This fictional interview with Vannevar Bush is a transcription of the television show Futurists Revisited, hosted by Jim Marinetti. Bush, who died in 1974, “discuss” the recent development of the World-Wide Web and considers the role of “trailblazers” in designing a useful Web.
This is interesting in realtion to the term “documentary” too.
Not an original thought:
Far from all are comfortable with writing or even reading blogs. Presenting blogposts in reverse chronological order first makes sense when it is the latest which is considered to be most important, but it is ahrdly the logical way around if you try to follow a discussion which involves a number of posts. Does this way of reading favor those who usally reads magazines backwards?
I guess an important part of an answer is that a reader of blogs starts at the top of the front page and continue to read, expecting the text to be coherent. Instead the reader follows hyperlinks between blogs and other sources in order to try establish some kind of unity. This is perhaps why reading blogs are more rewarding for those writing blogs. When you find something of interest you try to trace where it all began and write your own post summing it all up.
When your way of reading is “tracing” the backwards posting makes sense. Vannevar Bush would of course called this trailblazing. In a review of From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s MachineGeorge Landow refers Randall H. Trigg who argue, ”one critical feature of Bush’s original notion of trailblazing has yet to be realized, namely, the subsumption of linking under the activities of trail creation and following, or more simply, linking as trailblazing”. In Bush’s vision of the memex, links primarily embodied, not relationships between node and node, but meaningful sequences.
By the way, Macwarriors TrailBlazer looks promising.
Update: Isn´t a little strange that when blogs list posts in reverse chronological order, the comments are listed chronologically? The explanation is probably that the designers expect us to read comments differently than blogpost, but I can´t figure out what the substantial differences are.
An elegant interface makes StikiWiki more enjoyable than most wikis I´ve ever visited. There is of course room for improvements when it comes to some functionality: I think I´ll check back in a couple of weeks to see if some of the suggested improvements are implemented.
FreeiPods.com is one of several websites run by Gratis Internet. The site promises an iPod to anyone who signs up for various online promotions and persuades five others to participate. Since the launch in June, FreeiPods has dispatched more than 2,500units. In the end they plan to give away $50 million worth of iPods! (Read more in Wired)
This looks interesting: iCritique is a web application that streamlines the process of publishing and viewing Digital Video work on the Internet, and that easily enables online discussions of the work published.
Always something interetsing form Howard Rheingold. This time he´s interviewed by Business Week Online:
”Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they’re doing it by manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn’t prevent the telephone, the railroad didn’t prevent the automobile. But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they’re spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents. ”
In this article in The Feature Kristov Nyiri, director of the hungarian Institute of Philosophical Research, talks about how MMS is complementary to face-to-face communications.
Several of Nyiri´s writings looks interesting:
Vernetztes Wissen: Philosophie im Zeitalter des Internets (2004)
“From Texts to Pictures: The New Unity of Science” (2003)
“Pictorial Meaning and Mobile Communication” (2003)
“Bildbedeutung und mobile Kommunikation” (2002)
“The Picture Theory of Reason” (2000)
