Title:  Volume 1, Issue 2 - Small Pieces Smartly Joined

Seq:    1.2

Level:  3

Body:

[David Weinberger][dw] has [famously described the Web][sp] as "a loose federation of documents — many small pieces loosely joined."

And there's no doubt that this ability of any web author to link to anything published by any other was and still is revolutionary. 

However the Web has not evolved in the ways that many of us might have imagined, or would have wished. 

Without laboring the point, those small pieces and emergent connections seem to have been largely overwhelmed by corporate interests making sure that most of the small pieces we see are ads of dubious relevance, joined at the hip to sales and marketing sites. 

And so, if an author wishes to produce some words that might prove intelligent and meaningful and of lasting value, and worth reading without the distraction of ads, then we probably still need to do some of that joining ourselves, to architect some coherent larger work out of our smaller pieces. 

Which brings us back to the notion of a book, or at least some longer-from writing made up of parts. 

And yet...

I still think some of the basic concepts of the Web still have a lot to offer. Things like:

+ Small pieces, with each one containing a distinct capsule of information or idea, having some potential value on its own;
+ A unique, human-readable identifier for each small piece;
+ User direction applied to the path one takes when navigating through these small pieces, with a traditional linear path being only one such option;
+ Reading layouts that adapt responsively to the user's screen size, chosen window size, and other preferences;
+ Open, unfettered access offered to anyone with a reasonably modern web browser. 

And so, as an alternative to Weinberger's notion, we might wish to consider the idea of *small pieces smartly joined*. 

Which is, perhaps, the reigning idea behind Notenik: not to collect a bunch of unrelated small pieces, not to patiently wait for the relationships between our pieces to show themselves, but to *consciously architect* the relationships between a particular set of small pieces, thereby fusing them into some larger whole – yet without sacrificing the advantages of the web mentioned above. 

 

[dw]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weinberger

[sp]: https://www.smallpieces.com/content/preface.html
