When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed -- not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.

ThoughtMesh is a potentially powerful system through which scholars, students, and other researchers will be able to discover texts related to their interests, and which will allow authors to read and write in collaboration with one another, allowing their texts to develop communally, creating a dense and rich network of discourse. The resulting mesh fruitfully highlights the often under-addressed social nature of reading and writing, as writers react and respond to one another through their texts. However, in ThoughtMesh, the texts themselves remain closed systems, allowing their authors to interact, but restricting others to read-only access. For a fully social publishing network to emerge, it would be useful for future development of ThoughtMesh to include possibilities for reader response or interaction beyond simply clicking and reading. What if readers could add tags that enable their own uses and interpretations of these texts? What if texts were open to commenting and discussion, allowing authors to receive feedback from a broader readership?