I can buy into that, and you can draw neat graphs that even let you pick dates, but several questions remain.

I propose the following answers, increasing ability to aggregated intelligence and the concept of objective reality.
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I’m pretty sure such a beast is the solution to a lot of the grief seen on the net today. Issues like credibility, who to trust, peer review, not having big companies control the world, etc. Someone just has to figure out how to make it work.

My studies of late have lead me to read some philosophy. I’m pretty confident 21st century information architecture has a lot to learn from 20th century philosophy. I wish I’d gotten into it years ago.

Since almost none of this stuff is on the net I figured I’d start blogging a few quotes and maybe babble about them later. We’ll see. To start here’s a pile of stuff from the English translation of a French book called anti-oedious by gilles deluze & felix guattari. When I read this and think about the Wikipedia I get all tingly.
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Dircaster seems to have taken on a life of its own and is up version 0.4e without my help. Awesome! I am going to see about releasing it into Sourceforge or something so it can be more easily maintained by others.

I’ve also given up on comments. Further apologies. Feel free to e-mail me at ryan (at) shadydentist.com. The plan is to write some sort of wiki plugin for wordpress to take their place but that is still pending.

Think of all the cool things that should be possible with that data. Figuring out which articles had strong connections to one another across multiple degrees of separation; from different perspectives based aggregate user types. I’m not sure what some of the results would be but I’d love to be able to find out.

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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this article since I read it a few days ago. His use of the pace maker example is great.

The article itself is perhaps a bit overly dramatic but the idea of breaking the carbon barrier and exchanging information bidirectionally between cells and machines does have spooky ramifications.

I’m not too worried about unstoppable self replicating cancer cures yet but I agree that such technology would rapidly obscure the definition of ‘life’ past the point of usefulness. After that, who knows…

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Some thoughts. I use both of these sites heavily and there seems to be a lot of concern that Yahoo is going to stick ads all over everything and generally muck things up. I’m not sure. Admittedly merging Yahoo’s ID system with Flickr’s wasn’t super pleasant, but other then that they haven’t changed anything I can see.

Keep in mind that they say Del.icio.us only has 300,000 accounts. Peanuts by Yahoo standards. Yahoo could start a social bookmarking service and have 300,000 users in there inside a week. Flickr only had 250,000 when they sold.

I think Yahoo is after bigger fish. They suspect tag based classification is going to be a huge deal and they want inside knowledge. Google knows it too, the labels on Google Base are basically tags.

What I want to see is what happens if you resort the results of a google-type text search based on Del.icio.us-type tag clustering and popularity. If I search for ‘poker’, show search results first that have a high number of ‘poker’ tags applied to them in the tag system. Or are frequently bookmarked by people who frequently use the tag ‘poker’, as they are likely intimate with poker on the net.

I’ve fiddled with implementing this but Del.icio.us is too slow to grab a few hundred URL histories on the fly remotely. I think Yahoo had the same idea and spent $30 million to speed up the process.