by Flemming Funch
David Weinberger:"Here's something blindingly obvious, really just a spin on what has been said elsewhere:
Most (?) ordering schemes apply an externally-devised order to the stuff to be ordered: alphabetic order is not something built into the books on your shelf. Or, in the case of Trevor Bechtel, while the color of a book's binding is clearly part of the book, the idea of ordering them on a shelf by color comes purely from Trevor.
Hyperlinks aren't like that. They build into the page itself its place in the webby universe.
Is there something interesting about this other than it's how web spaces construct themselves?" I'm looking for clues in similar places. Clues for how we might better organize our information world.
Hmm. Hyperlinks show that something is (claimed to be) related to something else. That is a form or organizing of course. But it doesn't sort things, like one can do with a book title or color. Somebody (a search engine spider) has to go and use those links to find ALL the data it can get its, and THEN they can sort things.
But, hm, what if a hyperlink actually were used as part of an ordering scheme? Like, if a document includes a bunch of links that say "This is where I belong". It could link to a certain web resource that would be the central coodination place for a certain time period, a certain geographical location, several different places for organizing topics. Would that work? I'm not sure. Because what if that resource moves or changes a bit, and the link breaks. It would have to somehow be two-way and self-repairing, if we would consider counting on it.
I'd like to be able to ask questions like "How many yellow books do I have in my library?" or "Tell me everything that happened in my life on Thursday the 12th". I'd like the answers to be ready very quickly, a couple of seconds, even if I ask an unusual question. I don't really care whether a program goes and looks through ALL my data bits from the outside to figure out if they fit, or whether all my data bits have reported in by themselves. As long as the answer shows up immediately.
I still dream about a vague as-yet-uninvented storage scheme that will allow you to instantly search on arbitrary criteria, without having to have thought of them much in advance. Some kind of fuzzy quantum computing thing that provides all possible answer to a question at the same time. The moment you say "red" everything red is instantly there, whether anybody dreamt of that before or not. And, no, I'm not just talking about a text search in Google.
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