” Authors need content, and content needs authors”

so ends Stephen Downes'(@005) paper Semantic networks and social networks http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=31624 which was a really helpful paper in allowing me to connect up the value of social connections within a sematic or content-related context. He also points out the separated distinct nature of early instantiations of these technologies on the web: Flickr for pictures, Delicious for semantic tags etc, and it emphasized for me how critical the interconnection is between the ideas, the people, the people connected to those and related ideas and so on–a meaningful web, rather than one based on pattern-matching at a simple level.