On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:40 PM, John Kennison <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Maybe in the near future, researchers will publish papers on their web sites > and journals would consist of stars (and maybe other symbols) and links. > ________________________________________
In a sense that's what already happens, except that they publish on arXiv.org, and the stars are being kept for some topics on blogs here and there, but mostly in people's heads. Recommender systems try to track the stars for books (Amazon) and movies (Netflix) and websites (Google), http://recsys.acm.org/ and http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/recommender_systems.php, but they all fail when the thing to be recommended falls outside the space spanned by previous experience. And they all assume a dilettante's interest in the recommendations and that everyone has a useful opinion about everything, neither of which holds when we get into the lands of publish-or-perish. Ideally you would have a wiki on top of arXiv.org where each wiki article was an ongoing review of the literature in the article's subject. And when one published on arXiv.org one would not just pick a single topic of publication but submit to all the reviews which might find the new article relevant. And the reviews would need to be multi-threaded, a hyper-wiki, so that differences of opinion could exist side by side rather than attempting to obliterate each other through ping pong edits. And that's the issue, of course, in journals or on wikipedia: whether the metastasized consensus can silence minority opinion by declining to publish or by blacklisting ip addresses or otherwise excluding them from the one true venue. Free speech meets true speech. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
