Today, I spotted two approaches to serving a large helping of information:

Pot Roast

Responding to perceived failures on the part of mass media, Change This intends to distribute large, PDF "manifestos" through the blogosphere. They must have forgotten that the medium is the message.

Clay Shirky has a lot to say about this:

In the middle of announcing their plans to rescue intellectual discourse, they suddenly point to a specific document format; it?s like listing the brand of knife the chef uses on a menu. What do PDFs have to do with Change This?s larger goals?

And the answer, of course, is ?Everything.? PDF is the ultimate no-backtalk format. It is designed for the page, not the screen, can?t be annotated, has no provision for comments and nor can it host any trackbacks ? in short, it is almost useless as a site for subsequent reference to the very conversations Change This says they want to stir up. Source.

Cheese and Crackers

Vivisimo is hosting a "clustered" version of the 9/11 Commission's Final Report. Their approach is obvious and simple, and it works very well.

It is too bad that deconstructed documents such as this one are walled off from one another, and walled off from those who would annotate them. Statements in documents should be as easily referenced and retrieved as verses in religious texts.