* In yesterday's meeting, I commented that gathering
intelligence is the easy part -- it is the evaluating
and summarizing that is most important -- so the
intelligence community has a small army of people
devoted to that task. This lends further weight to
the concept that a SlashDot-style system would be
invaluable for our purposes.
* Much as I want to read a "Guide to Running to a NIC"
it is manifestly clear to me that I have no idea on
earth what I could possibly contribute to it. It's
pretty clear to me that I don't know the first thing
about it.
* I'm glad there is an effort to pursue a direction, but
I remain unshaken in my belief that WBI is fundamentally
the wrong approach to the problem. Its a great tool
to investigate, and undoubtedly has uses -- even within
this project -- but as the fundamental component for the
design, I'm afraid I simply do not see it.
The major points against it are:
* Server-based manipulation of the user's view
Having to make a round-trip to the server every time
you want to change your view is, in my opinion, simply
untenable. I find that kind of system unacceptable on
a high-speed local network. I hate to think of what it
would be like over the Web, especially across a modem.
* Degradation of Information
As nice as it would be that HTML pages would be transcoded
in a way that would let people link to individual paragraphs,
the links would degrade over time as pages are moved or
modified. That's the way the Web is today, true. But the
problem would be exacerbated by an order of magnitude --
the average number of paragraphs per document. Even worse,
since modifying a page would change the tags, any links
I created might still be "valid", but pointing to the
wrong location. The result would be gibberish as text I
linked to or included inline from another document would
be replaced by some other text in that document.
The result of these two observations is that the system, as
presently envisioned, will be both slow and ineffective.
I saw ThinkTank singlehandedly destroy the outliner market by
building a truly awful interface and marketing the hell out
of the product. They got a tremendous amount of mind share and
investigation by early adopters -- all of whom quickly concluded
that the concept was useless. The fault was the interface, rather
than the concept, but by the time we could prove that, the
damage had been done and the market had all but disappeared.
While an architecture built around WBI might be something we
can learn from, I can only hope that it does not get promoted
too widely, lest it have the same unfortunate impact on public
perception that ThinkTank did.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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