A lot of people are getting pretty excited about “social software”. Bloggers like Joi Ito and Marc Canter are writing with gusto about social software. I’m hearing lots of trendy new acronyms and phrases – FOAF, MetaBlogs, “reputation systems”, “web of trust”, “moblogging”, “micro-content”, etc etc. It’s all getting to be a blur. But these are heady times and everyone is out there hunting that White Whale, the Semantic Web.
I’m going to add my own trendy phrase to the mix: Web of Ideas.
Yes I know, “Web of Ideas” isn’t a particularly original phrase. When I googled it, I found a number of old newspaper articles and school assignments that used it. But still I want to use it myself, because it succinctly states what I have always believed the World Wide Web is all about: dissemination of ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th century American writer, once said: “The ideas in every man’s mind make him what he is.” We’re lucky to live in the 21st century. We have Web technologies such as weblogs and RSS to help us discover, create and share ideas.
I’ll write more about the Web of Ideas later. For now (it’s getting late and I’m starting to ramble), I want to point to an interesting development at Erik Benson’s weblog. Erik is developing an idea database. Hey, good idea Erik 😉
