About

The goal of this website is to catalogue my personal activity in reading and learning, and to recommend the material to my friends. It is an alternative concept to blogging, and social networking. These other platforms are unsatisfactory to my purpose. Particularly, Social Networks share content linearly in time. This means that whatever I posted last year is lost in the archives. Consequently, this property of social networks reduces my incentive to announce new entries because they will push old ones to chronological oblivion. Somewhat better, blogs allow to categorize past entries in the menu, but they require one to write an article about every entry. Such article, if it is good, requires original content in addition to the material it promotes, otherwise any descriptive text is only an advertisement. This detracts from the purpose of a blog, which is a collection of personal articles. Particularly, it dilutes whatever few original articles that are in the blog, with articles that only reference another material.

As a response to these issues, Social Networks attempt to combine the idea of personal articles, advertisement, chat and chit-chat and lifestyle into one big system by automatically organizing data into categories, such as by groups of friends, or by media types. In contrast, this website does not purport to be several things but isolates the concept of intellectual adventure into a concrete form of a hierarchical collection of web-links with short descriptions. It contains not only references to books but to online articles and other forms of media such as video and audio.

In addition, my Social Network accounts serve the complementary purpose of a notification arrow into this site. My blog serves the complementary purpose of integrating knowledge, where whatever I write will combine knowledge and also add a little bit of my own, even if my own is only the skeleton of such combination.

My Twitter account is @BorisRarden.