I came up with a little method of looking at information tonight that I like. I saved an article that I’m pretty into from a website. I then opened it up in word and saved it as a document. I am proceeding to go through and look at the information contained in it line by line. I am color-coding it based on the value I see it having to what I am interested in. Areas with no value are grayed out - almost like when they declassify documents, but black out a bunch of lines in it. Then I have neutral information, which I think may be supportive of the direction I’m headed. That is left alone. Then I have “hot” information, which speaks directly in some regard to what I am after. That gets highlighted yellow. Maybe this isn’t any huge new revelatory technique of looking at printed matter. But to me, there is something hidden in this sort of approach that I think could be important. What if I could write a program that knew how to look for “hot” information online, and scoured the web for it, delivered it to me in some form, and then I approved or disapproved, which further enabled the program to refine what’s hot and what’s not? What if information became stored in “hot clusters” instead of in articles? I would read by perusing soundbytes, and if I wanted context, I could expand to include related lukewarm information, and further to include cold information. And then I could trek off in a new pathway, and the system would automatically adapt towards what it knew that I now considered to be hot. What if this program was a virus and also infected office networks, and gathered “hot” data from their secure information banks? And it could infect universities, and home users, and gather data on what those users considered to be hot data (without them even knowing - just based on their search preferences, bookmarks and saved data)?

How long before this happens? Has it already happened? Are people using these sorts of mining techniques (and others, see post below) right now without us being aware? Isn’t technology always developed years ahead of when it is implemented on a mass scale? Wasn’t the internet around since the 80’s (or 70’s?), but didn’t become widespread until the middle nineties? Isn’t this crazy?