Tim Oren has some interesting things to say about the relationships between Xanadu and services like Feedster and Technorati.

What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.

I particularly like the phrase "gestures in social space" to describe how many online texts work; it isn't entirely complete to my mind - how do we associate things like bug reports (generated by humans, but tightly coupled to a service or function), and some items of text in an interlinked space are content which speaks for an organization or service (consider much journalism, PR, etc; government reports are another example).

Originally found via Kevin Marks

Posted by esinclai at February 16, 2004 09:12 AM |