Hypermedia

A short time of writing with AI Dungeon demonstrated to me that language models are multiverse generators, and that an interface which supports branching would provide great utility for cowriting with a language model, whether one is composing virtual worlds intended to be multi- or single-history (in the latter case, branching explores counterfactuals which can be merged into main), as well as for nonfiction tasks like brainstorming and prototyping prompts.

After I was given access to OpenAI’s API, motivated to actualize my HITL thought experiment, I began making an interface which allows the user to generate, navigate, and visualize natural language multiverses.

Obsidian 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.

Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior.

Decker builds on the legacy of HyperCard and the visual aesthetic of classic MacOS. It retains the simplicity and ease of learning that HyperCard provided, while adding many subtle and overt quality-of-life improvements, like deep undo history, support for scroll wheels and touchscreens, more modern keyboard navigation, and bulk editing operations.

Tangent is designed to let you write the way you think. Your thoughts are connected; Tangent lets you link to existing notes and make new ones with ease.

Let your mind wander along the path of interest. Don't suppress thoughts, embrace them.

Tangent visualizes the path of your thoughts with elegant sliding panels and a branching map that builds itself as you write. You always know where you are and where you've been.

Let me argue that the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed, not just that end users had functioning minds, but that a better understanding of how those minds worked could completely shift the paradigm of interaction.

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.

HyperScope 1.0 provides enhanced power and efficiency to your internet browser in a simple, easy-to-use format. HyperScope 1.0 is enabled when browsing webpages tagged for this purpose. The simplest form of HyperScope browsing offers these value-added features:

• Zoom buttons for zooming in and out of structure
• automatic numbering of each object for easy reference
• jumping by number
• custom view settings
• use of the numbers and custom view settings inside URL links

All designed to provide unified access into a "living" repository of documents, email and other dialog records, intelligence collections, briefings, source code, workflow, etc.

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.

The '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.

An 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?

Collect 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.

We believe this is the most general data structure, able to replace tables, arrays, spreadsheet and relational database, and intrinsically offering built-in visualizations and hands-on controls.
That structure we call zzstructure, or hyperthogonal structure. Like a table it is composed of cells which are connected in rows and at right angles. But there are no overall spatial coordinates.

In a conventional table, the bottom of one cell is connected to the top of another, the left side of once cell is connected to the right side of another.

We generalize this, and say the top of any cell can be connected to the bottom of any cell, and the left edge of any cell can be connected to the right edge of any cell.

...You may think of hyperthogonal structure as:

• sculptures of cells in three dimensions or more
• crossed lists in multiple dimensions
• irregular constructions of cells at right angles and side-by-side
• crystals of lists in corresponding connection

Hyperlinks should look different if it’s busy at the other end. Like: maybe they should be noisy, or glow, or have a yellow halo that gets bigger and bigger

A note-taking tool for networked thought.

Project 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."

Build ideas mindfully.

Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.

HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking “cards” arranged into “stacks.” Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk.

The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he’d realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people’s machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser.

I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard. I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I’d grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser.

...I thought everyone connected was a pipe dream. Boy was I wrong.

In 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.

Too 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.

As 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.

Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.

URLs (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.

Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links weren’t directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.

Tinderbox 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.

Quotebacks 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.