[finders] The Memetic Web

[finders at findability.org]

November 4, 2005: The Memetic Web

http://www.findability.org/archives/000068.php

What if Tim Berners-Lee had pitched his idea for the World Wide Web to me
back in 1989? That was the strange question dancing through my head after a
magical evening with Holly and Bob Doyle.

After a long day teaching IA1, the prospect of dinner with two certified
geniuses (both have doctorates in astrophysics from Harvard) was a bit
intimidating.

But they turned out to be friendly, down-to-earth folks, and I found Bob's
enthusiasm for his latest idea, the memetic web, to be inspiring and
contagious.

The proposition, as explained on memography.org, is simple. Create a
globally unique string or meme ID. Paste this string into relevant web
pages. Wait for search engines to crawl the pages. Then use the meme ID to
search with 100% precision and recall. And you can even create an aboutness
page to define your meme, so others can use it properly.

Of course, the real challenges are far from simple. What about the known
problems of inter- and intra-indexer inconsistency? What about meme ID
spamming? And isn't this too complex to achieve widespread adoption?

On the other hand, free tagging has created an unquenchable thirst for
specificity. Intentional misspellings like indicatr and statistically
improbable phrases like ambientfindability will only take us so far.

So, I'm not totally on board, but I do think Bob's onto something, sorta
like TBL back in 1989. What do you think?