Thanks for this excellent article and feedback on ThoughtMesh. My Craig Dietrich and I agree that your suggestion of a global tag editor would make it easier for authors to finesse the metadata associated with their essays, and therefore the links between their essays and others in the mesh.

So we’re going to try it! Craig has a significant editor upgrade coming out soon; I’m not sure this feature will make it into this next release, but it’s now on our To Do list.

You’re also spot-on about the need to snare a critical mass of good writing. Craig and I have been working with USC to encourage authors of previous Vectors issues to retrofit their articles with meshed dopplegangers; since most of the Vectors publications end up in Flash, this re-publication would also serve to expose more of Vectors scholarship to Google. (This side benefit is a bit ironic, since one of the motivations behind ThoughtMesh was to provide an end-run around Google.)

I was also glad to hear that ThoughtMesh mirrors Mark’s online research style, as it does mine. A multi-tab interface is also my presentation style, as it’s a lot easier to respond to an audience’s questions and comments by opening a new tab in Firefox than in vainly searching for a relevant slide in your PowerPoint stack.

In fact, Mark’s suggestion makes me wonder if some future iteration of ThoughtMesh should include a bookmarking / citation feature to facilitate research based on lateral thinking…?

Anyway, good food for thought(mesh)!

jon

With Wikipedia the typical way I use it is instead to maintain a “knowledge frontier” around the topic I’m researching as a set of open tabs. As I read about stuff in the frontier, I can expand it more in that direction (open new tabs for articles that it points to), both in a broad direction (related topics) and deep direction (more detailed sub-articles), etc. Unlike with traditional publications I have much more control over precisely which part of the frontier I want to expand next, how deep to go in each possible direction, etc. ThoughtMesh seems like an interesting attempt to bring some of that style of navigation to academic writing, which would be cool if it turns out to work well.

But, thinking back on what I’ve read and heard about ThoughtMesh, I realize that I represent only one audience for the project … and arguably not the most important audience. ThoughtMesh is also a simple and (compared to other methods) fast way for scholars who don’t have a lot of web savvy to get new material online.

So, while I certainly still urge blogging, tech-engaged authors to experiment with ThoughtMesh, I now think the main thing I should have been doing is urging my less technically-inclined colleagues to use it as a way of becoming part of online scholarship. So that’s the plan from here…