For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative hypertext systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today.
Alex Wright, in his presentation entitled The Web That Wasn't and in his book Glut, explores the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems. It's obvious that looking back in the past can provide promising ideas for the present. I love the idea of tracing the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries. Finding clues to the future in our recent technological past.
Alex talked at length about the following people:
- Charles Cutter
- H.G. Wells
- Teilhard de Chardin
- Paul Otlet
- Vannevar Bush
- Eugene Garfield
- Doug Engelbart
- Ted Nelson
- Andries Van Dam
- Tim Berners Lee
While some of these guys really did have a significant influence on the web most had their ideas and manifestos ignored. Pity because the web might be even more powerful had they been listened to. Had they had more influence we may have had a web that:
- married top down classification with bottom up social space
- insisted on two way linking (who's linking to this object)
- delivered visible pathways of users between documents / pages / objects
- introduced gradations of links that communicate something about the quality of the information at their destinations
- backed on a cornerstone of identify and reputation management
- users as authors from the beginning
He suggested loads of great reading too:
- Tim Berners Less - Weaving the Web
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Phenomenon of Man
- Paul Otlet - Visions of Xanadu
- Vannevar Bush - As we may think
- Ted Nelson - Literary Machines
- Doug Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intelligence
- Alex Wright - Mastering Information through the ages
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