Graph

n.

a diagram representing a system of connections or interrelations among two or more things by a number of distinctive dots, lines, bars, etc.

From Tim Berners-Lee’s Blog:

The Net we normally use as short for Internet […] The realization was, “It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting”. […] Obvious, really.

The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. […] The realization was “It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”. […] Obvious, really.

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

[…] tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.

Bravo, Tim, still not losing the forest through the trees after all these years.

It’s all about the layers, he reminds us – first, we connected computers, then documents, and next, he thinks and I agree, ideas. Net, Web, Graph.

A perfect example of this movement, as he cites, is the plethora of social networking sites out there. (Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, etc) The actual subjects of the different sites, the friends, the people, transcend the individual systems, but each time you sign up for a new site, the “next big thing,” you have to tell it who all your friends are, just like you did for the others before it. There’s no way to represent the entity that is a person above the repetitive little database entries each site has about you.

The solution, of course, is not for the frustrated social networker to start the mother-of-all-networking-sites that will blot out all the others (pulling a Microsoft…), but to use this next generation of tools and formats that Tim/the W3C and others are making to transcend the barriers between the individual sites and tie together the ideas which they all represent, just as we transcended the barriers between computers and documents.

It’s the logical next step towards the waaayy future, connected society I envisioned, albeit a bit half-finished-ly, in the Meaning ML post.

Obvious, really.

(PPS actually read Tim’s post – there’s more goodies than I feel like writing about)

November 24th @ 9:50 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback

Gestalt

n.

A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.

November 17th @ 10:46 AM | 0 Comments | Trackback

Why Blog?

http://cogito-thought.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-blog.html

A question which is fair game to anyone who authors a blog is “why?” I’ve been asked this quite a few times myself, so here are a few of my reasons, in approximate order of priority:

1. To explicitly state my thoughts somewhere besides my mind. I have a lot of random thoughts/ideas/interpretations, and if I only state them in my own head I tend to either never follow up on them because there are too many, or I find that my subconscious tries to remind me of them at inopportune moments (this is similar to the phenomenon of “too much stuff” as described by David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done). I tried a journal, but found that I was still keeping the key components of the idea in my head. With a blog, however, I have an audience, and therefore have to communicate the entire idea.

2. To create a record of my thoughts in progress. It’s nice to be able to look back and see how a certain idea was formed or developed, and this was actually the impetus to start the blog in the first place: Some friends wanted to see the thought process behind some of my ideas.

3. Writing is fun

4. To create a repository of personal statements/answers to common questions. This way, if someone asks, for example, what my views on the student shocked with a Taser are (yes, I know, old news), I can just provide him a link instead of explaining again and again. This post is partly an example of this reason.

Pretty an exact articulation of my answers to the little devil’s advocate inside my head who keeps asking me why I keep sitting here typing for like the 3 people who will probably ever read this. Especially 2. I’m kind of obsessed with the idea that a mind starts out as a blank slate that’s then shaped by everything that it senses, that the state of a person’s mind, and even their thoughts and actions are just the result of things that have happened to the person, things that they’ve seen, books that they’ve read. An extremely complex chain of dominoes.

Anyway, that’s why I started blogging in the first place. To trace the evolution of my mind.

November 13th @ 8:02 AM | 0 Comments | Trackback

Reality Distortion Field

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, and marketing.

It’s true, really – nothing apple did was ever “revolutionary,” just executed better than anyone else’s.

Take the iPhone. It’s a music player, a phone, and a web browser, put together in a sleek little package with a touchscreen and an accelerometer. Nothing new, and nothing special when separated into the aforementioned parts, but when put together and with an Apple logo on the back, it’s “revolutionary.” BS. Can’t believe everyone played along with the hype.

November 10th @ 10:21 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback