Social Web

This idea has been haunting me for a few months now. I spend a lot of time online - mostly reading, listening to music and watching videos. I read a few blogs, and even among the news websites, find myself greatly attracted to what other people are saying about the news of the day. Digg and Reddit, for instance, have taken this idea to its logical end - news stories are only posted there if there are a million people interested in it.

I find it intriguing that so much who we are and what we know depends completely on the people around us. But today, in this exciting global village we live in, the number of "people around us" suddenly includes everyone with a modem! It boggles the mind to think of the number of people reading the same news I read everyday, and coming up with completely different conclusions, and those conclusions influencing my conclusions and so on ...

The link posted here talks a little bit about this interesting social interaction we have developed over the web. I'm not sure how good the idea is, but it does merit some thought, so I decided to post it.


TED | Talks | Jonathan Harris: The Web's secret stories (video)

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web -- so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents "We Feel Fine," a project that scours blogs to collect the planet's emoti(c)ons