Talking to Ted

Posted on October 7, 2004 by Lessig

I’m here at home talking about Ted Nelson‘s ideas.

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7 Responses to Talking to Ted

  1. Ian Clarke says:
    October 7, 2004 at 11:21 am

    I would be curious as to whether he can point to any good prior art for Altnet’s claimed patent on retrieving content over the Internet based on the hash of its contents.

  2. Andrew says:
    October 7, 2004 at 1:33 pm

    I haven’t read much of Ted Nelson’s writing, but I have read quite a few articles about hypertext systems in general, K. Eric Drexler’s is probably clearest in my mind. One thing they all seem to have in common is a ‘link’ that is a lot more flexible than the simple, one-way links we all know and love. I think it would be a major step toward some of these richer hypertext worlds if something like the XLink proposal could gain more support and wider spread adoption.

    Then again, I’m a fine one to talk, since I don’t even use proper blog trackbacks, which at least vaguely resemble the two-way links Drexler described.

  3. Miles Archer says:
    October 7, 2004 at 4:33 pm

    I have the book Dream Machines/Computer Lib that my dad gave me in the 70’s. It was an inspiration then and a great source when someone claims to have invented something new.

  4. Chad Woodford says:
    October 7, 2004 at 10:14 pm

    Isn’t this basically what a Wiki does now? At least, that’s what the page you link to makes it sound like. You can essentially create new pages linked from the current page and it’s all very much user friendly and mostly transparent.

  5. adamsj says:
    October 8, 2004 at 6:15 am

    The use of arbitrarily large numbers strikes me as a way to avoid hashing.

  6. Jon Hendrix says:
    October 8, 2004 at 11:55 am

    I had never heard of Ted Nelson before, but this isn’t my area of expertise. After poking around his website I’ve concluded that he is one of those thinkers who is so out there, you don’t know if it’s high-level genius or high-level gibberish sometimes. But he does discuss what he perceives as problems in the architecture of Hypertext and the WWW, which dovetails nicely with Prof. Lessig’s work. Perhaps more relevant (and I’m surprised it wasn’t linked or discussed) – is his system of Transcopyright(TM), which attempts to work around the problem of things not being in the public domain by allowing people to assemble pieces of a copyrighted work while acknowledging its origins. Anyone want to tackle this in terms of fair use?

  7. Ezra says:
    October 8, 2004 at 3:22 pm

    Ted Nelson’s life work is a treasure trove of prior art. I remember about ten years ago I was doing a collaborative interactive web thing, and somehow Nelson and HyperLab/Keio got involved (I was promised a Xanadu t-shirt, which I never got). They had some kind of web-transferable code system which was out of this world. A couple years later Sun comes out with a patent on Java for the same idea.

    I really don’t know the whole history–who does?–but I think one of Nelson’s main problems in getting his ideas adopted has been his focus on the business models, which were creative but strange. As a geek kid back then I was definitely turned off by microroyalties for transclusive links.

    It’s a shame the only time you hear about Nelson is in web retrospectives.

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