Traction and "as We May Think"

At first blush, Traction Software looks like a cheesy “blog” “enterprise” play–i.e. repackage blogs to make them more palatable for Office Space managers.

Fortunately, I had, by happy accident, a chance to be demo’d Traction not once but twice. I say fortunately because I had already seen the Traction site and made the snap judgment mentioned above, and because it took both those demos for all the lightbulbs to go off (about half each time).

Without that experience, it will hard to understand how on-target they are, since they are all enterprisey–which means little access for individuals. But they do have a blog of some intelligence.

And during the second demo the sales guy went on a tiny tangent about the philosophy behind Traction, mentioning Vannevar Bush and referencing As We May Think and Memex as source material.

Can’t summarize those links. Have to follow them if you want to follow this thread.

I like when people think before they build. I wish Traction success. They very well may be the closest I’ve seen to getting the Semantic Web, or maybe just what Hypertext has wanted to be all along. I wish they had a more consumer-accessible version or offering so they could get a bit more of a memic foothold in the user-generated content space.

Heheh…I said “space.” Ding a bell.

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