Why automated search tools ?

Hypertext's original idea was to take advantage of electronic data processing to organize large quantities of information that would otherwise overwhelm a reader.

Two hundred years ago, the printing press made possible a similar innovation - the encyclopedia. Hypertext's older cousin combined topical articles with an indexing system to afford the researcher one or perhaps two orders of magnitude increase in the volume of accessible information. Early experience with hypertext suggests that it may ultimately yield an additional order of magnitude increase, by making directly accessible information that would otherwise be relegated to a bibliography. Hypertext's limiting factor appears not to be the physical size of some books, but rather the ability of the reader to navigate increasingly complex search structures.

Currently, additional increases in human information processing ability seem tied to developing more sophisticated automated search tools, though the present technology presents possibilities that remain far from fully explored.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
-Jean-Philippe Pastor

Google Knol is now live

Google Knol is now live.

It's like Wikipedia, only written by experts and pwned by Google. Check it out!

Also, I happened upon Everything2, this other weird & interesting hypertext community where anything goes, not modeled on an encyclopedia.

Not necessarily by experts, as I'll be writing a few, but there will be known authorship. It's more a moderated version of Wikipedia. For instance you'll always have nutters who think Buffy is better than Sabrina, but now they won't be able to vandalise the article with sentences like "Buffy shows more more character development in a world where goals are earned rather than the simplistic wish-fulfillment of Sabrina" because I'll have to approve them before they get added to the knol.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Of course if you do disagree, then you'll be able to make your own entirely separate Buffy knol, which would be a blow if a special interest group wanted to police an entry.