Curiosity made collaborative: Apture’s “Hotspots” feature brings crowdsourcing to link generation - niemanlab.org
EXCERPT
But Apture has a broader goal, as well. In some ways, Harris points out, the premise that Hotspots is building out — the ability of the community to tighten intellectual connections among discrete bits of information — is an old one.Vannevar Bush, in the early part of the past century, discussed the idea of a “human brain”; Kevin Kelly, more recently, has applied that notion to the workings of the web (“a neural net that can learn”). Both visions are based on the notion that links, both literal and figurative, are core units of collective intelligence. They’re not secondary to our “human brain”; they’re necessary features that allow it to function. As Harris puts it:
But Apture has a broader goal, as well. In some ways, Harris points out, the premise that Hotspots is building out — the ability of the community to tighten intellectual connections among discrete bits of information — is an old one.Vannevar Bush, in the early part of the past century, discussed the idea of a “human brain”; Kevin Kelly, more recently, has applied that notion to the workings of the web (“a neural net that can learn”). Both visions are based on the notion that links, both literal and figurative, are core units of collective intelligence. They’re not secondary to our “human brain”; they’re necessary features that allow it to function. As Harris puts it:
Imagine the web is one big global brain: every page is a neuron (it holds information), and every link is a synapse that connects pages together. Every day we use the web, we make it smarter. When we click a link, we’re thickening and strengthening the connections between two pages. And every time we create a link, we’re teaching the web an idea. And just like the brain, it’s not the pages that make the web powerful, it’s the connections.