Last night, I added this neat new feature to MMM where by clicking on a button at the bottom of a post, you can save an article to your personal Evernote account. Essentially, this allows someone to not just save an article from MMM, but essentially create their own MMM-magazine. Strangely enough, I have has an AddThis share button on the site for a long time, but it never resonated the same kind of message.
Sharing
The web has certainly moved into a sharing mode quite quickly. Not that it is a bad thing, we like to share. Heck, I’d not be writing this post of I didn’t want to share my thoughts. But, if you look at it another way, we are doing a lot of sharing, but not necessarily a lot of remembering and recomposing.
Sure, there things like Twitter lists, Facebook fan pages, My Yahoo portal pages, and several other items that ask us to pull things we like into a central place. Just as more of a pointer to them sharing with us, not necessarily for us to remember and compose something else from it later.
Remembering
When I moved to using Evernote (more often), I realized that I was asking for a change from the simple sharing that was going on (digitally) around me. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to point out things that are interesting, and have my own efforts to stay plugged into them, but I derive more value from the web when I can take something, note it for what it is, then remix it into something else later.
In adding that Evernote button to MMM, I realized that this is what I am hoping that some people would begin doing. I don’t necessarily want them to go away from MMM, but to be able to take an idea, or a piece of content, save the original but then be open to remixing it into something else.
That something else can take any form, gets any approaches, and is totally out of my control. As a content creator, I am not just now sharing, but provoking that the content be remembered for more than just a reference.
If I were taught to write papers like this in school, I might have become a better writer and better able to discourse matters of world and faith a lot sooner. Being able to not just point to something, but remember it and find new meanings because of it is what I would hope the web develops into (in part). A web where we remember, not just share, sounds like an experience to cherish wouldn’t you say?
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