Sunday, August 26, 2007

Web 2.0 Browsing with friends (and friends’ friends) or, as the Beatles put it—“I get by with a little help from my friends…”

With the advent of web 2.0 tools for social bookmarking or sharing such as del.icio.us, furl, LQ, Digg, Blinklist, Chipmark, Connectedy, Connotea, Diigo, Lookmarks, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz, Simpy, Spurl, Unalog and many others, there is now a convienent way to share what we like and dislike without referring to reading lines of text-based material posted on facebook, myspace, or the like. These tools for sharing bookmarks and favorites are typically simple to use and using them create a “people powered” search engine for finding the most popular links.

There have been hundreds of “clones” and “better mousetraps” created and used.

For an excellent up-to-date listing of the myriad of so-called social bookmarking (tagging) tools available see:
http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html

On the downside, I am not entirely certain that I want to trust others who may or may not have the same taste in humor or likes/dislikes as I do. I haven’t done much research on this aspect yet, perhaps there are ways to filter the “popularity” factor…

*Cheers & Waves*
Have fun!

Friday, August 3, 2007

Week 4- Failed Project Analysis

Week 4- Failed Project Analysis
Post #6

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

The Analysis

Why did Xanadu fail?

In a nutshell, I believe Xanadu failed to emerge as a successful prediction (and ends up in the failed category) because Mr. Nelson wanted a “perfect” system or world, and would not release control of the software or system until it met his predetermined internal definition of success—his system was never “good enough” in his eyes.

Too much to ask for?

Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to “save the world” ostensibly from itself…

With the explosion of scientific discovery in computing that occurred in the early 1980s, the most successful projects seemed to be the ones first-to-market in many cases.
The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web (see history above for more on this).

Perhaps, the Xanadu story would be one of success if only Nelson had pushed to market with what he had and who knows; maybe we would be cursing him instead of Bill Gates!??

Perhaps the Xanadu project had too many “rules” or requirements?

In all likelihood, the open source projects of today may have the right idea in this area—put your code “out there” and let others help you test/break it to get it built quicker and more reliably…

Please provide your thoughts and insights on why you think Xanadu failed!??

Week 4- Failed Project Reality

Week 4- Failed Project Reality
Post #5

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

The Reality

The invention of hypertext

Ted Nelson is generally thought to have “coined” the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965 and worked with Andries van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University.

Douglas Engelbart had begun working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. That year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "The Mother of All Demos".

Funding for NLS slowed after 1974. Major work in the following decade included NoteCards at Xerox PARC and ZOG at Carnegie Mellon. ZOG started as an artificial intelligence research project under the supervision of Allen Newell. Only much later would its participants realize that their system was a hypertext system. ZOG was deployed in 1980 on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and later commercialized as Knowledge Management System. In the early 1980s, two other significant projects were Ben Shneiderman's TIES (1983) and Intermedia at Brown University (1984).

Applications

The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map in 1977. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE, an early hypertext database system somewhat like a wiki. The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers.
In August 1987, Apple Computer revealed its HyperCard application for the Macintosh line of computers at the MacWorld convention in Boston, Massachusetts. HyperCard was an immediate hit and helped to popularize the concept of hypertext with the general public.

(Ed Note:) Ted Vera is beaming with pride at this moment!

Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk to invest in Nelson's revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.
The group continued their work, almost to the point of bankruptcy. In 1993, however, Nelson met John Walker, founder of Autodesk, at a conference for the people mentioned in Steven Levy's Hackers, and the group started working on Xanadu with Autodesk's financial backing.
While at Autodesk, the group, lead by Gregory, completed a version of the software, written in the C programming language, though the software didn't work as well as they wanted. However, this version of Xanadu was successfully demonstrated at the Hackers Conference and generated considerable interest. Then a newer group of programmers, hired from Xerox PARC, used the problems with this software as justification to rewrite the software in Smalltalk. This effectively split the group into two factions, and the decision to rewrite put a deadline imposed by Autodesk out of the team's reach. In August 1992, Autodesk divested the Xanadu group, which became the Xanadu Operating Company, which struggled due to internal conflicts and lack of investment.

Charles S. Smith, the founder of a company called Memex (the name of the hypertext system designed by Vannevar Bush), hired many of the Xanadu programmers and licensed the Xanadu technology, though Memex soon faced financial difficulties, and the then-unpaid programmers left, taking the computers with them. (The programmers were eventually paid.) At around this time, Tim Berners-Lee was developing the World Wide Web.

Hypertext and the World Wide Web

In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.
Then in early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of their Mosaic web browser to supplement the two existing web browsers: one that ran only on NeXTSTEP and one that was only minimally user-friendly. Mosaic ran in the X Window System environment, which was then popular in the research community, and offered usable window-based interaction. It allowed images as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other Internet protocols, including the Gopher protocol.

After the release of web browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the web, even though it lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as typed links, transclusion, and source tracking.

Implementations

Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu, Hypertext Editing System, NLS, HyperCard, and World Wide Web, there are other noteworthy early implementations of hypertext, with different feature sets:
FRESS — A 1970s multi-user successor to the Hypertext Editing System.
Information Presentation Facility — Used to display online help in IBM operating systems.
Intermedia — A mid-1980s program for group web-authoring and information sharing.
Storyspace -- a mid-1980's program for hypertext narrative
Texinfo — The GNU help system.
XML with the XLink extension — A recent innovation in web-language related to HTML.
MediaWiki, the system that powers Wikipedia, and other wiki implementations — Relatively recent programs aiming to compensate for the lack of integrated editors in most Web browsers.
Microsoft Word — This common program has evolved from paper-only to in-computer documents using hyperlinks.
Adobe's Portable Document Format — Another common program supporting links.
Windows Help


Week 4- Failed Project Alternate?

