The Earliest Interweb-Thingy ?

Thanks to Dan Glover for posting this Mundaneum link on MoQ-Discuss.
(And to Ron Kulp for this documentary link to the same subject.)

I’ve blogged several times previously on the similarity of blogging to the approach Pirsig used to organise his ideas, and how this is a generic metaphor for the interconnectivity rather than atomism of knowledge itself.

Pirsig, like this much earlier Mundaneum approach, involved gathering “useful facts” as simple index cards (a page, a post, in blogging terms), but the crucial thing is that these “atoms” contain links to other indexed atoms, and in fact some atoms are nothing but links – meta-atoms, subject headings, organisational nodes, place-holders, what-have-you – little or no content of their own.

Partly this also mirrors the context and story-telling emphasis of modern knowledge management – recognising that sources (individual first-person people / conversations / anecdotes) are context that is at least as important as the content of “knowledge” in any objective sense.

Note – the original Mundaneum link is from the “Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society” web site, which itself is a blog and has some wonderful links in its side-bars. A new source of exploration for me.

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