In today’s ZDNet column, I review Internet TV start-up Brightcove:
“Brightcove was presented at the Web 2.0 Conference and is what I would class as a disruptive Web 2.0 start-up – one to keep an eye on. Whether or not they meet their ambitious aim of becoming a Google-scale Internet TV business, will play out over time. One thing’s for sure, watching their progress will be as entertaining as the many videos uploaded onto their platform.” [Full story at ZDNet]
Also today I came across the latest project of a man who wants to tear down Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and replace it with his own vision. It used to be known as Xanadu, but has since morphed into Transliterature, A Humanist Design. I am of course referring to Ted Nelson, who invented the term “hypertext” in 1965 and is generally regarded as a computing pioneer.
Ted Nelson recently wrote an essay about “Indirect Documents”, which got Slashdotted today. In the essay Nelson outlines why (in his opinion) the Xanadu project failed and he explains his new vision for Transliterature. He takes a number of potshots at Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW on the way, e.g.:
“Why don’t I like the web? I hate its flapping and screeching and emphasis on appearance; its paper-simulation rectangles of Valuable Real Estate, artifically created by the NCSA browser, now hired out to advertisers; its hierarchies exposed and imposed; its untyped one-way links only from inside the document. (The one-way links hidden under text were a regrettable simplification of hypertext which I assented to in ’68 on the HES project.
But that’s another story.) Only trivial links are possible; there is nothing to support careful annotation and study; and, of course, there is no transclusion.”
Ted Nelson is certainly an original and I’m glad he’s still around to throw spanners in the works. I’ve written about him before and I’m sure I will again, Web 2.0 or not.
