[extropy-chat] Information Wants to be Liquid

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Tue Jan 25 17:19:25 UTC 2005


--- Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wired: Hegland's project, Liquid Information, is
> kinda like Wikipedia
> meets hypertext.

Hype alert: Wikipedia is hypertext.

> In Hegland's web, all documents are
> editable, and
> every word is a potential hyperlink.

Also true of Wikipedia, and of any wiki.

Ignorance of the true nature of what one is improving
on tends to give very poor results.  Based purely on
the above (but buffered by the below problems), I
doubt this effort will produce much of use.

> Hegland's idea is simple -- he plans to move beyond
> the basic
> hypertext linking of the web, and change every word
> into a
> "hyperword." Instead of one or two links in a
> document, every single
> word becomes a link.

Ah, but link to what?  Most words in Wikipedia are not
linked because they have nowhere useful to link to.
(One could possibly argue that, say, "a" could be
linked to its dictionary definition, but this is such
a trivial use that it may as well be omitted - anyone
who really needs an online dictionary for it can have,
say, www.dictionary.com up in a separate browser
window.  By omitting such trivial links, the links
that remain gain more utility by flagging that these
links have non-trivial meaning.)

> Further, every link can point
> to more than one
> place, pulling up all kinds of background context
> from the web as a
> whole.

User interface issue: how to specify which link of
many one wishes to pursue when clicking on a link?
It would seem necessary to click on the link, then do
something else to specify the type, which is more
complicated (in time, physical effort, and mental
effort/decision making) than simply clicking on the
link.  Though they may find a way around that.



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