Last week Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a guest article for the Wall St Journal, discussing the need for new forms of newspaper publishing to replace the old print paradigm. Another not-so-new paradigm, but one more suited to the networked computer age we live in today, is Vannevar Bush‘s 1945 pre-hypertext concept the Memex.
Trailmeme is a product by Xerox that models itself on The Memex. It’s a destination site for Xerox Trails, which is being promoted as “a new kind of Web-based publishing technology.”
We last saw a product attempting a Memex-like service over 3 years ago, when we reviewed Trailfire in 2006.
Trailmeme enables users to map a set of web pages or other digital objects. So what is the Memex? Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Memex is. You have to see it for yourself. Check out this example using a ReadWriteWeb post: ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009.
Trailmeme includes a “collaboratively filtered” destination site, a bookmarklet and a toolbar for consumers, and a set of plug-ins compatible with WordPress and Media Wiki.
Xerox has created Trailmeme in the hope that it will be one solution to the decline of paper use and print publishing. The problem is, the Memex as a concept has been around for over 50 years and it has yet to catch on.
Nevertheless, just as Google is looking for ways to rejuvenate the publishing industry (see the Google Labs project mentioned by Schmidt in the WSJ, Google Fast Flip), Xerox is searching too.
