Alex Wright presented at the Google Tech Talks October, 23: Surprisingly similar to our IA lectures over the years - and yes, we have heard of Paul Otlet before - his picture is in our slide deck as well ;)
From the abstract: "The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system. We'll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past."
Thanks for collecting, Alex!
View Alex Wright's December article in the NYT on Friending, Ancient or Otherwise, exploring the social networking phenomenon in light of Walter J. Ong's theory of secondary orality.
Ted Nelson citation taken from the presentation: "I Don’t Buy In. The Web isn’t hypertext, it’s DECORATED DIRECTORIES! What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined… There is an alternative. Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files must not be part of the mental structure of documents. Links must go both ways. All these fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible. We fight on. More later. - Ted Nelson"