First post here, so let me introduce myself. I'm Colin Maudry, and I want to enable people to get the information they seek in its purest form, as easily as possible.
It consists in regrouping similar "things", connecting those that are related somehow and presenting them a way that makes their meaning and purpose obvious to the target person or audience. I'm merely refering to enabling any interesting piece of knowledge to unleash its full potential and let anyone who is looking for it embrace it with no compromise whatsoever. The perfect connection between information or knowledge, and the one who seeks it.
That's quite a tough challenge when you know the massive load of knowledge available... Well, when you think of it, the existing mass is not an issue. If you leave aside the outdated knowledge, in other words, the knowledge that is not true anymore or has an extremely low probability to be of any interest for anyone*, the endless universe of books, articles, maps, PDF, tagged concrete walls, fanzines, cereal packages and tweets shrinks to a galaxy. You can't sense the difference, but you know it's smaller.
Moreover, I'm not the only one, there are more. More people, skilled gardeners of the human history, holding their ground under the assaults of the worms of ignorance and oblivion. They do their little part of the job, sorting, listing, organizing, filtering, updating their rows of litterature cabbages, their science pumpkins or their news sunflowers. They rule a library, reign on the yellow pages or sort their records in inverted chronological order of release date. In a word, they keep stuff tidy, in a way that will help people to access it. That's some more sectors of the galaxy I don't have to worry about, because they are in good hands.
That leaves us the interesting information that is either not managed or badly managed. The information people are looking for, but that is hardly findable (by the way Internet did a hell of job to make things, if not easily findable, at least somewhat accessible). If we state that any piece of information that is not managed correctly is not easily accessible and consequently sinks sooner than later into oblivion (= the endless universe, §3), we identify the real challenge: taking care of the new knowledge as soon as it's out of the press, published to the Web or saved on the disk. We are billions of intelligent creatures who create or imagine something new, every day, in every corner of the Earth. But our memory is limited. And we like sharing. And we are curious. This is where I roll up my sleeves and start doodling the kind of things you see in the background.
I created this blog to share (!) with you the content management tricks I come across with during my trip in this galaxy.
- Colin
*I'm not saying there is such a thing as "uninteresting" information, given it's a relative notion. In this article, I refer to this information that only historians or archivists are likely to be interested in, precisely for its very nature of old forgotten piece of information.
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