There is a little known feature of Google Labs called
Google Sets. Basically what you do is supply a few seed words and Google Sets then returns to you a list of other words related to what you have given it.
For example if you type in the words
Aristotle, Plato, Neo, Nietzsche
Sets returns
plato
aristotle
nietzsche
descartes
socrates
machiavelli
kant
hegel
locke
rousseau
hume
metaphysics
plotinus
heidegger
My theory of how it works is that it finds all the primary hit pages for your various words. Then it looks in the relevant word lists for those pages and returns back to you the union of the primary words for those pages.
In using it I have found it much like having a mentor on a subject. Basically like talking about some A C and F and then your mentor says "well have you also considered B D or E?"
So I was pondering this issue with Pyrotex and he suggested that I should post it here. That was actually how I came to find this place. I just took a while to get around to my question
What I am noting is that during our life experience we cannot know everything there is to know in the world, even on a subject that we have studied intently. And there is great value in collaborating with others, especially those that are experts in our field of interest. They can give us great nuggets of hidden treasure. Some of the best organic seeds seem to come from such overlooked things or people. In fact personal introductions to people can also work in a very similar way.
But I guess what I am ultimately pondering is: Is there something we can learn from Google Sets about how to mine such gems? Is there an equivalent to the reverse lookup that Sets provides, or some method we could use to generate artificial mentors in other areas besides the information on the web?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this,
Allen
PS And
to Pyrotex for introducing me to this wonderful little intellectual oasis on the web.
PPS Bonus points to anyone who can count the number of metaphors I used in this post
