At 05:40 PM 10/3/01 -0400, Seth wrote:
>I know how to do those things, of course, but that's beside the point.
>Brian's fulfilling my personal vision for Conversant by managing a massive
>pile of knowledge with it, making it all accessible in unique, creative
>ways. He's not just managing a weblog, which frankly could be done a
>little easier with other software.
Wow, thanks for all the kind words, Seth.
I like that "massive pile of knowledge" image. The thing about Conversant
is that it is so easy to dig through that massive pile. If someone writes
me and says, "you know it would be really useful if you had a page about
XXX," it takes just a few minutes to create a page that will go through and
show all the articles related to that topic. Quite a few times I've looked
at the log files and noticed a lot of people were running searches on a
topic, and it takes just a few minutes to put up a page that will
automatically bring out any connections with that topic.
That's very powerful stuff.
As you mentioned in another part of your message, there are things that
could be better about my sites (I have an outline on my Palm with a little
over 1,900 things I need to do on the various sites), but it is still
amazing that just one person can do this. And I'm not sure it could be done
to that degree on a different software system given the shoestring budget
and my level of technical ability.
But what I really wanted to emphasize was that the metaphor I use to think
of my sites is as a sculpture. A site like Overpopulation.Com still has
basically the same information that it had two or three years ago, but the
site is far more useful today than it was back then, and if you come back
in a year it will be even more useful.
