I’ve written briefly about David Gelernter before. Now William Grosso, a “well-known speaker” I’ve never heard of throws out a short article titled “We’re all Gelernter Now“. Grosso doesn’t write much, but he does hit on the key point:
“has anyone else noticed that time-based tagging is becoming more and more important to the way we store and process data?”
Along the lines of Sifry’s interview with Lydon, this brief aside really underlines that we are finally building metadata as a side product of our normal process. It’s that lack of effort which is contributing to its ubiquity… and therefore its importance.
Gelernter hits on many useful concepts, but his academic foresight was, well, academic, in that I don’t believe he’s profiting from his early insights. Recognizing the way people think ahead of others didn’t give him enough of a head-start in envisioning how to take advantage of his ideas. Still, maybe it’s better to be right than rich. On most days, I’d settle for either, even if history cares more about who’s right. [found via Evhead, who noted the surprising non-mention of blogs as an “time-based tagging” example, even though Grosso was writing in his blog?!?]