Google + Blogger = Stimergy. Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then:
- this trail is highly followed
- do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
- here’s a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
- this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value
Lots and lots of reaction to Google buying Pyra. This post plus another from Cory at Boing, Boing hit on the most provocative interpretation I’ve seen; that Google is building the Memex. Here’s Matt’s key observation:
GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX.
They’ve got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they’ve realised – like Ted Nelson – that the fundamental unit of the web isn’t the link, but the trail. And the only place that’s online is… weblogs.
There are two levels to the trail:
1 – what you see
2 – what you do
(“And what you feel on another track” — what song is that?)And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step.
What Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, weblogs, and now Google are all demonstrating is that the boundaries between organizations and disciplines are arbitrary. It’s the connections and the trails that matter. It’s just taken a lot longer to build it than we would have liked. With a bit of luck we’ll find out that we’ve managed to build it in time.