An interview with Ted Nelson,2002.01.30

An interview with Ted Nelson, credited with coining the term "hypertext", is interesting and revealing. His frustrations with the web are not unlike Tim Berners Lee's. "It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it. What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes. But the links can only go outward from a page. There is no way to have links coming in which can be seen from that page. We have so-called computer basics that are essentially lies."

Does Google hold the key to the Internet kingdom? Otherwise known as, Why I Love Google So Much. If only every other company in the world could strive for this level of excellence rather than getting bogged down by how many ads they can squeeze into a page and its popups and popunders and Pop Tarts.

Paid searches are becoming a theme with those other search engines. Northern Light has switched too.

It's not a revolutionary idea expressed in this article, but it's all too true: Managers don't like the idea of remote access. Even if you don't need to be in any meetings and are planning to shut out the world for the day with headphones so you can get work done, they like you there. Visible. This way they know you're really working. Trust is a wonderful and rare thing.

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