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
Office XP and 2003 files are often bloated with revision tracking and comments and other "hidden info". MS has released a addin to remove all the hidden and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Word 2003/XP, Excel 2003/XP, and PowerPoint 2003/XP files: Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data. After installing the addin, there's a new menu item on the File Menu: "Remove Hiddent Data..." When you distribute an Office document electronically, the document might contain information that you do not want to share publicly, such as information you’ve designated as R... (more at Sanjay's Coding Tips)
While in a pure collaboration environment, arguably this isn't such a great thing (in that you lose the collaboration information). But in environments where pickled documents are distributed (to a customer or vendor), this sort of tool would be very useful (and would provide a nice complement to the existing practice of pdf-ing to pickle documents).
Of course, you have to upgrade to O2.3K to take advantage of it, unless there's a comparable version for the 'legacy' versions of Office most enterprises will be running for another 12 to 18 months....
Sam Ruby has posted his slides for his ETCon2004 presentation . This is one of the presos I was most keen on seeing if I could have gone.
About 33% of the way through (so not yet to the meatiest of meat), and it conveys what I recall of rubys' other pieces I've read. Pithy, open for discussion, and valuable.
In other ETCon notes, TrevorFSmith is cataloging various shared notes again this year. Much to read and catch up on. Hopefully archives of the irc will turn up soon as well (the Trippi discussion is the only one I've seen thus far)...