Noosphere.org

http://www.noosphere.org/index_html

Dec 17, 2002: www.nooron.org is up

Nov 27, 2002: A useful release of Nooron is now available.

DISCLAIMER: This site consists of a large amount of rapidly repurposed material written over an 11 year period. We've been laboring in a Cathedral and are stepping out into the Bazaar for some fresh air. The voice of these writings is inconsistent because the nature of the effort was at varying times: private, marketing, activist, dopey, experimental, tentatively academic and always inescapably idiosyncratic. Let's face it: the goal here is (perhaps) stupidly ambitious; to ground an actual (as opposed to metaphorical) collective human intelligence in some fun and easy to use software. If you find some verbiage particularly obnoxious (especially by claiming too much with insufficient apparent foundation) please bring it to the attention of Shawn Murphy. Hopefully, I can improve the text, or better ... learn something! Thanks for your patience.

Goodness is Not Enough

A bottom-up or first-person perspective on the project.

A Self Improving Container

Nooron is a self-improving container for self-improving ideas. Nooron is server-side collaboration software which embraces and extends the World Wide Web, as it did to preceding protocols (ftp:, gopher:, telnet:, mail:, wais:). It uses a novel rating system based on user contributable subjective criteria in place of the single tacit criterion of 'goodness' other systems use. The resulting hyperdimensional 'subjective space' offers fresh opportunities for navigation, information discovery, filtering and presentation. An integrated versioning technology results in Nooron being an information system which aggressively automates the evolution of its contents. The final twist is that by subjecting its own constituent artifacts (Vantages, WorldViews, DepictionStyles, ReviewPanels and many others) to such evolutionary pressure, Nooron becomes a self-improving system. Hence Nooron is a self-improving container for self-improving knowledge. QED.

Essential Elements of Noosphere

Tantalizing possibilities

Obviously many of the following Vantages really only make sense when there is knowledge representation going on too.