Knowledge anno 2008

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

I love Adriana's conclusion to my remark about what great lengths I'd go to dig out dusty old books on this particular subject some 16 years ago, whereas now it's all on Wikipedia:

"The remembered trivia one was so proud of now two clicks away! What is the world coming to -:)" I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Update 14:15: a_spod just reminded me of Google book search in the comments, which reminded me of this interesting article by John Naughton: "Google pays small change to open every book in the world"

Comments

[a_spod]

And the very dusty books themselves can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, previewed on “Google book search”, or otherwise found on the web. Minus the dust. ;) But I miss the yellowing pages and the smell. :(

[Kristine]

How very true:-) Just added a note on that to the blog post, but yes: I miss, not only the smell, but also the sense of adventure and atmosphere I used to experience while book-hunting in big old libraries. Time and work prevents me from doing much that these days, and it's so much easier to do it online...