When I moved to the big city I anticipated a fine library, and it was so. While I was getting my library card, the librarian struck up a conversation with me. Perhaps a 14 year old boy who wanted to read about radio transmission, grinding telescope mirros, and Kierkegaard wasn't such a surprise to her. In any case, after giving me instructions concerning the lower floor (which was for kids) she told me to come and see her if the book I needed wasn't there, and she would give me a reference to the real thing on the upper floors, which was reserved for grown ups.
I wouldn't say that the web is for kids, because that simply isn't true.
If on the one hand we have an ocean of greed and petty larceny, on the
other we have a second ocean that's even deeper ... white-papers, learned
texts, complete books, research documents. And in between we have a third
ocean, individual essays and hobby pages, forums and news groups, and of
course ... blogs!
This project concerns itself with weaving those together, with an eye to
facilitating access to material of appropriate granularity while enabling
annotation and comment. In short, this is about knowledge
creation through participation and discourse.