Social knowledge

Funny how sometimes you hear about something, and then keep hearing about it later on. This happens for instance when I learn a new word in english. Strange I think first, never seen or heard this word before. but then, you start seeing it everywhere, in newspapaers, books, and keep hearing people using it. Probably one of these brain's functions which help you sort the complexity of the world, and automatically erase things from your memory, things that it doesn't have the time to process.

Any way, this happened today when I was watching Tim Berners-Lee, talking about the future of the web.

During the presentation, he started mentioning RDF, SPARQL, RDF-S, OWL, RIF as ways to structure data semantically. Very interesting - I had never heard about this until 2 days ago at the TEN networking event when I heard Ben Griffith and William Tunstall-Pedoe talking about it. And here we go, 2 days later, I come across the same thing again, and start doing some research about it.

This experience probably highlights the importance of meeting with people, interacting with them, and discuss new topics. This is I think the real trigger to knowledge - otherwise, you can keep reading for hours about new topics, your brain will simply filter things out for you, without your agreement of course...