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-Through my eyes-

10 January 2005

Runtime, realtime, user-defined, user-friendly navbar

First, the framework:

Websites are created via two major processes. One, a person or team plans and then designs. Second, the website is not planned, it just happens on its own. Like this blog or slashdot.org.

For a decentralized information bank, such as this blog, we need a real time navigation system. Here is what I mean,

Suppose I want my friend Andy to read all of my posts related to systems theory. Although I have rambled all over the board, it is only after that you read my posts in a certain order can you understand what I'm saying. So I want to create a navigation system that is easy to create, and lets my friend hop across postings via a hyper link.

The 'next' and 'previous' hyperlink is a subset of what I'm saying, except that this form of navigation is mostly design-time. Ofcourse, it is a great way to organize pics and sell ecommerce.

How can I easily create a hyperlink navigation system on a blog that helps a user navigate through the site in an arbitrary order??

Making it more interesting (thank you system's theory!), how can a group of 1000s of reader create optimal paths around a blog or site and as a result come up with the most optimum for understanding?

Well, actually they don't have to create any optimal path. You see, create a seperate section in the blog and call it 'routes'. Here anyone can post the best navigation path to explore the information in a huge blog. Once you have thousands of navigation paths, the software publishes the top ten most heavily recommended. This is a good way to 'harvest' knowledge from an other haphazard system.

Hey, you can do the same thing with the internet! So how about creating a portal where different users can post different paths, inorder to fully understand something, anything, any subject.
But how do you let the users post optimal paths? How do you motivate people? Do something like woot.com. One topic/day. And anyone can come in, without registration or anything, and recommend the best set of links, read in the best order (we can turn on and off the order feature) needed to explore a subject. Once you get a lot of spam, which you eventually will, let the users rank other paths. The system will naturally select the highest rated paths for anyone to explore.

People love to help and communicate, me inclusive!

SK.
PS: Oh! Google's philosophy of 'democracy works on the web' is nothing more than the negative/positive feedback in a system called the internet!

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