Bear's Log

In the early days of the Internet the term “hypertext” was coined by Ted Nelson to describe a project he was creating named Xanadu where

The Web trivialized this original Xanadu model, vastly but incorrectly simplifying these problems to a world of fragile ever-breaking one-way links, with no recognition of change or copyright, and no support for multiple versions or principled re-use. Fonts and glitz, rather than content connective structure, prevail.

and where the links and versions would be visible and documents could be recomposed, commented on or annotated with copyright and micro-payments would be allowed and enforced.

Today I saw via Twitter a post by Paul Adams of Intercom.io titled The End of Apps as we Know Them where he puts forward that the move to mobile and other “second screen” devices, coupled with the changes to how notifications are handled on Android and Apple, will mean that more of the user’s interaction will happen inside the notification and outside of the app. One set of images he uses particularlarly triggered this post:

The idea of a stream of events and data that are composed of small discrete items with three degrees of movement:

• Up/Down - time sequence
• Left/Right - more of the same source or category
• In/Out - clicking on an item to “drill down” or view in context

This we have seem before with Xanadu and/or ZigZag and even with Apple HyperCard.

Now what has really got me excited while I was writing this was the jolt I got when I realized that the IndieWeb folks are in a lot of ways moving towards the original version of hypertext - the idea that each post, note or item is composed of text with microformats embedded to allow for machine processing while keeping the text clean.

I am looking forward to seeing how this idea is handled that this time around with how powerful and inter-connected our devices are - it should allow each person to be their own generator of data, allow them to own the data and enable bi-directional information transfer.