It's almost 9pm. I've started this adventure at 11 am today, and am fairly sure my eyes are bleeding. But I believe I have made my decision.

Here were my constraints for the dissertation:
1. must be relevant to design
2. must have a relative application: theory could be put to immediate use/testing

I wanted to look at web 2.0 applications in teaching, or the scheme developed by the telecoms to devise a cable pay scale web system. Worthwhile (in my opinion) topics that could shed some interesting light, especially on those rotten ISP bastards.

Narrowing those down, I came to find some interesting points on BitTorrent and textbooks. Okay, so what about making Wikis instead of textbooks and distributing the source files via torrents? Hmmm...will people use them? What happens if I develop it and the torrents are all dead, downloading from one seed?

...moving on with 2.0 technologies that don't suck. I wish I tracked all the pages I went through for this flow, but here's my idea flow, ironically not displayed in a visual sensemaking chart (item #3). Seriously, don't ask how I went through this, because I don't remember. At one time I had 20 tabs open in firefox. If you refer to the previous post, you can see a reference my obsessive compulsive nature.

-designer of 2015
-design 3.0
-visual sensemaking
-tagging and mapping through meta structures
-issuescreencrawler
-censorship online
-meta tagging (again)
-innovation acceleration-damn, this phrase is cool. Moving on
-VUE. Bingo. We have a winner.

Tie in web 2.0 without examining technologies that have been done for a while you ask? Yes, yes indeed. Enter VUE: "The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information."

In short, you can visually connect relevant items together and map them. Pedagogically, this would allow one to show connectedness between, say classic works of art or poetry.

i was looking at meta tagging, especially with what we have now with ilife, but this operates on that framework. How you ask? Because it works with one of the key principles of design 3.0: integrated design development.

Does it have a relevant application? yes, I imagine not as many people have heard of it yet as those that have heard of wikis.

Is it relevant to designers? heck yeah! this is not "how do I make a brochure" instruction here.

ahhh...now to get it to work and flesh it out.

and if it doesn't work out, I'm going back to metatagging the world. Hey, gotta go for global domination somehow.