Collaboration and Organization on the Internet

While Kiran, Rekha and I have been working on Mashedge, my friend Dave Liddell (http://www.ridesouth.net/) was writing a concept paper on the same topic. Its a good read and brings out the essence of Mashedge.

Research Portal Abstract
When you research a topic on the web, you search, you read, you study,you dig deeper into concepts which you don't understand, you learn,you correlate, you evaluate information statistically. Hardly ever do you find an article that answers your exact question in this complicated time we live in and if you do, you don't take it as gospel until your cynicism has been assuaged with corroborating information.

Once you arrive at your personal answer to your question, whether that is how much salt you should intake in a day when sweating on your touring cycle through Central America, what do to do when you get bitten by a scorpion, if Colombia is really safe to travel in, what the best camera is for the price when you are primarily interested in semi-professional grade low-light images, or which foods you should avoid when breast-feeding your child when you suspect his or her rash is food related, you add some opinion based on your facts and you reach a conclusion. Then you act on it. You might tell someone else about it and you might not. Most people don't give feedback to the forums they read, post comments on blogs, have a feedback facility(media articles, etc), or update Wikipedia when they find something that they think is right on or they think is rubbish. This is the problem. There is too much garbage to wade through and everyone hasto do it, over and over again. There is no easy tracking of compound problem solutions.

Wouldn't it be better if you could have a place where topics were researched, the conclusions shared, the garbage tagged as such, and the good stuff labeled prime? You might not always agree with the conclusion, but you could come to an understanding of how they got there, and decide if the evaluations were wrong, they didn't dig deep enough, there's not enough info out there, you personally have the answer, or heaven forbid; you agree with them. In any case, it would shorten your time in research and partially cut out the middle-man,the search portal and all the trash to wade through. Augmentation of"stories" or topics would make them more robust, and rating and evaluation systems would cause consensus to float to the top of thepile. Those who are found to have an analytical nature would also be easily found, not from quantity; as most sites do; but from qualitybased on weighted consensus, based on user research integrity.

Socially, contacts and groupings could be made as a sidebar or story organizational / grouping tool.Why doesn't such a place exist? No one has done it yet. Not all that innovative, just a different way of looking at it.

The Solution: A tool that allows you to easily categorize, refer to, correlate, rate, comment on, and present, information on the internet. This data can then be commented on by the researcher, and in turn any aspect of it can be commented on by others. The research in it's entirety can be rated, disputed, augmented with a different "view" or "overlay" and each overlay or the root (original) research block can be rated and evaluated by the public so that the most logical conclusion is presented and reached. A social intellectual competition which feeds into the social networking aspects.