I’m not sure how that happened but a guy at BusinessWeek wrote an article about iTunes and when he mentioned the Digital Butler from Negroponte‘s book Being Digital he referenced the digital butler and linked the term to an article on this site.
For some reason he linked it to the Sunday post on last.fm. Not entirely sure why he picked that one, except that it was, in fact, an article on the kind of user preference agent capability that you see on last.fm, Amazon, Netflix, et cetera. Of course, I’d already published a post earlier that morning (I wrote it yesterday and scheduled it to post at 3:00 AM PST this morning) that made mention of the digital butler.
It’s not a new idea, but it is awkward when you are there to witness a futurist’s vision starts taking shape. If any of the guys who worked on the Manhattan Project were fans of H.G. Wells they must have felt the same thing.
QuantumTom 