[via Prakash Swaminathan] Nova Spivack has a nice post on what he calls as the Metaweb – the web which connects Intelligence (also see the graphic):
The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a Web focused on relationships between things — what I call “The Relationship Web” or the “Relationship Revolution.”
We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the “arcs” will begin to rival that of the “nodes” that make up the network.
This is similar to the human brain — individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of “spreading activation” to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links.
As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind — the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a “bunch of interacting parts” to “a new higher-order whole” in its own right — a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.
I think of this as the Memex.
