Mike Caulfield

> "single social media personalities" routinely beat major news media organizations in being correct

Citation?

> and this happens frequently enough that lots of people have noticed

Now we are getting back into "feelings" about what is true or not, or more plainly "this is what I want to hear" vs. "this is was is factually accurate". I am confident individual social media accounts become better confirmation bias machines than even you most slanted news orgs.

> If you can't accept that this happens regularly, then there is indeed no hope for actual exchange

I admit it has happened, like you can pull 1 or 2 examples using 30 years of history, but it's extremely uncommon. And you haven't sourced anything in making your arguments. If the statistics say individual social media accounts (or any specific account) have greater accuracy than news organizations with full-time fact checking, now is the time to provide those numbers.

> The solution is to, when possible, fact check sources yourself.

I think I know where this is going.

> Patterns will soon become apparent.

Yep. You are describing how people go down internet rabbit holes and become conspiracy theorists. "Doing your own research" is incredibly hard, we rely on trusted sources to do this work. What we need to do individually is make sure the sources we trust deserve our trust. No anonymous blogs, no podcasts with a long history of getting important things wrong with no accountability.

Mike Caulfield's SIFT method…

I cannot dispute the fact that the web is fantastic in many ways, and I did not intend to do so. Nevertheless, the current incarnation of the web is not the full system envisioned by Nelson and even TimBL.

I chose the excerpt from that full quote poorly. I'll try again, but I'd recommend reading the full linked quote (or watching the original source video).

> The "World Wide Web" program, the original browser/editor, was in fact an editor, and you could make links as easily as you could follow them. And that was fundamental. There are two things which seem to me to be totally bizarre. One of them is the fact that you can't do that [now], that we've lost that. So in fact the thing is not interactive. I don't know if I can think of any hypertext experiments in research where you haven't been able to make links just as easily as following them. Authorship has always been right up there. And now, for some historical quirk, which I could go into, I have gone into, I won't go into, we have a whole bunch of things out there which are "browsers".

The big ideas that TimBL is expressing is still fairly applicable 20 years later.

Other interesting links:

http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/
http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/
http://hapgood.us/2014/08/14/the-web-is-broken-and-we-should-fix-it/

I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.

I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance?

[1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

Well, there’s “right” in some abstract sense, and then there’s “right” as in most profitable. Building user-centered technologies is hard to make competitive with building corporate-centered technologies, especially once big money and bureaucracies have taken a field over from the dreamers and tinkerers and scientists.

But yeah, Ted was right, as were Vannevar Bush and Doug Englebart before him, or Alan Kay after. Some more recent thingies:

http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html

http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/

This is the (admittedly somewhat long) transcription of a talk I use to introduce people to the idea: http://hapgood.us/2014/11/06/federated-education-new-directions-in-digital-collaboration/

The elevator pitch for tech-minded people is that wikis are to SVN as federated wikis are to git. Instead of a shared wiki that people modify, each user has their own wiki which consists of both pages they've made or forked, so information propagates back and forth between users. It's a really compelling idea and I hope they can make it work.

I don't use this, but I think you might find this very interesting because you were talking about starting a blog on organizing information

http://zettelkasten.de/book/de

(click around to whatever you might find interesting, most of the site is in English.)

It's basically exactly that, a blog on organizing information.

Also make sure to check out the garden and the stream

https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/