The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.
You and I are partaking in something magical.
A look at how personalisation works in digital interfaces and real-world objects.
This is quite mesmerising—click on an image that takes your fancy; see it surrounded by related images; repeat.
- It’s enormously valuable to simply follow your curiosity—and follow it for a really long time, even if it doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere in particular.
- Surprisingly big breakthrough ideas come when you bridge two seemingly unconnected areas.
You don’t need to write for anyone else. You don’t need to share, or even keep it. You just need the act of it. Writing is a particle collider for reality and the imagination. And new discoveries are the result.
(That’s why I write here, of course. It’s how I think.)
It me.
I love the thoughtfulness that Sally put into her personal write-up of dConstruct.
A wonderful look at the kind of links we didn’t get on the World Wide Web.
From the memex and Xanadu right up to web mentions, this ticks all my boxes!
(And can I just say, it’s so much fun to explore all of Maggie Appleton’s site …or should I say web garden.)
In 1990, the science fiction writer Douglas Adams produced a “fantasy documentary” for the BBC called Hyperland. It’s a magnificent paleo-futuristic artifact, rich in sideways predictions about the technologies of tomorrow.
I remember coming across a repeating loop of this documentary playing in a dusty corner of a Smithsonian museum in Washington DC. Douglas Adams wasn’t credited but I recognised his voice.
Hyperland aired on the BBC a full year before the World Wide Web. It is a prophecy waylaid in time: the technology it predicts is not the Web. It’s what William Gibson might call a “stub,” evidence of a dead node in the timeline, a three-point turn where history took a pause and backed out before heading elsewhere.
Here, Claire L. Evans uses Adams’s documentary as an opening to dive into the history of hypertext starting with Bush’s Memex, Nelson’s Xanadu and Engelbart’s oNLine System. But then she describes some lesser-known hypertext systems…
In 1985, the students at Brown who encountered Intermedia had never seen anything like it before in their lives. The system laid a world of information at their fingertips, saved them hours at the library, and helped them work through tangles of thought.
Look out someone else’s window somewhere in the world.
There’s something indescribably lovely about this. It’s like a kind of positive voyeurism.
I lost a lot of time to this.
This looks like an interesting hypertexty tool.
I’m finding this tool to be very useful for the kind of chaotic mind-mapping I do when I’m preparing a conference talk.
This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.
After two decades in tech, I realise phones and social media won’t be going away, so we work with them. My take is that I now need to seek positive digital tools that connect more of us to the non-digital world and really benefit our lives.
On the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, Tim Berners-Lee delivered this address in 1995.
To a large part we have MEMEXes on our desks today. We have not yet seen the wide scale deployment of easy human interfaces for editing hypertext and making links. (I find this constantly frustrating, but always assume will be cured by cheap commercial products within the year.)
This looks like a very handle little performance-enhancing script: it attempts to prefetch some links, but in a responsible way. It won’t do any prefetching on slow connections or where data saving is enabled, and it only prefetches when the browser is idle.
Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:
…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.
Videos for the whole first season of James Burke’s brilliant Connections TV series.
Internet Archive and chill.
Smart thinking—similar to this post from last year—about using the navigator.connection API from a service worker to serve up bandwidth-appropriate images.
This is giving me some ideas for my own site.
The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.
Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks. If you’ve got no tracking on your site (no Google Analytics etc), you are harder to profile. People can’t come to harass you on your own site if you do not offer them the means to do so