Borges is one of my favorite writers. In
"Las Ruinas Circulares" (one of the stories from his famous book
"El Jardín de Senderos que se bifurcan") he wrote:
"...No ser un hombre, ser la proyección del sueño de otro hombre ...", later "...A todo padre le interesan los hijos que ha proceado..." and wrapped up with "...Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo."
Altough I am definetively not an expert in analyzing Borges' writing, one of the reasons I like his writing so much is that I just love the way he uses topics such as dreams, labyrinths, paths, men, circular references, symbols and some others to correlate with mathematical artifacts and with a fantasy world that so closely resembles the "real" universe. Some of those mathematical artifacts are the chaos theory, graphs, trees, set theory and the infinite.
Today, someone coming from http://ged.livejournal.com/friends has visited this blog. That page links to my previous post on Austin Ventures buing two online customer feedback startups. Looking closer, it says the user who posted that was technorati2987. From technorati2987's page:
"The following are the titles of recent articles syndicated from Technorati Search for: http://www.perseus.comSearch Technorati...."
So we can see that this last page is automatically collecting the links containing "www.perseus.com" from Technorati. The first one is also automatically collecting posts from technorati2987's feed, and from some other sources as well. That was aparently a tree structure. But not any more. It is now a graph since I've just linked back to them as well.
So I am now talking about the web. Yes, the web can be understood as a gigantic graph. That's not my message. My point is, the underlying structures that rule our world can be (easily) modeled. Once modeled, they can be further studied and more deeply understood. That can then bring some light back on why some things are the way they are in the "real" world. The way to model and explore this structures is not limited to mathematics or natural sciences. Borges created his own theory, his own way.
Borges was also writing about the web. Not the same one, but one that worked on a very similar fashion. Which possibly makes it, at the end, the same one. He was also referring to, at the same time, humanity and social networks. I just wanted to point out that, regardless the technology we use, regardless the concrete problem or ideas we are analyzing, it is often the underlying structure that is interesting to understand and explore so that it will shed light into understanding how things work and why they work the way they do. Again, understanding and describing how the structure works can be done through, for example, arts and science.
Have a look at websites as graph for another creative example (by the way this post is from the author of onethousandpictures.com. Seth Godin has posted about it too). At some point, I will probably talk about viral marketing in this blog. Understanding how a network or graph works is the key to understanding social networks and viral marketing.
In Argentina, we say "el mundo es un pañuelo". Well, I believe the web is one too. Now... this will be a hard to classify post. Is it Marketing, or Technology? ...
