a blogging product without a publish button and create a space for collecting the dots. ​ It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see.

Others’ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleague’s associative structures alongside your own, on the same files. Yes, on a wiki, you can add a link to the text yourself…but that link would appear for _everyone._ There’s no notion of _personal_ associative markup.

nLab is to collect the stable bits, organized, hyperlinked, usefully. ​ Such a far-flung structure is highly vulnerable and, once broken, impossible to restore.