Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
Vannevar Bush - As We May Think Section 6
I have been pottering around in the last few days, investigating features I could add to this page. But, apart from their novelty, I ask myself what they will accomplish. The problem is that the resources I use for teaching and for my various research projects build up in my del.icio.us pages, or in scraps of text notes I type into my computer, and the "trails" they were part of are now only represented by the vague folksonomies I created in the heat of the moment, or the titles of text notes I have filed away in a research folder. In other words, the technology creates a kind of order, and this order is much better than nothing, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.
