The Interconnectedness of It All
So, everything is connected and we need to visualize it all. Somehow. A few thoughts occured in a form of strange (or not so strange) synchronicity (this or this or maybe something else). Some things that have bubbled to the top of late, although seemingly unrelated to what I am supposed to be doing or have been doing or had been planning on doing. Anyhow, here they are. Started with becoming briefly re-acquanted with the term Semantic Web. Here is a nice Scientific American Article about it. Basically, it is about defining ways in which context can be encoded so that meaning can be shared between various applications that can create agents that can automagically do our bidding. For real. More simply, it is the next generation meta-data effort. Meta-data never really resonated with anyone. Semantic Web is a much more exciting and provacative term. The W3C folks are in the final stages of defining the standard for managing this information.

So, really. This is cool. Interesting. Sort of acedemic like most of Berners-Lee's stuff. After all, the dude invented the world wide web. That's cool. All this interconnected stuff came in when I was reading the JOHO blog. There I ran across this link to Touchgraph. Now this is cool. Not really the semantic web stuff from W3C, but the inherent and explicit connectedness of links in web pages. Even less scientific (in a sense) is the truly artful connectedness of Alice In Wonderland.

So, like, really, dude, its like, you know, totally all connected. Is there some depth to all of this? I think so. But maybe less in the formalized markup of the W3C standards and maybe more in the way of the touchgraph sort of thing. An emergence. An emergent meaning not designed into the web, but part of the natural (natural?) order of things complex. Or social. Is society complex or is complexity social? Chicken or the egg. Theory would argue that complexity in physics led to complexity in life which leads to complexity in societies.

So, it is all connected. But I still search for the meaning. Maybe that is the significance of the Semantic Web. That there is meaning. The links hold explicit meaning instead of the implict meaning of all the links pasted in above. What is my meaning of having all these links? They must be related if I put them there. Right? Right. Even I can't really tell you the meaning of them all to me without your own interpretation of their meaning which may be very different than mine or Tim's or David's. Does that matter? Probably not. But they are there, so perhaps that is enough. It is enough for me. And enough of this.