by Karl Svartholm 2025-04-30
There’s a quiet question underneath all our work on the Knowledge Web:
Are we building something to read — or something to think with?
Should the K-Web be a carefully crafted experience, like Connections — a trail you walk, designed by someone who already knows where it leads?
Or should it be more like an old notebook full of half-finished scribbles, arrows, and odd clippings?
Or a wall covered in index cards and red thread?
Think of it like this:
On one end, there’s the authored journey — like watching a documentary, or reading a well-edited essay.
You follow. You reflect. You remember.
On the other, there’s the freeform maker’s space — a blank page, a stack of books, a pen.
You explore. You connect. You shape meaning yourself.
But most of us live somewhere in between.
We read a book, dog-ear pages, jot notes in the margins.
We copy a quote, paste it in our notes, connect it to something we heard in a podcast.
That’s a kind of web too.
Another question:
Is the Web always there, waiting to be uncovered — or does it collapse into existence as you move through it?
One view says:
The web is already there.
Like the stars in the sky — you just don’t always see the constellations until someone draws the lines.
Another view says:
The web is made — as you move, as you ask, as you follow your questions.
The trails only appear because you walked them.
Maybe both are true.
Maybe the job of the K-Web isn’t to choose one side, but to let you slide between them.
There’s value in letting people travel a well-built web.
Burke’s Connections is proof of that.
But there's also danger — of overload, passivity, forgetting how to make sense for yourself.
And there's magic in letting people build their own webs — especially when the system helps, suggests, guides, but doesn’t dictate.
So maybe the real question isn’t what the K-Web should be, but:
How can it help each of us find the right balance — to learn, to wonder, to connect — without losing ourselves in the flood?
And luckily, in this digital age, there’s little need to choose.
Shared maps and collective trails will always matter — they help us orient, collaborate, feel part of something bigger. But each person can also grow their own web, shaped by the way they think, feel, and act.
Each journey can be unique.
Each trail meaningful.
Each web alive.
Maybe the best Knowledge Web isn’t one fixed shape —
but a system that starts with something like an episode of Connections.
You watch James Burke lead you through a dazzling trail of historical links.
But then — you pause.
You zoom in.
You follow a side path he only hinted at.
You explore an offshoot of the story — drawn from Wikipedia, Wikidata, books, or other sources (maybe surfaced by an LLM that knows where to look).
You add notes of your own.
You make a connection Burke never said out loud — but that now feels obvious, or exciting, or personal.
You pin it to your web.
You keep going.
Maybe you save it.
Maybe you publish it.
Maybe you throw it away — a one-time flash of curiosity satisfied.
Or maybe you don’t start from Burke at all.
You start from nothing — just a question, or a feeling, or a blank infinite canvas.
And the web grows from there.