An Aha! Moment
Last night just before I went to sleep, I had an aha moment. I was thinking about something bloggy but quite different and my mind wandered off and thought the following (and I just watched it think):
I saw the individual links that we make between different pieces of information as small discrete lines but as more and more people made similar lines the footsteps formed pathways and a digital skeleton became sineuwy and organic. It grew in front of my eyes like ascii art.
Last week I saw a post from Dave Winer (Courtesy of Scoble) about categorisation of their blog posts. (can’t find link). Categorising is painful, to paraphrase Dave You do 95% of the job and get punished for the 5% that you slipped up on. Wouldn’t it be better to have a system that rewarded you for doing 5% of the work?
I guess my mind took some time to digest this post properly. Its seeing a hard genetic code of words and and a simple link of A->B forming the basis of an organic structure – a web brain that is dependent of us all and all the connections that we make.
Creating taxonomy is an arduous task, I know I’ve spent months doing it. You never stop moving things around, adding layers taking layers away. You worry about making that binary desicion then fight the person who alters your changes. Let everyone contribute – problem solved.
Services like del.icio.us has been on my radar but I haven’t digested what it does yet. Will it create these nueral pathways. Will it blur the distinction between what is a Text Search and what is a Directory Search approach? I’m off there now to have a play;-)
You’ll never say this again after you’re using Del.icio.us regularly. 8^)