It's hard to imagine much of a future for MySpace. Which is probably why it took a science fiction author to do so: Bruce Sterling says the flagging social network is an ideal shantytown for the nihilistic unemployed. Compelling!

NICK DOUGLAS — I had a lot of fun live-mocking last year's moving but off-kilter speech by sci-fi author and futurist Bruce Sterling. The venue was South by Southwest, the topic (mostly) spimes, Sterling's pet idea of constantly trackable objects. He's speaking again this year, no one knows what about. And in what I'm now declaring an annual Valleywag tradition, I'm live-blogging it below.

NICK DOUGLAS — "A new company is paving the way for a more automated Internet," shouts the New York Times. Oh god. New internets are like perpetual motion machines: they get "invented" all the time, but you'll never find a working model. Here are the most famous, including Cyberspace, the Semantic Web, and Bruce Sterling's Magical Spime World.

Peanut gallery's been roasting again:

Super-futurist Bruce Sterling gives the State of the World address today. A half-hour in, he's talking about "spimes" — super-data-rich objects that report their origins, ingredients, support info, and anything else that sounds cool to predict. I'll be liveblogging it for the next half hour.

ETech 2006 rolls on, and Scott Beale keeps photographing the folks who make the Internet. Tuesday's highlights include Tim Bray's Indy outfit, Esther Dyson's spelling, and Jen King's primal scream.