Ted Nelson, again
Have I not been reading the informed blogs? This is already old: there is apparently a working version of Xanadu – Windows only. Huh? Ted Nelson (yes, the one-and-only Ted Nelson) presents it in a video here, in a Google-talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8329031368429444452. Via http://www.futureofthebook.org/archives/2007/10/ted_nelsons_still_on_the_job.html.
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It feels like a demo and rather awkward when navigating but it is a nice visualization of Xanadu.
If I lke it, it’s probably more for Nelson’s somehow admirable stubborness on insisting for 40 years that things could’ve / should’ve been different, and pursueing his idea of transclusion regardless of well, how technology & culture have developed in reality… Xanadu-space looks beautiful, but pretty awkward to work with.
I do agree with Nelson’s ‘analysis’ that it’s stupid to keep on imitating paper on a computer screen (only makes sense when one needs to imitate paper… and I download lots of pdfs). But exactly the way text-use, and communicating by writing is evolving – and I think of trackbacks, comments, the sort of networking that goes on amongs blogs etc, the technorati-kind-of-applications – is, however simple it is – the sort of networked text-use that, well, was “promised” to us, years and years ago (by the “pioneers”).
That we humans do not always use those tools very well, is another issue.
… hmm, does this actually make sense? I’m not sure.