The web is primarily a textual medium; as design majors and visually-oriented people I think we tend to forget that. Text is a very flexible, efficient medium for communication, and I have always been interested in its capabilities to convey and generate ideas across broad boundaries. One of my favorite pieces of web writing is Paul Ford’s August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web, in which he explains how semantics, or the meaning behind words, could be harnessed by Internet technologies to create a global, intelligent, and powerful layer of logic and connection above the analog social sphere. And yeah, I hardly know what that means, and the concept as all but been shot down as a pipe dream. The world is too complex to be spelled out in terms of simple relationships. But that does not mean something cannot be gained from a system that develops those relationships.
My dynamic site will focus primarily on the text. On a basic level, it will encompasses Cloninger’s idea of location-independence, but only as much as the rest of the web already does. It will be powered by a database, which will store the text and the serialized associations created by users, editors, and the system. Most importantly, it will be a many-to-many, automated system, connecting the ideas of a multitude of users programmatically in order to make the invisible visible.