Joho the Blog
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June 17, 2003
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? Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 17, 2003 10:45 AM
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Comments
The most interesting thing about it to me is that it lets the book take itself off the shelf and throw itself into the incinerator without the avid reader having (or able) to do anything about it.
Posted by: Ray | June 18, 2003 10:57 AM
But the hyperlink, like the classification number for a book, is separate from the content itself. The content of a web page remains the same even if its URL changes (which happens fairly often).
As I see it, the URL is a much a constructed method of organizing and accessing electronic materials as cataloging data is a constructed method of organizing and accessing printed materials. Books these days come pre-classified with "Cataloging in Publication" (CIP) data, and the range of "formal" classification/organization methods in bookstores and libraries is pretty limited. (Subject, author, classification number.)
The "books by color" example seems a bit of a red herring, as that's a personal collection--not unlike downloading interesting information from the web and placing it in idiosyncratically-named folders on your desktop.
Posted by: Liz | June 19, 2003 08:37 AM
I'll disagree a bit differently. The analogy seems mis-targeted. The document's analog is the single book (which may refer in its text to other books).
So the analogy for the bookshelf is any directory or other listing: Yahoo/DMOZ, Google, your bookmarks list, etc.
Hmmm, is there a lesson there for the SemanticWeb and Ontology cabals?
Posted by: BillSeitz | June 20, 2003 08:02 AM
Yes, there's a direct lesson for the Semantic Web. The Web is implicitly and and inherently organizing; that's why it succeeded. The Semantic Web is explicitly and extrinsically organizing. That's why the Semantic Web will fail, at least at its grandest vision.
I'm in the middle (well, towards the beginning) of writing a long-ish piece on the Semantic Web along these lines.
Posted by: dweinberger | June 20, 2003 09:35 AM