I came across this essay summarizing certain ideas on where the web may go and why and I was struck how, on first review, it did not make any sense – not in the vision but the elements. There is a problem with people playing with the idea of the web which seems to be based on knowing more about the web than knowing about ideas. The utility the web can bring is through its organization not necessarily further complications of linking or these semantics, some sort of basic artificial intellegence. Before any of that makes any sense, it must be fixed to a comprehensive reference related to the way ideas work rather than the media, the web. Off the cuff, there are three ways ideas work: like a myth, like a hierarchical codification or like a dictionary – Plato, Aristotle or Samuel Johnson. [Are there more?] The stuff of dynamic ideas are not good in myth as myth is given – the tough bit is figuring meaning. That may be where the web is now as it is run by those in love with it, who love leaning over deep pools.
How it speaks to itself, as we do in our minds free of myth, will require not mimicking how we think but something more between the what and why – ideas. Someone needs to distill the ideas out of all this content and make them maliable, transformable, comprehensible. Winer’s categories are a very bad codification as it based on personal taxonomy which will likely only compound confusion – a bad filing system loses documents without them leaving the room. Google is a very bad dictionary which cannot guide you to what idea is the best or more useful for your purpose, a shoe box of receipts awaiting an accountant’s hand.
We don’t need the web to think for us. It is not there yet. We need the web to be able to even tell us what it contains first, what it has gathered – not just that it has gathered.