The Google Story Chapter 21. A Virtual Library mentions that Paul Allen was interested in trying to create something like the "Final Encyclopedia" from this book. This is somewhat the same motivation for Google Books and Google's activities more broadly, as shown in their organise the world's information mission statement.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honourable_Schoolboy#Adaptations mentions:
Jonathan Powell, producer of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), said the BBC considered producing The Honourable Schoolboy but a production in South East Asia was considered prohibitively expensive and therefore the BBC instead adapted the third novel of the Karla Trilogy, Smiley's People (1979)
This is perhaps slightly worse than the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but still amazing.
Some difficult points:
- how did the general deduce that the old woman's daughter had a link to Karla? It must be linked to the fact that the Russian agent who made the offer was a Karla-man.
- some things are hard to understand without having seen the previous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, e.g. they say nothing clearly who Toby Esterhase is, he now works on art sales
- but others are inconsistent, e.g. they changed the actor for Peter Guillam...
Smiley's letter to Karla scene from Smiley's People 1982 BBC miniseries John le Carré adaptation EP6o
. Source. Fan-uplod by Ciro Santilli, one of the greatest television scenes ever. Blocked in the UK.Why was this so rarely used as of 2020s compared to ISBNs? It would have been perfect for helping find obscure records from Chinese traditional music and Indian classical music!
The IMDb of music! They actually have a reputation system apparently. And sneaked in a vinyl marketplace as well.
The website name sounds like play on words: disc + hog, with hog in the sense "memory-hog", i.e. something that consumes all your computer's memory.
Classifies clichés in storytelling.
Every page is highly intelligent and interlinked to other pages.
It is incredible.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact