mblog

In the past 100 years, we have learned more than has ever been learned in the past. In the next 50 years, we are expected to double our knowledge. Already this information is cumbersome. Google has done a good job of indexing it, and you can certainly look up anything that you want. But with all this knowledge and information available to us, there must be more to been known than what one can think up to search, let alone the deluge created by all this content.

We need tools to help our premature brains sort, search, and be fed the countless possibilities of information available to us. As individuals we all have our own paths to follow and our own habits and tendencies that need to be recognized. We need technologies that know who we are better than our Moms do. If we hope to maintain any sort of cognoscente thought, these tools must know what we like, what we’ve done and what we want to know, even if we don’t.

The internet is still a wild beast, and she needs to be tamed. LivePlasma is helping tame her. The primary use of the software is to cluster similar movies, artists, directors and other media in a visual web using Flash. One take on the application is Musicovery.com, a program that allows you to navigate a similar music web, but this actually plays the songs. Another is C|Net News’ ‘The Big Picture’, which takes news stories and displays paths to related articles. Imagine these routes when applied to science, health, environment, or even government! These implementations are rudimentary and barely intelligent, but give hope that our information is becoming navigable in a not-so-linear fashion.

For other neat visual exploration, see: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/