Making links

[nmg]

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.

The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).

The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Comments

Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

"Also in tonight's programme: the greenhouse effect really starts to bite."
Ouch. That would be funny if it weren't so tragic. (Unfortunately, Flash has gone horribly out of sync, so I'll have to wait for the AVI version to download to see the rest.)

Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

Wurgh. It started well, but I'm glad that last year's state of the art wasn't sitting in my living room with VR googles and a neon glove on, surrounded by glowing, geometric shapes.

TRON-esque visages do not good navigation interfaces make, IMO. The coughing micons interrupting each other at the Multimedia Lab part was bad enough---one of the great things about dumb, blue, underlined text is that it just sits there and shows that further contextual information exists, without trying to grab your attention.

Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

VR: the technology that's always in your future. Thankfully.

That said, I always liked the coughing micons as a relatively subtle way of getting your attention by using existing human social cues.

Ted Nelson has a great rant about links-as-advertising (the link that demands that you click it) in response to the early ad banners, but that slightly misses the point. If you're in a Xanadu-like open hypertext world, which is effectively what Hyperland is, it's reasonable to expect that you can have several link anchors on the same text fragment. In this situation, it's easier to get the user to choose the desired link from those available, than to intuit the user's context and work out which link they want, so you need to give the user some way of working out which one they want.

Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I guess you got shown bits of it in Hypertext and Web Technologies, then?

That,

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

and Intelligent Agents. Quite possibly even HCI. All the times I've seen it it's always been Tom's introduction and part of the customisation of him, and none of the actually useful parts demonstrating hypermedia and Tom actually doing agent-y things like finding relevant content. Usually even stopped short of the fish joke.

Presented as such, the words "Office Assistant" come to mind, which is probably why I've never considered that clip particularly good.

Re: That,

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Ah, Microsoft Bob. If the Office Assistant had ever displayed as much context-awareness, proactiveness and, dare I say it, discretion and understanding of nuance as Tom the Software Agent, it would have been incredibly useful.

The annoying thing about Bob and OAs

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

is that Microsoft called the tech behind them Microsoft Agents, but it was purely about the animated characters. Their idea of a multi-agent system was having two animated characters on the screen, both with their own speech bubble, walking animation, voice synthesis, pointing towards a location...

...everything except the actual, useful work that agents are supposed to do. Way to grab onto the shallow graphical parts with both hands and miss the core idea, MS. Again.