Collection
The web
Updated 8h
Collection
Updated 8h
Vision and Reality of Hypertext and GUIs: 2.1.13 Microcosm @mprove
Microcosm (cf. 2.1.13) is a research project at the University of Southampton. Like Intermedia five years before, Microcosm is designed around the idea that material of diverse sources and formats should be tied together into one hypertext. To achieve this goal links have to be separated from the documents. They are stored and maintained in special link databases. In contrast to Intermedia, Microcosm plays the active role in gathering the necessary data out of the documents. For each topic it stores data on which documents contain information about it and also where inside the documents the information is located. This elaborated conception of links can be seen more as a kind of Memex’ trails than simple one-to-one links. Given this structure dynamic linking becomes possible. This means that links can be associated with generic text strings. Wherever this string shows up a link is placed automatically. This has the effect that documents that are imported for the first time into Microcosm can have links immediately.
Tim Berners-Lee, Giant Global Graph (2007)
A new vision for the web where the users master their data and link them to everybody's benefit in a giant global graph.
Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment
Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
No Longer No Sense of an Ending
This is my first feature piece on Contents Magazine, about harnessing the properties of hypertext and the Web for superior reader experiences and business results.
The Slow Death of Online Safety
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Disaster, doubt, and the origins of hypertext
Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.
How It All Started: Pre-W3C Web and Internet Background
1971: Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates email program to send messages across a distributed network.
Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share
Christopher (Cal) Lee University of Michigan School of Information
Google Reader was building the wrong future
The app that taught us to directly follow our favorite creators.
We Build On Hope @ PublicSpaces Conference 2026
Keynote by Robin Berjon The current state of tech can feel disheartening. Years of critical analysis and reform efforts have left us with a digital sphere that seems worse than ever. In Europe, our...
Ted Nelson on Pernicious Computer Traditions
Against the dark forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
brief history of browser accessibility support
Author: steve faulkner The Paciello Group contact: [email protected]
The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything
Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.
Information Civics
An exploration of computer-network architectures as civic structures.
