Forums are great, but ...
There's certainly nothing wrong with a lively forum, but as pleasant as these
might be, in this particular case I'm not looking for a discussion forum where
interesting topics get discussed by eloquent people so that I can know what they're
thinking and exchange ideas with them. I've got nothing against that (and Plastic
and Slashdot, and lots of other do this
very well), but I'm interested in something quite different. I want to read an
article that deals with a subject on a topic that involves me, or simply on a
subject that fascinates me, and discover that someone else has already read it
(sort of like having already taken it out of the library) and made some marginal
notes about it. Reading that person's comments may in some way connect the two
of us into a "community" but neither of us were looking for that. Instead,
we would each be responding, individually and personally, to something that we
read, and leaving our responses, our markings, on that text. Perhaps in that way
we'd be marking territory, but not necessarily
in order to claim it - only to let ourselves and others know that we've been there.
Go to: It is the web, you know, or
Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.