The Self-Indulgent Hacker

The development of hypertext has been a slow, plodding process, which still hasn’t yet revealed its full potential. In Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article, “As We May Think,” he describes a mechanism for the organization of information that is distributed, associative and loosely coupled. Further elaborated by Ted Nelson, these ideas inspired Tim Berners-Lee to create what we now know as the World Wide Web. The web has been the most successful implementation of hypertext because it minimizes traditional gatekeepers to authorship such as cost and expertise. However, authorship on the web has been hamstrung by its poor user interface. With the development of weblog and wiki software, non-programmers are finally using cheap, powerful and easy-to-use tools to self-publish in great numbers. But despite its increasingly successful reception from the mainstream, the web has still not fully realized Bush’s original idea of “information trails.” Interestingly, the existing web infrastructure readily accommodates these missing pieces and a few projects are under way to implement them.
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