Week 4- Failed Project Alternate
Post #4

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

The Alternate? Reality

Another view
(from the Xanadu Australia official website: http://xanadu.com.au/ )
Ted Nelson thought up the whole thing in 1960, and has been speaking and publishing about the idea since 1965. In that year he also coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" for non-sequential writings and branching presentations of all types. (The term "interactive multimedia" seems to have become popular recently.)
Since that time there have been a long series of changing designs embodying these ideas:
1960:
Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing windowing software provides this facility even today.
1965:
Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large non-sequential text structures.
1970:
Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the "enfilade" which became the basis for much later work (proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. until 24 August 1999)
1972:
Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.
1974:
William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle interconnection.
1979:
Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.
1981:
K. Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex versioning and connection management.
The Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's book "Literary Machines".
1983:
Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. (XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete development of the 1981 design.
1988:
XOC, Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices in Palo Alto and later Mountainview California. Work continued with Mark Miller as chief designer.
The 1981 design (now called Xanadu 88.1) was topped off but Miller began a redesign. Xanadu 88.1 was not subjected to quality control or released as a product.
Dean Tribble and Ravi Pandya became co-designers and work on the redesign continued.
1989:
The World Wide Web, Hyper-G and Microcosm projects are initiated, all inspired or influenced by the Xanadu ideas.

1991:
The World Wide Web enters the mainstream public.
On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

1992:
Autodesk entered into the throes of an organizational shakeup and dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.
1993:
Nelson re-thought the whole thing and re-specified Xanadu publishing as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.
1994:
Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab. Memex changed their name to Filoli. SenseMedia became the second Xanadu licensee under the name of "Xanadu America".
1996:
Nelson became a Professor of Environmental Information at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University. Initial draft of text transclusion proposal released.
1997:
Initial draft of OSMIC specifications released. Internet-Draft on Fine-grained Transclusion in HTML released. Transpublishing and transcopyright start to be used on the Web.
1998:
Nelson received his first award for his work on Xanadu and hypermedia, the 1998 Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation lifetime achievement award.
1999:
Open Source release of Xanadu 88.1 and 92.1 code under the names Udanax Green and Udanax Gold respectively.
2001:
Nelson awarded the medal and title of "Officier des Arts et Lettres" by the French Minister of Culture for his work on Xanadu and hypermedia.

Week 4- Failed Project History Continued

Week 4- Failed Project History Continued
Post #3

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

The History

History Continued




PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT
(from the Xanadu official website: http://xanadu.com/ )
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents-- with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.
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.
WE FIGHT ON.




Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years.

This long gestation period may not put it into the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other modern contemporaries to surpass.

The fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his reputation as the king of unsuccessful software development makes Xanadu interesting for another reason: the project's failure (or, viewed more optimistically, its long-delayed success—In 1998, Nelson released the source code to Xanadu as Project Udanax, in the hope that the techniques and algorithms used could help to overturn some software patents. And in 2007, Project Xanadu released XanaduSpace 1.0.) coincides almost exactly with the birth of the so-called “hacker” culture.

Xanadu's manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales of billion-dollar companies born in garages.

Regardless of what you think of Ted Nelson, Nelson's writing and presentations inspired some of the most visionary computer programmers, managers, and executives - including Autodesk Inc. founder John Walker - to pour millions of dollars and years of effort into the project. Needless to say, Nelson is charismatic in a strange sort of way.

Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to “save the world” ostensibly from itself…

Week 4- Failed Project History

Week 4- Failed Project History
Post #2

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu
The History

History

During his first year as a graduate student at Harvard, Nelson began implementing the system which contained the basic outline of what would become Project Xanadu: a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. Though he did not complete this implementation, a mockup of the system proved sufficient to inspire interest in others.

Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the ACM in 1965, calling the new idea “zippered lists”. These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept he named “transclusion”.

Ted Nelson published his ideas in his 1974 book “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” and the 1981 book, “Literary Machines”.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is written in a non-sequential fashion: it is a compilation of Nelson's thoughts about computing, among other topics, in no particular order. It contains two books, printed back to back, to be flipped between. Computer Lib contains Nelson's thoughts on topics which angered him; Dream Machines discusses his hopes for the potential of computers to assist the arts.

In 1972, Cal Daniels completed the first demonstration version of the Xanadu software on a computer Nelson had rented for the purpose, though Nelson soon ran out of money. In 1974, with the advent of computer networking, Nelson refined his thoughts about Xanadu into a centralized source of information, calling it a "docuverse".
(Shades of the World Wide Web!)

In the summer of 1979, Nelson led the latest group of his followers, Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene, to Swarthmore College. In a house rented by Gregory, they hashed out their ideas for Xanadu; but at the end of the summer, the group went their separate ways. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system based on transfinite numbers which they called tumblers, which allowed any part of a file to be referenced.

The 17 original rules of Xanadu:
1. Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
2. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
3. Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
4. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
5. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
7. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
8. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
10. Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
11. Every document can have secure access controls.
12. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
13. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
14. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
15. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
16. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
17. The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.

Week 4- Failed Project Introduction

Week 4- Failed Project Introduction
Post #1

Failed Prediction: Project Xanadu

Introduction
“It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair.” –Wired Magazine.

The title of the project is a reference to the poem "Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment." by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Xanadu is the name of the Chinese province where Khan establishes his pleasure garden in the poem.

Project Xanadu was the first publicly announced hypertext project. Founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson, the project, according to its website contrasts its vision with that of paper—“…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…”

Wired Magazine called it the “longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry” -- The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it wasn't until 1998 that incomplete software was released.

For further reading see:
http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki2
http://www.abora.org/links.html
http://hyperworlds.org/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html