Blue-Sky Startup Ideas: Socratic Linking

Wherever you are on the web, if you are looking at text, you can highlight it and choose to either make a comment, ask or answer a question. The process goes like this:

• Highlight the text
• "Sort" the text. That is, choose how it emotionally impacted you and what keywords you associate with it
• Choose to add a statement or a question
• Type in a title and a long version of your statement/question
• Hit the Ok button
• Next time people visit that site, an icon for statement/question pops up next to the text letting them hover and see options they can then choose to navigate to.

Not only does this allow cross-site linking based on both semantic and emotional responses, the data is collected and displayed elsewhere. So there's a Google-like screen. You type in a question. Up pops various answers, gathered from people responding to similar questions all over the web. You read them and respond if you choose, creating a long string of question-statement-question blurbs.

Reading an article on CNN about superconductors but have a question? Highlight the text that prompted the question, sort it, and type in your question. If you choose to navigate away, you're taken to the google-like site where other questions which were tagged with superconductor were asked along with possible answers. It's like a wiki that exists on top of the normal web and is formatted in a conversational manner (instead of topic-link manner normally found in wiki)

So where does this "emotional impact" part come up? Well, that's where it really gets cool. Because sometimes you feel like joking around, sometimes you feel like pondering serious questions, and sometimes you might want to be inspired. As the system learns your moods and how you respond to material other people have sorted, it can manage your emotional state by ranking linked text based on predictive emotional response. In layman's terms, it's not only going to learn what you like, it's going to learn why you like it.

Socrates famously created the Socratic Method, which tried to instill wisdom through questioning. We've done a great job of providing systems, like Google, which can pour through material to find individual answers, but we've done a horrible job of taking the rich content on the web and turning it into a huge cross-topic conversation amongst all consumers. In other words, if I'm reading something and have a question, I can usually find an answer. But if the text of the answer is not interactive, I've got to stop what I'm doing, go back to the search engine, and start searching again. There's no string of how all these pages work together towards a larger whole. It's just search-response, which was cool for a while but seems rather limited.

Can I code this? You betcha. Might even be fun. It'd definitely involve a lot of stuff: Javascript, creating add-ons for Firefox, Safari, and IE, creating an uber cool data system on the back-end.

Should I code this? That's a much more interesting question. It involves what kind of team I have, how long we can run before needing money, and what all of our individual goals are.

Right now I'm just happy with blue-skying the concept. See what other people think. Maybe run it by my closest 10,000 friends on HackerNews. Who knows? Might turn into something useful.