psychoanalys.is

What this project is about.

Background

This principle concern of hypothes.is and annotateit as well as a few other services such as diig is annotation of the broad internet. It is difficult to see how they are different to clip and comment offerred by google plus and facebook. The fundamental point about google and facebook is their sheer size and their ability to offer a well populated community based on the revenue generation of such volumes. Whether the free and open source efforts of hypothes.is and annotateit or the reasonable, but nevertheless paid plan of diig will attract numbers remains to be seen. Very much depends on whether their difference is attractive to users who have particular usage in mind. From this point of view it seems that hypothes.is and annotateit are distinct in that they are interested in the intellectual mind set. This brings them into a relationship with academia, publishing and, of course, what goes with this in this area, such offerings as Mendeley. How this works out, whether one service compliments another is an important issue mid term, as the basis for knowledge generation in the new model embraced by them is openness and sharing in a productive spiral.

psychoanalys.is

psychoanaly.is, as the name implies, is a very particular positioning of these are related technologies to, yes, embrace a positive spiral of knowledge dissemination and growth, but also to offer an experiment in understanding ourselves in relation to a set of concepts identified with the Psychoanalytic domain. This is envisaged as a cultural experiment. Some aspects of just how this is done, how it is defined as a task, is part of the experiment and quite open. The idea here is that there is a set of concepts that can be defined in an open ended and approachable way that people who are interested can relate to themselves and to others using all means of web 3.0. There are fundamental issues of privacy and anonymised data use that need to be worked through. Encouragement to participate may be rewarded on a basis similar to Quora, Stackoverflow, github or many other participant lists. This also needs to be designed well and criteria may not be exactly the same as in other examples. There are further issues of provenance and authority that must be linked to methods of discovery, again not necessarily the same as other examples. Finally there is the relationship with existing publishers. This is the area with the potential for the greatest change and, without doubt, the area of greatest difficulty. In the very near future it will be important to establish prior art for these ideas by being able to show priority and authenticity.