Realtime Global Conversations

Once in a while, the miracle that is the hyperlinked web bops me on the head and reminds me how incredibly awesome it really is. Like just now, I read Jeremy Zawodney’s post “Why do Wiki RSS Feeds Suck?” via my Bloglines feeds (which in itself is amazing - aggregating syndicated content from hundreds of sources for my viewing pleasure in near realtime) and thought “Hmrf. This ought to ruffle a few feathers!”. A quick check on the Bloglines references link lead me to 5 independant discussions referencing Jeremy’s post, again only hours old, one of which was Nate Koechley’s Blog post where he points to a FASCINATING bit of research from The MIT Media Lab’s Fernanda B. Viégas, in collaboration with IBM’s Collaboritive User Experience Research Group, where they’ve done some beautiful, insightful and important work visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. The Gallery there is awesome, with images like this one showing the evolution of the document “Islam” at Wikipedia:

Cool. As I read through the preliminary report, I was struck by just how amazing the chain of technology and ideas that led me there is. Jon Udell reminded me of Dan Bricklin’s Cornucopia of the Commons before and the interesting feedback loops created by self-serving, social software. But sometimes I just need a great series of hyperlinks to travel along to remind me just how fundamentally revolutionary the web is. It’s certainly a great time to be alive, and an interesting place to be sitting in the history of the Net, if you’re an information junky like I am.