Information Annealing Process

byrec123

626 followers

13 years ago

For centuries blacksmiths used a process of tempering (heating), quenching (cooling), and annealing (combination of the two with different timing). Today in metallurgy and materials manufacturing, the annealing process is used to cause changes in its properties of materials (to harden or soften) by aligning the molecules to an equilibrium state.

Neil Larson coined the phrase "information annealing". In the 1980's his company, Maxthink, created several DOS software programs that were basically outlining programs that use hyperlinks. Maxthink was definitely a pre-runner to the wiki-style software or sites on the internet.

Ward Cunningham was the developer of the first wiki software in 1994 called WikiWikiWeb. It was designed to be a simple online database program that anyone with access could contribute to the information it contained. The best known wiki program or site today is wikipedia.org. It is one of the top ten most visited sites on the web. Wikipedia receives some criticisms over its principle of being an open edit site. For anyone to make changes its content, allows Wikipedia to be perhaps unreliable. Even so, I feel it is also one of the best sources of timely information on many topics. It is one of the best examples of the use of the information annealing process. In other terms, Wikipedia aligns the components of knowledge on various subjects.

I am fairly certain the "open education project" and other components found on Wealthy Affiliate (open chat, the forum, and both the blogs and personal networks) serve as a prime example of knowledge annealing in the realm of internet marketing. Information or knowledge can be shared quickly and used to align or strengthen the business processes that work best in marketing to customers.