JD on EP

Later in the article Tim makes a pitch for using existing specifications to describe the relationships between the contents of documents, and repeats this in his final call-to-action. I think his goal with this article may have been to adjust a tactic in his Semantic Web campaign; a rebranding. I still like the "Net/Web/Graph" phrasing, though.

For that "ideas seem to vary by the eye of the beholder" line above, check out the example in Tim's penultimate paragraph: "When I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark." The airline company's flight designator doesn't matter so much to me during a trip... considering how funky current travel UIs are, I'd rather bookmark the process I used to achieve the task! I might want to bookmark the plane if I was geolocating or estimating time-of-arrival, but a canonical single relation between types of ideas presumes the the world of ideology is just as fixed, and Korzybski was very clear that "the map is not the territory", and that maps vary by the viewer and their current condition. I'm still waiting to see how the "Semantic Web" proposal acknowledges this.

Another reason I'm so skeptical of current "Semantic Web" talk is that it seems to ignore the idea of gaming:

-- It's simple to connect machines together in a Net, but we failed to properly anticipate that some people owning those machines would try to infect or snoop on others... we understood "malware" too late.

-- It's simple to connect documents together in a Web, but we failed to properly anticipate that some people writing those documents would try to advertise or exploit others... we understood "spam" and "security" too late.

-- It's simple to create a Graph describing aspects of how ideas in different documents are connected, but we're not really talking about feedback mechanisms to deter parasites from exploiting this system too.

People adapt. We're not as stolid and unchanging as mechanical things. These are interactive and evolving Organic Systems, not linear and predictable Mechanical Systems. The ecology's decisionmaking is, in fact, decentralized.

As soon as a resource becomes valuable enough, the incentives grow for people to change their behavior, and to "play the system". Google Search was great when it started, then people adapted and degraded it, just for private commercial gain. Wikipedia, YouTube and Techmeme are all very useful, but have also become battlegrounds for people trying to convince others. Any talk about "networks of ideas and their manifestation in the world" should really start talking about recognizing and avoiding manipulation, before drilling down into formats or mechanisms. That's why I've been skeptical on prior discussions.

But "The Net (of internetworked computers) supports The Web (of hyperlinked documents), which supports The Graph (of ideas described by those documents)"... that's a neat formulation, I like it.