Street smarts on the information superhighway
Connecting a world’s worth of people should lead to world-wide cooperation, in an ideal world. In the real world, however, the internet doesn’t foster cooperation everywhere everytime, but there are one or two sites it mostly works. Everything (2) is such a site. A giant collaboration created by some geeks in Michigan, better known for their nerdy news site Slashdot, and operated, updated and edited entirely by its userbase, E2 strives to be a comprehensive archive of all the information in the world.
Failing that, they’ll settle for any information members are willing to post. Every topic, called a node, can be added to by any number of users. Some of the nodes are more active than others: being an outgrowth of a geeky site the Matrix nodes are particularly well populated, but others
are often lavished with similar care.
Though the nodes are the site’s focus, E2 also is somewhat unique in its inter-node linking. Commentary and ’see-also’-esque links are added simply by searching from a node, and every link expands a node. Writeup authors can easily link any word in a writeup to its corresponding node simply by typing brackets around it. The site’s underlying software does all of the necessary database and hyperlinking functions, and the result is a massively linked and cross-referenced database of some very good yet free information.
