A Thought Experiment

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I think that is what Einstein called daydreaming.  Anyways, I was having an epic one last night I want to share.  Going back on my thoughts that I wrote on somewhat the other day, “learning ouside of school and the moral justifications of piracy”. But I was thinking about collaboration and the way that thoughts flow.  That is what I enjoy so much about this blog is that my thoughts can just flow and others can see it, but how many tools really let us do that?

My Idea

So this was my thought.  A web based program that would transcribe text to speech from any internal or 3rd party input device.  But unlike your average text to speech software this would be built like an idea web.  As you talk it would be constantly scanning databases and the web and definitions of words etc, to know when a topic has changed, and create a new node in the web.  It would also be intuitive enough to detect natural punctuation.  It would have a built in database of keywords that would trigger things to happen, for instance if you said the keyword ideas, it would start a list of ideas.

It would also have a section that would list news stories and peered articles relating to your topic.  Furthermore it would actually transcribe the brainstorm word for word as any dictation software so you can read it just the way you thought it.  The web would also have the ability to attach rich web content, videos, images, even entire web pages.  It would keep a bibliographic record of all the sources used and you could import that into word.  And you could add your own web nodes and ideas manually as well.  The web would also have the ability to “trackback” or highlight from topic to topic how a specific idea node was created.  You could manually add your own trackbacks as well, so you can find the most direct and relevant information for your topic.

It would also have the ability to index these brainstorm webs, tag them, and notate them, so a record is kept.  It also would be able to index and tag and notate other files and information from the internet much like Zotero.

Pretty wicked awesome right?  I thought so.  Anyways that was my thought.