Of course he’s mad, but he also truly is a hero: Ted Nelson. Searching for images in a last attempt to contribute to this weekend’s Tomorrow Book-project, I land at Nelson’s Xanadu-page. You have to love this:

PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT:
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents — with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.

Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

WE FIGHT ON.

http://www.xanadu.net/

And wouldn’t it be beautiful to have “deep quotable hypertext”… if only for the terminology…

Xanadu, in development since the 1960s, never took off. I wonder what Nelson thinks about what is happening now, with blogsoftware automatically sending out (meta-)information, that is aggregated by services like Technorati.