This is Like was an online mnemonic network that I was working on between 2007 and 2011. It helped people build their own knowledge networks from the things they liked.
The approach was very simple: you begin with something interesting to you (a concept, a person, a place) and This Is Like shows you what is “like” it. As a result, you could quickly get lost in a rabbit hole of associations created by other people, following infinite rhizome-like structures of ideas.
While This Is Like itself did not work as a service (because I made it too general and didn’t focus on a specific use case at the beginning), it lay the foundation for InfraNodus — a tool I developed in 2014, which is using a similar approach to analyze text.
Interestingly, the concept behind This Is Like got another birth in 2020 when knowledge graphs became hugely popular and apps such as Roam Research and Obsidian appeared.
September 25, 2008
Archive, Digital, Discourse, Medium, Publishing, Tool, Type, Urgency