Great entry on Battelle's Searchblog about the value of recording the journey of finding information on the Web.
That's when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush's famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush's explication of the problem – that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush's answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent – the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher's discovery through the Memex's corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them.
