[This is a slightly improved version, with help from Aaron McBride.]
Problem: How to vote for ideas instead of individuals? How to construct public opinion? For instance, how do we know what is the opinion of the entire blogging community, or any web-based community, about a particular issue?
Solution: LinkMyMind is a scheme for voicing and searching for opinions online. This is a complete flip-side of conventional electoral processes which reduce the individual to a statistic by representing him as a vote. In this case, the individual is treated as a cluster of opinions, and 'public opinion' is treated as a signal being extracted from the noise of opinions.
This opinion can be searched via an engine, in context. For example, as of today the google hits for "LinkMyMind" are zero.
The idea also stems from the art of creating unique, non-existing words that can be tracked on the internet in relation to specific content. For instance, Lawrence Lessig invented the word 'enblogment' to take a partisan stand for Kerry, and the meme was growing prior to the elections.
This tag when attached to, and representing people's opinions can be searched via an engine, giving us exact opinion distribution, or even frequency. As this idea, or meme, spreads the hits will increase, and they can be analysed.
A technical definition of LinkMyMind can be expressed in several ways - 1) an opinion ID structure, 2) a trigram tag at the bottom of each comment, 3) or the tag as the opinion.
Description: Like everything, there is an underlying structure to personal opinion which is lost in the survey and polling systems that exist today. This is the reason we get binary results in elections. The problem is in posing the right question to the voter. In this scheme, there are no questions posed to the voter. He is simply expressing opinion, and depending on what question you ask the search engine, you will get an opinion distribution.
The idea is based on negative feedback control systems in Control Theory, and Cybernetics. Here is a thin notion of how we process information through our nervous system and convert it into opinion. In the process, we learn...
Opinion = [Context]passing through[Identity]and becoming[Thought]
1. When we post on blogs in reference to other items, we Link/Context.
2. My blog is how I express My/Identity.
3. What did that information make me feel? I make up my Mind/Thought.
So suppose I write a blog entry that wants to say that ee cummings is a great poet. I say what I wish to and sign off by writing a tag like this "cummingsMyGreat", without any spaces. cummings is the link, the link is my identity, and my mind thinks it's great.
To remember this syntax, all one has to remember is LinkMyMind. The middle gram should always be My, linking to your website or blog. Else, you can't search anything. the formal structure of the tag is thus: [LINK]My[MIND]
For reasons of readability, the first letter of each gram/word should be a capital, as in L, except when one must respect a great dead poet who preferred the lower cases.
Feedback is life. Please improve this model for me at the Wiki.
