Org-mode information sharing
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Modern web do have important issues and flaws, we need something better.
Let's start with why the web was invented: at that time we have had various
documentation systems, few digital, many paper-based. Digital systems have
had to flaws:
- no search engines, finding things happen asking people on various
usenet newsgroups, looking in some specific institutions or consulting
local system documentation;
- usenet was and still is tremendously effective for public
interpersonal communications like mails was and still are
tremendously effective for private interpersonal communications
but there is no equivalent to "pin information" for the public.
Far before the so called Documentation Movement or to be more precise,
Paul Otlet give
birth to the idea of "web of documents" based on "electric telescopes"
that would allow people anywhere in the world to search and browse
through millions of books, newspapers, photographs, films and
sound recordings, all linked together in what he termed a réseau mondial:
a "worldwide web"
1 so someone
CERN have thought that time is ready to make "the web" with modern
"digital telescopes". The original aim was publish and connect information
in an easy to browse way, NOT a substitute of full books, but a way to
share small articles "atomic enough" to be composed in documents name
"websites". It was a success and still is to a certain extent.
Quickly back to the present with the actual web we:
- depend on few private search engines to a point that they can pilot
de-facto people knowledge selecting knowledge they present
2;
- depend (for most people) on some proprietary web-apps like
Facebook, Reddit, HN, GMail, ... that can censor anything at any time
making it de facto disappearing from our common knowledge "repository";
- we can't easily create our "repo".
Some solutions was invented, like feeds, that let us see a personally selected
web slice and store it locally for future operation but unfortunately while
many still use RSS/Atom and a not marginal slice of websites offer feeds, most
only put a title in the feed to force people visiting the linked websites to
make revenues from ads. This was the classic mariner's that damage the harbor.
Can we go back to classic feeds like the ones this site offer? I doubt. We need
something more easy to spread, more local, more personal. Org-mode shared as a
repo (git if you like, but not necessarly like git) can be an option for small
slice of the information space, with that model we can share information easy to
be integrated in personal org-mode based PIMs/KMs and we can manage not only
test but also any kind of attachments, code etc. It does not scale, it's not
practical but is the poor man's solution to try something different and start
to think at something more personal, broad and not easy to censor.
Practically speaking I'll publish a small repo, probably git but not necessarly
git, with this website as a collection of org-mode docs, links in them with IDs
prefixed by my site fqdn to avoid conflicts and structured to be accessed easily
via org-roam or some other similar Emacs package, so anyone can clone that repo,
keep them up to date with a pull, access and link that in org-mode. An external
"slip-box" in a local
ZettelKasten knowledge system/exobrain.
- 1
- that last sentence is actually stolen from Alex Wright's
Cataloging the World, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in
2014, ISBN 978-0199931415
- 2
- time to cite another book: The Filter Bubble: What the
Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser, ISBN 978-1594203008
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0
/ Copylefted by Kim ALLAMANDOLA.