But I won’t in this case, at least not yet. I meant journals where I used the word. Not journalists. I get now that this wasn’t clear, but I’m not sure its worth changing. On re-reading it with that in mind, do you think I should change it?

Copy editing seems to be more of a dying art than good journalism.

–M

But in Jeff’s case it seems like it’s *data* he wants more than macro sense. (Or at least, the data piece is the part most-badly-served at the moment.)

This actually smells like a SemanticWeb use-case. We want every claim/statement to have some structured data, esp: (a) who’s making the claim (could be person or institution); (b) location-stamp (lat/long or object-name); (c) timestamp. Then we probably want to be able to assign multiple tags to a claim (“DownedTrees”, “Flooding”, “Trains”, etc.). And some way for others to comment on each claim.

Then some kind of GUI that integrates map view/filter with tag info and time-filtering (distinguish fresh claims from old claims).

(Hmm, hack idea – use FlickR since lots of photos have lat/long and timestamps. And the photo becomes a key part of the claim.)

thanks for the answers.

winer has seen _everything_ as an outline
for about 3 decades, so i’d have thought
that this idea would have occurred to him.
either way, now you know for next time…

i do not think lists on one blog could give
jarvis the full information he’s looking for.
he clearly invokes leveraging of the social
that “would let anyone in town annotate”
and keep the information freshly updated.

i’d certainly like to see your idea brought to
reality, as it could be a real breakthrough.

-bowerbird

“Go deeper than wikis. Wonderful as they are, wikis are very flat as outlines go.”

The wiki platform (WikiMedia, in this reference) is open-source and is merely a content management system for collecting blank pages into an infinitely customizable taxonomy. While the configuration of the platform of Wikipedia may seem flat, there is nothing to prevent a wiki from utilizing an outlining approach.

The Semantic MediaWiki community is filled with people who seem to be motivated by the same callings as the outlining community. (I don’t know exactly what they mean by *semantic* as they use it, but it’s community of people who seem to develop all the cool extensions that you don’t see in Wikipedia, but make other wikis do cool things.)

Outlines can’t be beat in ways that allow the writer / reader to go deep (vertically) into a topic. Wikis are great for connecting horizontal content.