Tag: hypertext

Concept Refactoring

If you’ve ever maintained a Wiki, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot of refactoring involved. Ideas are written down in one place, then rewritten, moved, titles changed, links redirected, pages split and merged.

Hypertext wants to be refactored. This is a feature of hypertext, not a bug. Through constant refactoring, knowledge in a hypertext network evolves to find the right packets for a given domain, where 1 packet = 1 idea. What if we introduced the minimum amount of structure for working with text? Something simple for people, simple for computers, and meaningful for both? That is my goal in experimenting with this new markup language, Subtext. Not formatting, but a kind of minimal markup for making notes legible so software can help you refactor them. “CSV for thought”.

I’ve found the same to be true for blogs with their tags, and better links over time.

HyperTIES

HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES Browser (right) and UniPress Emacs Multi Window Text Editor Authoring Tool (left), tab windows and pie menus, running under the NeWS Window System.

what could have been. another awesome OS that died because it was proprietary

Personal CMS

Mitch Kapor (ex Lotus) is building a personal CMS with Andy Hertzfeld (ex Apple). Very interesting architecture, and with these people behind it has a high chance of seeing the light of day.
2004-10-15: Google Desktop Search brings my vision of a personal cms (for lack of a better term at the time) a step closer. As I am writing this, outlook express is synchronizing my 2 IMAP stores to the local disk so that the indexer may pick them up. this gives me at least access to my existing emails while the wait for thunderbird support continues. I’ll start using slogger to save all my Firefox sessions permanently to disk and see how it goes. (Don’t forget to filter out 127.0.0.1 or you’ll have a nice little feedback loop with slogger picking up your desktop search pages, storing them, desktop search indexing them, etc)
Using adblock aggressively should help to keep the signal to noise ratio of those saved pages as high as possible.
I wonder where SharpReader keeps it’s local copy (currently 23841 posts) and if this facility gives me a way to search through posts that have expired.
I will try to get a good-sized gmane nntp feed in through outlook express to see if it gets picked up as well.
I also noticed that my Trillian chat logs are not being picked up even though they are text files. maybe it is just a file locking issue, but it still makes me wonder why AOL chat logs are singled out in the preferences.
Of course, once you have full-text search over most of your digital footprints (which now seems within reach), you begin to wonder what else you could do. correlating information (what sites was i visiting while I had that IRC conversation?), visualizing connections (show me other mentions of the term “projectx” over time), bayesian techniques (show me sites I might find interesting based on my accumulated data). Eventually we will all be using MyLifeBits.
2005-05-17: For those who already freaked out over the minor changes the google toolbar makes on their site (only if you specifically trigger it, a fact that was conveniently swept under the rug), what will they make of this? personal content management? the writable web? another step towards Xanadu?

Platypus is a tool for modifying web pages and then saving those changes so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Changes are made by selecting an element on the page and then hitting a key to use one of the commands below. To save your changes so that they’ll be applied the next time you visit the same web page, hit Save (Ctl-S). This will bring up a window containing a GreaseMonkey script. Install this script and you’re done!

2018-08-12: Memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

In this essay we investigate personal memory systems, that is, systems designed to improve the long-term memory of a single person. In the first part of the essay I describe my personal experience using such a system, named Anki … The second part of the essay discusses personal memory systems in general. Many people treat memory ambivalently or even disparagingly as a cognitive skill: for instance, people often talk of “rote memory” as though it’s inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I’ll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity.