymore: it changed when I closed the window, transformed like a butterfly going back to a caterpillar. It's an arrangement of bits now. The computer broke it into pinhead-sized pieces. It recorded the position, brightness, and color of each piece in a binary code."
"Can I see the bits?"
Drop down into the next world.
[ ... ]
"You said the bits are just below the surface (of a CMOS chip). If we scrape the surface, can we see them?"
Invisible world coming up.
"Sorry. The transistor structures that hold the bits can be seen with a microscope, but not the bits themselves."
The teacher came up with a photograph, taken through a microscope, of the top layer of an integrated circuit. At high magnification, these circuits look like cityscapes seen from high in the air.
"Each room in the city holds one bit. A transistor acts as a door that can open to admit millions of electrons to each room."
"Why millions?"
"Because we can't detect one electron, only whole thunderclouds of them."
"Can I see them?"
"Sorry again. First, the room is never empty. New electrons simply add to a spongelike latticework of atoms and electrons that's already there. Second, electrons can't be seen. There's an apparent paradox at the heart of the world of very small things: Any attempt to see them changes, in a random way, what you're trying to see. It's like trying to grab smoke."
"How do you know they're really there?"
Yeskel wrote this piece in 1995, describing (essentially) the magic of technology and the world we all take on faith (those who say spirituality is on the decline are misinformed). It's still magic to me, and this world is still calling me to be faith-ful, but now these electrons are doing more than we ever thought possible.
Hi, my name is 
