(2003-09-24) Stephenson Quicksilver Meta Wiki

Neal Stephenson's Quick Silver is finally out. He's collaborating with Applied Minds to use annotations from the book as a basis for a MetaWeb site based on Wikipedia's WikiEngine. Neal writes I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people... Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized. We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started.