This post is a part of a post series with notes to prepare a WebTrends article on the Synaptic Web I’m working on. Basically the Synaptic Web revolves around the idea that the structure of, and mechanisms on, the web increasingly resembles that of the neural networks in our brain. This will have, for instance, consequences for how we will find information on the web in the future, how people, products, services, brands get attention on the web and how value can be extracted from it.
To make a start for my article I did some web searching to find out what others have to say about the topic. Important articles and videos are:
- The post founding the concept on synapticweb.org by Khris Loux, Eric Blantz and Chris Saad
- A Read Write Web video interview with Khris Loux
Khris is co-founder of JS-Kit that created Echo, a commenting service that is build with the ideas behind the Synaptic Web in mind. - A post by Eric Norlin. As an early reaction to the article on synapticweb.org, he talks about the importance of the Synaptic Web as an analogy, ‘there’s a bigger picture being painted’
- Nice article by Dominiek with a focus on importance of semantics
- Very good article by Rudy Nadler-Nir (“ToingToing! We’re Here to Bury Comments, Not to Praise Them”) showing the consistency of the concept with observations made by thinkers in the past
After reading/viewing the above I got the impression that the notion of the Synaptic web is still in its infancy, explanations are still quite abstract. What the Synaptic Web is and how it works has to be made more concrete, practical examples of its mechanisms need to be created. Further, a better understanding needs to be developed about what the Synaptic Web could imply for how we use the web to find information, how (web) businesses can create new value, how to get attention, how to communicate and how we work and live in general.
These are challenges I will attempt to take up in the article I’m preparing. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, but I like a good challenge ;)
PS: initially I wanted to post these notes on my 3 tweet blog experiment on Posterous. But since I could never cramp what I wanted to say in 3 tweets it was promoted to my main blog site!
Tags: attention, real-time web, references, search, semantic web, synaptic web, trends, web business
