Lawrence Lessig on US Presidential candidate Howard Dean's blogging efforts:
"Neutrality aside, though, Governor Dean has earned a special respect. Of course there are issues on which I would disagree with anyone. But I have been struck in reading these posts, and the passion they inspired. They revive a feeling I had as a kid รณ that ideas could matter, and that there could be people who would make them matter."
(emphasis and font colour mine)
I'm from New Zealand, so I haven't been following American politics. But that last sentence struck a chord with me, because it's a universal concept. Ideas do matter.
One of the Web's great strengths is it allows ideas to flow freely, because it is a Two-Way communications medium. Television is just one-way, books are one-way, newspapers are one-way. The Web allows ideas to be more than dead words on a page or flickering images on a screen. On the Web, an idea can travel across thousands of nodes on the Internet and take on a life of its own. The Web makes ideas come alive!
Not unrelated, Adam Bosworth has just started a blog. He used to work at Microsoft, where he played a key role in the development of Internet Explorer. So it's great to be able to read his ideas on how the web browser should evolve. He has a concept of a "web service browser", which he defines as:
"...a browser that can access information published as XML messages by services, let the user interact in a rich and graceful way with this information or these services, but can run well in terms of interaction whether the user is online or offline. "
I will be keenly following Adam Bosworth's weblog as he explores this fascinating idea. There have already been some interesting comments from readers. I'm looking forward to what Scoble has to say ;-)
As for my own much more humble contribution to the Web of Ideas, I've started to note down some thoughts for an ideas/topics web application. I'm currently investigating XTM Topic Maps. I'll talk more about this later...
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