msb-0323 Paul Otlet: A Man of Vision

msb-0323 Paul Otlet: A Man of Vision

The Mundaneum:

http://www.kk.org/truefilms/archives/2007/10/the_man_who_wan.php

Paul Otlet & the Web (hypertext decades before the 'Net)
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http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet/

Documentary about Paul Otlet by W Boyd Rayward
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Characteristics of Information
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intro

Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!

MSBPodcast is "not" any kind of a medical podcast.

It is by and for MSers.

Its purpose is to keep us entertained, to explain our symptoms, to remark on our discoveries, and to raise the general consciousness about our disease.

The path to illness is shadowy, murky and rough strewn.

The path to wellness is lit by the lamp of knowledge.

----

I have a quick and easy, painless and too to figgin' nosy customer survey that I really, really, really need you to go and fill out.

You can go to my podcast page [ http://www.msbpodcast.com ], click on the button on the left hand side of the page and anonymously answer a few simple questions.

I really need this.

If you've already done this, thanks...

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Feedback comes first, so...

You'r getting something after the French.

Take it on the chin guys.

Somethings the French (or the Belgians in this case,) are actually good at. And what an opus it was...

Paul Otlet was a Belgian who's opus is described in the videos attached to this post.

He had hyperlinking and the rest of Venevar Bush's contraption working years before Bush himself.

With his skills at organizing information, he has crafting methods for using a semantic web years before the second world war.

---- "Visions" by: "Lorenzo Monni" http://www.lorenzomonni.com/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop us an email: "charles at MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Simplify Your Vision" by: "Lance Lopez" http://www.lancelopez.com/cds.htm

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: "charles (at) MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Splintered Visions" by: "Into Eternity" http://www.centurymedia.com/us/single_artist.php?ID=27

"Thesis:"

"Paul Otlet": [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet ] was a man who was very much of his time but who saw how knowledge had to be indexed.

He managed to create and maintain his vision of a "Mundaneum" despite the lack of technology until the Belgian government had lost interest and until Hitler's troops had marched into his very offices and commandeered the space.

---- "Vision (Futurescape)" by: "Synthetic Movements" http://www.soundclick.com/syntheticmovements

"Synthesis:"

I'll let his biographers write paeans about Paul Otlet and his vision.

I'm writing about something else today.

You may have noticed the music has a definitely hard edge to it today.

That's because I can almost feel the man's frustration in everything that he left behind as his legacy.

Maybe I'm projecting here but that is something I can totally relate to. (I'm not a elitist, but I'm thoroughly fed up with working for jerks, ass-holes and jack-offs. Damn. Its so hard trying to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.)

In addition to the 17 million index cards of information, he left behind some documents which absolutely put Dewey and his decimal system to shame.

He was a man of such drive that it took a world war to put him aside (the Reich was suspicious of him but even they didnt know whether to take him out and shoot him or if he might be of use to them since his organizational skills put even the Reich's to shame.)

He would have attacked the internet and the web in an entirely different way than "Tim Berners-Lee" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee ] who's trying to play catch-up with the web with the slow creation of the "semantic web" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web ]

He would not have prevented people from putting up their documents but he would have stopped them from going up without being properly cataloged.

The idea of even needing a Google to filter through the dross would have been foreign to him. (Google's main problem is that key word searching can only take us so far. Then it runs into the problem that the words people use don't mean what they say and in combinations and phrases, they sometimes mean entirely contradictory things at the same time. [Its the old "Korzybskian" semantic anomaly of "I know you think you understood what you heard/read, but what you don't seem to realize is that what I said/wrote was not what I meant".])

If its worth doing at all, its worth doing right and he would have made sure we had the tools to do it right.

The semantic web would exist already and Google searches would be that much more capable.

---- "Visions Of Armageddon" by: "Adastra" http://www.adastracave.com/

"Conclusion:"

I am, or was in a previous pre-MS life, sometimes criticized for being too theoretical.

That's only by people who don't turn on the ["THINK"] sign.

I am the ultimate pragmatist.

But I thought of the poor schmuck who was going to be stuck trying to use my software first.

The average project manager doesn't.

And that's why projects of all kinds, of all types and for all uses, are reimplemented again and again, over and over.

I guess that that's why they're only average and average just ain't cutting it.

---- "Double Vision" by: "The Well Wishers" http://thespinningjennies.com/WellWishers.html

Outro