• Comment,  Perspective,  Uncategorized

    Re: Change is expensive

    In reply to “Change is expensive” by Frode Hegland. This is mostly sequential commentary in the order of paragraphs in the source. Would work better in a system that supports annotations, side-by-side, visibly connected. Where change is expensive, wouldn’t make it sense to work on making it cheaper? The example of Engelbart shows that change can be made sufficiently cheap so it becomes affordable to have lots of it. Who cares about actually changing standards (?) if you can have and make lots of them? Better to have standards than everybody doing their own thing in an incompatible, conflicting way! Isn’t the knowledge worker somebody with highly specialized needs, tools,…

  • Uncategorized

    Ideas for Rich Documents

    Frode and I have spent a long time discussing rich text documents. Or augmented or enhanced. Whatever you want to call them. The basic idea is that structured supporting information should be included in the document. Generally this should be little or no work for the author as they will already have the structured information so it’s just about tools to attach it in creation and exploit it in consumption. The proof of concept demo Frode has recently shown just writes the BibTeX version of the bibliography at the end of the document (in a small font). Discovery is as simple as looking for a line starting with a “@”…

  • Uncategorized

    FoT Invitation (draft)

    We are hosting the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium and would very much like it if you could join us. This is a ‘summit’ which means there are not audience and speakers, only participants who will all have time for a brief presentation followed by dialog. Announcing the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium Summit on the theme of ‘Connecting Texts’ A major step in the story of our evolution was when we gained the ability to point out to each other what we could see. A further major step was when we gained the ability to point out what could not be seen and to interact with what…

  • Uncategorized

    Blog post for 1/22 meeting

    What I am doing? I am working in concert with Frode and Chris to bring an improved set of authoring and reading tools to the WordPress platform which adhere to “Englebartian” principles. It is my intention to carve out some time to work on a new tool that will enable two-way linking of text in a browser. In essence, when a backlink to content is created, I would like to enable a method for the original author of the content that is being linked to to be notified and be able to avow or disavow the link to create a more interconnected network of content which is known among authors…

  • Uncategorized

    How should we work together?

    I suggest that all of us put forth a proposal of how we should work together from now on, with whatever level of involvement you are comfortable with and how we want to integrate. I also think we should honour the question from the 8th of December to guide our effort: What problem are we trying to solve? Personally I think we are trying to solve the problem of small, distributed teams working together, in other words; how we can work together better. By better I mean getting a greater understanding of what the other team members are doing and the status of our common work, through less effort and…

  • Meetings,  News/Updates,  Perspective,  Priorities,  Recordings,  Uncategorized

    after the 9th

    We had a fantastic Saturday together on the 8th, with many participating in person and Gyuri, Timour, Irina and Shane joining us online: thefutureoftext.org/8-december-2018.html The 9th was marked by a large celebration at the Computer History Museum, where we all demoed alongside such luminaries as Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee: So where do we go from here? We have all had some time to settle down from the events (and the work leading up to them), so we now need to decide how to move forward. It’s been suggested that we ‘eat our own dogwood’ and that we should therefore use Exaptive and KnowFlow, which I personally agree with. I…

  • Uncategorized

    TrailMarks Post on TrailMarks

      Blaze trails with @TrailMarks as you search and annotate the web using @hypothes_is . Link annotations to your narratives as you “connect the dots”. Share narrative trails as posts with searchable HyperMaps giving the “entire scaffolding by which they were erected”. “Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.” charles eames Trailmarks lets you extend the frontiers of your knowledge as you blaze trails across the Web annotated by Hypothes.is. In collaboration with the Liquid Space project we are aiming to  turn WordPress into a community-knowledge sharing platform. Like the  MEMEX, TrailMarks let’s you weave narrative trails to augment your ability to understand and to be…