An Aside…
Topsy, is “a search engine powered by tweets.” They see internet as “a stream of conversations.” They’ve got $15 million in funding. Because conversations are happening on social networks like twitter now more and more than on pages linking to each other (the way web searches are traditionally ranked), this makes whatever is being talked about more searchable, faster.
With all this instant access to a worldwide conversation about everything, I do wonder how we can deploy this sort of technology to strengthen community and knowledge. If all this technology becomes another way to find out what happened when John Hodgman washed his headphones, or to try to control the spin of SCOTUS nomination, what’s the point? Will this just amplify the same talking-points over and over, or can it expand the conversation? It is certainly a powerful organizing tool.
At a time of ever more intertwined global crises, we need more depth, not less. While I am enamored of the technology, I do wonder if it isn’t just a distraction from the meaningful conversations that take far more than 140 characters. But harnessed to bring people together, not by pundits and politicos, but by real community organizers, this stuff does have the power to be transformative. For example: a search for “Prop 8 rally” on Topsy.com brought back well over a thousand results, all connected to real events and people. For a second, while sitting in my office (which is actually a closet), I felt like I was part of something much larger. All I had to do was get up and leave the computer behind to find out what.
