ShiftSpace: a new internet

ShiftSpace is a brilliant concept: an open-source layer built on top of the existing websites that lets you reorganize and recontextualize information with several handy editing tools. Immediately I think of what a time-saver this would have been for those countless university research papers, now that the internet has almost completely replaced the library as our primary reference source. With ShiftSpace you can reorganize the seemingly endless content on the net into a more manageable community web of information.

From the ShiftSpace website:

…control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web has followed the physical transformation of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

…a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we’re working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes and Highlights) and some are more interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). Users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, curating netart exhibitions or as platforms for context-based public debates.

Think a little further and a whole host of professionals could benefit from these tools. Bloggers can find and connect related information and commentary much quicker and easier by highlighting relevant text, and leaving notes and trails to further reading. Designers can pool together inspirational artwork, and swap images to make the web their own customized inspirational resource. Coders can can reference tutorials, post code snippets, or manually alter or insert new html source code to hack together their own interpretations of existing sites, or to combine resources. There’s no end to what’s possible. Plus, with an entire community soon to be Shifting the web, heaps of other Shifts are available for you to view, enabling you take advantage of the clipping, highlighting, note taking, and code shifting that others have done.

Even if this concept seems a bit overwhelming, take a look at some of the videos they have outlining the main features, and you may just be inspired to Shift a little yourself. Getting started is a Firefox extension away.