Extending the concept to information exchange

Abstracting away from the hypothetical situation with the furs, it isn't difficult to see how his same situation could be applied to costume jewellery. Theoretically, it should be possible to have a portal to cover every piece of jewellery being made. All that would seem to be necessary is to make contact with every costume jewellery manufacturer in the world and display their products on a Web site.

Immediately you think of doing this the problems become obvious. There would be so many possible items to exhibit that the Web site would become thoroughly confusing because of over choice. Old fur coats, that have been created in the past, represent a fixed and stable product range. Not so costume jewellery, which have an indeterminate range that is always be in a state of continuous dynamic change. The sale of costume jewellery then , as opposed to the sale of old fur coats, involves not only finding items, but, also of selecting from a vast range of ever changing possibilities.

The reason the costume jewellery counter worked in Hyper Hyper was because it offered a filtered selection of all the jewellery made in the world.. The selections had been made by the customers themselves as they jointly followed the changing trends and fashions. This counter then was not only supplying costume jewellery, but, more importantly, the information as to what was currently fashionable.

Earlier, we saw how costume jewellery could be viewed as a form of information. The trick now is to combine the scenario of the fur buying business and the essence of the costume jewellery business and substitute information for furs and jewellery. This abstraction sees us looking at how to build up an efficient supply of information that is optimally filtered from a wide range of sources.

Imagine taking time to build up a collection of information providers instead of fur suppliers. Imagine covering various Internet Discussion Forums and looking for contacts in the same way I looked for brick-a-bat shops in the towns of southern England. Imagine using a strategy of tit-for-tat to build up relationships based upon information exchanges. Imagine gradually whittling down and selecting for the most appropriate and efficient information exchangers. Imagine the information relationships becoming more and more efficient and usable.

What you would end up with is a number of contacts who would be your links to many different areas of knowledge. They may be spread out all over the world, but, you will have brought them all together into your own personal Berwick Street of information. It would be a virtual area, full of information suppliers who you could go to for information every time you had a need. It would be a personal Solution Point of people with whom you had built up a relationship of trust and co-operation.

The more efficiently you can communicate with and maintain the co-operation of the people on this list, the more extensive the range of filtered information available to you. This will need a means of organisation, a conceptual model that will make it easier to deal with many contacts and exchange information with them. For this, we have all the possibilities of computers available to us: enabling the creation of communication strategies that are not possible in the world of bricks and mortar. That is where we shall be going in the final chapter, but, before then we need to take one more look at the concept of object oriented design.