Seven years later…its getting closer!
March 2nd, 2006Take a look at http://wink.com
Where you can look at people’s collections of related links; for example:
This is SandervanderHeide’s Search Guide. You can look at SandervanderHeide’s tags, check out the newest links, or add the favorite “Collections” to your private page. This is a great way to stay updated on the things you care about from people you trust.
If you look at this users page, you can see, for example, all of his links that are to do with the NSA’s domestic spying.
You will remember that Higher Though works (heh, will work) by users manually linking together URLs that are related to each other, so that you will be able to browse them as collections of semantically linked pages, or images or any other type of object that can be accessed with a URL.
Wink doesn’t do this however; it merely allows people to collect related links together in a static list. To make it more like HT, they would need to allow you to go to another related link from any link, instead of the links only available destination being straight to the article.
HT works better than tagging. For example, on this users page, he has a colection of URLS all tagged witht the word ‘citizen’. Now, this tag essentially sits between any two URLS as a semantic mediator. The word ‘citizen’ doesn’t in and of itself contain the meaning of the two links, so if I click on any of these tags in his list, in the Wink results, I get a wildly different set of links, all tagged with this same word.
Higher Thought eliminates the semantic ambiguity of tags, by directly linking two URLS; the urls themselvs are the tags. Since the URL has the meaning of its content ‘encoded’ into it, if the HT connection is made correctly, once you jump into the HT stream of linked tags, each one will relate to the next without ambiguity. The objects a URL represents have very subtle meanings; this is why you have to use multiple tags to pin down the category of a blog post or news article. By linking URLS together directly, you eliminate the need for multiple tags, and allow the meaning of the information to organize itself.
Think of HT as a way of implimenting ‘fractional tagging‘, in the same way that an imaginary object in fractal geometry has a demensionaltiy that is between two whole numbers, the beauty of HT lies in the subtle graduations of meaning that single, one dimensional words can’t convey very well.
Obviously, we can build a moderation system so that bad users links (noise) are pushed out of site. Once we have a critical mass of users, good users links will all connect to each other, and the broken bridges between clusters of HT links cause by bad uers will be eliminated.
It would become a self organizing, semantically correct cloud of all objects with urls, with entry points at each url, from which you will be able to surf from one node to another, viewing semantically linked collections and lines of related urls.
I made a buzzword….
‘fractional tagging‘
‘fractal tagging‘
‘fractagging‘
‘fraagging‘