Brandymore Castle

This problem of how to transition ephemeral, but timely, information found in forums, Q and A sessions, all the forum-like forms on the network from Usenet to Twitter is one that fascinates me. I've thought about this for a long time without really coming up with any good mechanism for capturing the knowledge and experience of the forum, the group, from scattered individual, unrefined forms, to coherent, refined forms maintained by the community. I think that the idea of automatically transitioning content created by an individual into community property is a great idea. It may meet with some resistance from individuals. But I think it is a good solution to this problem, since anyone can start a conversation that does not just spin out into the oblivion of old forum posts, but can become a seed that grows into a well maintained, coherent, concise source of information. Where does my interest in this issue come from? As soon as I got my first website up and running, I wanted an emai...

One of my longtime interests has been how to create a system that captures the knowledge of experts and refines it into a single resource. I was attracted to wikis early on by their communal authorship, but found the lack of structure unsuitable for my needs. What I wanted, for two of my early efforts, one a site intended to help family photography historians answer questions about old photographs and the other a site for programmers to find help with coding questions, was a way to let users engage in a Q and A and then somehow capture and distill the expertise into a more traditional article format (like a wiki page), which could be maintained by everyone. I wanted to capture the expertise emerging from the group discussion through some mechanism. I ended up developing a content management system for the coding site, which had the ability to "fold" a comment thread attached to an article back into the article for editing. I also developed a tool, which could take a forum thr...

I suspected there would soon be a site attempting to give users a handle on their social and physical surroundings. To combine social and geographical "peripheral vision" enabling people to know what their friends are doing and where they are. What you are doing + where you are = an event , which represents a profound change in the way we use the web/network. And there is: http://www.whrrl.com/ "The people you know. The places they go" is their slogan. The first question whrrl asks is "What are you doing right now?" There is nothing special in this since Facebook has used the same question to power The Wall (social blog/feed system) for some time. Next, you are asked "Where in the world are you?" Whrrl combines a social activity feed of Facebook with the lightweight asynchronous message system of Twitter or Jaiku with elements of various mapping systems. Whrrl enables you to discover and keep in touch with your social and geographical surrounding...