[oblio]

While this is somewhat cool, I have a few comments:

> The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for.

True, but most people aren't researchers. Heck, I think most people don't even know what indices are :)

> The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume.

Guess what, most people, 99% of the time, "consume".

> Billions across the globe rely on the Web to enhance their intellectual capabilities on a daily basis, building understanding through its rich mesh of connections.

Not really, billions across the globe check out funny cat pics, play games, watch you-know-what, etc. :)

Anyway, what I'm saying is: it's a nice vision of the world and the web, but that's not what the world mostly is. Good luck with it, but don't expect that a super contributor-friendly media will turn the vast majority of people into constant contributors.

[jhbadger]

The majority of people may not be professional researchers, but the Web certainly has encouraged amateur research, even on seemingly frivolous topics. There are countless wikis detailing every single character and place in movies, cartoons, and video games. Before the Web, this would have required physical conferences, actual paper publications, and so on. Some of this of course existed (think SF conventions and fanzines) but on a much smaller scale.

[amelius]

Yet, it's amazing how much information is freely available right now, given all the barriers that exist to host content.

At least it will be interesting to know by how much the amount of available information will increase when those barriers are taken down.

[oblio]

> Yet, it's amazing how much information is freely available right now, given all the barriers that exist to host content.

While there are barriers, are you sure that's true? There's a million options to host content these days. It's much easier than 10 years and much, much easier than 20 years ago.

You can get a Wordpress blog or a Medium one with 2 clicks. You can make a Facebook account very easily. They might not be perfect, but the options are there.

[HelloNurse]

A Facebook account isn't even a useful platform for the aforementioned funny cat pics, let alone more important and more complex content.

Hosted blogs can be better in theory, but in practice only an expert can use them for complex applications: for example, indexing a collection of cute kitten photos by tags and multiple criteria isn't the same as posting kittens without metadata and offering readers only titles and generic post listings.

[morsch]

FWIW, you could get free webspace on Geocities and its contemporaries with 2 clicks, 20 years ago.

[Torwald]

Well, "2 clicks" is a bit of hyperbole, but in the spirit of your comment, yes, things improved even over that. The free hosting schemes available today are much more powerful. Just think about what you can do with a Google account. Docs, Drive, Blogger, Sites, Forms, Picasa & on & on & on

[avcdsuia]

Hey, most people just use Windows as the only OS and we still have Linux. Making the world a better place by forcing a majority of people being smart is much more hard and subtle than creating intuitive and expressive learning materials and IMO it should be left for economists.

[joesavage]

I largely agree. I'm very much coming at this from the angle of 'knowledge work', and think a system of this kind is most useful to (though definitely not only useful to!) scientists, engineers, designers, lawyers, journalists, etc. While the population of knowledge workers is admittedly much smaller than the population on the whole, though, it's still sizable. Knowledge workers play an incredibly important role in our society, and anything that can amplify their intellectual capabilities is well worthwhile in my view.

[michaelscott]

If the target audience is knowledge workers then this is a nice step in a better direction. Bear in mind, though, that the goal of a knowledge worker is to understand content so the focus of any such project probably shouldn't be on enhancing the manifestation of graph theory on the web and rather on the methods of education available.

Focus on how the content is presented to the user rather than the connections between content, because at the end of the day it's the content I care about and not the connections.

[mtrycz2]

I also disagree with the premise that research happens on hypertexts.

When you do research you need to concentrate on the lecture at hand in-depth, not get lost in a web of references breadth-first style.

[jplayer01]

What? You need to survey hundreds of papers that are relevant to your research. Nobody has the time, nor is it expected or in any way efficient, to read even a majority of these in-depth.

[dredmorbius]

I read notes, bibliography, and index first. In that order. The more hypertext-like a work, the better, though it should be sufficiently self-contained that the references are supplementary.

[submeta]

>> Billions across the globe rely on the Web to enhance their intellectual capabilities on a daily basis, building understanding through its rich mesh of connections.

> Not really, billions across the globe check out funny cat pics, play games, watch you-know-what, etc. :)

This!

Many resources seem to be distributed asymmetrically, so is being interested in intellectual development, and only a tiny percentage follows the ideals of enlightenment and intellectual development.

So yes, even though we have the biggest resource of instantly available information under our fingertips, many seem not to use it at all for education and development.