hypermedia
gwern.net
Tinderbox
An ApplicationTinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.
Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening: as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you.
Obsidian
An ApplicationObsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
In Obsidian, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph.
Stepping out of the firehose
An Article by Benedict EvansIn 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?
...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.
Tangent Notes
A Tool by Taylor HaddenYour Brain, Your Notes: A clean and powerful notes app for Mac & Windows.
Monoskop
A WebsiteMonoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.
Glasp
An Application by Kazuki Nakayashiki & Kei WatanabeCollect the Web,
Express Yourself.Collect what truly matters to you from the web. It's who you are. Like-minded people will find and learn from you.
Glasp is a social highlighting app that allows you to highlight and tag what you think is important while reading articles or watching videos on the web.
are.na
An Application by Charles BroskoskiBuild ideas mindfully.
Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.
Whostyles
A Definition by Kicks CondorThe 'whostyle' is a way of styling syndicated hypertext from other writers. This could be a quoted excerpt or a complete article. A feed reader could use a 'whostyle' to show a post without stripping all of its layout.
Whomst styles?
An Article by Robin SloanThis is a “whostyle”: an attempt to carry the ~timbre~ of an author’s voice, in the form of their design sensibility, through into a quotation. It’s the author who defines their whostyle; the quoting site just honors it, a frame around their words.
I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:
- Text is more than a string of character codes. Its design matters, typography and layout alike; these things support (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.
- The web should be more colorful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expressive — let’s use them!
- Quoting is touchy, and anything you can do to cushion it with respect and hospitality is a plus.
multiverse.plus
A Website by Kicks Condor & Weiwei HsuAn audacious attempt to reshape blogging, to see where it can go next!
Podcasts and video have really taken over - to the extent that it feels like reading may be falling behind. Can we enhance text and imagery on the Web? Try to give blogging new life?
The Internet Is Rotting
An Essay by Jonathan ZittrainToo much has been lost already.
The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Links work seamlessly until they don’t.
And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge—
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.A little act of hope
A Fragment by Jeremy KeithAs I scroll down my “on this day” page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web.
If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It’s only a matter of time until those links break.
In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won’t last, I still harbour that hope.
If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope.
I like that.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
An Essay by Toby ShorinProject Xanadu
An Idea by Ted NelsonProject Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
Designing Synced Blocks
An Article by Ryo LuTheodor H. Nelson, “As We Will Think." Proceedings of Online 72 Conference, Bruanel University, Uxbridge, England, 1972
What if the exact same information could live and breathe in multiple places? For example, if your company’s process for requesting time off changes, you’d probably have to find all the pages that mention the policy and manually update each of them.
Synced Blocks changes that. Instead of going through and updating the process to request time off in every page it’s referenced, turning it into a Synced Block allows you to update it once and have those changes reflected everywhere. Even though it’s a simple idea, it opens up many possibilities for how information can be structured and shared.
Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was
An Article by Claire L. EvansThe User Interface of URLs
A Research PaperURLs (Uniform Resource Locators) have rapidly become the standard method for specifying how to access information on the Internet. Although mostly used on the World Wide Web, URLs are also becoming more common for specifying locations for other distributed Internet services such as Gopher and anonymous FTP. Internet users see URLs both online and in print, and therefore URLs have visual interfaces. This paper gives an overview of many of the issues that concern the visual and user interfaces of URLs.
Hypertext 2020
A WebsiteRoam Research
An ApplicationA note-taking tool for networked thought.
- are.na
Quotebacks
A Tool by Tom Critchlow & Toby ShorinQuotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.
Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.
Cubed
A dry, husky business
Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.
A segment of the enormous file
As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.
Taylorism
“In the past the man has been first. In the future the system must be first.” — Fred W. Taylor
Taylorism was a way of thinking that came at the expense of the workers’ own knowledge of their system. Taylor summed up his philosophy thus:
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standard and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone.”
The unscripted practices of the old offices would remain, but as a kind of subterfuge: in the future, a leisurely pace wouldn’t be the norm; time would not be given, but stolen.
Divided against itself
By separating knowledge from the basic work process (“the separation of conception from execution,” as Harry Braverman once put it), in the factory as well as the office, the ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work.
Somewhat more dangerously, this division put into serious doubt the notion that office workers were, as a whole, on the way up. It became increasingly clear from the shape of the offices themselves, and from the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the “ladder”, that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck.
Form follows finance
The formula that Sullivan coined to explain this individualist-conformist principle has become a commonplace of architectural history: “Form follows function.” The envelope of the building was to reflect no particular style, no empty ideal, but rather, with as pure a transparency as possible, the shape and feel of the interior. It was the office that determined the skyscraper – a fact that might have had a beneficial effect on the form of the office itself.
But the result was the opposite: few conceptions of the office have had a more deleterious effect on the human work environment. The title of an influential work by the architectural historian Carol Willis gives us a better, if less palatable, explanation: Form follows Finance. For by and large, making an office “functional” had less to do with making it serve the needs of a particular corporation and much more with serving any corporation. The point was not to make an office building per specification of a given company, but rather to build for an economy in which an organization could move in and out of a space without any difficulty. The space had to be eminently rentable.
Serendipity
This was not meant to be like Bell Labs; there were no expectations that the clerical workers would run into their managers in a “serendipitous encounter” and produce a new innovation. The ideas was rather to create a workplace in which status barriers seemed to dissolve, in which participation and friendliness all around made the work environment look less like the white-collar factory it was.
Office survival
“The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.” — Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Chicago
The office landscape
An organic, almost forest-like office layout.
There is an affinity with certain planned “landscapes” of the natural world – namely, the classic Italian Baroque garden. In the sample plans the Schnelle brothers devised, the arrangement of desks seems utterly chaotic, totally unplanned – a mess, like a forest of refrigerator magnets. But, as with the seemingly “wild” overgrowth of a “natural” garden, the office landscape is more thoroughly planned than any symmetrical and orderly arrangement of desks. Imaginary lines wend their way around every cluster, delineating common pools of activity; between and through the undergrowth of clusters are invisible, sinuous paths of work flow.
Open-plan the world
In the end, noise would always be a problem, when quiet was not placed at a premium. Interaction and communication were conceived of as norms in the landscaped office; introspection and concentration were sidelines. In the rush to open-plan the world, some crucial values for the performance of work were lost.
The cubicle
The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.
Chilled-out anxiety
Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s.
A resource
The office, Chiat argued, had become the site of a turf war, not a place to do work. Changing the office “means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics,” he argued. “You come to work because the office is a resource.”