Collaboration Is the Database

When I wanted to start learning Drupal I didn't Google Drupal. A Google search of Drupal returns about 30 million hits; a vast ocean of almost entirely useless information. What I did was posted to Facebook if anyone had used Drupal, and I got a response with recommendations within a few hours. I had a human contact, someone I know who would connect me to the information.

It was not just the information that the person gave me about Drupal, it was my entire history with that person which put the information in to context. She is friend of almost 20 years, someone I have worked with over many years. The very fact that she answered by question quickly game me a feel for Drupal: that it was a fairly easy and yet still power web content management tool. My friend does not waste her time with things that don't work, and she uses the best in technology.

If some of my more techie contacts who I chat about augmented reality had responded I would have confronted Drupal very differently.

A persons in a social network provides so much more than just the data contained in the message, they carry a long standing context that greatly improves our ability to convert information in to workable knowledge.

As far as I see it people are knowledge and knowledge is people.

Google sees the internet as a ocean of words and associations of words. But Facebook has the real web, the web of people. Twitter has released the flood of this real time mass. You can write someone's name in Twitter and they are likely to respond to you. The entire planet is chatting there and rather than searching for a certain use of words in Google I am finding asking Twitter to be the true fountain of human knowledge.

Comparing Twitter to Wikipedia is interesting. Twitter is simply better. Mostly because Twitter lacks a community of self appointed admins. I can pose a question to Twitter and now 13 year old is going to judge the response I get. I have a desire for some kind of information and someone has a love of providing that kind of information. We enter in to a kind of relationship and like most relationships it ends badly, but I have the experience of the relationship, and it is through my series of such interfaces between between and ideas that I explore new areas.

No wonder people are leaving Wikipedia and flooding to Twitter. Why read the dusty receipts of learning when you can get the living breathing pulse right away.

Wikipedia, like all information, has a community that gives it structure. But the problem with encyclopedias and all such forms of information is that its not my community that I know giving me the data. I always find editing Wikipedia a bit odd, I don't know these people who give me the feedback and the way they communicate does not build trust. I have never been able to get my contacts to work with me on Wikipedia articles. They all say they don't feel at home there.

Twitter on the other hand is my network evolving as it grows. If I search it references to just about all the information I would ever want is there. But each line is provided with a biology, a person who presented the information who I can develop a level of trust with.

And now that I can view it spatially on my iPhone I get the key three features of Spatial, Semantic, and Social.